Introduction. Hello, everyone! 👋🏻

Hello, everyone!

My name is Andrea, I'm from Italy, and I'm very happy to have found this community 😊

For about a year now I've been slowly working on a personal retro PC project. It started with a very specific goal: I wanted to experience my all-time favorite games, Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II, with the best quality I could realistically achieve on period hardware.

As is often the case with these things, the project gradually grew over time. Once I started researching components, reading old reviews and comparing hardware, I found myself rediscovering an entire era of PC gaming that I had almost forgotten. Cue a nostalgic tear down my eye 🥲

With my builds I don’t want to chase a benchmark number, but rather recreate specific gaming experiences. I enjoy comparing image quality, experimenting with different driver versions, discussing audio solutions, and making sometimes unreasonable amounts of effort to optimize a twenty-five-year-old game.

At the moment I'm in the final stages of sourcing parts for two different builds: a late WinXP one, which will run games from the 2003-2007 era, and a more ambitious one based on Windows 98 SE.

The latter will feature, among other things, a Voodoo5 5500 PCI which I am extremely excited about.When I was around 13 years old it was my dream card, but owning one simply wasn't an option. After all these years I'll finally get to experience it myself instead of just reading old reviews and wondering "what if".

I'm sure I'll have plenty of questions and probably a few opinions of my own regarding drivers, image quality, Glide, FSAA, build philosophy and game-specific quirks, so I'm looking forward to learning from the people here and contributing wherever I can.

Thanks for having me, and I'm looking forward to the discussions! ☺️

Quote from Bier.jpg

That looks like LLM Text. Please don't use them here.

Hello!

I’m sorry that my writing style resembles AI 😅 I don’t plan on spreading AI-generated content. I just want to discuss my hobby with other (more experienced) users.

Quote from bschicht86

What would you like to learn? Read and understand the topics relevant to you. Do you have any questions? Please ask them specifically and we can help. What hardware do you use, and what do you use it for?

Hi, bschicht86!

The primary goal of my retro builds is retro gaming.

The WinXP build will use hardware from approx. 2008-2010 and will be used to play games spanning 2003-2007.

The Win98SE is more ambitious, as with it I would like to recreate different eras of Win98 gaming. The idea is to have different partitions with different installations of Win98, each with a specific combination of graphics card and sound card installed (while the other two are disabled in the control panel.)

The Voodoo5 5500 PCI will be paired with a Diamond Monster Sound MX300 in a partition with DX 7.0a. I will open a dedicated thread to discuss the games I’d like to play on this combination and what the best resolution/FSAA combo is for them. I’m curious what other users’ experiences are.

Also, I would like to get better educated about the drivers for the Voodoo5 5500. Perhaps that also warrants a dedicated thread.

EDIT: these are the specs of my builds.

I have almost everything for the WinXP build and I hope to put it together soon. The Win98SE will take a little bit longer.

WinXP:

Corsair RM850x
Foxconn BlackOps
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770
Scythe Mugen Max
2x2Gb G.Skill Pi Series PC-17600 CL7
1TB WD Velociraptor 10000rpm
Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 5970 4Gb
Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion
Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
Pioneer DVR-216DBK

Win98SE:

Seasonic Focus GX-750
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe
Intel Pentium 4 3.4Ghz
Zalman CNPS7000B-AlCu
2 x 512mb Corsair XMS PC-3200 CL2
74Gb WD Raptor 10000rpm
Gainward GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
3dfx Voodoo5 5500 PCI
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
Diamond Monster Sound MX300

I’ll of course need to do something about the 1Gb memory under Win98SE, as the OS is not gonna like it.

Thank you! 😊

I wish I could do more systems (there are some other itches I’d love to scratch: a Matrox Parhelia, a Voodoo3 3500… you name it 😄) but unfortunately I don’t have enough desk real estate to accommodate more than two builds.

The unfortunate side effect is that I’m effectively asking the Win98 build to do many things at once. There’s a non-zero chance that I will have to simplify the project because it doesn’t work the way I wanted it to.

Could you elaborate on putting mileage on the V5 while I’m not using it? If I’m using the GeForce FX, I’m still “wearing down” the V5? (I apologize if it’s a silly question, but I’ll never learn if I don’t ask.)

Thank you for your answers ☺️

Win98SE is somewhat delicate, I agree. It is certainly possible that I won’t be able to do all I had hoped for with this machine. However, there are users on Vogons who tried similar builds and succeeded, which is encouraging.

The reason for having two sound cards on the Win98 machine is that, well, sound in games is really important to me. With two sound cards I can cover two eras of gaming: 1997-2000 with A3D (which I absolutely want to experience) and 2000-2003 with EAX. They have distinct roles within the build.

So what I’ll be attempting is this:

Partition 1
Voodoo5 5500
MX300
DX 7.0a
This is the partition where I play games with A3D from 1997-2000. There are some that are native Glide games, so the V5 will get to flex its muscles.

Partition 2
GeForce FX
Audigy 2 ZS
DX 9
This is for late Win98 games, as well as the partition where I plan to have my Ultimate Baldur’s Gate Experience (TM)

Partition 3
GeForce FX
MX300
DX 9
Highly experimental. The purpose is to play games with A3D that are perhaps a bit too heavy for the V5: AquaNox, NOLF, American McGee’s Alice, and perhaps Deus Ex and Quake 3 (jury’s still out.)

Here’s where things get tricky: in order to use DX 9 on this third partition, I must use an older driver for the Aureal. Newer drivers just don’t play well with DX versions beyond 7.0a. This is not a problem per se, but it is possible that those games won’t work well with the older driver version. If that is the case, this will be declared a failed experiment.

Here are the games I plan on running on the V5:

Half-Life
Quake II
System Shock 2
Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force
Unreal Gold
Unreal Tournament
Kingpin: Life of Crime
Deus Ex
Dungeon Keeper 2

Do you have any experience with them on a 5500? What resolution and FSAA setting do you run?

I would like to add a question. I’ve recently learned that the V5 6000 has been reversed engineered and sold under the monicker “Strange God”. The V5 6000 is easily one of the most fascinating pieces of computing history, and it is awe-inspiring that someone cared so much that they actually reversed-engineered it.

What is your opinion on this endeavor? I imagine there is no substitute for the real thing when it comes to sentimental value, but as a piece of hardware it could be a way to experience what the V5 6000 could have been if it had made it to market.

Hey, guys!

Been a bit busy but, in the meantime, I’ve taken a step back and realized my plan’s complexity was getting out of hand (which you tried to warn me about, but I guess I just had to get there on my own). I was so determined to see it through that I did not realize I was cramming way too much stuff into a single machine.

This realization forced me to ask myself what I really wanted from the build, and what was merely a nice-to-have I could either do without or delegate to my WinXP build.

The main thing I want from my Win98SE build is A3D. I have a thing for audio and Aureal’s solution was way ahead of its time, but I never got to experience it. As a result, I’ve decided to keep the Diamond Monster Sound MX300 and remove the Audigy 2 ZS.

Now, Aureal drivers like DX7, which makes sense since it was the DX version that was out when they were being developed. This means the GeForce FX has to go, as it would make little sense to gimp it with a DX version that came so much earlier and missed so many of the GeForce’s key features.

I could, of course, use my Voodoo5 5500 PCI as my primary graphics card for the build (even though the knowledge that I have a free AGP slot would keep gnawing at me). However, I researched its performance and realized it would not be able to reliably run FSAA in all the games I plan on playing. That’s a bit of a bummer because 3dfx’s legendary RGSSAA is a big part of why I wanted the card in the first place.

So I got in touch with Anthony to inquire about the Strange God and, as it turns out, there will be another batch of AGP cards in the future (though no ETA at the moment.) Hence, I decided to wait until then to buy one and use it in my build.

These will be the build’s final specs:

Seasonic Focus GX-750

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe

Intel Pentium 4 3.4Ghz

Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu

2 x 512mb Corsair XMS PC-3200 CL2

74Gb WD Raptor 10000rpm

Strange God Voodoo5 6000

Diamond Monster Sound MX300

Logitech G 413 SE

Logitech G5

LaCie Electron 22 Blue IV

OS: Windows 98 SE

What cooler would you suggest?

An SSD wouldn’t be period correct for this machine; the Raptor and its noise are part of the experience I’m trying to recreate

You make a good point about the mainboard. I need to rethink the whole thing then.

Thank you.

Hi S2 Sedan and thank you for welcoming me

I’ll try to clarify.

While Baldur’s Gate II does support OpenGL acceleration for spell VFX, its computational requirements in that area are so small that at no point did I base my choice of graphics card on that particular game. The first two BGs are my favorite games of all time and what spurred me to get into retro computers, but they are not the reason I chose any particular piece of hardware.

As for the hardware being more powerful than games require, I don’t see why that would be a problem? All that means is that I can max games out without worrying too much about performance.

The build I originally proposed was cramming way too much stuff into a single machine, which is the reason I have since abandoned it as a concept, but every component had been deliberately chosen for a specific purpose. It just suffered from a bad case of, “That’s cool too, let’s throw it in!” But I’m giving the whole thing a rethink anyway.