Speaking of retro builds, I've got a couple projects coming down the pipe -- I'm rebuilding my old Pentium Pro system, for one, and I'm still kind of in the planning phase. I have a couple of video cards in mind -- I have a Permedia 2V that would go nicely in it, but I'm wondering how its OpenGL support is going to be. This is a time in which that was still really spotty, case in point the Matrox G200 that I'm planning to use in the other build. A known quantity is the TNT2 M64 I also have earmarked for it, but I'm kind of left feeling that's a really uninspired choice. I'll use it if I have to, but I'll be wishing the Permedia worked out the whole time.
I pulled an ISA Sound Blaster 16 out of my parts bin, this one is a CT2940, one of the later cost-reduced PnP models with the CT1978 CQM FM synthesis chip that's known for being kind of a poor OPL clone. It mostly seems to just be missing a lot of low-pass filtering -- it gets very gritty and tinny when a real OPL implementation wouldn't. There are some games where that's actually kind of what you want, and honestly, the PPro will be running Windows NT 4.0 anyway, so it's not going to be a multimedia powerhouse no matter what I do. I'm just throwing this at it so hopefully I can just use the built-in Windows drivers for it.
If that doesn't work -- not outside the realm of possibility, it's an untested card and seems to have taken a couple dings in its life -- I have an Ensoniq AudioPCI that will also do Fine™. That's actually a card that came with this machine when it was brand new -- I think this is the card I pulled when I was salvaging the motherboard from its original ruined OEM case. Like I said, NT4 isn't going to be a multimedia experience, this will mostly just be for the various dings and chord error sounds it'll make in use. NIC will be a bog-standard Intel PRO/100B.
The other build I have coming and, frankly, one I'm more excited for as I haven't messed with that platform in a very long time, is Socket 7. Just vanilla Socket 7, mind, it's coming with a Pentium MMX 233. The board is an EPoX baby AT design with an Apollo VPX chipset, meaning that cacheable RAM is heavily dependent on how much L2 cache is present. This example has 512K so I can cache up to 128MB, but I'm going with 64 anyway, at least for right now. I might try and run the system bus at 75MHz for an overclock on both the CPU (to ~262MHz, pretty doable according to online sources) and the PCI bus (37.5MHz, nothing crazy, I just don't want to move the divider to 2/5 and underclock it to 30) as well as the RAM, but we'll see how it goes. I don't have a very high opinion of VIA chipsets on a good day. If I hadn't been given this board for free I'd likely have pursued a 430TX or ALi Aladdin chipset board.
I'm probably going to run 98lite on it as it's fast enough and has enough RAM to benefit from 98's genuine technical improvements over 95 (VMM32 and VCACHE are marginally smarter, audio-mixing, WDM drivers, etc) but it's not so much so that I feel like leaving the regular Internet Explorer shell in place is a great idea.
I considered several options for graphics. Originally I wanted an S3 Trio64 or ViRGE for their near-flawless DOS compatibility, but the games that have issues on later cards I have a whole-ass entire other machine for, so I don't need to be 100% compatible with games from 1990. I have a Matrox Millennium II that I almost went with as it has a razor sharp, very vibrant VGA output and it's scarily quick under DOS, but I kind of wanted to dabble with what period 3D games would feel like on there, so I eventually decided to track down a PCI Matrox Millennium G200. I don't expect games like Unreal to be smooth on here by any means, but it should be fun to see just how bad it actually is, and the G200 should at least manage to render an accurate image, something the much simpler 3D core in the Millennium II can't do.
To be clear, I mostly just want to play late DOS SVGA titles and Windows 2D games on here, like Diablo, Starcraft, Age of Empires II, Fallout 1 and 2, etc. Stuff that struggles on the 486 but feels rather pitifully easy for my Geode box, for example. Later 2D games and 3D games in general on here are more for the novelty factor than anything, as I don't expect amazing performance. Something I also want to do with this box is investigate how badly XP runs on hardware barely meeting the minimum requirements, and how much worse it gets as you upgrade the service pack level.
I'm going to try my Audician32 (YMF719) card here. It always exhibited weird behavioral problems in my Blue Lightning, but for a while it worked fine in my original 486 build, so I figure it warrants a shot before I go and find something else. If that doesn't work out I'll be likely keeping an eye out for one of the rare AWE32s with a real OPL core, or just settle for something cheap and reasonably compatible like an ESS AudioDrive or such. I've not had amazingly good luck with Yamaha sound cards, which is frustrating as I want to like them, but I just never have a good time using them. I'll be using my strange, weird "PRO/100 ISA" here that doesn't actually have an Intel controller at all. It doesn't have much support outside of contemporary Windows and DOS, as Linux has no idea what it is. I figure 70ish mbits out of ISA and keeping the PCI bus uncongested will help what little performance there is to eke out of it.
Did you ever encounter another LS-120 drive in the wild? My uncle used a Zip drive in those days because he could usually rely on having some way of getting his disks into another computer.
