Retro Rig 1999 - 2001 AMD Athlon 3DFX Voodoo 5 5500 Build

Nostalgia Gone Wild

Previously I worked on a 1998-1999 build and highlighted a few areas where I thought upgrades would be advantageous in certain games. Instead of keeping one single retro-rig and modifying it as required I've decided to build an entirely different system.

Again, I've been reusing some older parts I already have available and throwing in a few newer parts that won't affect the performance of the build such as case, psu, fans etc. The spec will be equivalent to that I had "back in the day" to play games of this time-period.

Original spec was:

AMD Athlon 650Mhz

FIC SD11

256mb PC 100 (originally 128MB upgraded)

Geforce 256 DDR 32MB / 3Dfx Vooodoo 5500 AGP

Soundblaster Live 1024

17GB 5400 RPM HDD  

Iomega Zip 100

4X CDRW

48X CDROM

Suntek Viper case

Suntek 250Watt PSU

Some would question whether or not a Voodoo 5500 was really an upgrade to a Geforce 256 DDR. It wasn't really from a technical viewpoint, but at the time VIA based boards were pretty unstable when used in combination with Geforce 256. This quickly became apparent to me after purchase. After spending months waiting for the 3DFX "Rampage" I choose to go with the Voodoo 5500 upon release as my Unreal Tournament playing career was suffering as a result of constant game-play stutters and crashes thanks to a combination of the Unreal engine's poor Direct3D support and the SD11 board's ability to supply enough voltage via the AGP slot. The choice came down to what games I was playing at the time, and at that time Unreal Tournament was king.

Although I still own FIC SD11 board I'm opting to exchange it for an Asus board (not had a bad experience with Asus boards yet!) It cost me a whole £5 on eBay and came with a few extra cards I won't be using.

Apart from the motherboard and case, I already have all other required parts. The K380 case cost me £23 from ebuyer.com with free next day delivery - can't really beat that. 

One part I considered using was my Promise Ultra 133 TX2, but this is where the annoyances started. The card requires a floppy disk to install prior to operating system installation, unfortunately the Asus K7V was about to give me my first negative Asus motherboard experience as it turns out the floppy disk controllers on these boards are prone to failure. Guess what, mine had failed. I tried everything I could think of including flashing the board bios, tried several FDD's but still could not get it to work, defeated for the moment I've decided to got without the Ultra TX2, but may revisit in the future.

My new spec is:

AMD Athlon 750Mhz

Asus K7V

768MB PC 133 (running in PC100 speeds due to chipset)

3DFX Voodoo 5500 AGP

Soundblaster Live 1024

80GB 7200 RPM HDD

Intel Pro 1000GT Ethernet card

DVD-ROM

CoolerMaster K380 Case

Maplin "G7 Power Extreme 680W" (Which is more like 400watt PSU in reality)

Voodoo 5, Awaken from your slumber and unleash hell upon this world once again.

The gubbins inside the system - Again, I know - those cables!

A nice little system.

One issue I found was despite the new chassis with 2x 120mm fans the system is still quite loud. It turned out to be the combination of the Voodoo 5500 card and the Slot A cooler fan. I will need to get replacements as soon as possible.

Windows 98SE installed and ready to run

Game Performance

Medal of Honour: Allied assault 

This game was like a warning sign for me back in the day that my Voodoo 5500 wasn't going to last very long. While the Voodoo is perfectly able to play these games from a performance point of view, the driver support was just about dropped by this point. Little errors started to creep into games, such as the texture misalignment in MOH:AA in-game menus. Lighting looked a bit weird at times but overall the game was still playable.

Menu misalignment

Strange lighting on moving objects.

Yet some scenes are perfectly fine.

Hitman: Agent 47

Hitman wasn't really a game I ever got into on the PC. I remember playing it on the original Xbox and thought it was alright, but it just didn't seem like a PC game to me at the time. All the same, it seems to run quite well on this little system.

In Glide mode many of the advanced options are grayed out and we're restricted to 16-bit colour

Yet Direct3D offers much more

Woke up in a padded cell chained to my bed - what did I do last night?

Direct 3D may be sharper and more colorful, but it has a horrible bilinear filtered look is more obvious.

Emperor : Battle for Dune

This was a big-time favourite of mine back in the day. Me and a friend played this, along with Red Alert 2, Unreal Tournament for months on my first ever constructed home LAN.

The game runs well on Voodoo 5500, except you must remember to choose 32-bit colour, or things get really weird looking. I've never had this confirmed by anyone, but I'm sure that this game allows use of the advanced motion blur or T-Buffer effects when used with a Voodoo 5500.

So excited to see this again.

16-bit more offers graphical corruption

Fixed by 32-bit mode.

Imperium Galactica 2

Another game I wanted so bad to like was Imperium Galactica 2, I could see the potential, but it's way overly complicated, and impossibly difficult against CPU in skirmish mode. I played this with a friend on the LAN and it was a little more fun to gang up on the CPU, but the game was plagued with "Synchronization error" problems.

This game didn't offer display modes above 640x480 until a patch was installed, be warned!

A really neat concept for a game, but it's just impossibly hard to play.

The Rest

The others I've played on this system include the Quake 3 engine driven Startrek Elite Force, Halflife, the original Aliens Vs Predator game and Unreal/UT. All in all, the performance is good and what you would expect for a high-end card of this time.

Rambling is over for now, if you enjoyed the post please remember to give me a +1 or leave a comment. Thanks!

A Blast from the past - Unreal Forgotten Video Playthrough

Things Just got Unreal

I've been meaning to post this for a good while now but as you can imagine it's been pretty low priority in the grand scheme of things. It's only now with me having injured by back that I'm forced to take some time off work and take it easy that I've found myself once again playing games. Oddly to most people, it's not the latest and greatest games that take my fancy, but the older titles for obsolete systems that I once again find myself drawn towards. This potentially isn't a healthy thing for me, given that I once had a massive games collector habit that to this day still fills my attic (and my wife's head with dread), It's a collection that's legacy spawned a community that still stands in the now passed-on website sega8bit.com. 

I've enjoyed PC gaming since I got my first proper PC in 1998, as soon as I got that 3DFX Voodoo 2 I immediately understood how far ahead the PC was in the graphics department compared to the gaming consoles of the time (PlayStation and Nintendo 64). Unreal was one of the first titles I purchased that I felt properly harnessed the potential of that 3DFX hardware. It was also the first time I ever witnessed a fully 3D world with outdoor scenes featuring distant mountainous terrain, running water and a sense of being on an adventure in an alien landscape. 

After spending months playing Unreal in single player mode I finally delved into the world of online gaming where again my mind was blown by what seemed like an infinitely expandable universe as it was possible to download thousands of player-made levels easily and quickly for the first time. It was only a matter of time before I too would create my own levels and contribute something back to this community. 

My initial attempts were poor to say the least, a couple of box rooms joined up to each-other, but over the next few years as Unreal Tournament came out I continued to tinker with the editor and released with quite a few multiplayer levels (see Sinistral's Unreal). I don't know when it quite happened, but some time in 1999 I decided I wanted to make a single player pack, Work was progressing well up until at least December 2002 and then college and work and life in general got my attention. I would be years later (2009) before I resumed work on the pack and finally released it to the (by then severely diminished) Unreal community. The map pack was quite literally forgotten about, hence the title for my pack was found. Unreal: Forgotten is a result.

Here's the low-down on Unreal: Forgotten

"Forgotten is a Map pack created by Andrew "Sinistral" Allison for the original Unreal. It uses some of the features of the unofficial Unreal 227 patch which can be found at Oldunreal.com. Forgotten consists of six new levels, plus two new cut-scenes."

 Titles and order are as follows:

• Intromap - And So It Begins
• The Abandoned Village
• The Old Mining Colony
• The Krall Castle
• The Massacre of Outpost One
• Earth Under Attack
• The Skaarj Supreme Command Cruiser
• Extromap - The End

Intromap: And So it Begins

A brief mini-movie to set the scene, the engine was very limiting from in this respect.

The Abandoned Village

The first playable level sets the scene on the snowy northern hemisphere of NaPali, a part that isn't seen in the original game. 

The Old Mining Colony

This will be pretty familiar to anyone that's played the original Unreal, the level oozes classic Unreal mining level atmosphere, but there's a few surprises in there.

The Krall Castle

A very long level that started out as an experiment of clobbering together a few different pieces I was working on, the result is (what I think) is a pretty epic scale Unreal map.

The Massacre of Outpost One

Explore a human base on NaPali, there's more than a little bit of Stargate SG1 influence in there.

Earth Under Attack

Another Human level set on Earth during a Skaarj invasion. 

The Skaarj Supreme Command Cruiser (includes Extromap- The end)

The final battle takes place on the Skaarj command cruiser where you must face the Skaarj Queen.

Unreal Forgotten can be downloaded at the Unreal Forgotten homepage.

As always, sharing is caring. Don't forget to leave a comment or give me a +1 if you enjoyed this post! Thanks!