Retro Gaming Build! (Windows 98, Pentium 2, Voodoo 3 3000)

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pandora's box

Supreme [H]ardness
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Sep 7, 2004
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So a little bit of a back story for you - At work a client asked us to come out and clear out their server room of old computer parts. While there I saw a beige computer case that caught my eye. Opened it up to find a Pentium 2 processor and a motherboard with ISA and PCI slots along with AGP. It had a 3dFX banshee video card in it and integrated sound. It also has 64MB of RAM.

I took it home, cleaned it up with a magic eraser and it looks brand new. I bought a IDE to SD card adapter to replace the old IDE hard drive in the system and loaded up Windows 98. The system was up and running in no time. After playing around with it for a bit, I decided to upgrade the Banshee video card to a 3dFX Voodoo 3 3000 and I also purchased a Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA sound card. There are a few DOS games I'd like to play and the integrated sound was not being detected. I also purchased 512MB of PC100 RAM. The 3dFX Voodoo 3 card arrived yesterday, I haven't received the sound card or RAM yet, but I decided to go ahead and start putting things together. After some frustrations with Windows 98 setup freezing when attempting to install the USB drivers, I decided to take a break and sleep on it. This morning I decided to be bold and reset the BIOS back to default settings - this did the trick. Windows 98 installed with no problems at all. I then proceeded to install all of the drivers and a few games.

Pictures of the Setup

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The Games!!

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I took some videos of a couple game start up cinematics. I pretty much had a smile going from ear to ear watching these.

Outpost 2



Lords of Magic



Descent Freespace



Half Life Demo Video



I need to pick up a joystick to really enjoy some of these games how I enjoyed them back in middle school and high school. Can't wait to relive my youth.
 
What Pentium 2 exactly??

That looks super-sweet. Noted Caesar II in the stack (y)
 
This is really awesome. A machine like this would have been my dream as a kid.
 
Reaperkk said:
This is really awesome. A machine like this would have been my dream as a kid.
Click to expand...

Yeah most of the games I had ran like shit on the computer we had when I was in high school. Had a Pentium 66mhz with 24MB of ram and a 2D video card. My Dad refused to upgrade it as it did what he deemed it needed to (Word and Excel for my school reports). Lords of Magic took two hours to install and ran terrible, I'm surprised it ran at all, lol. Dad finally replaced the machine with a Athlon XP 2700+ and Radeon 9700 Pro system, sadly this was a Windows XP system and half the games pictured in the original post refused to run.
 
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pandora's box said:
Yeah most of the games I had ran like shit on the computer we had when I was in high school. Had a Pentium 66mhz with 24MB of ram and a 2D video card. My Dad refused to upgrade it as it did what he deemed it needed to (Word and Excel for my school reports). Lords of Magic took two hours to install and ran terrible, I'm surprised it ran at all, lol. Dad finally replaced the machine with a Athlon XP 2700+ and Radeon 9700 Pro system, sadly this was a Windows XP system and half the games pictured in the original post refused to run.
Click to expand...

Yea there were zero upgrades to my machine. Its funny because now I've built myself a monster rig to make for lost time.

How do the glide games run? I've always been a huge fan of 3dfx rendered games
 
Glide runs pretty well, 800x600. I've never used a voodoo card before so this is new territory for me
 
Nice system, have worked on many of those Gateways back in the day, yours looks like a GP6-400. That motherboard is most likely the WS440BX looking at the one motherboard picture and the CPU-Z BIOS string. Here is the newest P14 BIOS: http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1517&menustate=0

Most likely with the newest BIOS that board should take up to a Coppermine PIII 850MHz (100MHz FSB), though if you really want to play it safe I'd stick with a 500-600MHz Katmai PIII. A CPU upgrade would help, as that PII 400 is holding your Voodoo 3 back if you play at 800x600 (less so at 1024x768 unless overclocked) or especially with Unreal engine games.......

I'd also suggest keeping that precious Voodoo 3 cool with something like an old Vantec Spectrum fan card.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vantec-SP-...107055?hash=item3ab134706f:g:aA8AAOxy0QBSO1RL
 
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