juansolo Posted August 15, 2017 Share Posted August 15, 2017 The GF4 Ti4600 is a classic video card (the FX series and every one else that followed do not render certain effects properly). If I could have only two AGP video cards, it would be this one and a Voodoo 5 -- and both come in Mac versions. Yeah the Mac GF4Ti is the card I'm trying to get for it. It's not massively faster than the Radeon, but it is the best card available for it. My first Mac I ever had, when I essentially switched from PCs, was a Graphite G4 400 which was running a Voodoo 5 card. That thing was perfection for running UT. I toyed with putting one together just to do that, but Mac Voodoo cards are so hard to get hold of because they were the only PCI versions of the card and you can flash them to work on a PC. So loads of them were snagged when they were worth nothing and turned into PC cards. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boxpressed Posted August 15, 2017 Share Posted August 15, 2017 There's a PCI version of the V5 for PCs too. The easiest way to tell the difference is that the Mac version has DVI and VGA output jacks while the PC version has only VGA. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 (edited) Well my Gateway 2000 P5-120 rebuild is finally complete....and it is AWESOME. I did run into some Win98 installation quirks due to the fact that the BIOS has issues with CD-ROM booting *sometimes* and I had no floppies...and I didn't feel like removing my only internal floppy emulator from my A2000 for the project. But I did find another solution that I will get in to in more depth in a longer post (with pics) tomorrow sometime. For now, here are the final specs: Windows 98SE (of course) 180MHz MMX Overdrive CPU 64MB Memory Diamond Stealth II S220 4MB PCI Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 1 4MB PCI Soundblaster AWE64 Gold Gateway Telepath 28.8 Modem (just because it was there...haha) 5-port USB PCI card (working in 98SE thanks to Osgeld!) CF to IDE adapter mounted in a 5 1/4 front bay for easy removal of "hard drives". It is the primary and only "drive" in the machine now sporting a 2GB CF PATA DVD-ROM drive Brand New Sidewinder gamepad (yes, it was sealed and I opened it. Best $10 ever spent!) Brand New NOS Gateway 2000 keyboard Brand New NOS Gateway wheel mouse It was a lot of fun setting this up to be honest. Brought back a lot of memories Edited August 16, 2017 by eightbit Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boxpressed Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 Congrats! Love the Verite accelerators. I have a V1000 and a V2100 (same Diamond card you have). It's pretty amazing to play hardware-accelerated Descent 2 from DOS. It looks fantastic. It only works with the V1000, however. But there is a Voodoo version out there that runs from Windows and looks great too. Descent 1 & 2 are some of my favorite DOS games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 (edited) Well my Gateway 2000 P5-120 rebuild is finally complete....and it is AWESOME. I did run into some Win98 installation quirks due to the fact that the BIOS has issues with CD-ROM booting *sometimes* and I had no floppies...and I didn't feel like removing my only internal floppy emulator from my A2000 for the project. But I did find another solution that I will get in to in more depth in a longer post (with pics) tomorrow sometime. For now, here are the final specs: Windows 98SE (of course) 180MHz MMX Overdrive CPU 64MB Memory Diamond Stealth II S220 4MB PCI Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 1 4MB PCI Soundblaster AWE64 Gold Gateway Telepath 28.8 Modem (just because it was there...haha) 5-port USB PCI card (working in 98SE thanks to Osgeld!) CF to IDE adapter mounted in a 5 1/4 front bay for easy removal of "hard drives". It is the primary and only "drive" in the machine now sporting a 2GB CF PATA DVD-ROM drive Brand New Sidewinder gamepad (yes, it was sealed and I opened it. Best $10 ever spent!) Brand New NOS Gateway 2000 keyboard Brand New NOS Gateway wheel mouse It was a lot of fun setting this up to be honest. Brought back a lot of memories pretty beefcake for a pentium, grats There's a PCI version of the V5 for PCs too If anyone is interested I have previously modded a ATI Radieon 7000 PCI pc card to work with mac though you have to replace the bios rom which is a 8 pin soic, and have a working OS9.22 machine, in a nutshell you take off the 64Kb rom replace it with a 128k rom, boot into OS9.22 (with a different video card while the ati is installed) run the ati software update which does drivers AND bios to flash the mac bios onto the card this should work with Radeon 7000/8500/9000/9200 pci cards, from there it works on ppc osx, my power mac 9600/300 with that 64 meg 7000 pci card, ran quake 3 full options at 1280x1024 @ around 60fps give or take a bunch of crap on screen (ok consider my AMDK6/2 350 did just about as well with a pair of voodoo 2's in SLI but at like 800x600) Edited August 16, 2017 by Osgeld 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
juansolo Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 There's a PCI version of the V5 for PCs too. The easiest way to tell the difference is that the Mac version has DVI and VGA output jacks while the PC version has only VGA. Aha! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 Congrats! Love the Verite accelerators. I have a V1000 and a V2100 (same Diamond card you have). It's pretty amazing to play hardware-accelerated Descent 2 from DOS. It looks fantastic. It only works with the V1000, however. But there is a Voodoo version out there that runs from Windows and looks great too. Descent 1 & 2 are some of my favorite DOS games. I wonder if patching it with v2dosfix would allow it to work with the V2100? http://reocities.com/siliconvalley/campus/6499/myutil/myutil.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Great Hierophant Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 I wonder if patching it with v2dosfix would allow it to work with the V2100? http://reocities.com/siliconvalley/campus/6499/myutil/myutil.html The author of that program seems to think that his program is unnecessary for DOS to work with VQuake. From his readme : The latest Speedy3D API natively detect both the V1000 and V2x00, such games should already work under DOS. The latest Vquake and Indycar II patches are examples of recent Speedy3D games which do *NOT* need fixing." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 The author of that program seems to think that his program is unnecessary for DOS to work with VQuake. From his readme : The latest Speedy3D API natively detect both the V1000 and V2x00, such games should already work under DOS. The latest Vquake and Indycar II patches are examples of recent Speedy3D games which do *NOT* need fixing." I was referring to DOS Descent II however Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flojomojo Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 Not evangelizing or advertising or suggesting you should play anything other than 2005 Descent with our without 3D acceleration ... just putting this here in case any fans of the old game might have missed it: Descent was recently remastered/remade/reimagined for modern PCs with or without VR goggles. I backed the Kickstarter, I have the game, but it makes me just as sick and confused as it did many years ago on DOS. For many people, I'm sure that's a feature. You might like it, though: https://descendentstudios.com/ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boxpressed Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 I wonder if patching it with v2dosfix would allow it to work with the V2100? http://reocities.com/siliconvalley/campus/6499/myutil/myutil.html I remember trying to patch D2 to get it to work with the V2100, but I kept getting errors. Here's a thread where I discuss the problem: http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=44386& I eventually found a V1000, but it wasn't easy. It's one of my favorite vintage video cards. But do try out the Voodoo version. It's a 3rd party fix, but it looks fantastic and should run great with a V1. Also, there's a small chance that your Diamond is a V2200 instead of a V2100. I think Rendition ran short of V2100s and sent out V2200s for some Diamond cards. V2200s were the fastest Verite. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boxpressed Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 Not evangelizing or advertising or suggesting you should play anything other than 2005 Descent with our without 3D acceleration ... just putting this here in case any fans of the old game might have missed it: Descent was recently remastered/remade/reimagined for modern PCs with or without VR goggles. I backed the Kickstarter, I have the game, but it makes me just as sick and confused as it did many years ago on DOS. For many people, I'm sure that's a feature. You might like it, though: https://descendentstudios.com/ Definitely going to check this out. Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheGameCollector Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 Try your local facebook groups, craigslist or other similar want ad sites. Sometimes people who hang onto old PCs are willing to just give them to you for free. I got a free Windows 95 desktop from someone on facebook and a Windows XP desktop from someone on craigslist for $30. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
briwayjones Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 I just tossed my last GeForce 2 MX card. My last S3 is long gone. GeForce 2 MX cards were epic. Only about 10FPS slower than NVIDIAS top end cards at the time for about 1/6 the cost at $30. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+nanochess Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 I keep a Pentium II 333 mhz with 5 1/4" floppy disk drive and 3 1/2" plus Windows 98 for oldies thingies. It's a real pleasure to hear again the sound of a 360K floppy disk being formatted. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 Not evangelizing or advertising or suggesting you should play anything other than 2005 Descent with our without 3D acceleration ... just putting this here in case any fans of the old game might have missed it: Descent was recently remastered/remade/reimagined for modern PCs with or without VR goggles. I backed the Kickstarter, I have the game, but it makes me just as sick and confused as it did many years ago on DOS. For many people, I'm sure that's a feature. You might like it, though: https://descendentstudios.com/ It is! I wouldn't mind playing Descent in a 3-axis trainer either. Be so cool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flojomojo Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 It's a real pleasure to hear again the sound of a 360K floppy disk being formatted. I searched for "rule 34 floppy disk" just to make sure you weren't alone in your fetish, but all I found was this 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted August 17, 2017 Share Posted August 17, 2017 (edited) So just a couple of pictures of the final product....except the CD-ROM in these pics was exchanged for a DVD-ROM shortly after and the CF replaced with a WD CF 2GB. I played POD today on this and it was 100% perfect. Very smooth I had only one quirk with this model and that is the CD-ROM booting from POST. The option is in the BIOS and I was able to boot the Win98SE CD-ROM quite a few times, but out of nowhere it just stopped working properly. It would start the CD-ROM where it asks if you want to start from Win98 CD or HDD, and if I chose the CD option it sat there at a blinking cursor. Then some other times (like 1 out of 20 reboots) it would work. What I think it is is simply a wonky BIOS with a very early implementation of CD-ROM booting. Each time it didn't work the floppy light would come on and stay on. I bet if I had a Win98 3.5 floppy boot disk it would have worked just fine...but I have no disks. This BIOS is also weird in the fact that the primary and secondary IDE ports do not allow secondary slaves. There isn't even an option in the BIOS, and if I slave another CD-ROM for example it will just lock up on post after detecting the primary CD-ROM. The BIOS *does* however have a list of FOUR IDE hard drives for the primary channel. Huh? I have no idea how that is supposed to happen....and I don't ever recall seeing that in the past in the BIOS on these old machines....really weird. In any case, I did something a bit different in order to get Win98 to the CF card. I installed Win98 in VirtualBox on my modern PC first. Then I mounted the resulting VHD in disk management to the OS and imaged it directly to the CF card using HDD RAWCopy. Then after bringing it back to the Gateway and booting up (and it having to discover all hardware...copying the "win98" folder to the CF helped so that I didn't have to putz with the CD anymore) I had to remove all of the components that VirtualBox added from the device manager in order to resolve the 20 or so conflicts (with the REAL hardware). Once cleaned up it works perfectly. A bit of a bitch and there are probably better solutions, but it worked. After installing all drivers and testing everything for perfection I imaged the 2GB CF card using Win32DiskImager so that I will *never* have to do that again. Windows 98 reinstall (if I mess it up down the road testing crap...which I know I will) would now take around 3 minutes Edited August 17, 2017 by eightbit 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boxpressed Posted August 17, 2017 Share Posted August 17, 2017 Great monitor. If you haven't already, check out Phil's Computer Lab's video on the AWE64 Gold. Playing around with soundfonts is a lot of fun, and the built in Creative romset is average at best. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted August 17, 2017 Share Posted August 17, 2017 Great monitor. Thanks. It is so big and so damn heavy...but so crisp and handles two VGA inputs. I love it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boxpressed Posted August 17, 2017 Share Posted August 17, 2017 Perfect for a Voodoo card then. No pass-thru cable needed! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted August 17, 2017 Share Posted August 17, 2017 you still have two slots free lol in regards to your IDE confusion, cable select cables were often the norm on commercially made machines of this era, so I bet if you got 2 cs cables where one connector is labeled master and slave, set all your jumpers on the devices to CS and let her roll you can get 4 devices on 2 channels no problem 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted August 17, 2017 Share Posted August 17, 2017 you still have two slots free lol in regards to your IDE confusion, cable select cables were often the norm on commercially made machines of this era, so I bet if you got 2 cs cables where one connector is labeled master and slave, set all your jumpers on the devices to CS and let her roll you can get 4 devices on 2 channels no problem Thanks for that tip. I will be looking into that! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eightbit Posted August 17, 2017 Share Posted August 17, 2017 Perfect for a Voodoo card then. No pass-thru cable needed! Nah, the other VGA is for my TI99/4A Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newsdee Posted August 21, 2017 Share Posted August 21, 2017 (edited) A new FPGA core was released for the MiSTer (the next gen MiST) that runs a slow 486. Worth testing how some of these games fare with it... http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=167&No=1046 Edited August 21, 2017 by Newsdee Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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