I finally build a retro gaming PC that has 3D Acceleration, in the form of a 3DFX Voodoo card. Experimenting on a similar 386 board - • DOS Games On A Tiny In... Designing the PC104 soundcard - • Mini DOS Gaming PC Par...
Oh man, I SERIOUSLY love these videos! I have TWO industrial PCs (both based on the AMD geode) and I just love the retro feeling you get out of these. Even better when you customize them, as you greatly show on your videos. Awesome content as usual!!! Greetings from Argentina!
Someone should make an isa and pci based fpga sound card where you can run a simple dos program to switch between various sound cards. Maybe a dual implementation for a pair of sound cards for those that want.
I've been thinking about a project like that to really learn FPGA. (I've done a little tinkering, but I need a goal to really get deep into it.) For me, I would be happy with SB Pro and switchable dual-OPL2 / OPL3, and stereo Covox Speech Thing / DSS (kinda just for fun.) I'm not sure what else you really need in DOS. Althought, pie in the sky and all that, I would love to add GUS and/or EMU8K and/or MT-32. GUS would probably be easiest because it lacks the DSP algorithms the others have. Will I ever get to this? Probably not. But it's fun to think about.
- TheRasteri: It's time to test the soundcard and chew bubblegum. - Me: Visibility confused. - Duke: ☢️ Radioactive symbol appers. - Me: Spitting coffee all over the place. Well done, sir.
Well that's certainly a neat-lookin' little brick of boards you've put together! Pentium MMX 200 plus a Voodoo 2 would make a sweet little portable rig IMO!
The Cacheis callled a COAST Module (Cache On a Stick), very popular in 96. That board was designed to be used in fruit machines and quiz games,, Dransfields in Leeds UK was a major purchaser of the units. Had to fix plenty back in the dy
I like how there's a huge space on the board for the clock battery but they put it dead close to that voltage regulator 👍 (Edit) oops I just noticed you had to change that at some point - maybe the proximity to the voltage regulator didn't do the old one any favours. I've had the clock battery in a thin client die at 4 to 5 years old from excess heat.
@@TheRasteri in my case it was something near the DC jack that had gone dead short, it cooked the battery and got hot enough to add 20°c to the idle CPU temp! The whole board is just under 10x10cm so all pretty close together. I took the part off the board and it works fine without it, might have just been a diode for reverse polarity protection or something like that.
@@TheRasteri hi sir, I've just discovered the existence of those industrial motherboards and I'm literally crying: I can't believe this technology (that i love) is still manufactured!!!
The reason that the 300MMX was detected only at 166Mhz is due to the Pull up/Pull down resistor changes for the MMX line. Necroware did a piece on that, required adding a resistor to the BF0/BF1 pins ont eh CPU
I think these little SBC boards are cool and cute, but is it really worth it? I think most people don't even want to use a small cabinet for themselves, and in the end they are expensive and laborious to make. I think that a socket 7 (or super 7) baby AT board, besides being cheaper, can be mounted in a custom case that will end up being the same size as you would get with an SBC. The space problem on retro machines boils down to a full-sized at/atx font, and their cards (especially sound cards) that are large. But for SBC or Baby AT/ATX you can use a small font like the ones found in dell computers, or external fonts, xbox 360 fonts, adapters that convert notebook font to atx... And pci, isa cards, there are several solutions, from simple risers, to customized boards that you can print on the pcbway. I don't mean to disparage SBC, I'm just arguing some facts from a financial standpoint for someone who just wants a small retro computer.
I remember drooling over an Avantech SBC when I was in college in the mid 90's, for use in a music rig for a band.. and my contact stopped talking to me when they learned I wanted only one of them.
TNT2 was the "big one" - first to put the voodoos in the corner. Probably not going to get the best out of that card until you're in the 300Mhz to 400Mhz zone
I’d love to see a hat for MiSTer that connects to PC104 and PCI on these embedded systems. That way the MiSTer doesn’t have to use FPGA resources on the base PC hardware and can be used instead to replicate something like 3Dfx Voodoo, Sound Blaster, or Roland MT-32.
That riser card is ideal height. Small overal package, yes. But if you add power supply and any kind of I/O drives, then it'll approach micro-ATX build scale, unless parid up with a pico PSU and maybe a slim CD reader... I used to love making miniature PC's back in the day. Cramming as much into a small space as possible, to the point where I had parts burn if the fans weren't roaring like a blowdryer. I've seen cool industrial PC's that fit into a car stereo rack. Pentium 3's, but I don't remember what models they were, and power would have to be external 12V, like in a vehicle. I regret not buying one of those when I had the chance.
MiniATX formfactor ( *not* MiniITX or MicroATX), I have one with a Socket 478 Pentium 4... Which would not have been my first choice to shove into a DIN slot due to heat, and doesn't support Socket 479 Pentium M even with adapter. Got it cheap though, was planning to put it into a random thing that wasn't made for computers like I had seen people do to MiniITX boards, but never completed it. Takes ATX power, and seems to have been intended for an external DC-DC converter board whose standard name I forgot (still around in mini systems too powerful for picoPSUs).
@@tom611 Interesting. I ended up just cramming a Micro ATX build into my old Chrysler. What was cool, is that I hooked up video glasses to it. That was early 2000's, and I don't think consumer LCD's were common. Still CRT days. And I could drive to the middle of nowhere, put glasses on, and watch a movie in some revolutionary new compression format like DivX (lol). I was running a 1GHz P3 with 256MB of RAM, which is a lot for an early 90's Chrysler. That setup had no real practical use. All I did was watch movies on it. Could get maybe 6 hours of runtime off the inverter before draining my car battery dangerously low. I have the video of the machine on my channel under "Retro PC Revival Attempt". That pack used to sit in my car, before becoming a table item.
I gamed hard in this era, the P90 should easily reach 50fps in doom, Quake should be about 16 to 25 fps - the 200Mhz processor should be able to hit anywhere between 40 and 50fps in Quake on a 200Mhz Intel at 320x240 - I suspect that the onboard graphics card's framebuffer is very slow - try a good 2D capable graphics card perhaps? (that onboard one might be ISA and abysmal internally!) in terms of the voodoo with a 200Mhz mmx your sweet spot is deffo the Voodoo 2 - that's a 50 to 60fps experience in quake and games that use MMX for mixing colours like sub culture should run really nice too on that Intel chip.
@@TheRasteri - yeah man - even so? a 200MHz MMX on that little board is lovely :D off the top off my head Sub-Culture had binaries for x86, MMX and 3DNow respectively - 3DFX and others too if memory serves. It was a a great game for benchmarking back in the day! that and the second reality demo lol
@@TheRasteri - But deffo don't neglect MMX builds of games in that era - I was a 3DNow fanboy but at those clocks? the vector instructions added a huge boost to performance when implemented in an engine - MDK had a MMX binary and it was night and day on the same system!
Oh! check the IDE controller too - if it's DMA capable but in PIO mode? old VIA chipsets were notorious for tanking windows performance when in PIO and I remember having to enable DMA manually in device manager on many a machine back then - might be worth checking :) hope you're well!
3dfx made enermous difference on the p100 i had when i got mine with any early 3dfx enabled titles/demos like quake, turok and such. It made them run them better than a p166 plus in software
Interesting. I was able to get a PCM-5864L and so far, had only been messing around with Debian 3.0 on it, but the wired LAN connector it came with was broken, so I wasn't able to get it online, but was able to use APT to install some packages that were included on the install CD set. I do plan to mess around with Windows 95 and NT 4 on it eventually.
Great video! Strictly speaking my last few PCs have been in the embedded category, if laptops are to be counted. I have not used a desktop/tower PC for personal use since 2007. I'll be looking forward to seeing more of your experiments.
Note that early 3D APIs were very very CPU bound, as the CPU had to instruct copies to GPU memory or the GPU had to be instructed to read main memory and DMA shenanigans for every frame, often re-sending data to the GPU repeatedly.
Wasn't surprised about Unreal, the Voodoo1 was pretty outdated by the time Unreal came out. If you would have popped a Vooodoo 2 in there (or you could have just popped in a Voodoo 3 and not needed the passthrough!) you should have got easily playable FPS at 200 MHz.
the thing that holds quake back is floating point performance. other 3d games around that time used fixed point math (descent for example). since the voodoo card only does polygon fill, its going to be held back. if you could find the 3dfx accelerated dos version of descent, you might get pretty good performance.
I had a 486 DX100 and I thought I got more frames than this - but I prefer the software renderer. - I wonder how a Pentium-3 - 800mhz would do - would that get us to 60fps?
@@brentgreeff1115 even software renderer makes heavy use of the fpu. i remember something along the lines of "absolutyely must have math coprocessor" in the system requirements. no x87, no bueno. pretty sure the 486dx had one and all the pentiums and later. ran pretty good on my 120mhz pentium. i think i had one of those sec pentium 2s but by that time i was already playing q3a on a voodoo 3.
What an odd combination of the PC104 header and a PCI connector. there must have been a specific goal in mind for that. I will say when it comes to Glide games under DOS, they can be a bit tricky with anything other then an original Voodoo. some had the drivers as a separate file and those tend to be ok if you replace them with a later version (iirc its glive.ovl). but others had the drivers statically compiled into the game and those tend to be much harder to run on later cards.
coool. always happy to see more of your adventures. also seen you around on vogons recently in the fast doom thread; would be awesome to see that new feature they are adding where you can add a second hercules monitor just for the automapping while playing the game in VGA
Thing is: while most older 3dfx (DOS) games run just fine on a voodoo rush, banshee, 2, 3 or what have you, some odd games specifically require a real voodoo 1 and won't run on anything else. I had a K6-2 + Voodoo 2 at some point and always wondered why I could not get some games to run with 3dfx acceleration ... carmageddon being a prime example. I got a MMX pentium 1 now and a real voodoo 1 to go with it and those games magically work. Stuffing the voodoo 1 in a faster machine makes no sense either, as games that could benefit from more CPU speed usually don't have that "voodoo 1 only" limitation ... and there are also some games that don't like fast CPUs ... wipeout XL for example will run at the right speed on a 200mhz pentium 1 but the game engine isn't fps-locked in any way and will go as fast as the machine will let it so the 450 MHz K6-2 was already a tad fast and the game becomes unlplayable on a 500 MHz pentium 3 ... if you run it on, say, a 1+ GHz athlon, it goes crazy fast and looks like a quake timedemo would look on that same machine. What I'm saying is: you wanna keep a pentium 1 + voodoo 1 machine around for these odd games, so, make a nice little case and put that pentium board and the voodoo 1 in there.
That looks to be an EBC formfactor board. That's the size of a 5-1/4" drive bay. Get an extrnal CDROM box or the like that's two bays high and you could probably fit that all in, then you'd just need a front plate to cover things and to sort the power supply, pending the internal one wouldn't work, which it might not as the board I have needs several Amps off the 5-volt rail (12V just for CPU fan).
9:46 The distorted vocals in the background song made me think that someone was screaming or shouting somewhere in my apartment. (Am wearing headphones). xD Gave me quite a scare and I didn't get a chance to listen to the particulars about Socket 5 and 7 xD
Interesting, in 11th grade (Around 1998) I had a cobbled togather Intel 486-50 that I overclocked a 66MHz, later I installed an AMD 586-133. 16MB RAM and Windows 95. Played mostly DOS games on it. Had a Soundblaster knockoff (Cant remeber the brand) though I couldnt afford a true 3D Accelerator I did have a Matrox Millennium I bartered for.
133/166/200 pre mmx are the same chip, if it works with 1 it works with the other, it might not have the multiplier for beyond 166, but you can set it like a 133/166 then overclock the bus to get a stable 200 mhz pc. its faster doing it that way anyways. You are reaching the limit of the pci bus, if you clocked the cpu lower than spec and then overclocked the bus until the cpu was back to spec... you would see bigger framerates than you would from overclocked cpus... also you should unlock vsync, and overclock the voodoo and get the Fastvoodoo2 or Wicked 3d Drivers.... its not undoable, to get 50-60fps in Quake on that setup. You will know if done correctly by running the drect3d test, the spinning cube should be spinning so fast that it looks like a 3d porcupine star.
21fps glquake at 480p ain't bad for the p90, better than expected. The dos 2d performance seems a bit slow, I would have thought the doom frame rate would hit the 35fps cap. Were the games that support it running in vesa video modes (duke3d, dos quake) or was it mode 13h. I suspect gaming performance not emphasis for industrial board video chip though.
I just had a look on Ebay USA for one of these boards. Being on Ebay, you know the price is a bit steep. But Pentium III you say? My search term was "Advantech 5890" and one of the results was a decendant of thime board in this video: SOM-5890 Rev. A1 (RAM slot had a sticker with SOM-5890FG printed on it) running a 1.1 GHz Celeron. I couldn't tell anything about expandability from the usual not-so-great Ebay photos, but it would be interesting to see what could be run on that board. Fortunately, the price of the later board was less than 1/3rd that of the older boards. Side note: My mother in law once unintentionally referred to the Celeron CPU as "Sell -ya-wrong".
That looks to be using some sort of header that is not something really hobbyist usable for basically everything, probably needs a backplane board or breakout board. Try the search term "EBC Motherboard" instead to more of the formfactor of this one, usually with a PCI slot and headers for the rest, though take close look at or research the manual to find what /size and pitch/ the headers are, as one I have uses the pitch of a notebook IDE header (1mm?) for most of the connectors which is more of a pain than the usual size (0.1 inch?)
I was using a laptop in latter 90s for a while with a chips and technologies for graphics. It was pretty decent when it came to vesa 2.0 modes supported, 15 bit modes and all
The problem with Unreal may be the lack of ram. I played it with a 233 MMX and Voodoo1, and discover it stopped swapping with 96 Mo ram, not above this.
god im just thinking about a nice. buckling spring early 90s commodore 128 or sony MSX equivalent machine; 3dfx, DOS, the works, all in a little (big) keyboard PC!
I have something similar I'm going to be doing a video with for DOScember this year, though it does concern me a little, as I'll be doing much the same things as you in my video, even down to using one of your PC/104 soundcards, I don't want to be seen as copying, it's been planned for a while. There are some key differences though in my video, currently on getting some of the bits for it. Mine won't have a Voodoo, but i'm trying to figure out a good 3D accelerated video card that works well under DOS
Wow that thing is absolutely packed with components and they are all right next to each other ...if something shorts, you find the closest capicitor and then what ? Pray for a circuit diagram to fall from the heavens and the lord himself to walk up to and hand you a donor board .
Was WinQuake slow because of running 640x480 (compared to DosQuake's 320x200)? Or was it slower because of Windows+DirectDraw? The 200 MHz fix was magic!
I feel like you're getting worse performance than you should. I used to rock a P133 and a voodoo for longer than I'd have liked and I remember it managing playable framerates in a surprising number of games released into the P2 era. What I do remember is that I tried to overclock it and the BIOS would report Pentium 150/166 depending on the jumpers but the benchmarks would all agree that the CPU got SLOWER and usually benched about a 120. I never figured out what that was all about, but since that's not an officially MMX compatible board you've got I'm wondering if you're getting the same problem? It's "running" at 200MHz but not really giving you the performance of a 200MHz CPU?
Could you get your hands on a current-gen PC104 or COM based PCs to review it? I'm an SFF enthusiast and I've only seen a few pico/nano/itx form factor computers. I've know they're usually for industrial environments, I'm just curious about how they would perform against something like, let's say, a NUC or a RaspberryPI. Thank you.
