I use Slot1 PIII-600 o/c to 733 with Voodoo3 2000 + Noctua o/c to 164Mhz. Work very stable. Unreal Gold 1024x768 59fps. Very balanced build, what cover most Glide-games with impressive performance!
Hey Phil, on the discussion of getting a formatted/bootable brand new SD card without a floppy or CD device on the retro win98 PC, I have tried 50+ different methods in the last week with a BX Slot 1 board and have finally found a process that works. I tried the VirtualBox and MacOS tricks and the like, with limited success at getting the cards bootable. However, I have discovered a process that seems to work every time and its dead simple. No fdisk, no slow MS-DOS formatting, no fdisk/mbr, no Gotek/CDROM. Latest version of Rufus (4.3) supports making MS-DOS disks again. So with the SD card in the USB reader on a modern PC, we can launch Rufus and format the brand new SD card as MS-DOS with Large FAT32. Rufus will automatically download the system files from Microsoft the first time and format in a few seconds. Then we can drag over the WIN98 install folder from the CD, and thats it! You can transfer the SD card into the SD to IDE reader in the retro PC and it will boot straight to a C: prompt and you can install windows. I've tried this same sort of pathway in the past to no success, but it appears to be functional now. I made 6 working cards this week and tried them with Slot 1/Slot A/Socket 7 of various chipset brands and it seems to be working. Takes less than 3 minutes from opening the SD card package to be at the Windows setup screen! Thought you should known! Appreciate all your videos on this topic!
Interesting! I have used the VirtualBox trick (creating the raw disk access, assigning it to the VM, etc.) with success before but your method sounds far less involved. I’ll have to give it a try.
One thing about the developer of Croc (this game was also on PS1 and Dreamcast), was Argonaut Software were also the developers of the original StarFox for the SNES ("Starwing in Europe/Australia). So if you had an SNES, or played it at a friend's place, you know of this developer. :D Also, minus some demoscene stuff discussed on VOGONS, the S3 is probably the most compatible card out there if you want DOS gaming.
Hi Phil, you did a lot of videos on Mendocino celerons, P2, Durons and Athlons, but I'm waiting for years for a video on Coppermine-128 based celerons. They were also amazing overclockers. Back in the day I had Celeron 566 on MSI BX Master mobo (with adapter) and not only it easily did 850 MHz (50% OC), but I used it on 952 MHz for everyday use, it could boot non-stable at 1050 MHz, and I think it was stable at 1030 MHz or something with voltage boost. But as I said I used it everyday on 952 MHz with no voltage boost. I know Duron was a little bit better, but I enjoyed my coppermine-128 Celeron so much. Phil, maybe you can make a video on some of these?
Slot 1 is probably the best platform for retro computing. It's pretty fast, it's still cheap, it runs Windows 98, DOS, most of the 90's games, most of times it has ISA, PCI and AGP, you can't mess up the pins of the CPU, SDRAM is easy available, most of them are ATX form factor (easy with power supply and case), and a lot of the boards still seem to work fine after 25 years. Capacitor problems do exist but mostly on S370.
This type of videos make me remember those troubleshooting adventures configuring Windows to my liking and making it snappy and fast. The same for drivers and trying to make games run, even if they were slooooow... 😄 Awesome as always, Phil!
Great tutorial! Been years since I built a Win98 machine. Being a packrat of sorts, I do have several Intel OEM 440BX boards and one in particular that has built in ATI graphics, this is the one I will use and add a Voodoo 2 card to it. Back in the day storage was an issue in capacity and reliability. It is great that SSD type storage is the norm for retro computing.
I can only think of one possible interpretation of the name SLOT1FUN. Very wholesome.
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Proud user of a Slot 1 machine here. I love my Pentium 2 system because I find it to be super versatile. I can easily boot into either DOS on Win 98, so it covers quite a large spectrum of games. The motherboard it uses is a PC Chips M748, which is certainly not on the top of the list of great pieces of hardware. However, it has some interesting quirks. It can be powered by both AT and ATX power supplies (which was great since the old PSU failed and I replaced it with a present-day 250w unit). It has one ISA slot (I chose an SB16 to go in there). Unfortunately, said slot is very poorly located. The SB16 is a long card, and it sits on top of the front panel connectors. The workaround was to "unmake" the connectors from the front panel and "shave" them down to size so that the plugs still have room to touch the required connectors. Also, it still uses an AT keyboard jack but has USB ports and an integrated AGP video card (8MB, shared with regular memory). It is a weird little machine and I think this is precisely why I love it so much. It took me a good month to put everything together, sort out all the quirks and get it running properly. I use it mainly for DOS gaming and I really enjoy it.
FDISK /MBR was an undocumented command AFAIK. It creates the master boot record. The master boot record is the first sector of the disk. During the boot process, the BIOS is supposed to load this sector to the memory and pass execution to it. Of course, just 512 bytes of code is not enough to actually boot an operating system. The rest of the operating system is loaded from the OS partition. This 512 bytes is just enough to do that, loading the "volume boot record". So in a nutshell: formatting creates the volume boot record, but fdisk /MBR creates the master boot record, which is also needed for the disk to be bootable. Some misconceptions regarding newer machines: a lot of people confuse partitioning with the boot process. A lot of people falsely think, that they can not use GPT partitions with BIOS ("legacy") boot, and that GPT requires UEFI somehow. This is wrong. The two are completely unrelated. The BIOS does not care about the partition table. The BIOS only cares about that first sector containing executable code. Actually using an older computer without UEFI support at all will boot a GPT partitioned drive perfectly fine. But some UEFI-aware BIOSes refuse to use legacy boot process when they see a GPT partition table, even though they should not care about it in legacy mode.
@@philscomputerlab If I remember correctly, my method of creating a bootable disk was using a standard MS-DOS install floppy. The MS-DOS installer does create the MBR, however it is limited by the FAT16 filesystem to 2 GB. Then I also found this command, and that helped me a lot :) I thought that the windows 98 setup does that too, when ran from the install CD. But it is always such with old with old hardware and software. A lot of things that we take for granted nowdays, are not a given with retrocomputing. I greatly appreciate your efforts in bringing this knowledge to everyone interested! :)
Nice vid - I skipped right over this gen, from a 233 MMX right to a PIII 800. I see I didn't miss much, but it's nice to see the flexibility of this transitional motherboard.
i had a dual slot 1 pentium 2 back in the day for my rendering rig. my first over $1000 machine. now im on my second over $6000 machine (when new) that i built. i always liked my machines overkill. right after building the dual pentium 2 i was introduced to the DEC Alpha.
My windows95 machine os based on intel 440LX, it has a pentium ii klamath processor clocked at whopping 300 MHz, 64 MB SDRAM, an overclocked rage pro turbo and a 3dfx voodoo. Very solid performance for any games of around 1997
This is my favorite time period of computing. Such a great boom of tech advancement and computers for the masses. Great refresher and intro for the new to the hobby people..
I enjoy the current period though, my 5 year old hardware can still run current games while back then if your PC was 5 years old, you were hopelessly out of date.
There are as few sure things in retro gaming as a 440bx chipset and a slot 1 processor. Click them together like lego bricks and "it just works". I have never had a BSOD in Win 9x on this hardware.
Hey Phil, awesome video as always. Do you ever build a system and not just immediately pull it apart again? Do you have a collection of complete daily systems? If you do it would be cool to get a overview of them. Cheers
Great question! A build usually is just up and running for a short time. Recently I try to get more than one project out if a build to increase efficiency but yes, every build gets taken apart soon after. The only permanent Retro PC is my Socket 7 time machine!
i've been trying to build/find a windows 95/98 pc recently for old speed sensitive/picky games, but any listing with the words "windows 98" has had a significant price markup because the retro market is all over the place, got any suggestions for anything somewhat reasonably priced? even thin clients go for a ton these days i've found
If craigslist and facebook marketplace (or whatever you use locally) aren't working for you, try putting the word out to friends and family that you're looking for an old computer from the 90's. You never know - people put stuff in storage all the time thinking they're going to do something with it or properly dispose of it and then never do. Also, yard sales / garage sales / estate sales...but that can time consuming.
Hi I have a Windows 98SE Pc around a AMD Athlon XP 3200+ using a Asrock K7VT6. It works very good all my drives are SATA. What you need to do is in the bios set the SATA to IDE on installing windows 98SE when all done, install the SATA drivers set the SATA in bios to SATA 1. then you have SATA drives. It is used to run older soft ware.
I love slot 1. I have a few motherboards and CPUs stored away since stuff is starting to get expensive. Slot 1 is so reliable and flexible. My next build is going to be a Pentium 2. It’s either gonna be a 266mhz or 450mhz. Probably gonna be the 266mhz since I have a Pentium 3 build that takes care of the more demanding games.
CPUs on a cartridge were so awersome , computers are modular enough as is and changing a regular cpu isnt exactly challenging but I just love the fans and massive heatsinks on the convenient cartridge 800x600 looks amazing on that monitor. would have been neat to see the frame rate on tomb raider with the perspective correction and filtering off the verge is supposed to be a great 2d card I wonder how games like duke and shadow warrior would perform.
Croc really runs like crap with that s3 card. when i got it i had croc for the first time it was soo smooth. I'm happy my first experiences were with voodoo 2 and a pentium 2 at 400mhz.
Still have my Slot 1 Pentium system from the HP we bought in 2000. A Pentium III 800 MHz with 384MB of SDRAM and Sound Blaster Live! Platinum. GPUs went from TNT2 to Radeon. It still works and is my go-to system for Win 98 era games. The PSU was a bit underpowered at the time so we ended up replacing it with a PC Power and Cooling direct replacement PSU that had higher efficiency and wattage. I hated dealing with IRQs and moving add-in cards around to prevent PCI conflicts.
Hey Phil, glad to see this! Just yesterday I came into possession of a ton of Socket 7 and Slot 1 processors destined for recycling. When I get around to building those systems this'll really come in handy
In 1998 I got the Pentium 2 450Mhz, 128Mb SDRam, Rage card.that latter I swapped for a CREATIVE NVIDIA RivaTNT 2 Ultra 32Mb & a PCI Diamond 3Dfx VooDoo 2 12Mb.
Just remember to get a board based on the 440BX or VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset. Getting screwed with a 440LX or Apollo P6 based board is the last thing you want.
I really enjoyed this video, I love slot 1. I have 2 builds Pentium 2 350 and 400 MHz, and 2 others with Pentium 3 533 and 650 MHz. W the Intel 440BX chipset🤩 and thanks for your drivers that I always come to steal😅. In each of your videos there is a new trick to learn to make these machines even more awesome for a hybrid MS-DOS Windows 9x system. Thanks for all this. In my Pentium 2 350 I want to remove the Banshee and try the Millennium 2 PCI with a PowerVR PCX2 M3D which I will buy if it passes the tests🤩. Virge's Patch for Tomb Raider is sadly, much stronger than Matrox Mystique for me, I tried it with the Diamond Stealth 3d 2000 but I have even lower FPS than these. I was on a Pentium 120 that time though. Now I'm sharing the video on my little Facebook Community. Greetings and thanks
HI Phil, sorry to hijack your slot1 comments with a XP question lol BUT im about to rebuild my XP build and was wondering what ISO / IMAGE you use for fresh XP installs, i would probably lean towards an OEM XP sp3 disk but wondered if you knew of an XP image that has all updates and patches already installed etc. thanks and keep up the awesome work, love your videos mate.
The Pentium II 350mhz was the CPU in the Gateway 2000 PC my parents got in 1998 when I was 6. They did have a 386 or 486 before that but I don't really remember it, so really the Pentium II was my first experience of PCs and of PC gaming. Lots of happy memories playing Unreal, age of empires II, Incoming and many more games from the era. I would love to rebuild it one day. They had it up until 2002 I think when they upgraded to a 2GHz Pentium 4.
I love Croc! It was originally made as a Yoshi game but Nintendo refused it so they retooled the characters and we have Croc. It was first game my son Brandon ever played. It was the Saturn Version.
Just bought slot 1 Pentium II 350. And your video arrive at the moment. Now I'm exactly know what to do with it) Are you travelling now? Virge3d is all what you have now?) Maybe you devorce and wife took all the treasures)
I already have countless slot 1 and socket 370 here. Compaq Deskpro P2 450, P3 550, self-made P3 667, HP P3 933, self-made P3 Tualatin 1300, self-made Dual P3 700... What I'm still missing is a Socket 370 system with a VIA C3 processor. It's something exotic.
Thanks for this, Phil! I'm a little curious about the video card choice. It seems like the performance was not so good other than POD. Would the system fare better in DirectX with say a GeForce2, or is this more of a CPU limitation?
Yes the ViRGE is infamous for being a 3D decellerator 😂 A Geforce2 would certainly be a much better choice. The ViRGE however is awesome for DOS and also terrific for any 2D windows games like point and click adventure games.
Remember, this was made to be a Nintendo game in the Mario-Verse so much of that gameplay will still apply. You just have to look harder for it as they re-textured everything so it no longer looked like a Nintendo game.
Hey Phil, great vid! Would love to see more of these detailed how-to videos. One thing that seems to always get skipped over is flashing the latest bios. Maybe you could make a similarly-detailed tutorial on how you go about doing that? Thanks so much!
That's actually straight forward. From the support site download the files and stick them onto a boot Floppy. Boot from it and then run the batch file that's supplied or manually run the flash tool.
I have a Pentium 2 350 with a BX440 board, but never had any luck getting it to post, I think ram was limited to 128mb per slot back then right? I only have 256mb sticks of PC 133, the original PC came with 64mb of pc100 which I no longer have. ah on wikipedia: This chipset does not support 256Mbit SDRAM, which became more common in the 2002 to 2003 period. The higher end 440GX chipset released in June 1998 that was originally intended for servers and workstations has this support. so i was correct.
Yes and there was also something about single and double sided ram. SDRAM is cheap though and plenty so try working with the platform again in the futures it's well worth it!
I feel you do a Pentium 2 build at least every 4 months on this channel. That's not a complaint, keep it up, I'll watch every single one of them. Just so I can hear someone validate my preference for the 440BX chipset. It never gets old.
Reports are mixed, some report 1GB as working others don't. I usually pick 256MB it just works and avoids issues. It's heaps of ram, back in the day you'd have 32 or 64MB in a lot of cases...
Man, Flexibility is key with Slot 1, You can either put an S3 Trio (Or even something else, if you desire, maybe like one of the best ATI RAGE GPUs) + 3DFX Voodoo, and then put it either SB Live, or if it's a Motherboard with ISA then perhaps something like SoundBlaster 16. It's kinda odd to see that 5V isn't that needed on a Slot 1 Motherboard, but then again I guess it's no wonder when I run something like a Athlon XP Build and such which is really needed. 16:13 Gotta love when AD just enables by itself for no reason xD
@@philscomputerlabOops, Now I noticed that, I think all that +5V talk on Athlon XPs on some parts of internet messed my brain a bit and forgot about -5V, sorry 😅
Wow. Just wow. I played 'pod' as a child. I believe it was one of my first ever computer games. It blew my mind too pieces. I couldn't sleep seeing the flashy images in my brain lol. It's unbelievable to see it again here. Much appreciated for this video. It was a wonderful time back then.
I would love to see you do this with a dual or quad Slot motherboard. A friend had a dual slot a board back in the day and it didn't do very much for games back then, I wonder what they would be like now?
Not much you could do with them, unless you wanted to run some old productivity software for some reason. Even the fastest PIII is too slow for any game with proper multi threading, and the latency between two discrete CPUs wouldn't help either. There's one exception I can think of: Quake 3. Figures that John Carmack would be experimenting with multi cpu support in the late 90s, though I don't think it gave much of a speedup.
@@xsc1000Looking back that was what he was running. NT. I do not remember what version. This was pre windows 2000/XP. I sat and played GTA on it with him.
I'd like to see your take on alternative chipsets like the Apollo Pro 133 (693A, not the 694) to spice things up a little (AGP that must run at 1x, possible PCI latency issues, SCANREG having to be disabled & deleted). The SY-6VBA 133 that equipped it is the most ubiquitous Slot 1 board in my country (next to the SIS-based M748).
I have back then very bad experience with 693A chipset. My office P3 733Mhz Coppermine, MSI board with 693A chipset running WinMe was tragicly slower, than my home Celeron 666Mhz@750Mhz with Abit 694X board running Win98 SE. It surely wasn't only chipset fault, but it created at least bad taste for this chipset for me.
Croc is a fun little game, played it for a couple of levels. It's not that difficult but not easy eithet. No precision jumping like in Tomb Raider but if you are sloppy with the input you can easily fall off ledges, fall into lava or get hit by the enemies. The game follows the Sonic-rules, if you have a diamond on you, you can get a hit and lose them, if you are able to pick up at least 1, you are good for another hit. My problem with the game is that I can't really judge distance therefore I misjudge my jumps. It's a platformer game but not really strong at platforming. It was probably inspired by Tomb Raider hence the little backpack on Croc's back. You have to free all the little Gobbos, those furry creatures from the evil toad-frog looking thing. From time to time you have to do a boss battle and they are always doing something interesting with them. But you need better framerates to play it.
I just scored an Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard recently - perfect timing that you put out this video! I was going to save it for a future project, but now I am feeling inspired!
I never restored any slot one retro build, did owned some board, and multiple CPU's on it. Xeon, Pentium II and Pro, and Celeron without the box, cash on a card only slot one. Many AMD Now! Voodoo PC's from that era made it in my personal museum, non is slot one intel, LOL.
Great video, however, I remember playing Tomb Raider on my maxed 486 and Pentium 1@166 but it was not so slow. As video card I had an Trident TGUi VLB and an S3Trio PCI (onboard integrated) respectively. I am missing something?
Playing in lower resolution maybe? Also, the S3 patch/mode is just garbage performance in high resolution and it's limited by the graphics card itself, not the CPU.
Sucks that they are just so damn pricey today. Well, Socket A is affordable and to be honest, I have more fond memories of my teen PC gamer years with a S462 platform. :)
on a wide variety of 98 builds a game i cant seem to go w/o for a good time killer was Gearhead Garage. (sad no actual Virtual Mechanic game since has been able to really match what Gearhead was like. )
Thanks for the excellent content Phil! I think you know but that motherboard supports the SMB tool which lets you set the FSB from 50-133MHz from the command line. Best!
Could you please try tomb raider 3 with the s3 virge? I think it had an issue with transparency and the water was shown black but I could be mixing it up with a different gpu.
Even though his motherboard can support up to a 1.4GHz processor he has gone with a 333mhz processor and 32 mbs of RAM. None of these guys will EVER max out the capabilities of these motherboards. EVER period.
A Voodoo 1 would be a good fit for this machine (time period correct) right? If one wants an inexpensive alternative, Geforce 4 MX would run better than S3. I never had a S3… had some Cirrus Logic cards, then ATIs (Rage Pro) which never really worked well with 3D, and later found about a certain 3dfx card that was really cool and a game changer….
Hey Phil. Great video as always. Can I ask what monitor brand and model you’re using? Seems do deal with the resolutions really well!!! Also how do you have it connected? Straight vga cable to the graphics card?
Hello there, I have a good Rachel gamer PC myself I like your videos but I can’t find the video you made full automatic answer disc for Windows 98 Home made a video I would like to know maybe you can help me
i repaired my atholon slot a motherboard a while back having issues getting win 98 on it the keys i have dont seem to be recognized by the os which is frustrating have me on it right now but would prefer 98 second edition
I really appreciated the in-depth showing of configuration / drivers / settings. Thank you ! I'm a bit old now, so a refresh of memory was needed. This is a nice Pentium II setup. The S3 Virge seems a bit limiting on this platform. So, while retaining a maximum compatibility, which video card would you consider as an period acceptable upgrade ?
I use Slot1 PIII-600 o/c to 733 with Voodoo3 2000 + Noctua o/c to 164Mhz. Work very stable. Unreal Gold 1024x768 59fps. Very balanced build, what cover most Glide-games with impressive performance!
Hey Phil, on the discussion of getting a formatted/bootable brand new SD card without a floppy or CD device on the retro win98 PC, I have tried 50+ different methods in the last week with a BX Slot 1 board and have finally found a process that works. I tried the VirtualBox and MacOS tricks and the like, with limited success at getting the cards bootable. However, I have discovered a process that seems to work every time and its dead simple. No fdisk, no slow MS-DOS formatting, no fdisk/mbr, no Gotek/CDROM.
Latest version of Rufus (4.3) supports making MS-DOS disks again. So with the SD card in the USB reader on a modern PC, we can launch Rufus and format the brand new SD card as MS-DOS with Large FAT32. Rufus will automatically download the system files from Microsoft the first time and format in a few seconds. Then we can drag over the WIN98 install folder from the CD, and thats it! You can transfer the SD card into the SD to IDE reader in the retro PC and it will boot straight to a C: prompt and you can install windows.
I've tried this same sort of pathway in the past to no success, but it appears to be functional now. I made 6 working cards this week and tried them with Slot 1/Slot A/Socket 7 of various chipset brands and it seems to be working. Takes less than 3 minutes from opening the SD card package to be at the Windows setup screen!
Thought you should known! Appreciate all your videos on this topic!
That's it? As simple as that? Will for sure test it 😊 Thanks for the heads up!
Interesting! I have used the VirtualBox trick (creating the raw disk access, assigning it to the VM, etc.) with success before but your method sounds far less involved. I’ll have to give it a try.
One thing about the developer of Croc (this game was also on PS1 and Dreamcast), was Argonaut Software were also the developers of the original StarFox for the SNES ("Starwing in Europe/Australia). So if you had an SNES, or played it at a friend's place, you know of this developer. :D Also, minus some demoscene stuff discussed on VOGONS, the S3 is probably the most compatible card out there if you want DOS gaming.
DOS is it's real strength no doubt!
Happy Friday Phil! Thank you for covering the slot 1 build. I know a lot of people will appreciate this. 👍
How were you able to make this comment 7 days ago if the video came out 4 hours ago?
@@the_kombinator Patreon supporter
@@mesterak Ah. OK thanks, I was wondering if I'm blind or dumb or something else.
Hi Phil, you did a lot of videos on Mendocino celerons, P2, Durons and Athlons, but I'm waiting for years for a video on Coppermine-128 based celerons. They were also amazing overclockers. Back in the day I had Celeron 566 on MSI BX Master mobo (with adapter) and not only it easily did 850 MHz (50% OC), but I used it on 952 MHz for everyday use, it could boot non-stable at 1050 MHz, and I think it was stable at 1030 MHz or something with voltage boost. But as I said I used it everyday on 952 MHz with no voltage boost. I know Duron was a little bit better, but I enjoyed my coppermine-128 Celeron so much. Phil, maybe you can make a video on some of these?
He actually has done a video about celeron 900 and 1000. I suggest checking those out
Hold my beer 🍺
Phil you're the best ;)@@philscomputerlab
@@chloedevereaux1801 coppermine was used in pentium 3 AND celeron processors.
@@chloedevereaux1801 unsuccessful trolling
Slot 1 is probably the best platform for retro computing. It's pretty fast, it's still cheap, it runs Windows 98, DOS, most of the 90's games, most of times it has ISA, PCI and AGP, you can't mess up the pins of the CPU, SDRAM is easy available, most of them are ATX form factor (easy with power supply and case), and a lot of the boards still seem to work fine after 25 years. Capacitor problems do exist but mostly on S370.
PCI Voodoo II as i remember, 3 cards, D3edge for 2d too
I have a slot 1 board and it sadly fails to fully power up..
Phil's videos slot right into my subscriber feed!
My Slot 1 system is based on a Siemens Scenic 600 horizontal desktop case! It has 450MHz Pentium III and i put a Voodoo3 inside.
This type of videos make me remember those troubleshooting adventures configuring Windows to my liking and making it snappy and fast. The same for drivers and trying to make games run, even if they were slooooow... 😄
Awesome as always, Phil!
Great tutorial! Been years since I built a Win98 machine. Being a packrat of sorts, I do have several Intel OEM 440BX boards and one in particular that has built in ATI graphics, this is the one I will use and add a Voodoo 2 card to it. Back in the day storage was an issue in capacity and reliability. It is great that SSD type storage is the norm for retro computing.
I can only think of one possible interpretation of the name SLOT1FUN. Very wholesome.
Proud user of a Slot 1 machine here. I love my Pentium 2 system because I find it to be super versatile. I can easily boot into either DOS on Win 98, so it covers quite a large spectrum of games. The motherboard it uses is a PC Chips M748, which is certainly not on the top of the list of great pieces of hardware. However, it has some interesting quirks. It can be powered by both AT and ATX power supplies (which was great since the old PSU failed and I replaced it with a present-day 250w unit). It has one ISA slot (I chose an SB16 to go in there). Unfortunately, said slot is very poorly located. The SB16 is a long card, and it sits on top of the front panel connectors. The workaround was to "unmake" the connectors from the front panel and "shave" them down to size so that the plugs still have room to touch the required connectors. Also, it still uses an AT keyboard jack but has USB ports and an integrated AGP video card (8MB, shared with regular memory). It is a weird little machine and I think this is precisely why I love it so much. It took me a good month to put everything together, sort out all the quirks and get it running properly. I use it mainly for DOS gaming and I really enjoy it.
One great CPU to go with i440BX -system is VIA C3, multiplier is freely selectable with setmul.exe. 1,5GHz Nehemiah equals to 900MHz Pentium3.
Yea very common and I've been working on S3 projects recently!
FDISK /MBR was an undocumented command AFAIK.
It creates the master boot record. The master boot record is the first sector of the disk.
During the boot process, the BIOS is supposed to load this sector to the memory and pass execution to it.
Of course, just 512 bytes of code is not enough to actually boot an operating system. The rest of the operating system is loaded from the OS partition. This 512 bytes is just enough to do that, loading the "volume boot record".
So in a nutshell: formatting creates the volume boot record, but fdisk /MBR creates the master boot record, which is also needed for the disk to be bootable.
Some misconceptions regarding newer machines: a lot of people confuse partitioning with the boot process. A lot of people falsely think, that they can not use GPT partitions with BIOS ("legacy") boot, and that GPT requires UEFI somehow.
This is wrong. The two are completely unrelated. The BIOS does not care about the partition table. The BIOS only cares about that first sector containing executable code. Actually using an older computer without UEFI support at all will boot a GPT partitioned drive perfectly fine.
But some UEFI-aware BIOSes refuse to use legacy boot process when they see a GPT partition table, even though they should not care about it in legacy mode.
Yea for whatever reason frisk/MBR is needed with factory new flash storage. Took me ages to figure that one out...
@@philscomputerlab If I remember correctly, my method of creating a bootable disk was using a standard MS-DOS install floppy. The MS-DOS installer does create the MBR, however it is limited by the FAT16 filesystem to 2 GB. Then I also found this command, and that helped me a lot :)
I thought that the windows 98 setup does that too, when ran from the install CD.
But it is always such with old with old hardware and software. A lot of things that we take for granted nowdays, are not a given with retrocomputing.
I greatly appreciate your efforts in bringing this knowledge to everyone interested! :)
Nice vid - I skipped right over this gen, from a 233 MMX right to a PIII 800. I see I didn't miss much, but it's nice to see the flexibility of this transitional motherboard.
Absolutely love my pentium 2 build! OK it's only a 233mhz model but I actually prefer it that way
This felt like more like a "How to Setup a Slot 1 Retro Gaming PC" video, going step by step. Very nice!
THIRTY SEVEN MINUTES! He is making my friday night a party!
i had a dual slot 1 pentium 2 back in the day for my rendering rig. my first over $1000 machine. now im on my second over $6000 machine (when new) that i built. i always liked my machines overkill. right after building the dual pentium 2 i was introduced to the DEC Alpha.
My windows95 machine os based on intel 440LX, it has a pentium ii klamath processor clocked at whopping 300 MHz, 64 MB SDRAM, an overclocked rage pro turbo and a 3dfx voodoo. Very solid performance for any games of around 1997
LX is just BX without 100MHz support, so its the same solid platform.
I think this video would greatly benefit from chapters like: part selection, BIOS setup, Windows install, etc.
Good point, will add this!
This is my favorite time period of computing. Such a great boom of tech advancement and computers for the masses. Great refresher and intro for the new to the hobby people..
I enjoy the current period though, my 5 year old hardware can still run current games while back then if your PC was 5 years old, you were hopelessly out of date.
There are as few sure things in retro gaming as a 440bx chipset and a slot 1 processor. Click them together like lego bricks and "it just works". I have never had a BSOD in Win 9x on this hardware.
Thank you,GA-6BXC is my first MB in my life
Hey Phil, awesome video as always. Do you ever build a system and not just immediately pull it apart again? Do you have a collection of complete daily systems? If you do it would be cool to get a overview of them. Cheers
Great question! A build usually is just up and running for a short time. Recently I try to get more than one project out if a build to increase efficiency but yes, every build gets taken apart soon after. The only permanent Retro PC is my Socket 7 time machine!
i've been trying to build/find a windows 95/98 pc recently for old speed sensitive/picky games, but any listing with the words "windows 98" has had a significant price markup because the retro market is all over the place, got any suggestions for anything somewhat reasonably priced? even thin clients go for a ton these days i've found
Try to search for 'windows ME' maybe ?
If craigslist and facebook marketplace (or whatever you use locally) aren't working for you, try putting the word out to friends and family that you're looking for an old computer from the 90's. You never know - people put stuff in storage all the time thinking they're going to do something with it or properly dispose of it and then never do. Also, yard sales / garage sales / estate sales...but that can time consuming.
Haha 😅😆
I have a sy-6vba133 that works very well for me, its only drawback is that with some rams it only recognizes half of its capacity.
It was standard problem of that time. I also have some modules which are recognized as 64MB on Socket 7 boards but only as 32MB on BX boards.
You know its S3 if Software-rendering outperforms hardware-rendering🙂
😂
Another wonderful video!
Thank you! Cheers!
Hi I have a Windows 98SE Pc around a AMD Athlon XP 3200+ using a Asrock K7VT6. It works very good all my drives are SATA. What you need to do is in the bios set the SATA to IDE on installing windows 98SE when all done, install the SATA drivers set the SATA in bios to SATA 1. then you have SATA drives. It is used to run older soft ware.
I love slot 1. I have a few motherboards and CPUs stored away since stuff is starting to get expensive. Slot 1 is so reliable and flexible. My next build is going to be a Pentium 2. It’s either gonna be a 266mhz or 450mhz. Probably gonna be the 266mhz since I have a Pentium 3 build that takes care of the more demanding games.
CPUs on a cartridge were so awersome , computers are modular enough as is and changing a regular cpu isnt exactly challenging but I just love the fans and massive heatsinks on the convenient cartridge
800x600 looks amazing on that monitor.
would have been neat to see the frame rate on tomb raider with the perspective correction and filtering off
the verge is supposed to be a great 2d card I wonder how games like duke and shadow warrior would perform.
Croc really runs like crap with that s3 card.
when i got it i had croc for the first time it was soo smooth.
I'm happy my first experiences were with voodoo 2 and a pentium 2 at 400mhz.
Still have my Slot 1 Pentium system from the HP we bought in 2000. A Pentium III 800 MHz with 384MB of SDRAM and Sound Blaster Live! Platinum. GPUs went from TNT2 to Radeon. It still works and is my go-to system for Win 98 era games. The PSU was a bit underpowered at the time so we ended up replacing it with a PC Power and Cooling direct replacement PSU that had higher efficiency and wattage. I hated dealing with IRQs and moving add-in cards around to prevent PCI conflicts.
Hey Phil, glad to see this! Just yesterday I came into possession of a ton of Socket 7 and Slot 1 processors destined for recycling. When I get around to building those systems this'll really come in handy
The old reliable Pentium II 300mhz, one of my favorite childhood memories. Ive got one or two in my beige box collection.
In 1998 I got the Pentium 2 450Mhz, 128Mb SDRam, Rage card.that latter I swapped for a CREATIVE NVIDIA RivaTNT 2 Ultra 32Mb & a PCI Diamond 3Dfx VooDoo 2 12Mb.
Just remember to get a board based on the 440BX or VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset. Getting screwed with a 440LX or Apollo P6 based board is the last thing you want.
I really enjoyed this video, I love slot 1. I have 2 builds Pentium 2 350 and 400 MHz, and 2 others with Pentium 3 533 and 650 MHz. W the Intel 440BX chipset🤩 and thanks for your drivers that I always come to steal😅. In each of your videos there is a new trick to learn to make these machines even more awesome for a hybrid MS-DOS Windows 9x system. Thanks for all this. In my Pentium 2 350 I want to remove the Banshee and try the Millennium 2 PCI with a PowerVR PCX2 M3D which I will buy if it passes the tests🤩. Virge's Patch for Tomb Raider is sadly, much stronger than Matrox Mystique for me, I tried it with the Diamond Stealth 3d 2000 but I have even lower FPS than these. I was on a Pentium 120 that time though. Now I'm sharing the video on my little Facebook Community. Greetings and thanks
Awesome I'm so happy to read such comments!
HI Phil, sorry to hijack your slot1 comments with a XP question lol BUT im about to rebuild my XP build and was wondering what ISO / IMAGE you use for fresh XP installs, i would probably lean towards an OEM XP sp3 disk but wondered if you knew of an XP image that has all updates and patches already installed etc.
thanks and keep up the awesome work, love your videos mate.
The Pentium II 350mhz was the CPU in the Gateway 2000 PC my parents got in 1998 when I was 6. They did have a 386 or 486 before that but I don't really remember it, so really the Pentium II was my first experience of PCs and of PC gaming. Lots of happy memories playing Unreal, age of empires II, Incoming and many more games from the era. I would love to rebuild it one day. They had it up until 2002 I think when they upgraded to a 2GHz Pentium 4.
Heat memories!
I had Croc on Playstation. It's hard to see how it could be fun, being so slow on that video card!
Have been seeing a few videos based on Slot 1 / Pentium II systems just recently which is nice!
Told that used Gigabyte MB, but on the POST Asus P3B-F is displayed
🤔 Not sure what happened there...
Phenomenal video Phil
You have helped me with ALL my retro pc stuff. Thank you man.
You can type Exit to get back into Windows? No shit, decades of using it I had no idea that was a thing. I usually just typed WIN.
You know you are successfull when you manage to run POD.
😂
I will totally use 3d card with agp like tnt2 or voodoo3 and pentium3 500
Slot1Fun indeed! Awesome platform
I love slot 1, last year I finally put together my dream pc with a Pentium III 600, Voodoo 3 3000 and a Sound Blaster AWE64
Slot one i all trashed, kept the AWE 64 and all fancy bay tools that came with it, Voodoo II SLi only, was already on TNT back then.
I love Croc! It was originally made as a Yoshi game but Nintendo refused it so they retooled the characters and we have Croc. It was first game my son Brandon ever played. It was the Saturn Version.
Interesting story I had no idea!
Just bought slot 1 Pentium II 350. And your video arrive at the moment. Now I'm exactly know what to do with it)
Are you travelling now? Virge3d is all what you have now?) Maybe you devorce and wife took all the treasures)
even he needed a break from putting overkill Pentium4-era GPU's in a Pentium II at least for one video
Haha yea maybe you're right 😂
I already have countless slot 1 and socket 370 here. Compaq Deskpro P2 450, P3 550, self-made P3 667, HP P3 933, self-made P3 Tualatin 1300, self-made Dual P3 700... What I'm still missing is a Socket 370 system with a VIA C3 processor. It's something exotic.
Thanks for this, Phil! I'm a little curious about the video card choice. It seems like the performance was not so good other than POD. Would the system fare better in DirectX with say a GeForce2, or is this more of a CPU limitation?
Yes the ViRGE is infamous for being a 3D decellerator 😂 A Geforce2 would certainly be a much better choice. The ViRGE however is awesome for DOS and also terrific for any 2D windows games like point and click adventure games.
@@philscomputerlabI was secretly hoping for "and now let's add a Voodoo 2" or something like that :^)
@@philscomputerlab TNT and GeForce are stil VESA compatible so they are great for DOS too and fast in Win98 games.
@@xsc1000Yes agreed!
In order to pass that level you need to butt slam that log on top of that mario-esque looking pipe/well.
Remember, this was made to be a Nintendo game in the Mario-Verse so much of that gameplay will still apply. You just have to look harder for it as they re-textured everything so it no longer looked like a Nintendo game.
Hey Phil, great vid! Would love to see more of these detailed how-to videos. One thing that seems to always get skipped over is flashing the latest bios. Maybe you could make a similarly-detailed tutorial on how you go about doing that? Thanks so much!
That's actually straight forward. From the support site download the files and stick them onto a boot Floppy. Boot from it and then run the batch file that's supplied or manually run the flash tool.
I have a Pentium 2 350 with a BX440 board, but never had any luck getting it to post, I think ram was limited to 128mb per slot back then right? I only have 256mb sticks of PC 133, the original PC came with 64mb of pc100 which I no longer have.
ah on wikipedia: This chipset does not support 256Mbit SDRAM, which became more common in the 2002 to 2003 period. The higher end 440GX chipset released in June 1998 that was originally intended for servers and workstations has this support.
so i was correct.
Yes and there was also something about single and double sided ram. SDRAM is cheap though and plenty so try working with the platform again in the futures it's well worth it!
I feel you do a Pentium 2 build at least every 4 months on this channel.
That's not a complaint, keep it up, I'll watch every single one of them. Just so I can hear someone validate my preference for the 440BX chipset. It never gets old.
😊
Hi Phil is 1 GB too much for windows 98se? Because I want to building a athlin 64 3800+ for windows 98/XP Dual Boot for games 1995-2007. Kind regards.
512MB is the normal limit, that should be way more than enough for 98SE
@@carltonleboss thanks for the reply
Reports are mixed, some report 1GB as working others don't. I usually pick 256MB it just works and avoids issues. It's heaps of ram, back in the day you'd have 32 or 64MB in a lot of cases...
Anotber informative build video 👍
I swear I could hear those ISA slots crying out for a AWE series sound card lol
AWEsome 😎
@@philscomputerlab 🤣🤣🤣
Im Watching your Videos for years now, i like your stuff and everytime you remind me of Mr. Clean
😂
I had a CirrusLogic at the time on my dx4-100
Now looking forward to a slot.a video
It's in the works!
Man, Flexibility is key with Slot 1, You can either put an S3 Trio (Or even something else, if you desire, maybe like one of the best ATI RAGE GPUs) + 3DFX Voodoo, and then put it either SB Live, or if it's a Motherboard with ISA then perhaps something like SoundBlaster 16.
It's kinda odd to see that 5V isn't that needed on a Slot 1 Motherboard, but then again I guess it's no wonder when I run something like a Athlon XP Build and such which is really needed.
16:13 Gotta love when AD just enables by itself for no reason xD
To clarify -5v isn't needed. 5V most certainly gets heavy use..
@@philscomputerlabOops, Now I noticed that, I think all that +5V talk on Athlon XPs on some parts of internet messed my brain a bit and forgot about -5V, sorry 😅
Wow. Just wow. I played 'pod' as a child. I believe it was one of my first ever computer games. It blew my mind too pieces. I couldn't sleep seeing the flashy images in my brain lol. It's unbelievable to see it again here. Much appreciated for this video. It was a wonderful time back then.
I would love to see you do this with a dual or quad Slot motherboard. A friend had a dual slot a board back in the day and it didn't do very much for games back then, I wonder what they would be like now?
Not much you could do with them, unless you wanted to run some old productivity software for some reason. Even the fastest PIII is too slow for any game with proper multi threading, and the latency between two discrete CPUs wouldn't help either.
There's one exception I can think of: Quake 3. Figures that John Carmack would be experimenting with multi cpu support in the late 90s, though I don't think it gave much of a speedup.
@@ozzyp97 Only one way to find out.
Windows 9X dont support more than one CPU, so there is no benefit for them. You have to use NT4.0 or W2k for it, but there is too little game support.
@@xsc1000Looking back that was what he was running. NT. I do not remember what version. This was pre windows 2000/XP. I sat and played GTA on it with him.
@@Trick-Framed I think that GTA just use one CPU, so it runs, but doesnt benefit from more CPUs.
Have you ever considered looking into VIA CPUs for a Retro PC?
I have!
I'd like to see your take on alternative chipsets like the Apollo Pro 133 (693A, not the 694) to spice things up a little (AGP that must run at 1x, possible PCI latency issues, SCANREG having to be disabled & deleted). The SY-6VBA 133 that equipped it is the most ubiquitous Slot 1 board in my country (next to the SIS-based M748).
I have back then very bad experience with 693A chipset. My office P3 733Mhz Coppermine, MSI board with 693A chipset running WinMe was tragicly slower, than my home Celeron 666Mhz@750Mhz with Abit 694X board running Win98 SE. It surely wasn't only chipset fault, but it created at least bad taste for this chipset for me.
Croc is a fun little game, played it for a couple of levels. It's not that difficult but not easy eithet. No precision jumping like in Tomb Raider but if you are sloppy with the input you can easily fall off ledges, fall into lava or get hit by the enemies. The game follows the Sonic-rules, if you have a diamond on you, you can get a hit and lose them, if you are able to pick up at least 1, you are good for another hit. My problem with the game is that I can't really judge distance therefore I misjudge my jumps. It's a platformer game but not really strong at platforming. It was probably inspired by Tomb Raider hence the little backpack on Croc's back. You have to free all the little Gobbos, those furry creatures from the evil toad-frog looking thing. From time to time you have to do a boss battle and they are always doing something interesting with them. But you need better framerates to play it.
Thanks for the pointers I really appreciate that!
The way around writing a floppy or CDR is to pull that SD card and mount it on a VM.
Why so complicated, just use a SD card reader, Windows knows the file system just fine
I just scored an Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard recently - perfect timing that you put out this video! I was going to save it for a future project, but now I am feeling inspired!
Very nice!
I never restored any slot one retro build, did owned some board, and multiple CPU's on it.
Xeon, Pentium II and Pro, and Celeron without the box, cash on a card only slot one.
Many AMD Now! Voodoo PC's from that era made it in my personal museum, non is slot one intel, LOL.
Your best videos are always about DOS and Win98!
Wow, thanks!
I think you can install win 98 on a p4. I installed Win Me on a p4 and its working ok.
Yes you can!
Great video, however, I remember playing Tomb Raider on my maxed 486 and Pentium 1@166 but it was not so slow. As video card I had an Trident TGUi VLB and an S3Trio PCI (onboard integrated) respectively. I am missing something?
Playing in lower resolution maybe? Also, the S3 patch/mode is just garbage performance in high resolution and it's limited by the graphics card itself, not the CPU.
Yea likely running at 320x200 which a Pentium can handle...
@@philscomputerlab Yes, that may be; I used to play in low resolution, for sure. And I did not knew at the time that it existed the S3 API mode.
#DOSember 😉
Will add it 😊
Seems to be for twitch streamers?
Sucks that they are just so damn pricey today. Well, Socket A is affordable and to be honest, I have more fond memories of my teen PC gamer years with a S462 platform. :)
on a wide variety of 98 builds a game i cant seem to go w/o for a good time killer was Gearhead Garage. (sad no actual Virtual Mechanic game since has been able to really match what Gearhead was like. )
Para ficar perfeito só faltou um monitor 4:3
Like
Thanks for the excellent content Phil! I think you know but that motherboard supports the SMB tool which lets you set the FSB from 50-133MHz from the command line. Best!
Well well I didn't know that 😂
@@philscomputerlab Run it with a VIA C3 Ezra-T that has 3.0-16x multipliers and it's a very good combination.
Could you please try tomb raider 3 with the s3 virge? I think it had an issue with transparency and the water was shown black but I could be mixing it up with a different gpu.
That's hard for me to do as the project is already dismantled...
ah ok no worries
I always referred to SLOT1 as "Slutty One" as it was so good at what it did.
Slot1 bx440❤
Even though his motherboard can support up to a 1.4GHz processor he has gone with a 333mhz processor and 32 mbs of RAM. None of these guys will EVER max out the capabilities of these motherboards. EVER period.
Awesome Video !
A Voodoo 1 would be a good fit for this machine (time period correct) right? If one wants an inexpensive alternative, Geforce 4 MX would run better than S3. I never had a S3… had some Cirrus Logic cards, then ATIs (Rage Pro) which never really worked well with 3D, and later found about a certain 3dfx card that was really cool and a game changer….
Nice video
Hey Phil. Great video as always. Can I ask what monitor brand and model you’re using? Seems do deal with the resolutions really well!!! Also how do you have it connected? Straight vga cable to the graphics card?
Viewsonic IPS screen with VGA, DVI and HDMI. Yes straight with VGA for this project.
@@philscomputerlab Thanks for that. Do you have the specific model reference as well?
VS14880!@@phantasiaPT
Hello there, I have a good Rachel gamer PC myself I like your videos but I can’t find the video you made full automatic answer disc for Windows 98 Home made a video I would like to know maybe you can help me
you don't need to turn irq's off........ if they're not being used then they are not being recognised...........
Even though the gaming PC can handle up to 4 GBs of RAM he has inserted one stick, which is more than enough in this case, only 32 MBs.
Who else came here after seeing This Does Not Compute talk about a Dell Slot 1 Pentium 2 266?🤔
I miss the old videos Form years ago where you did a lot of benchmarks of slot 1 and socket 370. but they are a lot of work I guess
Overall impression - S3 virge is not really adequate for this PII.
i repaired my atholon slot a motherboard a while back having issues getting win 98 on it the keys i have dont seem to be recognized by the os which is frustrating have me on it right now but would prefer 98 second edition
Hello, I do have about tree motherboards with pentium 2. One with pentium 3 all slot 1 hard drive CD-ROM and sound card like yours
Nice!
Another very helpful video. Thanks
My Slot-1 Gateway ES-450 is freezing now. Much sad.
Check the capacitors and RAM.
I really appreciated the in-depth showing of configuration / drivers / settings. Thank you ! I'm a bit old now, so a refresh of memory was needed. This is a nice Pentium II setup. The S3 Virge seems a bit limiting on this platform. So, while retaining a maximum compatibility, which video card would you consider as an period acceptable upgrade ?
Voodoo 3 would be a great fit but expensive. TNT2 comes to mind. Maybe a OG Radeon. Matrix G400 and Savage4 are less popular options.