I think the fact that you could reuse the case of your very first own computer makes this build even more special. It's a glorified retro gaming beast now.
Your video makes me once again regret that I didn't save the populated motherboards, cards, and floppy drives from every system I've ever built from my first one based upon an AMD Am386DX-40.
You used to be able to do a manual configuration in the device manager for specific hardware. I'd probably disable the parallel and serial ports (leave one active for a serial mouse or other hardware) to free up as many irq and io addresses as possible. Check what resources your sound card is using via any dos game with a sound setup program. You can then use that info to set the resources the card needs manually. I used to get this error for an old sound card I had in the 90s. I vaguely remember having to install the card in dos as well.
Damn. I pretty much cried as kid cause our first PC had Hercules card and it was really limiting factor on games. Never thought someone would make Doom run on it 😂
Someone has tried to port Doom to every known piece of computer equipment available. I am sure I came across someone that put Doom on a TI-80. Might not have been the actual game but one written for that calculator. There are rumors that someone is currently working on porting Doom to the Antikythera mechanism.
Currently rocking a KT133A retro rocket myself! I have found success with the board you mentioned, but I'm currently using a Soltek SL75-KAV with an Athlon XP-M 3000+ (extremely unsupported but works on all my SL75-KAVs). The jumpers only let the system boot at 12x but CrystalCPUID can get it up to 16.5x. Works great if your addon hardware doesn't lock the system up.
Other decent KT133A boards I have used for MS-DOS gaming setups, all with ISA slots and 686B southbridge for those curious: - Iwill KK266+ - Soltek SL75-MAV (same as KAV but with integrated ProSavage) - Soyo SY-K7VTA PRO But among all similar boards, the QDI Kinetiz 7T mentioned in this video and Soltek SL75-KAV have been the real stars in my experience.
Man this brings back some memories. You should totally come to DEFCON in Vegas and find a way to either do a talk, village, or workshop. I know people bring old hardware and PCs.
Been enjoying my own take on this since last year, but he missed that you can slow it down enough with the cpuspd tool to play 8086 era games as well. It can cover a very wide range. Mine doesn't have an ISA slot and it has a Voodoo 2 to complement what the Geforce 6800GT can't do. The soundcard is a ESS Solo-1 which works on VIA motherboards with socket 939. So you can use even more ram and more cpu speed than his one while still retaining almost flawless dos sound compatibility with really good soundblaster sound. Pair that up with an audigy 1 for EAX and you now have sound all the way up to windows 10. Mine can play Crysis 1 to, but it also plays those early speed sensitive dos titles. And his can to if he grabs the tool :D
I had a Athlon XP back in the day. I picked the one with the fast FSB (IIRC 333Mhz rather than 266Mhz, so it might have been this exact chip). Got some Ram that could run at that speed too, an ATI GPU, NVidia chipset board and a PSU. The damn thing was unstable in 3DMark. I got all the parts from some online place that was excellent with returns. Tried swapping out the GPU and PSU. Still unstable. Eventually I found out that the ram I'd got couldn't in fact run at the fast FSB it claimed. Manually downclocked it to the slow speed. Very stable and no perceptible loss in performance. However the onboard sound was glitchy so I ended up buying a cheap sound card. This sysem put me off AMD/ATI and only now would I consider them. Basically no Intel system I've had, and I've had a few, would have had this issue with ram because Intel would probably have special-cased the ram I bought and run it slower than it claimed it was capable of. Intel seem to have invented XMPP so they can select a low, safe speed by default but enable the fast and less safe mode on ram they've tested. Also ram branding is more Crucial now than it used to be, in the sense that if you buy your ram from them it will run fine at the claimed speed. I still feel a bit bad about that parts place who saw their profit margin wiped out by me exchanging parts that were probably perfectly fine.
I'm about to get an Ensoniq / Creative ES1370/71 for my own "retro rocket", maybe that might solve a few problems. Does seem to work with DOS stuff from what I've seen online.
I feel like for the sound card in win 98 you need to go digging around the internet for a better driver. It's really annoying to do this since sometimes there are multiple versions of the same sound card and sometimes if they are OEM they use a different driver that may even be on the recovery cd if you can find it. Edit: probably not the issue the more I think and look over the description and vaguely see in the video so I added some replies to this with some additional thoughts.
the last line makes me think the motherboard may not like the sound card though. if you can get it to operate in other pcs in win9x it is possible the bios/OS is assigning bad resources [some bioses will let you assign resources manually and sometimes windows will let you as well] it's a little perplexing that you got it to work in xp though so maybe the issue is with windows 9x itself. I have had issues with windows assigning sound blaster live! cards to the same resources as other devices for whatever reason and had to figure out how to manually get the resources to something without a conflict. When looking up the motherboard I also noticed there are 2 other version that have built in audio chips.[an AC 97 one and a CT5880 chipset] I wonder if that could be part of the issue. And the odd looking slot next to the agp turns out to be an Audio/Modem Riser Interface Connector.
I keep trying to find a good shot of the onboard audio jumper. I would not expect that to even exist on the board but the jumpers on this board seems to be a specific shade of blue and it looks like there is one there. Make sure the jumper next to the agp & Audio/Modem riser is in position 1-2 to disable the onboard codec.
@@TheRasteri one last thought I had was related to the amount of ram you have. Try it out with 1 stick of ram if that's possible. Outside of trying to manually assign resources in the bios that's the only other thing I can think of that could be causing an issue in win 9x.
QDI was a subsidiary of Lenovo (then called Legend), it produced boards for both Legend-branded systems and DIY PCs, and QDI boards were very popular in China in the late 90s. I tried using my 512MB 7600 GT AGP with a Gigabyte 8I865GME-775 mainboard and a Core 2 CPU last weekend, and the graphics card refused to work unless I flashed the VBIOS for 256 MB cards and replaced the two 1 GB RAM sticks with a single 256 MB of DDR 400, even if I set the MaxPhysPage to 10000. This rig runs Windows 2000 without any issues but problematic with 98, so I'm looking for another machine that can run Win98 out of the box... Thanks for your video!
Really fun build! I love it when people take on the same challenge I did in trying to build a wide range DOS PC. My route is similar but a little different. I went with a newer ASUS A8V socket 939 motherboard and an Athlon 64 X2 4200+. So under XP I can access 3.5GB of RAM and have two cores. Under 98 I cap the ram to 512mb with the Windows 98 Memory Burn Driver. For the graphics card I went with the 6800GT which has native 98 drivers and also runs Crysis 1 well on low. I considered 7000 but the hacked drivers have a driver that is to new for maximum stability. The problem is that starting at the 6000 series they dropped certain texture support so I also added a Voodoo 2 to the mix to cover the gap. My FSB is to fast for static linked games in DOS so it only works with dynamic linked games and I made my own modded Voodoo 2 driver bundle to make that easy. The soundcard issue i solved differently. For Windows I went with the Audigy 1 for great DOS prompt support and EAX. But for DOS i needed better compatibility. The socket 939 chipset from VIA still has all the ISA stuff functioning on the PCI ports so soundblaster emulation is possible with the right card. There is one that can do it very well and that is the ESS Solo-1. Once initialized the card hijacks some DMA functions making it work and for many games I do not even need a TSR. It works in every mode, even real mode games. I also load a special program that turns the mixer on the audigy on so i can have passtrough from the solo-1 and the cd drive without having to mess with cables. Last but not least is the lower end games. 8086 stuff, so games like sopwith. Those also work on my build and will likely work with yours to! All you need is cpuspd which gives you very good control over things like power states, multipliers and cache. So you can get very good results with it. That means with our builds you should be able to play even the earliest DOS games and then reboot into crysis.
@@TheRasteri Few tips for when you do. The card is IRQ sensitive for me. Some games worked on one, the other half worked on the other. And when i tried a third IRQ it worked on both. i believe mine is on IRQ10, it will automatically take IRQ5 once initialized for its sound blaster emulation. It also has limited Windows 3.11 support but the driver they ship has a broken installer. I managed to make an installer that works if its initialized in DOS. And there is a way to manually initialize the card without a TSR (doesn't work on all games but works on many). If you manage to get one I can send my drivers over. Otherwise you'd be stuck with a Win98 driver (that does work in MS-Dos mode).
something I've always wanted to test was a"PC/PCI" or "SB LINK" port on some motherboards and pci sound cards, it allows you to get fully compatible sound blaster support on newer systems without an ISA bus by adding a 5 pin cable, there are zero videos about this even through it was common in the early 2000's
What needs to be created is a thru parallel (db25) cutout port SD card reader. Reads full sized SD cards, with adaptor for micro and mini cd cards. Could probably provide an additional micro SD slot. Both these accessable from outside. With an IDE or SATA cable to the host controller. LEDs would be nice, power and access lights for each slot. With mechanical push to eject mechanism. Probably with either or both software/ button dismount disk(s) function. Definitely monitor disk eject function, but if prevented an emergency eject function like optical drives.
Cool build. Ironically I build a XP machine just by reciclying a lying pc combining parts. And it's a Athlon XP at 1.25 and for dos I got a working k6-2 (potencially 3) and some 2 old hp Vectra. All of this came seeing people doing retro projects like this one. I started appreciating more old hw so I found what I had on storage and Frankenstein everything I could. I hope you can do more projects since seems really interesting to try.
Damn, yours is bigger than mine, lol! 1.68GHz overclocked P3 Tualatin is my fastest retro rocket. I also re-used a special case with some history when I built my first retro PC, the Dual 1GHz Slot 1 Pentium 3 system. Originally that case housed a PC I built for a client in the early 2000's, one of my first hardware sales - which I would end up buying back years later as a used machine, upgrading the internals and using it as my own desktop system until about 2009. Then it sat as discarded parts until 2019 when I lovingly cleaned up the case and re-used it to build my first retro PC!
god I love that cases are *still* ibm compatible, and vice versa. It's so magical knowing that, with the right adapters, any hardware is still compatible, even internally.
if you have a 3d printer, you can grab a mounting plate with faceplate for your case and 3d print a faceplate with everything ready for you to mount the SD card to and have it accessible that way. I have printed quite a few of them for my retro machines. Very fun.
1:59 I think this claim is not really true. From my experience there are a lot of PCI sound cards which provide a perfect 100% compatibility (with SB-link of course) with every DOS game. All this while giving you a much better and cleaner sound, compared to majority of ISA ones.
If you have access to SB-LINK and only PCI slots, the YMF724 (and its friends 744 and 754) is the best choice for this hands down. It just so happens however that any motherboard really worth using that also has this connector also just happens to have an ISA slot or two.
@@jamesfmackenzie We meet again, my ESS Solo-1 with a socket 939 via board indeed works fantastic under dos to. Doesn't need sb-link either with the via chipset. That card has tricks up its sleeve to hijack whats needed.
A faster CPU will be Barton based mobile processor. I used to have ABIT KT133A main board supporting SDram and 1 ISA slot that boots up Barton Athlon XP-M CPU. Was a sweet PC!
Interesting build, especially running Crysis with an ISA soundcard. Unfortunately, the Adlib sounds terrible on that card, lol. I guess if you aren't playing too many DOS games on it, it's not a deal-breaker, but good Adlib sound is probably my biggest requirement for DOS, so I only use cards with a real Yamaha OPL chip.
You can get industrial mainboards with ISA, PCI and PCIe slots and modern CPUs. The PCIe hardware is a bit tricky or even impossible to get working under DOS and older Windows versions, though. Your build is nice, though.
I heard those ISA slots won't necessarily work properly with ISA sound cards due to lack of DMA support. I'm not sure of the specifics, but something to research if anyone is looking into those.
@@kunka592 there is already video, about the ones, that still support DMA. Tested with Quadcore Xeon E5450 or similiar. ISA worked, doom 1 and 2 worked under DOS with sounds.
I have the same passion for the same reason; but, I went for two Windows 98se computers and one Windows XP, and finally my Windows 10 computer. It's my hobby, I have tons of games, too many really; but, collecting all the games was alot of fun, and building all my computers has been a learning experience, and alot of fun too. For Glide games on Windows 98se, all you need is DirectX 9.0c installed along with a compatible DirectX 9 video card(mine is a Geforce FX5700), and install nGlide version 1.05. I have found that I can play all my old glide games that way without the high cost of buying a 3dfx Voodoo card. I will admit that my one Windows 98 PC has a 3dfx Voodoo 1 paired with a Geforce MX400, I run Need For Speed II SE ,POD, and Wing Commander Prophecy on that machine to name but a few, I have 42 games for that computer alone, mostly glide. :)
Sounds great. What CPU did you pair with that Voodoo 1, and what are your favourite glide games on that PC? I am building a voodoo 1 based PC but don't have many glide games. Some recommendations would be great. I do have the 3 that you mentioned, as well as Tombraider 1, Quake, Descent: Freespace.
To use NT 4.0 or 3.5 drivers you can try to tweek install inf files to make them compatible with XP. I saw made from XP to Win98SE for my LG 32" TV-Monitor. But it hard to do for all other drivers as their inf can be realy complex.
Apart from no ISA, I recommend shuttle XPC, as they are so compact so making them more convenient for most people as they don't get int he way or are easy to store and get out when you want to use them. I got a P4 3.2ghz one with DVD R/W and 2.5 Floppy (though will likely get a gotek emulator to replace that) with a 9800 pro, Audigy 2 ZS with 1gb DDr 400. I dual boot it with windows 7 32bit and Windows 98 SE. I picked up a cheap 500GB seagate hybrid drive that I use for windows 98 SE as its pretty fast without the trim concerns (plus 32GB main aprtition then the rest as storage is handy. Windows 7 is just on 120GB SSD with the shared storage from the hybrid drive making transferring files and the like nce and easy. Throw on a DVI to hdmi adapter and its even more convenient as it can connect to all my monitors or even the TV. They are currently pretty cheap and many are good to go out of the box for most people needs without having to have a big box retro PC, though if you want sata on board, those seem to be harder to find and have a bigger price tag unless you get lucky.
7:30 - First of all - good chipset drivers for VIA with patches. Second go to device manager and set manually parameters like IRQ, DMA and so on. This way its works if your card isnt plug and play.
I have a bit of a retro rocket in a HP desktop I found in the trash with a Coppermine 1Ghz. Only problem is no ISA. I have a 166MMX with a ISA sound card though... Not much space in this apartment for more
I built a similar retro rocket, but using a Pentium 4, Geforce ti4200 and a Soundblaster Live! PCI card - it's surprisingly good for a lot of DOS games despite not being an ISA card. Can play from most DOS games to anything up to Half Life 2 fairly well, but I might upgrade the GPU to a Geforce 6800 for DX9 support.
2:31 How were you able to use an AMD Athlon XP on that motherboard? I have a similiar QDI motherboard (Kinetiz 7t) and according to the manual i found on the web it doesn't say that it supports AMD Athlon XP, only Athlon up to 1 Ghz or higher.
I have a 7E which supports 133MHz FSB. But the 7T can do it too (it's called "Overclocking Jumper Setting" in the manual even when you're not technically overclocking), just it might not be as stable. Grab a 2800+ and try :) (code number AXDA2800DKV4C)
@TheRasteri Hey, one more question. Where did you get the latest bios for your motherboard (version 4.1 from 2004)? I found this version from somewhere for my motherboard, but when i flashed it, it only upgraded to version 3.8 from 2001.
I like doing overkill setups in retrogaming as well, i have something like this Celeron 3.06GHZ LGA775 Gigabyte ga-8vm800pmd-775-rh (agp and ddr2) 2x256mb ddr2 533mhz Nvidia vanta lt 16mb 30Gb IDE HDD (i like the sound...) Working well on w98 and its games, but for DOS gaming Pentium 2 350MMX with ISA soundblaster is my choice.
That Celeron might be a Pentium 4/Netburst-based CPU, so for more speed, I'd recommend getting some dual-core Core2-based CPU. I have a Win98SE build using LGA775 and I temporarily used a similar speed Celeron, but once I switched to a Core2 CPU, it was night and day difference in some games, even ones from 1997. That GPU might be a bottleneck in your case though.
@@TheRasteri I think Win98 have "1-bit"-like colour mode. You can try Win98 SE with that "hercules" card and let's see what happens. (Disable the integrated video card on the motherboard first.)
I have kept my K7N2 boards / PCs (the 400mhz FSB editions) all with AMD K7 3200 cpus. They have all the connections, are excellent boards and run every OS
FreeDOS runs on every PC that has a Legacy BIOS mode. So the most ridiculously overpowered DOS PC is just a modern PC that has this mode. Though it won't run games with sound because DOS games directly access sound cards and don't understand integrated sound, you need something with SB emulation (and even the Aureal Vortex, the most compatible SB emulating PCI card, displays severe stability issues on newer chipsets). My own retro rocket PC is a Pentium 4 with an old Intel chipset which works just fine with Aureal Vortex under DOS.
I’d love to recreate a retro rocket like the system I had back in the mid 2000s, loved AMD then and had an nforce 2 based Soltek board and a Barton core XP3200, MSI ti4800 agp card. Working in the industry and having access through friends and trading/swapping etc I ended up with a Tyan Tiger 2466 with matched MP2800 cpus, it was fast as hell but crap for gaming compared to the nforce board/XP processor. If I still had those rigs they’d likely need recapping, still have the 450w aerocool psu that ran them but not powered it up in years.
Your storage looks similar to mine. I am jealous though. I want an Acorn A3000 or later RISC pc, and I want an Amstrad CPC machine, but they never released here in the US as far as I can tell. So they never show up here where I live. Some day though.
I totally skipped P4 by going from P3 Slot1 to AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (Barton core). Paired with DDR333 (1.5G), Radeon 9250 AGP; I played many hours and also it was the first computer that was connected to internet. While XP SP1 was qiute unstable, I used Win2000 until I got a WiFi adapter that would not work on any OS lower than XP SP2. But by the time, it came out SP3 for XP and that was fast and stable. However, for XP to run well, I needed to upgrade the RAM to 2.5G. I was able to play anything on it, from the original Starcraft, Return to castle Wolfenstein, Warcraft 3, to Far cry, Half life 1&2, Uru, and many other obscure games (anyone remember the Ubisoft games sales?). It also could run dos games - the AC97 chip on the motherboard had some SB emulation that allowed dos games to run natively with sound. I changed that computer with a dual core when the Radeon 9250 died.
You kept fiddling with that backplane, and I assume that's also why you hauled out the "specialized ISA Pentium 4 motherboard", which is the central card for said backplane? Is this going to be somewhere?
out of curiosity, what kind of slot is that that you have just above the AGP slot? its the same color and width as an agp slot, but a bit shorter, and its a lot further towards the metal bracket than AGP is. never seen anything like it.
With Windows 98se, you are locked into real IRQs, and they should not be shared. You may need to disable whatever uses IRQ5 in your motherboard BIOS. And don't forget to install sound support in CONFIG.SYS (load high) and AUTOEXEC.BAT files (not required on 2K/XP, but you still need to set BLASTER in environment variables). Enjoy!
Fastest rocket DOS machines I have is Athlon X2 5600+AM2 with X800 XL 256MB with ESS Solo-1 and SB 128 PCI (cause I like its wavetable MIDI) and Voodoo2 12MB. Also have similar configuration but with Athlon 3000+ s754 with two V2's 12MB in SLI and FX5900 and similar sound cards. Those are both DOS and Win98 computers. GPUs for both computers run on Windows 98. I could go with GeForce 6800 but I do not like it for retro PCs as it doesn't do 16-bit dithering. Newer games I can run just fine on my modern PC
If i remember correctly, running ISA soundcard on Win2000, it can only play sound from 1 application at the time. Did u experience the same with those ISA card on XP?
Look man you probs know what your doing so I wont bore you. Disregard if its no new info. When struggling with drivers, just install the windows compatible with the device. Navigate to system32 then drivers. Copy all driver name related folder. Install your newer windows and copy this driver folder to desktop. Right click the device and browse for driver. Select the folder, a error will appear as the driver isnt signed but you can just allow it. Ive found out of 100 times this has worked 100 times :)
512?! Pfffth! I picked strawberries for 3 weeks (4 to 9 AM) to buy 16 MB EDO in summer '94......and YES! It WAS then I learned...more RAM ≠ faster x86....
I think it's time for a new Chain of Fools video. You can upgrade win10 from x86 to x64, so it's possible to go full-tilt and see if the legacy apps still work on Win11 x64. ;)
@@AlejandroRodolfoMendez If you mean upgrading win10 from x86 to x64, you just run the win10 x64 installer from within x86 windows, and pick the "upgrade" option. It should let you keep your settings/apps.
Ah yes, the dreaded MX440SE. I had one as well was was fine until the original Far Cry came out and needed shaders so I replaced it with a Nvidia FX5700. Huge difference and for all teh flack the FX series of cards got, I was more than happy with it.
I think the fact that you could reuse the case of your very first own computer makes this build even more special.
It's a glorified retro gaming beast now.
Your video makes me once again regret that I didn't save the populated motherboards, cards, and floppy drives from every system I've ever built from my first one based upon an AMD Am386DX-40.
i had a 386 dx, it run garbage..
a todays 70 dollar card was a long long dream these days.hahah.
200 dollars were gameboy these days..gar.bage
I tipped my original AMD 386DX-40 motherboard and memory a few years ago and kind of regret it now too.
I had an AM486DX40 and wish I had kept it
Came here after YT reccomended me your "Cursed Graphics Cards" short and I've got to say, I love old tech content. ❤ Happy to be a new subscriber.
You used to be able to do a manual configuration in the device manager for specific hardware. I'd probably disable the parallel and serial ports (leave one active for a serial mouse or other hardware) to free up as many irq and io addresses as possible. Check what resources your sound card is using via any dos game with a sound setup program. You can then use that info to set the resources the card needs manually. I used to get this error for an old sound card I had in the 90s. I vaguely remember having to install the card in dos as well.
Damn. I pretty much cried as kid cause our first PC had Hercules card and it was really limiting factor on games. Never thought someone would make Doom run on it 😂
Someone has tried to port Doom to every known piece of computer equipment available. I am sure I came across someone that put Doom on a TI-80. Might not have been the actual game but one written for that calculator.
There are rumors that someone is currently working on porting Doom to the Antikythera mechanism.
This is awesome! The sound card NT driver situation is kind of hilarious. Also those credit card sized microSD holders look mighty tempting…
Currently rocking a KT133A retro rocket myself! I have found success with the board you mentioned, but I'm currently using a Soltek SL75-KAV with an Athlon XP-M 3000+ (extremely unsupported but works on all my SL75-KAVs). The jumpers only let the system boot at 12x but CrystalCPUID can get it up to 16.5x. Works great if your addon hardware doesn't lock the system up.
Other decent KT133A boards I have used for MS-DOS gaming setups, all with ISA slots and 686B southbridge for those curious:
- Iwill KK266+
- Soltek SL75-MAV (same as KAV but with integrated ProSavage)
- Soyo SY-K7VTA PRO
But among all similar boards, the QDI Kinetiz 7T mentioned in this video and Soltek SL75-KAV have been the real stars in my experience.
oh crikey, I should get one of those XP-M 3000+, I could really use those extra 67MHz :)
@@TheRasteri Easily underclockable to 3x! :)
Man this brings back some memories. You should totally come to DEFCON in Vegas and find a way to either do a talk, village, or workshop. I know people bring old hardware and PCs.
You absolute magnificent mad man! You my have single handedly constructed the blueprint for legacy pcs for the next 10 years. Way to go!
Been enjoying my own take on this since last year, but he missed that you can slow it down enough with the cpuspd tool to play 8086 era games as well. It can cover a very wide range.
Mine doesn't have an ISA slot and it has a Voodoo 2 to complement what the Geforce 6800GT can't do. The soundcard is a ESS Solo-1 which works on VIA motherboards with socket 939. So you can use even more ram and more cpu speed than his one while still retaining almost flawless dos sound compatibility with really good soundblaster sound. Pair that up with an audigy 1 for EAX and you now have sound all the way up to windows 10.
Mine can play Crysis 1 to, but it also plays those early speed sensitive dos titles. And his can to if he grabs the tool :D
Dude that SD Card holder is Sweet, I had no idea they even made them in that form, gotta check it out. Keep up the vids
LOL you beat me.. I was gonna ask you if it runs Crysis LOL!
their positions is on museum n garbage😄😄
5:06 it's actually refreshing seeing these old parts in a video
Sweet build! I love the retro case.
I had a Athlon XP back in the day. I picked the one with the fast FSB (IIRC 333Mhz rather than 266Mhz, so it might have been this exact chip). Got some Ram that could run at that speed too, an ATI GPU, NVidia chipset board and a PSU. The damn thing was unstable in 3DMark. I got all the parts from some online place that was excellent with returns. Tried swapping out the GPU and PSU. Still unstable. Eventually I found out that the ram I'd got couldn't in fact run at the fast FSB it claimed. Manually downclocked it to the slow speed. Very stable and no perceptible loss in performance. However the onboard sound was glitchy so I ended up buying a cheap sound card. This sysem put me off AMD/ATI and only now would I consider them. Basically no Intel system I've had, and I've had a few, would have had this issue with ram because Intel would probably have special-cased the ram I bought and run it slower than it claimed it was capable of. Intel seem to have invented XMPP so they can select a low, safe speed by default but enable the fast and less safe mode on ram they've tested. Also ram branding is more Crucial now than it used to be, in the sense that if you buy your ram from them it will run fine at the claimed speed.
I still feel a bit bad about that parts place who saw their profit margin wiped out by me exchanging parts that were probably perfectly fine.
I'm about to get an Ensoniq / Creative ES1370/71 for my own "retro rocket", maybe that might solve a few problems. Does seem to work with DOS stuff from what I've seen online.
I feel like for the sound card in win 98 you need to go digging around the internet for a better driver. It's really annoying to do this since sometimes there are multiple versions of the same sound card and sometimes if they are OEM they use a different driver that may even be on the recovery cd if you can find it.
Edit: probably not the issue the more I think and look over the description and vaguely see in the video so I added some replies to this with some additional thoughts.
the last line makes me think the motherboard may not like the sound card though. if you can get it to operate in other pcs in win9x it is possible the bios/OS is assigning bad resources [some bioses will let you assign resources manually and sometimes windows will let you as well] it's a little perplexing that you got it to work in xp though so maybe the issue is with windows 9x itself. I have had issues with windows assigning sound blaster live! cards to the same resources as other devices for whatever reason and had to figure out how to manually get the resources to something without a conflict.
When looking up the motherboard I also noticed there are 2 other version that have built in audio chips.[an AC 97 one and a CT5880 chipset] I wonder if that could be part of the issue. And the odd looking slot next to the agp turns out to be an Audio/Modem Riser Interface Connector.
I keep trying to find a good shot of the onboard audio jumper. I would not expect that to even exist on the board but the jumpers on this board seems to be a specific shade of blue and it looks like there is one there. Make sure the jumper next to the agp & Audio/Modem riser is in position 1-2 to disable the onboard codec.
@@Miasmark Yeah I've tried disabling everything via jumpers, makes no difference :(
@@TheRasteri one last thought I had was related to the amount of ram you have. Try it out with 1 stick of ram if that's possible. Outside of trying to manually assign resources in the bios that's the only other thing I can think of that could be causing an issue in win 9x.
@@Miasmark yep, tried with 512MB. Suppose I could try 64MB...
Great Built Adlib makes Doom sound Fantastic!!
QDI was a subsidiary of Lenovo (then called Legend), it produced boards for both Legend-branded systems and DIY PCs, and QDI boards were very popular in China in the late 90s.
I tried using my 512MB 7600 GT AGP with a Gigabyte 8I865GME-775 mainboard and a Core 2 CPU last weekend, and the graphics card refused to work unless I flashed the VBIOS for 256 MB cards and replaced the two 1 GB RAM sticks with a single 256 MB of DDR 400, even if I set the MaxPhysPage to 10000. This rig runs Windows 2000 without any issues but problematic with 98, so I'm looking for another machine that can run Win98 out of the box... Thanks for your video!
yeah, getting hardware to work in W98 can be a pain.
I never knew you could get this inclusive using old hardware!
Really fun build! I love it when people take on the same challenge I did in trying to build a wide range DOS PC.
My route is similar but a little different. I went with a newer ASUS A8V socket 939 motherboard and an Athlon 64 X2 4200+. So under XP I can access 3.5GB of RAM and have two cores. Under 98 I cap the ram to 512mb with the Windows 98 Memory Burn Driver.
For the graphics card I went with the 6800GT which has native 98 drivers and also runs Crysis 1 well on low. I considered 7000 but the hacked drivers have a driver that is to new for maximum stability. The problem is that starting at the 6000 series they dropped certain texture support so I also added a Voodoo 2 to the mix to cover the gap. My FSB is to fast for static linked games in DOS so it only works with dynamic linked games and I made my own modded Voodoo 2 driver bundle to make that easy.
The soundcard issue i solved differently. For Windows I went with the Audigy 1 for great DOS prompt support and EAX. But for DOS i needed better compatibility. The socket 939 chipset from VIA still has all the ISA stuff functioning on the PCI ports so soundblaster emulation is possible with the right card. There is one that can do it very well and that is the ESS Solo-1. Once initialized the card hijacks some DMA functions making it work and for many games I do not even need a TSR. It works in every mode, even real mode games. I also load a special program that turns the mixer on the audigy on so i can have passtrough from the solo-1 and the cd drive without having to mess with cables.
Last but not least is the lower end games. 8086 stuff, so games like sopwith. Those also work on my build and will likely work with yours to! All you need is cpuspd which gives you very good control over things like power states, multipliers and cache. So you can get very good results with it.
That means with our builds you should be able to play even the earliest DOS games and then reboot into crysis.
Interesting! I knew some PCI cards worked with DOS games but I've never tried that route. I'll have to try and find a solo-1!
@@TheRasteri Few tips for when you do. The card is IRQ sensitive for me. Some games worked on one, the other half worked on the other. And when i tried a third IRQ it worked on both. i believe mine is on IRQ10, it will automatically take IRQ5 once initialized for its sound blaster emulation.
It also has limited Windows 3.11 support but the driver they ship has a broken installer. I managed to make an installer that works if its initialized in DOS. And there is a way to manually initialize the card without a TSR (doesn't work on all games but works on many).
If you manage to get one I can send my drivers over. Otherwise you'd be stuck with a Win98 driver (that does work in MS-Dos mode).
something I've always wanted to test was a"PC/PCI" or "SB LINK" port on some motherboards and pci sound cards, it allows you to get fully compatible sound blaster support on newer systems without an ISA bus by adding a 5 pin cable, there are zero videos about this even through it was common in the early 2000's
A great idea! I have a PCI sound card with the capability but no pins on the motherboard - would love to try this one day :-)
cool. loved the screenshots of fast doom on hercules.
Awesome build, man.
What needs to be created is a thru parallel (db25) cutout port SD card reader. Reads full sized SD cards, with adaptor for micro and mini cd cards. Could probably provide an additional micro SD slot. Both these accessable from outside. With an IDE or SATA cable to the host controller.
LEDs would be nice, power and access lights for each slot. With mechanical push to eject mechanism.
Probably with either or both software/ button dismount disk(s) function.
Definitely monitor disk eject function, but if prevented an emergency eject function like optical drives.
Cool build. Ironically I build a XP machine just by reciclying a lying pc combining parts. And it's a Athlon XP at 1.25 and for dos I got a working k6-2 (potencially 3) and some 2 old hp Vectra. All of this came seeing people doing retro projects like this one. I started appreciating more old hw so I found what I had on storage and Frankenstein everything I could. I hope you can do more projects since seems really interesting to try.
Damn, yours is bigger than mine, lol! 1.68GHz overclocked P3 Tualatin is my fastest retro rocket. I also re-used a special case with some history when I built my first retro PC, the Dual 1GHz Slot 1 Pentium 3 system. Originally that case housed a PC I built for a client in the early 2000's, one of my first hardware sales - which I would end up buying back years later as a used machine, upgrading the internals and using it as my own desktop system until about 2009. Then it sat as discarded parts until 2019 when I lovingly cleaned up the case and re-used it to build my first retro PC!
Cool video. Sadly you've made my go build an Athlon PC for Win 9x now :) Merry X-MAS!
god I love that cases are *still* ibm compatible, and vice versa. It's so magical knowing that, with the right adapters, any hardware is still compatible, even internally.
if you have a 3d printer, you can grab a mounting plate with faceplate for your case and 3d print a faceplate with everything ready for you to mount the SD card to and have it accessible that way. I have printed quite a few of them for my retro machines. Very fun.
1:59 I think this claim is not really true. From my experience there are a lot of PCI sound cards which provide a perfect 100% compatibility (with SB-link of course) with every DOS game.
All this while giving you a much better and cleaner sound, compared to majority of ISA ones.
Even without SB Link, I have an ESS Solo-1 and it works v well with a lot of DOS games 😎
Yeah that's true. SB-link would limit me to slower motherboards, though. Also I don't have any SB-link soundcards :)
If you have access to SB-LINK and only PCI slots, the YMF724 (and its friends 744 and 754) is the best choice for this hands down. It just so happens however that any motherboard really worth using that also has this connector also just happens to have an ISA slot or two.
@@jamesfmackenzie We meet again, my ESS Solo-1 with a socket 939 via board indeed works fantastic under dos to. Doesn't need sb-link either with the via chipset. That card has tricks up its sleeve to hijack whats needed.
@@Henk717 😎
I have a 386dx40 that I've been modding. I never thought to just have different CF cards with different OSes on them ready to go like you do. Nice.
A faster CPU will be Barton based mobile processor. I used to have ABIT KT133A main board supporting SDram and 1 ISA slot that boots up Barton Athlon XP-M CPU. Was a sweet PC!
I have a PII-400 with DOS&Win3.1, Win 95, Win 98 and XP on it. I taught a computer class and used it to demonstrate the BLOATWARE.
Interesting build, especially running Crysis with an ISA soundcard. Unfortunately, the Adlib sounds terrible on that card, lol. I guess if you aren't playing too many DOS games on it, it's not a deal-breaker, but good Adlib sound is probably my biggest requirement for DOS, so I only use cards with a real Yamaha OPL chip.
You can get industrial mainboards with ISA, PCI and PCIe slots and modern CPUs. The PCIe hardware is a bit tricky or even impossible to get working under DOS and older Windows versions, though. Your build is nice, though.
I heard those ISA slots won't necessarily work properly with ISA sound cards due to lack of DMA support. I'm not sure of the specifics, but something to research if anyone is looking into those.
@@kunka592 there is already video, about the ones, that still support DMA.
Tested with Quadcore Xeon E5450 or similiar.
ISA worked, doom 1 and 2 worked under DOS with sounds.
Hey thanks for the video. At 10:36 what type of shelves are they? Looking to buy some for myself
I have the same passion for the same reason; but, I went for two Windows 98se computers and one Windows XP, and finally my Windows 10 computer. It's my hobby, I have tons of games, too many really; but, collecting all the games was alot of fun, and building all my computers has been a learning experience, and alot of fun too. For Glide games on Windows 98se, all you need is DirectX 9.0c installed along with a compatible DirectX 9 video card(mine is a Geforce FX5700), and install nGlide version 1.05. I have found that I can play all my old glide games that way without the high cost of buying a 3dfx Voodoo card. I will admit that my one Windows 98 PC has a 3dfx Voodoo 1 paired with a Geforce MX400, I run Need For Speed II SE ,POD, and Wing Commander Prophecy on that machine to name but a few, I have 42 games for that computer alone, mostly glide. :)
Sounds great. What CPU did you pair with that Voodoo 1, and what are your favourite glide games on that PC? I am building a voodoo 1 based PC but don't have many glide games. Some recommendations would be great. I do have the 3 that you mentioned, as well as Tombraider 1, Quake, Descent: Freespace.
To use NT 4.0 or 3.5 drivers you can try to tweek install inf files to make them compatible with XP. I saw made from XP to Win98SE for my LG 32" TV-Monitor. But it hard to do for all other drivers as their inf can be realy complex.
Apart from no ISA, I recommend shuttle XPC, as they are so compact so making them more convenient for most people as they don't get int he way or are easy to store and get out when you want to use them. I got a P4 3.2ghz one with DVD R/W and 2.5 Floppy (though will likely get a gotek emulator to replace that) with a 9800 pro, Audigy 2 ZS with 1gb DDr 400. I dual boot it with windows 7 32bit and Windows 98 SE. I picked up a cheap 500GB seagate hybrid drive that I use for windows 98 SE as its pretty fast without the trim concerns (plus 32GB main aprtition then the rest as storage is handy. Windows 7 is just on 120GB SSD with the shared storage from the hybrid drive making transferring files and the like nce and easy. Throw on a DVI to hdmi adapter and its even more convenient as it can connect to all my monitors or even the TV.
They are currently pretty cheap and many are good to go out of the box for most people needs without having to have a big box retro PC, though if you want sata on board, those seem to be harder to find and have a bigger price tag unless you get lucky.
Brilliant Andy
7:30 - First of all - good chipset drivers for VIA with patches. Second go to device manager and set manually parameters like IRQ, DMA and so on. This way its works if your card isnt plug and play.
A great fan from your content man
I realise this is months down the line, but I distinctly remember using my ens1371-based card in dos, and there were drivers for it.
I have a bit of a retro rocket in a HP desktop I found in the trash with a Coppermine 1Ghz. Only problem is no ISA. I have a 166MMX with a ISA sound card though... Not much space in this apartment for more
I built a similar retro rocket, but using a Pentium 4, Geforce ti4200 and a Soundblaster Live! PCI card - it's surprisingly good for a lot of DOS games despite not being an ISA card.
Can play from most DOS games to anything up to Half Life 2 fairly well, but I might upgrade the GPU to a Geforce 6800 for DX9 support.
2:31 How were you able to use an AMD Athlon XP on that motherboard? I have a similiar QDI motherboard (Kinetiz 7t) and according to the manual i found on the web it doesn't say that it supports AMD Athlon XP, only Athlon up to 1 Ghz or higher.
I have a 7E which supports 133MHz FSB. But the 7T can do it too (it's called "Overclocking Jumper Setting" in the manual even when you're not technically overclocking), just it might not be as stable. Grab a 2800+ and try :) (code number AXDA2800DKV4C)
@@TheRasteri I see. Thanks :) .
@TheRasteri Hey, one more question. Where did you get the latest bios for your motherboard (version 4.1 from 2004)? I found this version from somewhere for my motherboard, but when i flashed it, it only upgraded to version 3.8 from 2001.
I am very new to retrocomputing, can I kindly ask you what is the rainbow colored keyboard down right at 0:05? Thanks!
Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Awesome little thing
I frequently get the urge to build a retro gaming PC. But my dreams are quickly dashed when I see the prices of these components on eBay.
I love it, it's even faster than my own Pentium 4 DOS/Windows 98 machine.
Mine's 2.0 ghz, with an Aztec Washington 16 sound card and a Radeon 9250.
I had that exact same pc case for our 1ghz Celeron computers, I played hl2 on that junker
Basically my dream PC. The Geforce driver link is dead. I don't suppose you know where else to get these? Thanks
Unreal Tournament ♥️
Whoa! Hercules DooM!
I had a problem concentrating on what you were saying in this one - might be the funky background music.
I like doing overkill setups in retrogaming as well, i have something like this
Celeron 3.06GHZ LGA775
Gigabyte ga-8vm800pmd-775-rh (agp and ddr2)
2x256mb ddr2 533mhz
Nvidia vanta lt 16mb
30Gb IDE HDD (i like the sound...)
Working well on w98 and its games, but for DOS gaming Pentium 2 350MMX with ISA soundblaster is my choice.
That Celeron might be a Pentium 4/Netburst-based CPU, so for more speed, I'd recommend getting some dual-core Core2-based CPU. I have a Win98SE build using LGA775 and I temporarily used a similar speed Celeron, but once I switched to a Core2 CPU, it was night and day difference in some games, even ones from 1997. That GPU might be a bottleneck in your case though.
I was, in fact, looking for a good way to store my overabundance of SD cards, so thanks for that!
Awesome video - my word - that Hercules Doom. Nice.
I'm curious: what if you boot Windows XP with that "hercules" graphics adapter? 🤔
XP doesn't have a hercules driver so not much I'm guessing. I think Windows 95/98 can be persuaded to use hercules, though.
@@TheRasteri I think Win98 have "1-bit"-like colour mode. You can try Win98 SE with that "hercules" card and let's see what happens.
(Disable the integrated video card on the motherboard first.)
Like the Hercules graphics adapter, I also dither in real time.
Just found your channel, love this video :)
Also, this video was fun. Thanks!👍
I have kept my K7N2 boards / PCs (the 400mhz FSB editions) all with AMD K7 3200 cpus.
They have all the connections, are excellent boards and run every OS
FreeDOS runs on every PC that has a Legacy BIOS mode. So the most ridiculously overpowered DOS PC is just a modern PC that has this mode. Though it won't run games with sound because DOS games directly access sound cards and don't understand integrated sound, you need something with SB emulation (and even the Aureal Vortex, the most compatible SB emulating PCI card, displays severe stability issues on newer chipsets).
My own retro rocket PC is a Pentium 4 with an old Intel chipset which works just fine with Aureal Vortex under DOS.
Glad to see someone else who enjoys Deus Ex. I love that game
Thanks for making me realize I may have the parts to do this. LOL.
98 / xp is my favorite time of computing
That DOOM sound. 👌🏼
I’d love to recreate a retro rocket like the system I had back in the mid 2000s, loved AMD then and had an nforce 2 based Soltek board and a Barton core XP3200, MSI ti4800 agp card. Working in the industry and having access through friends and trading/swapping etc I ended up with a Tyan Tiger 2466 with matched MP2800 cpus, it was fast as hell but crap for gaming compared to the nforce board/XP processor. If I still had those rigs they’d likely need recapping, still have the 450w aerocool psu that ran them but not powered it up in years.
The original GTA is a funny one. Fast 2D cards will run the game too fast, but when using glide with an Orchid Righteous 3DFX card on it... Bliss!
Your storage looks similar to mine. I am jealous though. I want an Acorn A3000 or later RISC pc, and I want an Amstrad CPC machine, but they never released here in the US as far as I can tell. So they never show up here where I live. Some day though.
I totally skipped P4 by going from P3 Slot1 to AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (Barton core). Paired with DDR333 (1.5G), Radeon 9250 AGP; I played many hours and also it was the first computer that was connected to internet. While XP SP1 was qiute unstable, I used Win2000 until I got a WiFi adapter that would not work on any OS lower than XP SP2. But by the time, it came out SP3 for XP and that was fast and stable. However, for XP to run well, I needed to upgrade the RAM to 2.5G. I was able to play anything on it, from the original Starcraft, Return to castle Wolfenstein, Warcraft 3, to Far cry, Half life 1&2, Uru, and many other obscure games (anyone remember the Ubisoft games sales?). It also could run dos games - the AC97 chip on the motherboard had some SB emulation that allowed dos games to run natively with sound.
I changed that computer with a dual core when the Radeon 9250 died.
You kept fiddling with that backplane, and I assume that's also why you hauled out the "specialized ISA Pentium 4 motherboard", which is the central card for said backplane?
Is this going to be somewhere?
out of curiosity, what kind of slot is that that you have just above the AGP slot? its the same color and width as an agp slot, but a bit shorter, and its a lot further towards the metal bracket than AGP is. never seen anything like it.
It's AMR, it can only take modems. Hardly ever used.
experience having a supercomputer in the old days
Watched your TY short an then this video and I loved it 😄
4:00 The DOOM music sounds like the goddamn 32X version!
Hey, what was the model of SBC card you showed with Xeon support?
Trenton XPI 6022, takes Socket 603 Xeons. I've never actually tested the ISA bus on it so it may not be a proper one, I'll have to try it sometime
@@TheRasteri Thank you!!!
With Windows 98se, you are locked into real IRQs, and they should not be shared. You may need to disable whatever uses IRQ5 in your motherboard BIOS. And don't forget to install sound support in CONFIG.SYS (load high) and AUTOEXEC.BAT files (not required on 2K/XP, but you still need to set BLASTER in environment variables). Enjoy!
7:35 probably it's a error message of the Isa card needing a free irq and from bios.
What's the song at the beginning? Its groovy af 🔥
Fastest rocket DOS machines I have is Athlon X2 5600+AM2 with X800 XL 256MB with ESS Solo-1 and SB 128 PCI (cause I like its wavetable MIDI) and Voodoo2 12MB. Also have similar configuration but with Athlon 3000+ s754 with two V2's 12MB in SLI and FX5900 and similar sound cards. Those are both DOS and Win98 computers. GPUs for both computers run on Windows 98. I could go with GeForce 6800 but I do not like it for retro PCs as it doesn't do 16-bit dithering. Newer games I can run just fine on my modern PC
I have a few pentium 4 MBs with 3 isa slots!
If i remember correctly, running ISA soundcard on Win2000, it can only play sound from 1 application at the time. Did u experience the same with those ISA card on XP?
Look man you probs know what your doing so I wont bore you. Disregard if its no new info. When struggling with drivers, just install the windows compatible with the device. Navigate to system32 then drivers. Copy all driver name related folder. Install your newer windows and copy this driver folder to desktop. Right click the device and browse for driver. Select the folder, a error will appear as the driver isnt signed but you can just allow it. Ive found out of 100 times this has worked 100 times :)
very cool video! Subbed!
Awesome build!
Where did you get the Hercules?
The ISA card was super cheap on eBay, the hercules monitor came with my Amstrad PC1640
I remember 512MB SDRAM sticks being huge and unobtainable for my 14-year-old self
512?! Pfffth! I picked strawberries for 3 weeks (4 to 9 AM) to buy 16 MB EDO in summer '94......and YES! It WAS then I learned...more RAM ≠ faster x86....
I have a Sinclair QL with tapes but I don’t have PSU for it you are interested in it
A 7600GT ! Whatttt legend
Need an idea: Multi boot Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, Windows ME, Windows 2000 & Windows XP
IRQ Conflict?
I think it's time for a new Chain of Fools video. You can upgrade win10 from x86 to x64, so it's possible to go full-tilt and see if the legacy apps still work on Win11 x64. ;)
Haha, maybe :) x64 windows won't run 16-bit apps though, I'm guessing it would be a pretty disappointing...
Wait it's that possible? How?
@@AlejandroRodolfoMendez If you mean upgrading win10 from x86 to x64, you just run the win10 x64 installer from within x86 windows, and pick the "upgrade" option. It should let you keep your settings/apps.
@@BenKDesigns oh on win 7 didn't let you or did a clean install. I didn't knew win 10 let you
Or DMA Conflict?
GTA with the frame limiter on actually still looked fast to me
Awesome build
Is his Hdd named Rule34 ? 8:28
Ah yes, the dreaded MX440SE. I had one as well was was fine until the original Far Cry came out and needed shaders so I replaced it with a Nvidia FX5700. Huge difference and for all teh flack the FX series of cards got, I was more than happy with it.
I know I'm late to the party, but it would eem the Hacked NVidia Drivers are no longer available :(
web.archive.org/web/20150602211318/www.mdgx.com/files/NV8269.EXE
Just extract the audio driver from Windows 2000, no need to upgrade from that OS just for that.