Reviving an old 3DFX powered PC

[merlin704]

Don't forget to put a piece of electrical tape over pin B21, use some PC133 ram and overclock that beast to 466. Going from 100 to 133 FSB will give you a nice little boost.

Also, remove the P2 450 from the plastic case so the cooling fan will have better contact with the chip.

 

[Bop]

Also, remove the P2 450 from the plastic case so the cooling fan will have better contact with the chip.

Is the case glued or does it come off easily?

I also have a question about even older PCs. How could I load games onto it if I only have a floppy drive for it and the small HDD running MS-DOS 6.2? I may restore my 486, but I don't have any of my game floppies anymore except for X-Wing. I have a bunch of MS-DOS game files (from gog.com), but how would I transfer them over? Would I have to connect the HDD to the Windows 98 SE machine and dump the game files on to it, or buy floppy disks and copy files back and forth, or is there a more elegant solution?

 

[GushpinBob]

I haven't used or bought anything off GOG, but I've heard that they use DOSBox for almost all of the DOS games in their library. Your best bet would be to find out where each game's root directory is stored, hook up your 486 machine's drive to your main machine, and dump each directory at the root of the drive.

You shouldn't have any problems other than some minor tweaks and configurations to suite your hardware since GOG strips the DRM from the games in their catalog.

 

[maboblivion]

Sad to hear bout the imcompatibility .... i hate trying to play old opengl games on vista xD with ati cards ,such a pain. rtcw and mohaa

 

[UnknownSouljer]

I just have to post in this thread and say this is an awesome retro build. It definitely brings me back to my first Voodoo 2 that I bought off of a friend. I only had 1, and it was the 8MB version, but I remember that day so vividly.

I installed it in tandem with a Matrox Mystique, and seeing Quake 2 on my own machine with 3D acceleration was a revelation! I stayed up all night installing and playing with that thing. Just firing up games to take in the graphics, not even worried about beating levels etc. As much as 3Dfx ticked me off near its end (with missteps, paper launches, failed releases, the purchase of STB... etc) the glory days of 3Dfx are remembered by me fondly.

I'm not sure what games you're going to run on that, but I have a few Win 98 favorites.

Shogo (not actually a Glide game, but a native Windows 98 game)
Wing Commander Prophecy (have they released a non-Glide version of this game yet?)
Quake & Quake II

 

[RogueTrip]

The owner of the CT2290 just told me one of the chips is cracked. Time to start hunting again. Has anyone found a good resource for all the different SB16 models?

EDIT: I just scored a 3dfx Voodoo 1! Anyone know if a 450mhz CPU is too fast for some old DOS glide games?

I found that the my 2x Diamond monster 3D (voodoo 1 4mb) are a bit FSB sensitive. They are great at 66FSB. It seems Gamma really increases at 100FSB. They refuse to work at 133FSB.

So the 450 should be 100FSB, it should work.

Also a note on the V1 card. If it is a Monster 3D they have SMD capacitors that can go bad. The 2nd one I got off ebay had bad ones, you could smell it! Smells like fish. I replaced them though on the card.

For Voodoo 1 a more ideal system is a Pentium 1 166/233mmx build.

If you are looking for more specific help for your dos games. Try vogons.zetafleet.com great site for retro goodness. Just watch out, you may become too addicted!!

Some GOG games are modified for WinXP+ only, not so compatible with a win9x system anymore.

 

[Mchart]

I will definitely utilize this method.

I took the Voodoo IIs out. Here they are:

Here is that odd passthrough cable too:

Anyone know if that is proprietary or not?

Even if it is proprietary if worse comes to worse you can easily build a new one as those are standard connector shells. You'll just need to spend the time with a pen and paper recording the pinout in case you loose it and actually need to build the new one.

As can be seen, there are only 9 pins on that one side. I doubt the extra pins on the DSUB side are looped back or anything. Very easy cable to make.

 

[Bop]

I just put the system together. The P2B-F will not boot. 90% of the time there is no CMOS beep, the other 10% there is a repeating high/low beep which means CPU error.

HOWEVER - I ordered a vanilla P2B off ebay just in case and everything works fine on that. All the jumpers are set correctly, so I'm not sure what is going on. I tried two PSUs with no luck either. Been at it for almost an hour with no luck.

I also got a Pentium 1 MMX 200 for MS-DOS/Voodoo 1 games. I hear you can enable/disable the L1 and L2 cache to match 486/386 speeds for older CPU speed tied games.

EDIT: I used my original P2B-F and that works, we will see if that freezing bug hits me again.

Even if it is proprietary if worse comes to worse you can easily build a new one as those are standard connector shells. You'll just need to spend the time with a pen and paper recording the pinout in case you loose it and actually need to build the new one.

Yup, I'm going to confirm the diagram posted earlier hopefully within the next few days and let you guys know the results.

I installed it in tandem with a Matrox Mystique, and seeing Quake 2 on my own machine with 3D acceleration was a revelation! I stayed up all night installing and playing with that thing. Just firing up games to take in the graphics, not even worried about beating levels etc. As much as 3Dfx ticked me off near its end (with missteps, paper launches, failed releases, the purchase of STB... etc) the glory days of 3Dfx are remembered by me fondly.

I'm not sure what games you're going to run on that, but I have a few Win 98 favorites.

Shogo (not actually a Glide game, but a native Windows 98 game)
Wing Commander Prophecy (have they released a non-Glide version of this game yet?)
Quake & Quake II

Quake 2 was my first 3D game as well. It was completely mind blowing back then. I haven't played Wing Commander Prophecy, but I did play the death out of Q2 and Shogo. Shogo had an oddly catchy intro theme. I should take a pic of my disc collection. I used to have all the boxes, but I had to get rid of them.

I found that the my 2x Diamond monster 3D (voodoo 1 4mb) are a bit FSB sensitive. They are great at 66FSB. It seems Gamma really increases at 100FSB. They refuse to work at 133FSB.

So the 450 should be 100FSB, it should work.

Also a note on the V1 card. If it is a Monster 3D they have SMD capacitors that can go bad. The 2nd one I got off ebay had bad ones, you could smell it! Smells like fish. I replaced them though on the card.

For Voodoo 1 a more ideal system is a Pentium 1 166/233mmx build.

If you are looking for more specific help for your dos games. Try vogons.zetafleet.com great site for retro goodness. Just watch out, you may become too addicted!!

That's an interesting thing about Voodoo 1s. I actually ordered a Pentium MMX after doing some research at vogons. I'm already addicted!

 

[H-street]

If anyone finds any information or a Canopus Spectra 2500 card please let me know.

I noticed during my googling that you were searching for a Spectra 2500. Did you ever manage to find one? I remember that was the TNT I wanted to get back then, but I couldn't find it. That digital pass-through technique seems really nice.

Thats funny, After 8 months of searching one finally just showed up on ebay that i bought yesterday.



Check out http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/canopus.htm for some info and pictures.

the only downside is the Spectra 2500 is a 3.3v AGP just like the Voodoo 5 (but it should work in your P2 board) which makes getting faster rigs with the same cards more difficult

 

[revenant]

Looks like a fun project. I wish I had kept my voodoo cards and my abit BH6 for that matter.

 

[GreenMonkey]

I had a Celeron 333mhz system set up with win98 and my old Voodoo 3 2000 for a while.

I found DOSbox though had improved so much I was pretty much using that for all of my retro gaming, and with kids/work/school I wasn't really using it, so I ditched it when we moved (I think I took my Voodoo 3 and Sound Blaster PCI512 out).

I've really had a hankering for oldschool PC gaming lately, and finished school last year finally...so I'm kind of regretting it. I had the whole thing all set up and working great.

 

[Zohar78]

I found the OEM Floppy! Thanks for the tips guys, I'm starting to get pretty excited about this project. Those spare parts can't get here soon enough.

I also found something I thought I didn't have anymore: A Voodoo Banshee! (Quantum 3D Raven) I even have the bundled games.

EDIT: I've been doing some research on these Canopus Pure 3D IIs I have an apparently they use a proprietary pass-through cable. I only have one, but I wish I had two in case something happens. Googling hasn't brought up anything If anyone finds any information or a Canopus Spectra 2500 card please let me know.

LOL! My very first computer was an Alienware area 51, p2 450, 128mb ram, IBM Deskstar 14.4 gxp (first 7200rpm drive), Canopus tnt with canopus voodoo2 sli. Still have all the parts. I did have it set for the internal pass through, but ended up using external. What happened though is canopus quit making drivers. So in order for me to play quake 3, i had to use default graphics card drivers which thus caused the proprietary internal pass through not to work.
Man that computer was a beast for its time. 100 fps at 800x600 in quake2. like 80 at 1024x768. If i recall correctly. sadly i ended up playing quake 3 on the tnt, because of better picture quality/slightly faster performance. Which i ended up nullifying by turning down the gfx options for faster performance so i can do a couple trick jumps in mulitplayer. lol

 

[Bop]

I got the systems up and running.

The first is my old Pentium 2 PC. I found an extra pair of Voodoo 2s on eBay for $16 so I decided to grab them. They're of the Wicked 3D brand. I also got a Diamond Monster Sound MX300. I never experienced Aureal A3D so I thought I may as well try it. This picture shows the SB Live installed. I no longer have those tacky 4.1 surround speakers, though.

Next up is my Pentium MMX PC. I loaded it with:

Intel Pentium MMX 233mhz
ASUS P5A(Pictured is actually an Intel AN430TX, IDE detection was too slow and I couldn't disable both caches for cpu speed based games so it went bye-bye)
64MB SDRAM
ATi Mach64 2MB(The Voodoo Banshee is in for this picture, the mach64 came in the next day)
3dfx Voodoo 1(Diamond Monster 3D)
Sound Blaster 16 (CT2800 w/ OPL3 chip)
Roland MPU-401 card w/ MT-32 and a Roland Sound Canvas CM unit

It's been a blast playing these old games. Monkey Island sounds so good with the MT-32. Shadow Warrior runs like crap with the Voodoo1 and Carmageddon slows down frequently, unfortunately. Hearing Doom run with a Roland Sound Canvas totally makes up for it.

 

[H-street]

great fun

did you decide to get that Spectra?

 

[yowen]

lol, the days of carmageddon on my voodoo 2, I remember them fondly. Unfortunately don't have that computer anymore, it was a P1 166Mhz MMX. Also used to play some amusement park game on it, can't remember the name of it, it used to crash constantly, but I played anyway. Anyone know the name of it?

 

[Bop]

great fun

did you decide to get that Spectra?

Still trying. I found a few people willing to sell them but I think language may be a barrier lol.

lol, the days of carmageddon on my voodoo 2, I remember them fondly. Unfortunately don't have that computer anymore, it was a P1 166Mhz MMX. Also used to play some amusement park game on it, can't remember the name of it, it used to crash constantly, but I played anyway. Anyone know the name of it?

Theme Park? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Park_(video_game)

 

[yowen]

omg yes thats it, I looked up screenshots. I want to play now! I will look into this more after work, haha. Sorry for my slight off-topic-ness

 

[GreenMonkey]

I got my hands on a Pentium 120mhz Gateway computer for $2 a couple of weeks ago (Salvation Army is awesome for old PC hardware...you just have to keep wandering in..stuff goes quick). Booted it up. It had a dead BIOS battery (standard CR232...I had about a half dozen of these from monoprice lying around for my old e-reader light)

It's got an OLP3 Sound Blaster 16 in it, a Caviar 2100 1GB drive, and an S3 Trio64 card. Windows 95 is on there right now.

The luckiest thing was that the original driver CD was in the CD drive! For some reason though the CD-ROM on the Gateway doesn't want to read it very well (it reads fine on my desktop).

Still, I'm reluctant to nuke the working win95 install. I have a 10gb WD HDD laying around (first HDD I ever bought) I need to see if I can get it working with the right partitioning so I can dual boot it with DOS 6.22. The case is huge and made out of steel or something, holy crap, I see why they call modern towers "mini towers".

The funniest thing is the box has 80MB of RAM! The thing shipped originally with 8MB so someone spent a lot of money upgrading it!

 

[LstBrunnenG]

I have a retro PC that I no longer use. It is not as retro as some of the PCs in this thread: P4 2.6C, Voodoo 5500. However, I found a PCI sound card that does near-perfect SB16 emulation, OPL and all. So it does DOS, Win3.1, and Win98 all with reasonable accuracy, and four to ten as much firepower.

What I found is that it's a huge pain in the ass to use. Any website that isn't completely barebones takes forever to render in 98, using FF or IE. Ubuntu is much better on the same hardware. So eventually the nostalgia wears off, the work involved in getting the ancient hardware to behave the way you want grows tiring, and the usability of the software gets extremely annoying. I have most of the retro games I care about able to play on Win7 already, so back on the shelf it goes, until next time nostalgia gets the better of me.

 

[Gorankar]

I have a retro PC that I no longer use. It is not as retro as some of the PCs in this thread: P4 2.6C, Voodoo 5500. However, I found a PCI sound card that does near-perfect SB16 emulation, OPL and all. So it does DOS, Win3.1, and Win98 all with reasonable accuracy, and four to ten as much firepower.

What I found is that it's a huge pain in the ass to use. Any website that isn't completely barebones takes forever to render in 98, using FF or IE. Ubuntu is much better on the same hardware. So eventually the nostalgia wears off, the work involved in getting the ancient hardware to behave the way you want grows tiring, and the usability of the software gets extremely annoying. I have most of the retro games I care about able to play on Win7 already, so back on the shelf it goes, until next time nostalgia gets the better of me.

It's not about resurrecting them for web surfing. Smartphones would surf the web faster. It is about running old games. Especially old Glide only stuff, and other stuff that just sucks to get going in an emulation environment like dos box. My retro PC is on my home network, but not allowed wan access. I have no reason to try and surf the web with it.

 

[Mozex]

EDIT: I just scored a 3dfx Voodoo 1! Anyone know if a 450mhz CPU is too fast for some old DOS glide games?

It should be fine. It's certainly faster than any CPU that was out when voodoo 1 was released, but games in that era tend to run just as well on fast hardware as slow hardware. It's primarily the really old DOS games like Tie Fighter and Wing Commander that are throttled by the CPU speed and end up running crazy fast. The last game I can think of that had that problem was WipEout in 1995.

 

[yowen]

Death Rally!

 

[H-street]

Bop i finally got my Spectra 2500 in and found a Pure3d II. I made a witchdoctor cable to go with it. The Spectra + Pure3D II is actually pretty cool how it works with the digital input going from the Pure3d II to the Spectra and then out the Spectra's VGA out..

Makes me wish i had this setup when i was doing in.. Instead I had 2 Diamond 8Mb in SLI back then.

I decided to officially mount my 3dfx PC on a block of wood. Below are the images, the motherboard is on standoffs and the PSU, HDD, and CDR are all Hot Glued on.. If you look close you can see my "Power Button"

The Game playing is Unreal Gold in Glide

Complete Parts List

MSI-6161 Slot A Motherboard
512 Mb SDRam
800Mhz Slot A Athlon
Canopus Spectra 3500
Canopus Pure3d II
Soundblast Audigy
40Gb WD HDD
350W PSU
TEC 52X CDR

 

[AjFreimuth]

This thread brings back memory's.

 

[Jay_2]

I still have a slot 1 PII 300 system fully working in my cupboard with its first and only Win ME install! Its not been turned on for years though.

 

[maboblivion]

Wow thats gettho!

 

[revenant]

That cool as shit. I have an old dual cpu slot1 board that I might try and get going with my one of my old AGP cards.... or pick up some voodoo2s or a voodoo5... I love retro pc gear!

 

[merlin704]

Hey, can we get some in game screenshots of what you guys are playing?

 

[Bop]

Bop i finally got my Spectra 2500 in and found a Pure3d II. I made a witchdoctor cable to go with it. The Spectra + Pure3D II is actually pretty cool how it works with the digital input going from the Pure3d II to the Spectra and then out the Spectra's VGA out..

Looks great! I'm finding that I really do not miss IDE cables lol. The Spectra I may buy has a driver CD, but do you happen to know any place to DL the last released drivers for the Spectra?

For the Pentium MMX machine I picked up an AWE64 Gold on ebay for pretty cheap. The OPL3 chip was nice with the CT2800, but I use the MT-32 and Sound Canvas for MIDI anyways. The crackling was getting on my nerves lol. But now I have to wrestle with BSODs. Damn Windows 95 BSODs every time I enable the AWE32 Wavetable MIDI driver. No resource conflicts... I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I have an Roland MPU-401 card in there.

 

[aronesz]

This thread brings back memory's.

Something tells me in the future there will be a fad/hobby/league of people purposefully building old computers with old OS to relive the old days... screw new hardware and modern tech!

 

[revenant]

Well... I have lots of fond memories of the early days when hardware 3d acceleration started taking off... very very good times for PC gaming. I worked at Software ETC while going to school and used to chat up PC gaming all day with people, lots of fun. I still play lots of old games due to the quality of the game play and content but getting them to work well with windows7 64 is a challenge... I have a retro-ish winxp box for that but now I might have to build up my old MSI k7n2-l as a 95 box. I think my slot1 mobo is dead... it's been in the garage in an old case for a LONG time. ugh.

Bop - pull the roland and see i reckon??

 

[yowen]

At work I saw a mobo with two slots for P2 cpu's, with one installed, it got thrown out The mobo was dead.

 

[H-street]

Looks great! I'm finding that I really do not miss IDE cables lol. The Spectra I may buy has a driver CD, but do you happen to know any place to DL the last released drivers for the Spectra?

Bop Msg me your email address, i found someone to send me the Canopus 2500K drivers.. I looked high and low and couldn't find them.

the other thing is you really don't need the drivers for the Digital passthrough to work. I am using the 71.84 Nvidia Drivers and it is working great.. the Digital passthrough works via hardware and auto switches when the Pure3d kicks in but i can send you the drivers if you need them.

 

[Bop]

Bop Msg me your email address, i found someone to send me the Canopus 2500K drivers.. I looked high and low and couldn't find them.

PM sent.

Bop - pull the roland and see i reckon??

No luck, still getting BSODs.

EDIT: I removed some jumper related to MPU-401 emulation and tried reinstalling the drivers. No BSOD now.

 

[LstBrunnenG]

It should be fine. It's certainly faster than any CPU that was out when voodoo 1 was released, but games in that era tend to run just as well on fast hardware as slow hardware. It's primarily the really old DOS games like Tie Fighter and Wing Commander that are throttled by the CPU speed and end up running crazy fast. The last game I can think of that had that problem was WipEout in 1995.

Tie Fighter was just fine on my 2.6 GHz P4 under DOS 6.22

 

[GushpinBob]

Something tells me in the future there will be a fad/hobby/league of people purposefully building old computers with old OS to relive the old days... screw new hardware and modern tech!

Well, theres MSFN for the software side of things and Vogons for the sw/hw side of things. I certainly wouldn't mind a retro hardware section on this forum.

 

[thehoj]

Upon reading this thread I was immediately inspired to build my own retro-gaming PC.

As of yesterday I've been able to find everything I need.

A friend of mine had an Asus P3B-F mobo with PIII 500, as well as a Sound Blaster PCI 16.
I already had 768MB of PC133 SDRAM laying around, an old 52x cdrom drive, a 40G Maxtor IDE drive, a D-link DFE-538TX network card, an Enermax 350W power supply, and an old Enlight Mid tower.

I've also surprisingly been able to secure a pair of Voodoo2 12MB cards, and a Riva TNT2 AGP card, both of which I'm waiting for to arrive.

For the time being, I've thrown an ATI Radeon 9200SE in there, just to make sure everything's working.
I threw windows 98 SE on last night, and all seems to be working well. I've got the OS set up pretty nicely, and it all seems to work pretty good.

The 9200SE is probably faster all around than the Voodoo2's and the TNT2, but that's not what this is about . I'll be swapping it out as soon as my other video cards arrive.

Anyways, just wanted to say this is a fun project, and I'm glad I popped into this thread.

So far I have Quake 1 installed, and it's running great on the 9200SE with opengl.

I'll post some pics of the machine once it's fully put together.. I can guarantee it won't be pretty. For one, I have no side panels, and no I/O backplate.

 

[Nasty_Savage]

Aw man I totally want to do this now. I gotta dig out my Myth cd. Remmeber that one? That was hot shit in glide. I gotta see if I can find my old Voodoo card and hack something together from all my spare parts...

 

[merlin704]

This thread needs more in game screenshots!

 

[aronesz]

Well, theres MSFN for the software side of things and Vogons for the sw/hw side of things. I certainly wouldn't mind a retro hardware section on this forum.

We'll also have modders that will take old tech and hybridize them with new tech (i.e. Prolimatech Megahalems or the likes on slot-based CPUs)