This video is amazing, back when I was a kid I was stuck on a 486 DX4-100 (oced to 120 Mhz) + 16 MB RAM until 2001 because PC's were ultra expensive in europe. I had an obsession with trying to run Counter-Strike 1.5 and other cool games people were playing on my 486, naive me even bought a "3D card" from a friend for 50$ (It was the S3 ViRGE 4 MB PCI *sigh*), didn't knew Half-Life could actually run, I tried back then but always crashed when loading the first map. I also remember playing Quake 2 on it, 320x240 on a tiny window at like 5 FPS, the only weapon I could use was the grenade and rocket launcher because it was impossible to aim with anything else, and I had fun playing like that! Also played countless hours of Starcraft and Age of Empires on it, it would slow down to a crawl during the initial Zerg rush when playing skirmish or multiplayer, but on actual campaign it ran 100% fine and speedy.
Thank you for sharing your story! I was stuck with a 485 DX 50 MHz for sometime too before upgrading, and even when I did, it was to an already obsolete AMD K5. But it's all good, today we can look at those times and take the good things from them. Have a great weekend! 👍
Man you retro guys just bring back the memories. I remember going to a friends house as he had the 3DFX card, I still had an ATI gfx card, mine could just do Tomb Raider 2 in some playable framerate, but we weren't so hung up on framerate like now, 30FPS was a dream, anything above 20 was like woooo.
Hey Warren, I'm glad you enjoyed it! You're absolutely right, we never cared about how high the fps was, as long as it was playable. Those were great times, seeing voodoo graphics for the first time. I got footage of other games in this setup, not sure how to release it yet. Have a good one!
@@SUCRA I still remember running NFS2 and a family friend who was a rally car driver said it wasn't really to speedy. Come to think about it, it wasn't but it still looked good for the time. It was only when I got my Voodoo 3 and a friend had a Riva TNT 2 that FPS started to matter. But it was interesting times. I loved watching the progression of graphics and sound.
@@C4nn15 What hit me hard was seeing Tomb Raider in my friends Voodoo 2, like you said. When I saw that in 1998 I needed to have a voodoo card. It was a huge leap in PC gaming graphics, and every year there kept being another leap. Really a good time to be a gamer. This week there will be a video with comparisons with the pentium MMX with the voodoo card!
The glory days, seriously I miss those exciting days. So much new stuff. I still remember having a TV out and conntecting it to my Sony Trinitron and playing doom. I looked so cool on a TV set
I always like these experiments because they reflect our attempt to improve our old PC back then, this unique feeling from the past! I became cringe again as always hahaha!😆 The rusty tower case is mandatory 😂
Yeah, I wondered if this would get anything. It's interesting, I think it's something I could've done while I didn't do a full PC upgrade and then Carey the voodoo forward to the next PC.
This was so cool man! I've never seen a Voodoo paired with a 486 before. Seeing Unreal on a 486 was mind blowing. And Half-Life too! I've seen that issue in Half-Life before where you can exit the tram when the fps is too slow haha! I'm glad your IDE 2 SD was okay after that minor short, that scared me a little XD.... I had to put electrical tape on mine as it rests on the bottom of my metal case.
Good thing you though about the electrical tape and actually moved to do it! Ahahaha! But thankfully everything is ok! Early voodoos are fascinating, really transformed any PC.
You can actually squeeze a LOT more performance out of that combo with a well documented jumper "hack" to unlock the full performance of the PCI bus on that motherboard when overclocking. The M919 mainboard in your system downclocks the PCI bus to 20 mhz when you have the processor FSB set to at 40 mhz @ boot time to get a 160mhz overclock on that chip, in order to preserve compatibility with both the VLB and PCI bus on the same board. The divider/multiplier settings applied to the PCI bus are not user selectable, but are configured via an auto-configuration process at boot-time in the BIOS. With the processor FSB set to 33 mhz (stock config), the BIOS selects a 1:1 PCI clock, when it's set for 40 mhz to get your 160 mhz overclock, the PCI clock gets set to a 1:2 / half speed ratio. There's no way to overcome this unless you change the FSB speed AFTER the boot-time multiplier settings are chosen, so overclocking via the BIOS/jumper options to 160 mhz actually reduces your I/O and graphics performance if you are running a PCI video card... something particularly relevant to your Voodoo benchmark tests. This can be overcome if you jumper configure the processor for a 33 mhz FSB but connect the "closed" position of your turbo switch header to jumper A on block JP7 (rev 1x) or JP3 (rev 3x). After the machine boots @ 133 mhz (33 mhz x 4) so the BIOS selects the 1:1 PCI:FSB ratio, but then overclock the processor FSB AND PCI bus to 40 mhz 1:1 by pressing the button to overclock after boot time. This is extensively documented on the Vogons forums (search for M919) and th2chips.freeservers.com/m919/unoff/m919.html if you want more information.
Hey, thanks for the huge amount of information, nice to have it here in the comment section. On another note I have experimented with that, you can see some of it in the #486QuakeRace video.
That's a really nice example of a Voodoo card - never seen that particular one, although the black finish it reminiscent of the later Obsidian models. What was the FPS for the Quake run??? Thanks for sharing this experiment - I was thinking about it myself :)
I never did run the time demo in GLQuake, I might try and see how that goes. Thanks for watching, man! If you ever do it yourself send us the link, I would love to see what you do. 👍
Thanks, Ricky! That's a point of view I hadn't thought of yet, really interesting. I really need to get myself another N64, it's a console I have little experience with.
@@SUCRA Sometime we wonder what is best, RISC chips or good ole 486 with Voodoo 4megs. But I got surprised at 1997, meaning that NV1 from Nvidia started just a little before 3dFx and that caused the big difference, the Gforce ate the market with ATi.
I remember that half life monorail stuck was a common bug that lots of people with old pcs had experienced, that was lots of fixes for that on the internet, so you could play the game with less them 20 fps.
Good stuff! I bet this could run Tomb Raider with the Glide patch perfectly. Another fun one to test is Pandemonium, which is a cool 3D platformer which supports Glide in Windows.
@@downundergarage6968 these games are barely playable with acceleration on the 486, without it I think the only one that you can actually play a bit is Quake.
Oh nice video, this hardware deserve a good case instead of this rusty one, but hell no you give me heart attack when I heard the electric shortage sound LUL
Hey there is a rusty spot on that case. ... Jk! Nice video and cool experiment. Surprised at the performance in some of the titles but that Half-Life stuck tram is hilarious.
I was always wondering if 486 was able to run NFS2 SE with 3dfx. It was unplayable on my 486 DX4-120MHz, but I never had access to the Voodoo while having that box to test it :(
@@SUCRA Thanks :) Btw, I've found an extensive benchmark on another guy's channel. Looks like this game was made with Pentium in mind, so Am5x86 performs at ~5fps. Way better than software rendering, but quite unplayable. Still, if you do this on 486 with different graphics settings, it would be interesting to see. Especially, the overclocked ones :)
Do you have a PCI Geforce? A 486 was weak for multimedia but the Pentium did it all, so adding a Geforce PCI would have compensated making the 486 strong. But this of what I say is not findable on the TH-cam.
If you would have turned off the sound, the 486 would have had the chance to manage the 3D graphics. But Unreal uses Tracker Music, wich alone would oversaturate the 486 in an instant. Even on standard quality wich is only 22Khz and ?16? voices. A very fast and optimized 486 can barely manage 4 to 8 voices with CD quality at 16Bit (Stereo vs. Mono) by itself without buffer underruns. If anything is going on additionally (Running Windows and such), the 486 will not be capable to hold its line. Sound in most cases was so hard on non MMX-CPUs that it would eat up all ressources. Unreal only works good on MMX CPUs, because with MMX instructions the music playback will only eat a fraction of CPU cycles.
This video is amazing, back when I was a kid I was stuck on a 486 DX4-100 (oced to 120 Mhz) + 16 MB RAM until 2001 because PC's were ultra expensive in europe. I had an obsession with trying to run Counter-Strike 1.5 and other cool games people were playing on my 486, naive me even bought a "3D card" from a friend for 50$ (It was the S3 ViRGE 4 MB PCI *sigh*), didn't knew Half-Life could actually run, I tried back then but always crashed when loading the first map. I also remember playing Quake 2 on it, 320x240 on a tiny window at like 5 FPS, the only weapon I could use was the grenade and rocket launcher because it was impossible to aim with anything else, and I had fun playing like that! Also played countless hours of Starcraft and Age of Empires on it, it would slow down to a crawl during the initial Zerg rush when playing skirmish or multiplayer, but on actual campaign it ran 100% fine and speedy.
Thank you for sharing your story! I was stuck with a 485 DX 50 MHz for sometime too before upgrading, and even when I did, it was to an already obsolete AMD K5. But it's all good, today we can look at those times and take the good things from them. Have a great weekend! 👍
Wow, you just gave me an incredible flashback! I had a Helios 3D voodoo 1 and I remember it was a revolution on my PC!
Nice to hear! And great dog btw. I have a fellow not too different from that myself.
I never clicked so fast before
Haha nice! Hopefully your expectations will be fulfilled.👍
She's a beauty that card
Also very impressive seeing a 486 running unreal and halflife
She is isn't she? I love it with he black pcb and all.
@@SUCRA yup :) those heatsinks are a nice touch most of them come without any
Really cool to see what the 486 could do! I imagine most games from around the launch of the Voodoo in 96 would run well on this combination.
I'm glad you liked it! I'll try to run some more games from the period, thanks for this idea, turned out pretty good!
@@SUCRA agree.need more game test in top 486 PC
Man you retro guys just bring back the memories. I remember going to a friends house as he had the 3DFX card, I still had an ATI gfx card, mine could just do Tomb Raider 2 in some playable framerate, but we weren't so hung up on framerate like now, 30FPS was a dream, anything above 20 was like woooo.
Hey Warren, I'm glad you enjoyed it! You're absolutely right, we never cared about how high the fps was, as long as it was playable. Those were great times, seeing voodoo graphics for the first time. I got footage of other games in this setup, not sure how to release it yet. Have a good one!
@@SUCRA I still remember running NFS2 and a family friend who was a rally car driver said it wasn't really to speedy. Come to think about it, it wasn't but it still looked good for the time. It was only when I got my Voodoo 3 and a friend had a Riva TNT 2 that FPS started to matter. But it was interesting times. I loved watching the progression of graphics and sound.
@@C4nn15 What hit me hard was seeing Tomb Raider in my friends Voodoo 2, like you said. When I saw that in 1998 I needed to have a voodoo card. It was a huge leap in PC gaming graphics, and every year there kept being another leap. Really a good time to be a gamer. This week there will be a video with comparisons with the pentium MMX with the voodoo card!
The glory days, seriously I miss those exciting days. So much new stuff. I still remember having a TV out and conntecting it to my Sony Trinitron and playing doom. I looked so cool on a TV set
For sure! Yeah, remember trying stuff like that too, fun times!
I always like these experiments because they reflect our attempt to improve our old PC back then, this unique feeling from the past! I became cringe again as always hahaha!😆 The rusty tower case is mandatory 😂
Yeah, I wondered if this would get anything. It's interesting, I think it's something I could've done while I didn't do a full PC upgrade and then Carey the voodoo forward to the next PC.
unreal on the 486 is actually impressive and hillarious at the same time :D
Haha it is! I was stoked it actually loaded the game.
Oohhhh...interesting! 🥸
👍
hehe that was fun, and the black voodoo is awesome 😎
Thanks man! Yeah, I agree! I love that thing.
So it seems it was faster than at low resolution in DOS!
Yes, totally! It definetely feels like it. 👍
Your videos are awesome. I also just started working on "new" old machine with Am5 x86 133ADW to experience something similar too :)
Thanks man, I'm glad you like it. Good luck with your build.
@@SUCRAThank you too, I hope to share a video once I finish it, if it works :)
This was so cool man! I've never seen a Voodoo paired with a 486 before. Seeing Unreal on a 486 was mind blowing. And Half-Life too! I've seen that issue in Half-Life before where you can exit the tram when the fps is too slow haha! I'm glad your IDE 2 SD was okay after that minor short, that scared me a little XD.... I had to put electrical tape on mine as it rests on the bottom of my metal case.
Good thing you though about the electrical tape and actually moved to do it! Ahahaha! But thankfully everything is ok! Early voodoos are fascinating, really transformed any PC.
You can actually squeeze a LOT more performance out of that combo with a well documented jumper "hack" to unlock the full performance of the PCI bus on that motherboard when overclocking.
The M919 mainboard in your system downclocks the PCI bus to 20 mhz when you have the processor FSB set to at 40 mhz @ boot time to get a 160mhz overclock on that chip, in order to preserve compatibility with both the VLB and PCI bus on the same board. The divider/multiplier settings applied to the PCI bus are not user selectable, but are configured via an auto-configuration process at boot-time in the BIOS. With the processor FSB set to 33 mhz (stock config), the BIOS selects a 1:1 PCI clock, when it's set for 40 mhz to get your 160 mhz overclock, the PCI clock gets set to a 1:2 / half speed ratio. There's no way to overcome this unless you change the FSB speed AFTER the boot-time multiplier settings are chosen, so overclocking via the BIOS/jumper options to 160 mhz actually reduces your I/O and graphics performance if you are running a PCI video card... something particularly relevant to your Voodoo benchmark tests.
This can be overcome if you jumper configure the processor for a 33 mhz FSB but connect the "closed" position of your turbo switch header to jumper A on block JP7 (rev 1x) or JP3 (rev 3x). After the machine boots @ 133 mhz (33 mhz x 4) so the BIOS selects the 1:1 PCI:FSB ratio, but then overclock the processor FSB AND PCI bus to 40 mhz 1:1 by pressing the button to overclock after boot time.
This is extensively documented on the Vogons forums (search for M919) and th2chips.freeservers.com/m919/unoff/m919.html if you want more information.
Hey, thanks for the huge amount of information, nice to have it here in the comment section. On another note I have experimented with that, you can see some of it in the #486QuakeRace video.
Actually this is the first 486 + Voodoo video I've seen, I was always wondering how that would match.
Hah, thanks for watching! I'm glad I could answer that for you. 👍
That's a really nice example of a Voodoo card - never seen that particular one, although the black finish it reminiscent of the later Obsidian models. What was the FPS for the Quake run??? Thanks for sharing this experiment - I was thinking about it myself :)
I never did run the time demo in GLQuake, I might try and see how that goes. Thanks for watching, man! If you ever do it yourself send us the link, I would love to see what you do. 👍
It was really interesting to see Turok. Because the Nintendo 64 has 4meg of ram video, and this Voodoo was performing like the N64. Great one.
Thanks, Ricky! That's a point of view I hadn't thought of yet, really interesting. I really need to get myself another N64, it's a console I have little experience with.
@@SUCRA Sometime we wonder what is best, RISC chips or good ole 486 with Voodoo 4megs. But I got surprised at 1997, meaning that NV1 from Nvidia started just a little before 3dFx and that caused the big difference, the Gforce ate the market with ATi.
@@SUCRA LGR talks about NV1
I remember that half life monorail stuck was a common bug that lots of people with old pcs had experienced, that was lots of fixes for that on the internet, so you could play the game with less them 20 fps.
Oh cool, I'm not sure I want to venture in 486 Half Life again thought it's a bit painful haha
Good stuff! I bet this could run Tomb Raider with the Glide patch perfectly. Another fun one to test is Pandemonium, which is a cool 3D platformer which supports Glide in Windows.
That's a great idea! I might release some extra stuff on another weekday.
it sure could, mine plays TR2 and 3 pretty fine! :)
Glad the adaptor survived!
It lived to be used in another computer! Since then I have ordered one for each machine, they are not here yet, that one surviver is still serving.
It would be good to do a benchmark on it.. to compare with non accelerated version.
@@downundergarage6968 these games are barely playable with acceleration on the 486, without it I think the only one that you can actually play a bit is Quake.
Great, I hope you will try also 3D acceleration from S3 Virge, also SiS 6326 was made for PCI bus.
Interesting, I might, I like the idea of the Virge cards. 👍
@@SUCRA For me best driver for Virge was that installed with 98SE. At other drivers I don't saw textures.
Oh nice video, this hardware deserve a good case instead of this rusty one, but hell no you give me heart attack when I heard the electric shortage sound LUL
I'm glad you like it! Well the Rust Bucket thrives on rust. I'm not sure it would enjoy a nice new case.
Hey there is a rusty spot on that case.
...
Jk! Nice video and cool experiment. Surprised at the performance in some of the titles but that Half-Life stuck tram is hilarious.
Haha the difference between the rust bucket and the regular pc is that it thrives on rust!
I was always wondering if 486 was able to run NFS2 SE with 3dfx. It was unplayable on my 486 DX4-120MHz, but I never had access to the Voodoo while having that box to test it :(
That's a good question. I wouldn't count on it, I can try to test it at some point.
@@SUCRA Thanks :)
Btw, I've found an extensive benchmark on another guy's channel. Looks like this game was made with Pentium in mind, so Am5x86 performs at ~5fps. Way better than software rendering, but quite unplayable. Still, if you do this on 486 with different graphics settings, it would be interesting to see. Especially, the overclocked ones :)
Quarantine hair hahahaha good one
and yay voodoo the saviour for gamers xD
The hair man haha looks bad. Need a cut.
@@SUCRA Tell me about it lmao
Have an extinguisher around on next videos!
Nah, the extinguisher will occupy the place of another retro PC, I rather not. lol
Parabéns pelo excelente canal! Abraço
Valeu, abraço!
Yes
Definitely
That was fun! :)
I'm glad you enjoyed it Ted! 👍👍
oh!the top 486.
Indeed! Pushed as far as it could go.
@@SUCRA But even the top 486. It is still very difficult to run 3d games. Like unreal.
Anyway, thank you. Never seen such a top 486
160mhz
@@阿綸的全勳學院 absolutely! This is pushing it a bit too far. Thanks for watching!
👏👏👏👏
👍🎉
Great video!
Thank you!
Put some electrical tape on the back of that SD adapter!
Haha of course! I'll try no to better next time.
Do you have a PCI Geforce? A 486 was weak for multimedia but the Pentium did it all, so adding a Geforce PCI would have compensated making the 486 strong. But this of what I say is not findable on the TH-cam.
I might have an fx 5200, I have to see if it works. But what kind of multimídia? Mp3s?
@@SUCRA Pixel Pipes has the numbers of the last cards made in the PCI format. Just graphics. Windows 98 se might be able.
@@lexingtRick oh I know, but a 486 is already overwhelmed by an FX 5200. No need to go any further than that.
👏👏👏👏👊👊👊🇧🇷
Vlw!!👍🍻
If you would have turned off the sound, the 486 would have had the chance to manage the 3D graphics. But Unreal uses Tracker Music, wich alone would oversaturate the 486 in an instant. Even on standard quality wich is only 22Khz and ?16? voices. A very fast and optimized 486 can barely manage 4 to 8 voices with CD quality at 16Bit (Stereo vs. Mono) by itself without buffer underruns. If anything is going on additionally (Running Windows and such), the 486 will not be capable to hold its line.
Sound in most cases was so hard on non MMX-CPUs that it would eat up all ressources. Unreal only works good on MMX CPUs, because with MMX instructions the music playback will only eat a fraction of CPU cycles.
Good point, I didn't think about that at the time.
Quarantine what?
Hair. Lol sorry, sometimes I attempt to make jokes.
Pair it with a Pentium 233 MMX. best CPU for this era.
And so I have! Haha thanks for watching.
in the future people will rust their PC's on purpose to look cool... trust me, i science
Ahaha that sounds about right