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)
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| Voodoo 5, Awaken from your slumber and unleash hell upon this world once again. |
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| The gubbins inside the system - Again, I know - those cables! |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Menu misalignment |
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| Strange lighting on moving objects. |
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| 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.
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| In Glide mode many of the advanced options are grayed out and we're restricted to 16-bit colour |
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| Yet Direct3D offers much more |
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| Woke up in a padded cell chained to my bed - what did I do last night? |
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| 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.
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| So excited to see this again. |
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| 16-bit more offers graphical corruption |
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| Fixed by 32-bit mode. |
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.
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| This game didn't offer display modes above 640x480 until a patch was installed, be warned! |
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| 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!
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