Software renderer for Tomb Raider was always like that. Texture warping is caused by the fact that perspective correction value is not calculated for each pixel but just for couple points for each face. Anything in between is simple affine texture mapping (no divisions - much faster). There are 2 or 3 settings possible in TR that select how much of these point to use per face. Quake engine did that too, but was a little bit smarter about it. As for face drawing order issues I am not exactly sure but it looks very similar to what you get when using simple painters algorightm instead of proper, per pixel Z buffer. Hardware accelerated version solves those problems by letting graphics chip do all the drawing, which it does much better than software renderer.
The software renderer reminds me of the PS1 port of the game but no Z calculations would make it run faster but suffer from the PS1-style warping. I was running it in 320x240/30ish fps on a 486DX100 back in the day on DOS 6.22 and I could even run TR2 in 320x240 on Windows 95 in software but it was more like 20 fps because of the 95 overhead.
I was Lucky to buy an Apocalypse 3dx back in the day and still have it to this day, in a p4 2.4 that runs tomb Raider, resident evil 1 and tomb Raider 2 with the help of a geforce 2 GTS 😁😁
After your last video I've started to build a P4 1.7GHz (Willamete) system, also with a SiS chipset, with a P4S533-X motherboard not the same chipset, but you gave me a baseline! best regards from Portugal!!11
@@philscomputerlab I'm planning to join the club soon :) I learned about CPU bottleneck and have decided to go with P4 (originally wanted to run PIII Tualatin). Your videos have been a huge help in showing me how great P4 is for 98!
Back in the day, I tended to avoid SiS chipset boards. They were a lot of trouble (bad drivers, bad performance of the IDE controllers, weird incompatibilities). I tended to stick to Intel chipset boards for Intel processors.
Very true.... I worked for a company that turned out a high number of machines back in the day and SiS became one to avoid but there were 2 exceptions.. the 630 and 730 chipsets were surprisingly good and didnt give trouble but you tended to see those on the p3 tualatin boards or laptops
I had a K7SEM 1.0 for my Duron 850 back in 06 and I didn’t have any problems but was not using DOS at all aside from its involvement in win98 behind the scenes
I recently made my dream Socket 478 machine. It has a Biostar 945GC-M4 motherboard with PCIe. I found a nice SCYTHE NINJA PLUS REV:B cooler with heat pipes to go with the 3.06 GHz P4. And a GT 440 1GB GDDR5 GPU. It runs beautifully on Windows XP. I can "watch" TH-cam on MyPal and play Minecraft 1.2.1 at 30 FPS. Before this, I only had a Dell Dimension 2400 with a PCI GT 610 card, but it ran horribly. The difference a fast PCIe card will make on this platform is amazing. Great Video!!
Pentium 4 is my favorite CPU of all time!!! Specifically the 640 on socket 775. At 3.2GHz and the ability to easily go 3.6/3.7 using PLL clocks, it saved me until 2012 when I FINALLY gave in for a quad core AMD APU. Thank you for giving old hardware such a great spotlight! Love your channel.
I have a 505 and a HT 631. the former is nothing to write home about, but the 631 is quite nice. 3 GHz, and could run mine easily at 4 GHz, even with reduced multi for more bandwidth. The platform can be really bandwidth starved and even when staying at 3 GHz, going from 15x200 to 12x250 improved performance by roughly 15%, so if you have a system where you can reduce the multi, do it and push the fsb up. Obviously still slow and my 2 GHz Celeron 440 completely crushes it at less than half the power draw.
@@lurch789 No one uses one like you're thinking in 2023. Definitely better options even for XP machines. And for a free CPU I'd say I got my money's worth with that P4 over a decade ago. 🤷🏻♂️
P4 was one of my favorite eras. I have an extreme edition chip for my 478 that bought way, way back then and it got great performance in HL2. It was also a great dosbox rig.
I love how the Aussie humour rubbed off on you. At the start of the video "SiS chipsets are somewhat sought after....to use them precious 3DFX Voodoo cards on a fast motherboard..." and later in the video, "today we will use the nVidia FX5200 graphics card." Ooofff!! Lol! 😅😅
This project really confirms me how important it is to pick your chipset platform carefully when your using MS-Dos. If it is the late era such as a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 I find that VIA has the best compatibility, and my VIA based system doesn't run into any of these issues. I also don't recall any of phil's VIA builds ever running into any of these issues, so for me SIS is definitely not worth buying if it ends up like it shows in the video.
@@miljororforsprakpartiet290 In my case a Athlon 64 X2 2005 build. Gets me a lot of versility from Crysis 1 all the way to the 80s. Very stable on DOS to. These things can be done, you just need to be careful with your hardware choices.
The SB Live or just about any PCI based Creative cards were notorious back in the late 90's for having issues with DOS games, system freezes and so on. For real a really stable DOS gaming rig you really want something with an AGP or PCI graphics card and ISA for sound. Also, some games that use the DOS4GW extender (like Doom, Warcraft 2 as examples) do not like running on machine faster than around 750 Mhz or so. I'm not sure why but I think that's the source for the crash you got in Doom.
The reason for this is Creative Labs recycling AudioPCI's emulation they obtained through the Ensoniq acquisition. The AudioPCI itself was rebranded and resold as various Creative products. So whatever DOS problems there were with Ensoniq's early to market PCI products were duplicated across basically Creative's entire line of PCI products.
You know what i always wanted to test? Some of those AM2 boards that had an AGP port, like the Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2, those things should be able to handle W98/DOS gaming very well and have a pci slot for a sound blaster live. The IGP should also work for W98, altrought its similar to a Savage 4/2000 so you cant expect much out of it.
By the time of the AM2 socket, AGP had been dead and gone for several years at that point. The few motherboards that still offered "AGP" were usually fake jimmy rigged proprietary vendor specific solutions that weren't really AGP, but instead some cobbled together black magic that relied on hopes and dreams to work. The K8M800 chipset was probably the last chipset to offer a real AGP bus, but not without some significant limitations and compatibility issues. Multi-core CPUs required specific driver setup to work, had a limited number of guaranteed compatible cards, and 64 bit operating systems didn't support fast AGP texture support, which significantly reduced performance. The "fake" AGP slots like AGI, AGX, XGP or AGP Express all had varying levels of compatibility and performance. AGP Express was probably the worst, since it was basically a rewired PCI slot. You lose 99% of the performance of the card going from 2133 MB/s to 133 MB/s shared bandwidth, plus the loss of AGP texturing, sideband signalling, etc.
@@GGigabiteM ASRock had lots of these mutant boards. On the other hand, that sounds fine for a Voodoo 3, those don't really use the advanced AGP features anyway.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Unless you find one of those boards with a universal AGP slot, no Voodoo AGP card is going to work, because they're all keyed to 2x. AGP 4x/8x has a different key so 1x/2x cards won't physically fit. They also run at different voltages (3.3v vs 1.5 or 0.8v) so they won't work regardless. The only exception is MAYBE the Voodoo4 4500, because it is the only model with a universal keyed edge connector. I've heard mixed responses about it working in newer 4x/8x slots though. The last known motherboards with universal AGP slots were in the middle of the P4 era with chipsets that usually only supported the 533 MHZ FSB Northwoods. Or earlier Athlon boards, but those are less useful since they only support SSE, where the P4s support up to SSE3 and can still run modern software.
Recently started playing Tomb Raider 1 again, surprisingly fun game once you get passed the controls. They become easier to manage as you play because when you start it feels like tank controls lol. Surprisingly good.
Good you are back! You do a lot of content for people who do not own the super rare hardware! I own one of these infamous SIS "nuggets" from MSI. It is a well made board I am using for testing suspicious AGP cards 😂 It survived a lot! I can give it a chance and test if I gonna have more luck with this. 😆
Like! The Pentium 4 is very nice for retro gaming. It’s fast enough for games from 2000-2003 and it can also be underclocked, if needed, for older games.
I guess I'm a little biased because I was never impressed by the P4, but even trying to look at it objectively it seems like it's in a bad spot compared to other architectures like the Athlon/Athlon64 and Pentium II/Pentium III. The Pentiums, particularly when paired with the 440BX chipset, win in compatibility with older games. The P4's main advantage is that there are so many of them that the platform is basically free in some situations, e.g. they still show up on street corners and public works collection sites. I wouldn't invest much in it, though. If you're going to overpay, a P4 isn't the place to do it in my opinion. Either upgrade to a Athlon64/Core2, sidegrade to the Athlon, or "downgrade" to a Pentium II or III. P4 is the platform to use when you already have it and didn't spend much to get it. If Voodoo 3 is a requirement, the truth is you're fairly limited in compatible options due to the company's limited time in the market. You're just not going to be able to stretch to the late 98/early XP era and also back to the DOS era with a platform like this, which is apparent in the video.
this one came right on time, i'm going to use this video as a guide. Just ordered a LGA 775 Early pentium 4 motherboard kit with pcie and agp ports and with suport for both ddr and ddr2 ram. Next order of business is to buy an FX 5200 for windows 98 and a second sound card to pair with my SB Live! (both because of compatibility with dos and for some good OPL3 support)
Tomb Raider was capped to 30, and the game's software mode had an imperfect or absent Z buffer so some PS1-like distortion is to be expected. If you use Glide natively, emulated, or wrapped those artifacts shouldn't be present but the cap will remain.
Texture distortion has nothing to do with the Z buffer, it's because of the lack of perspective correction. Games at the time used per polygon affine texture mapping because the host CPU didn't have enough processing power to do perspective corrected per pixel rendering and maintain an adequate level of performance. The Z buffer is used for sorting which objects are rendered in the camera view frustum. Many games also didn't use a Z buffer, in favor of the painters algorithm due to again limited resources. Z buffers use quite a bit of processing power and memory, something which PCs of the time didn't have in excess. Anything below an 8 bit Z buffer and you may as well just use the painters algorithm because Z fighting will become a big problem with everything being rendered clashing for priority.
Thanks for the video! Would be cool if you could also test the SiS 645DX chipset. There's a motherboard that looks tempting to me for the P4 that uses this chipset.
Thank you for the video, Phil. I've had great experiences with SiS chipsets on Socket 754 motherboards, but SiS's USB drivers often cause a headache under Windows 98 (especially for the 760 chipset). SiS's integrated Mirage graphics could deserve a look on the channel - from my testing, they're surprisingly competent in games from Wolfenstein to Half-Life.
I have an i815 chipsets board under my pentium 3, that comes with USB 1.1 already, but I added a pic card with USB 2.0, Ide and SATA just for the higher speeds. Haven't tried the SATA yet, but ide works.
SIS was always a bag of tricks and often required driver downgrades. Tombraider was always like that, a TNT Ultra would be a good choice and the fx5200 was awfull. Audio with Live also gave a few issues on DOS Games, if you can get a AWE32 or a SB16 ASP those are beautiful pieces of HW and fully compatible. sb16 ASP over AWE32 in general unless you want the Midi quality. this was a trip to memory lane, thank you.
Pentium4 and the whole Intel's Netburst architecture with exceptionally long pipeline made the whole CPU family so inefficient that it required much higher the clock speeds to match P3 performance. I think it's the last genecation of CPUs we can consider being retro. Great review, thank you!
Later P4s are in a weird spot with their support for x86-64. With that it would seem fair to include single core Athlon 64s in the mix. Multi-core seems to be the dividing line at this point.
For Windows 98 on most titles that don't require a CPU fix I've had no issues using a P4, but many DOS titles I had a bunch of problems with crashing caused by the soundcard (IndyCar Racing II was ultra-temperamental on soundcard when I used a Rendition PCI video card). ISA cards can fix the issue, but P4 board with ISA slots for the soundcard are so rare.
Hey Phil, Thanks a ton for your thorough and insightful videos! Always enjoy your content, no matter if it's about old or new tech :-) Always gives me nice ideas or helps me out. Greetings from Germany, Moe PS.: Somehow your homepage is shown as completely blank page - tested in Edge and Firefox...
Pentium 4's A and B were a disaster but C and D were great. I still have my P4 2.4GHz (C Northwood). I have a HDD with Win98SE and another with WinXP SP3. I can play all the old goodies. My old P4 never let me down. It works non stop since Nov 2002 (third power supply and second CPU fan). I originally had an AGP GeForce 4200 Ti 128MB VRAM and then I bought a Sapphire HD4650 1GB VRAM. One can also go with a Pentium 3 (800-1400 MHz) for a retro game machine, however P4's are easier to find, cheaper and newer. You do not need more than AGP4X, thus do not look specifically for a motherboard that allows AGP8x. Even the Sapphire HD4650 does not bottleneck at 4x over 8x (1-2fps will change nothing when you already have 50+ fps). Keep it up as you make great videos. 😊 Cheers from Bulgaria! 🎉
My favorite is still the SIS 5591/5592 AGP chipset, which runs at twice the speed, gets super hot over time.....But 75Mhz FSB isn't so bad anymore when you can access overclocked AGP and SDRAM at the same time! Too bad it's limited to only an AMD K6-3 at 450Mhz at best.
I bought a Dell Dimension 4550 OEM PC, back a few years ago. I had the same model about 11 years ago, but that one had bulging caps to it and thus I had to throw it out. Anyway, the Dell Dimension has a Pentium 4 2.0 processor ( no hyper threading) an AGP at 4x and 512 MB of memory. It's great for Windows 98 gaming. I used to have a Geforce4 Ti4600 card for the PC, but it started to artifact on me about a year and a half ago so I use a Geforce4 MX400 for it. I lent the PC to my brother because he likes to mess with old Windows 98 machine from time to time.
P4 was flawed and it made me an AMD guy back then but nowadays I'm not that biased anymore and I'm planning to make a P4 time machine which is easier then a Athlon XP machine. I have used a SIS chipset in the past but is was a 735 on the famous K7S5A socket A board.
Had 2 retrogaming Systems with p4 and sis chipset. One was skt478 and The last one was 775. Never had issues with 98...now i'm working on a new more updated machine to run Games up to 2005/06 equipped with a pentium D 950 and Intel 945 chipset with PCIExpress for 98se/xp...found some modded intel chipset drivers for Windows 98 but i still haven't found the right balance, still unstable.
Was always glad that I was able to dodge SIS chipsets most of the time. When people were complaining about reliability issues in the 2000s they had SIS-chipsets. VIA also had some pretty bad chipsets, like the kt133, that was able to eat your data if you copied something while listening to music over your sound card. ^^ Intel chipsets were fine, Nvidias Nforce for Athlon too.
Awesome video! I'm working on a Windows 2000 rig myself that, funnily enough, is using the exact same processor and GPU! I found an FX5200 in box at Goodwill and couldn't say no
Happy Friday Phil! As far as the SiS chipset, I’ve had better experiences in MSDOS when the board is using an AMD processor with SiS chipset. The board I had was a socket 754 or 939 I believe. Might be worth a try. 👍
I always enjoy Phil's videos, so informative, and you can tell how passionate he is about retro computers, and games. I have a P4 machine running a 1.8ghz CPU, I use the FX5700 (256mb) video card which supports DirectX 9.0a; using Nvidia driver version 56.64, and nGlide version 1.05, I have 2gb of PC3200 ram, a 120GB SSD, and a SB Audigy 2 sound card. This configuration lets me play 62 Windows 95 & 98 games. I have a second Windows 98 machine running a Celeron 400mhz CPU, FX5200 (256mb), a 40GB IDE HDD, I use DirectX 9.0a, driver version 45.23, nGlide 1.05, 500mb of PC100 ram, SB Audigy sound card. This machine will run the speed sensitive games like Wing Commander Prophecy just fine, I have 42 Windows 95/98 games for this computer. I love retro gaming, and finding the games, buying them, and building, or upgrading old computers is half the fun, then getting all the software loaded, and working properly...........I also built a high end Windows XP computer, I have 92 games for that machine.............it's a labour of love...........every guy needs a hobby! :) SUBSCRIBED
Tomb raider is capped at 30fps. In software mode the graphics lack perspective correction and I believe all of the vertex math is integer instead of floating point. This means wobbly polygons. Same thing on consoles like the PS1, but 3d accelerated version (3dfx/powerVR ect) fix it because that is what 3d accelerators are designed to do. As for Quake, it has no frame buffer enabled by default. This isn't a problem if you are running at less than 72 fps, but is a problem if you are running at a higher framerate. Either up the resolution until your framerate drops or you can enable vsync with a launch argument.
This was my go-to mainboard chipset for my Mame cabs many years ago...One of the few motherboards where the onboard sound ran perfectly with DOSadvancemame/vsync/ac97, with no dos drivers & zero configuration, also able to utilize a cpu fast enough for reasonably decent games (for back then). also used NvidiaGF-MX400 PCI cards for perfect custom 15k modes
If I ever manage to find an identical SiS board (the only branding on its box was SiS, so probably reference) to the one in my first PC that was capable of 3D graphics...I'm pairing it with another Celeron D at 2.4GHz, and "drag racing" the iGPU next to an SiS 315 and 315E. Maybe GLQuake won't be bugged unlike the non integrated 315 (it is worse than with the SiS 305 - dedicated or integrated). Fun fact - the 315E is cut down more than the iGPU found in some of SiS's Socket 478 chipset. Edit: Yeah, definitely is better with GLQuake. Still find it amazing that the SiS Mirage was more capable than the Mobility Radeon 9000igp (the version without a vertex unit) - and that it could run Halo.
i remember back in 2003 ..i bought SiS mboard for us$40. The cheapest s478 for Pentium4..nvidia .GF 4 mx not able max out HAlFlife2 800x600 60fps . 2 year later save some money replaced the old gpu to Radeon 9700 .. and the Fps different was night and day compare 4MX.... Even Doom3 run butterry smooth ..
That effect in Tomb Raider I think has something to do with the fact that it was a Playstation game, that is a common effect in most if not all PS1 3d games. Maybe they ported the engine and didn't bother trying to fix that for the PC. It's weird the way it works, like the screen is divided up into squares that don't perfectly synchronise. That doesn't happen when running on the Voodoo cards in Dos though. Aopen = Acer. Another Great video thanks Phil.
I think Tomb Raider is primarily a PC game. It was developed before the PS1 was invented. I don't know what 3D engine they are using but it is something common on all Tomb Raider DOS games. There is the texture sliding effect, is that what you are talking about? In the video, I think he was talking about something else.
You are right! I was recently playing around with a PSX emulator and it has some options to correct these render errors. Apparently it has to do with limited calculation precision of the chips...
I prefer to use Dosbox Staging on a modern system if I want more speed. I just can't be bothered with the hardware issues under pure DOS; sound cards, usb, vga issues, mouse...
5:30 Wow, till now I'd never seen that issue again. This freeze at that point was exactly what I got when I tried to install Windows 98 SE on my then brand new MSI K7-Master/1.4 GHz Thunderbird C. I had a floppy drive connected & enabled though. I tried several things but it wouldn't work so I had to switch to Windows Me, which I wanted to avoid due to the scrapped real DOS-mode (didn't know about the workarounds for that which are well known today).
I have a pentium 4 at 2,8ghz socket 478 with geforce fx 5500 agp and it rocks with all windows 98 games. I really like your vintage videos. I entered pc retro scene last year and I am still discovering new awesome videos from your channel history. That SBEMU is soo interesting. Can you please make a video about SBEMU in some cool thinclients you tested before: HP t5530, 5720 etc.? All have AC97 and are great for dos gaming if you can get sound to work with SBEMU.
Yeah I tried a SiS 662 Socket 775 and while Windows 98 was fine, I couldn't get sound effects from Live / YMF or Vortex under DOS. Vortex gave me FM which was surprising.. But another board I have from ECS, I'm running a C2D E8500, 6600GT DDR3 and a Aureal Vortex and everything works, from Win 98 to the SFX in DOS..
Thanks for the cool vid! I've never done a pentium 4 dos/win98 build, but feel inspired to give it a go now😁 Will have to go take a look at my boards and see if I've any with a universal AGP🤞
FX5200 was so bad... I got it when it was new, but drivers that not crashed in games (including my favorite NFS-5) was released years after... And included in XP-SP3 drivers was bsod-ing right during installing windows (not on all m/b but most of them, and all of what i had) and not only one brand, I tested 5-6 of them on 5-6 motherboards, same issue...
It's a SiS chipset thing, they just don't work properly with Soundblaster Live soundcards. I had a newer SiS 661FX chipset, experienced the same issues you did. I also have a Socket A motherboard. A PC Chips board that had the SiS 741GX chipset. Everything worked except the Soundblaster Live DOS drivers. It just simply wouldn't work under Windows 98, I had to leave it disabled on device manager on Windows 98.
i feel the 1155 socket is the ultimate all arounder in 2023 , you have single core cpus , dual core cpus ,quad core cpus , quad core cpus with hyper threading , descent ipc even for today , also a youtuber recently could get windows 2.0 to run natively much better on the 3770k system than he could his pentium D platform , not perfect but theres obviously some suprisingly good legacy compatibility in the platform considering how modern and readily available :) the platform is
I have a Sempron system with a WinFast mobo which has SiS chipset that I built three years ago. It has 512mb ram and an nVidia fx5500 gpu. Has windows xp on and I use it with a great Philips Brilliance CRT and it can go up to 145Hz at 480p. I love playing games and tinkering old software with this machine.
the fastest agp 3.3v chipset is the kt333, if you can find a mobo with it then you can run some high clocked 333mhz fsb cpus, this makes it probably the best platform for 3dfx cards because of the fast effective fsb clock of 166 mhz
That has nothing to do with the FSB, even the 266MHz FSB Athlons were faster then P4. But going for a P4 can be cheaper today, because those KT333 Boards are very sought after. And if you are not after the longest benchmark bar the P4 is enough because the Voodoo 5 5500 is mostly the limitation anyways.
I have a love / hate history with the P4. I had a powerful HT version back then and was RAW power. It lasted longer than I expected because of that, before an upgrade was inevitably needed. However, it was a power consumption and heat nightmare. Similar to nVidia nowadays, but the P4 was possible to buy. 😅
Phil I have been using an ECS 661GX-M7 with a Pentium 4 processor. The motherboard uses the SIS 964 chipset. I have run into exactly the same issues as you. Doom crashed with low tic rate error. Duke3d just freezes. I also noticed sound playback is slow. Having seen that you have the same problems I think it could be the chipset. If you turn off expanded memory the problem goes away but of course so does the sound!
Phil just an update for you. Having had the issues you had I managed to get hold of an Asus A7V266E which is a Socket A motherboard with the VIA VT8233 chipset. I used the hard drive from my previous build and made no changes. I just let Windows install the newer drivers for the new board. I then went into DOS mode and guess what no glitches. So I guess that proves the SIS chipset has issues
@@philscomputerlab Phil since you also mentioned trying the intel chipset I have tried this as well. I used a Gigabyte GA-81848P775-G Rev 1.0 motherboard. The northbridge used is the Intel 848P MCH and the Southbridge Intel ICH5. Again I used the same hard drive as previously but kept it in DOS mode so I didn't have to worry about windows. I have only tried it for a short while but it seems to work very well. I also set up IPX drivers to network. Doom played with no issues over the network with a dedicated DOS PC. However when I tried the same with Duke3d it kept freezing. Now I am not sure if this is an issue with the chipset or something else. I am going to have to look into it further. The Intel chipset defo works better than the SIS chipset. I would love you to look into this and hopefully compare results. All the best
I like the fact I can go to your website and get's rare drivers because sometimes nvidia links are broken (funny that on official site too). Great video I might revive that old sis p4 board I have it has built in mirage but does also have the uni agp slot.
Honestly it works ok with xp. For some reason SiS forgot 98/dos when they went to socket 478 and then dried up for any future platforms because of intel's licensing issues.
Sorry man I feel like a troll but I keep remembering things I am old lol. I also have one of the last fastest SiS chipsets for the socket 478 and the socket 775 platform the FX series. Ths 775 one worked like silk with windows vista the motherboard is made by the now defacto foxconn. Collectors item now by today's standards. Limited to only core2duo support on the 775 one. The 478 I paird with a Radeon x-800 AGP card and it works fantastic with xp. So I can only assume it is a lack of instructions or driver algorythem to include true dos support. FYI the 478 is one of those rare Gigabyte that supports all the preshott's with the sisfx chipset.
I think there is a resource issue. I had similar issues with an audiopci sound card in dos but it worked fine in windows. This was with a compaq Willamette P4 system using pc 133 ram. Dos games worked fine in windows. No freezing but in Dos, they would freeze. I think some motherboards just won't cut the mustard if you want pure dos. Unless they have options to assign irq to legacy isa. Since pci sound cards emulate isa cards in Dos, this could be the problem. Resources
I had the Dell equivalent of this machine, XP, 2.4GHz P4 pre-HT, AGP FX 5200 128MB ‘crap edition’. Upgraded to 2GB RAM DDR and Radeon 9600, though :) I found the bottleneck was definitely the Pentium 4 or the chipset, because I got an athlon 64 with board at some point, shoved the Radeon 9600 onto it, and my frame rates got so much better…
This PC is pretty similar to my Windows 98 machine except I went for a GeForce 4 graphics card for driver compatibility reasons. I wouldn't discount drivers to be the source of the issues seen here. I would suggest down-grading the GPU and sound card to ones that had more support in the Windows 98 era like the GeForce 4 or and an older sounblaster series card.
Glad to see more people embracing the P4 for retro gaming. My current retro rig is Windows 98/XP, Asus P800-E Deluxe MB, Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz, Asus P800-E Deluxe, 2GB RAM 400MHz, Geforce 4 Ti 4800 128MB and Sound Blaster Live!. This machine is not aimed for dos games thoug, but as a platform for the games using shaders not supported by newer graphic cards than the Geforce 4, spesifically Splinter Cell 1-4 and the like.
I have an aopen mx-800n with a celeron (SiS chipset). I've used the ymf724 on mine and dos compatibility is great. I also have dos in real mode because the sound blaster emulation is supported by the chipset via a tech called Distributed DMA, although the ess solo-1 doesn't work on this platform for some reason.
I've used a p4 for dos and 98. Advantages are it's cheap and its easy to obtain a safe modern atx power supply. Disadvantages are the motherboards are right in the middle of the capacitor plague and there are no isa slots in 99% of boards. I would move up to a core 2 duo/quad for xp but for cheap and easily avail 98 the p4 is a good choice
I have a sis board for 754. This might make me dig it out and try DOS on it. I found years ago Intel P4 and newer don't seem to go any faster FPS in DOS games natively than what you saw, 16 bit compatibility is more of a novelty by this point it seems. I wanted to see Quake doing like 1000 fps
Populate the ISA slot, & you should be able to run a more compatible sound card for DOS games. I notice the through holes are there but no slot is included.
I always avoided SiS chipsets, I always felt they were the bottom end of the market. However I believe the Aladdin V chipset on the Pentium platform was possibly quicker than the i430VX/HX? I The only time I moved away from Intel was when I bought my Athlon C 1.4 and Athlon 64 processors, I went down the VIA route with those.
Phil, you may need my experience with the S478 platform. I tried several motherboards on the S478 on Intel chipsets and VIA chipsets and on all my motherboards there was one "glitch" in FPS games under native DOS. It was expressed in the fact that when you run as a player, for example in Doom, sometimes there is a kind of "sticking" of the keys forward / backward and strafe left / right and the player himself runs and rests against the walls. I have tried everything, but I have not been able to overcome this ailment. I tried it on S462, 754, 939 platforms on VIA chipsets, there was no such "glitch" there. I don't know if there will be such a "glitch" with sticking on the VIA S775 platform or not, if it works, then I will try to check it. But after an unsuccessful experience, the S478 platform is no longer closed to me. It remains only to check the motherboard with the ICH2 south bridge, if one comes across. But I believe there is little chance of success. It is very sad to see that Doom does not work properly on the SIS 651, I had high hopes for this chipset.
@@philscomputerlab Thanks for the quick response, Phil. I always use only ps/2 devices for better compatibility.I tried everything that came to mind. Different Dos versions, different EMS/XMS managers, different keyboards, video cards, sound cards, different RAM, changed the keyboard settings in the Bios. Nothing helped!
New to the P4 club. Got mine 2 months ago for free but had one back in the days. A bit off topic from the SIS chipset: I got a Biostar mobo with via p4m266 chipset, 1.5 GB DDR RAM, 2.26Ghz s478 P4 cpu (could not tell arch right now), good modern fsp 300w power supply, SB Live 5.1 and a Voodoo5. I installed Windows 7 "Lite Edition" to have access to my steam library and now valve is going to discontinue Win7 from steam lol. Had to install the SB Live driver from the KX project, works fine for windows. I can run the steam version of UT99 with glide and runs beautifully, better than i remembered it. The steam version of Serious Sam does not work for me, only the classic stand alone one. As Phil said in other videos: For P4 systems try to get an intel chipset, if not then go for Via, compatibility is true, they are everywhere* and never had any issues with any of my via based pcs.
I had Celeron 1.8GHz@2.2GHz on MSI board with SiS 645E chipset with 256MB ram. Despite bad rep SiS chipsets got I remember having no issues with either DOS or Windows 98. Actually board was very stable in Win98 and there were no AGP, sound, etc. issues at all.
I have used SiS chipsets with theirs integrated video on few laptops. While they performed well under XP, they were quite sluggish under Win7 (being single core P4, dualcore, or with hypertreading). For some (the old ones with DDR RAM) I found drivers for Win98 and they were great for retrogaming (altough I remember some incompatibilities and being unstable sometimes).
I have an abit SG-71, which has an SiS 651 chipset. I was using the same CPU you were using. No matter what I do it will not boot from a HD with a SATA to IDE adapter. Bios sees it and it will install windows but when it's the boot device it hangs with an error. The motherboard has the same southbridge 962Lua, so I don't know what it's deal is. My PIII machine with an Intel 815E chipset has no issues with the adapter! My main Pentium 4 machine(from which I'm writing the comment, more fun this way) has a Gigabyte board with an Intel i865PE which has two Sata ports, so the SiS board is a decoration for the time being.
I'm currently using a micro-atx Socket 7 motherboard with SIS 530 and 5595 chipsets. Works well in MS-DOS 6.22 . In windows 95/98, it works well too but runs out of steam with 95/98 games using a Pentium 233MMX. Using AMD K6-2 350 works better but staying at lower resolutions. I ordered a K6-2+ 500 to check out if I get a better gaming experience and better score in futuremark99. The card I'm using is a Riva TNT on PCI. Motherboard doesn't come with AGP. On windows 98, I use Driver version 8 and on windows 95, I use version 6 because 8 freezes on start up. Those were the best drivers for good scores in Furturemark99. Games ran a bit smoother too
*A caveat for some Universal AGP slot SIS boards, looks can be deceiving.* I have an Asus P4S8X board with the SIS 963ua chipset. While the AGP slot is also universal in it's physical appearance, it does not support 3.3V cards. A red warning LED will engage at power on, and the board won't start the boot cycle. An excellent video Phil :) As an old AMD'er, K6 - Athlon 64, I'm only just now digging out some P4 hardware, for a trip down the road not taken
Interesting stuff with the P4 and AGP. The hardware might be just ever so too new for reliable DOS capability. Some of those modern, but backwards compatible chipsets like to do some funky stuff. I recently found a socket 775 ASUS P5S800-VMS with AGP 8x from the local recycling center. It has drivers for Windows 9x but seems to be a bit finicky with drivers, the board is from some parkard bell machine
You can get the Akasa AK-675-S, skt 478 cooler brand new still, I have 1 in my 478 P4 build, I have even swapped the fan for a Noctua item, hoping to make it a bit quieter, not that it helped much, lol.
I checked the photos online and to be honest it doesn't fill me with much confidence. The fins are massive, I have my doubts of it cooling a 3+ GHz CPU...
@@philscomputerlab I've got a 3.2Ghz Prescot with Hyper Threading and I don't have any issues Phil. Old Intel are like ice cubes compared to modern stuff like 12900K, lol. I'll have to boot my P4 machine up and take a look at the temps, but pretty sure I've investigated that before and it was all fine. After using modern stuff you get paranoid about temperature.
I don't think I need more computing power than something like this tbh. It can watch videos in 720p, surf the web(well, maybe a more non-bloated web) and play games from like 1998-2005ish. And you can play all those DOS classics natively!
Ahhh... Yes... Another Green Motherboard + SIS Chipset and Pentium 4... That was a common build in a Japan/Korean PC Surplus Shop here in Philippines in Mid 2000s along with Celeron, Pentium 3 Slot Type and Socket 370 Tualatin. Pentium 4 is a dream for me in 2005 but mom can only afford Pentium 3 Slot Type 533 Mhz PC (Korean Surplus and loan from a friend) for my thesis in my 4th year highschool days... Seeing that EXACT MOTHERBOARD board in a display of a JAP/KOR Surplus PC Shop (can't even afford Brand New in early days of Core 2 Duo era) makes me drool in those days... Thanks for such nostalgia Phil... =')
I had 2 pentium 4 PGA478 retro gaming PCs, but my AGP GPUs I had both died and didn't buy a replacement one, had 2 boards one is Intel and I still have it has 4 DDR slots and dual channel butno overclocking, and the secondr I had was an orange PCB Abit (first time I learned about that brand) one with 3 DDR slots, It supported overclocking but not by much before my soundblater live 5.1 SB0100 stopped working, unfortunately my mumthrew it out with a bunch of other retro hardware I had collected , had only one LGA775 board that only supported pentiums but gave it away because I had a core 2 Quad q9400 system already, that Intel board was the first time I learned about that PGA478 exists
just checked my local site that sells refurbushed and retro hardware and they have some good AGP cards now an ATi Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB (256bit) GDDR3 AGP for 72€ so compared to other AGP cards they have for 32€ seems expansive but from what I found it's one of the most powerful AGP cards so I -ot with my soldering skills and tools, they also have an Sapphire HD4650 1G DDR2 AGP for 72€ but I guess it's not as good even with the extra VRAM and ddr2 vs GDDR3, and hopefully I can find drivers for the intel board after they don't have them for download anymore. Edit: compared the specs amd the HD4650 1G is newer and better overall apart from the ddr2 and 128bit bus
Software renderer for Tomb Raider was always like that. Texture warping is caused by the fact that perspective correction value is not calculated for each pixel but just for couple points for each face. Anything in between is simple affine texture mapping (no divisions - much faster). There are 2 or 3 settings possible in TR that select how much of these point to use per face. Quake engine did that too, but was a little bit smarter about it. As for face drawing order issues I am not exactly sure but it looks very similar to what you get when using simple painters algorightm instead of proper, per pixel Z buffer. Hardware accelerated version solves those problems by letting graphics chip do all the drawing, which it does much better than software renderer.
The software renderer reminds me of the PS1 port of the game but no Z calculations would make it run faster but suffer from the PS1-style warping. I was running it in 320x240/30ish fps on a 486DX100 back in the day on DOS 6.22 and I could even run TR2 in 320x240 on Windows 95 in software but it was more like 20 fps because of the 95 overhead.
I will check next time if at 320x200 you see the same issues...
@@philscomputerlab These issues are still there at lower resolutions but they are less noticeable (due to pixelization).
I was Lucky to buy an Apocalypse 3dx back in the day and still have it to this day, in a p4 2.4 that runs tomb Raider, resident evil 1 and tomb Raider 2 with the help of a geforce 2 GTS 😁😁
After your last video I've started to build a P4 1.7GHz (Willamete) system, also with a SiS chipset, with a P4S533-X motherboard not the same chipset, but you gave me a baseline! best regards from Portugal!!11
P4 owners club 😃
@@philscomputerlab I'm planning to join the club soon :) I learned about CPU bottleneck and have decided to go with P4 (originally wanted to run PIII Tualatin). Your videos have been a huge help in showing me how great P4 is for 98!
@@lukeautosymbol2668 Nice! Pentium 4 lives on for retro games 😊
I love all of your content. This video is no different. I ran a lot of SiS chipset motherboards when I had them and loved it. Thanks for the video!
Good to see you being back on retro stuff Phil! Big up from Hungary.
I enjoy all your videos, it's good to have you back regularly. Appreciate the time you put into these!
I appreciate that!
FINALLY ! A Pentium 4 dos video. Your intel vs amd videos 6-7yrs ago made me to buy tones of p4 CPU and m/b. i have a room full of those😅
More love for the Pentium 4!
As I said on your last video, this is the sort of content that made your channel what it is 👌🏻
Awesome!
Back in the day, I tended to avoid SiS chipset boards. They were a lot of trouble (bad drivers, bad performance of the IDE controllers, weird incompatibilities). I tended to stick to Intel chipset boards for Intel processors.
Very true.... I worked for a company that turned out a high number of machines back in the day and SiS became one to avoid but there were 2 exceptions.. the 630 and 730 chipsets were surprisingly good and didnt give trouble but you tended to see those on the p3 tualatin boards or laptops
Same here. I have a really terrible experience with SIS models.
I had a K7SEM 1.0 for my Duron 850 back in 06 and I didn’t have any problems but was not using DOS at all aside from its involvement in win98 behind the scenes
I recently made my dream Socket 478 machine. It has a Biostar 945GC-M4 motherboard with PCIe. I found a nice SCYTHE NINJA PLUS REV:B cooler with heat pipes to go with the 3.06 GHz P4. And a GT 440 1GB GDDR5 GPU. It runs beautifully on Windows XP. I can "watch" TH-cam on MyPal and play Minecraft 1.2.1 at 30 FPS. Before this, I only had a Dell Dimension 2400 with a PCI GT 610 card, but it ran horribly. The difference a fast PCIe card will make on this platform is amazing. Great Video!!
Pentium 4 is my favorite CPU of all time!!! Specifically the 640 on socket 775. At 3.2GHz and the ability to easily go 3.6/3.7 using PLL clocks, it saved me until 2012 when I FINALLY gave in for a quad core AMD APU. Thank you for giving old hardware such a great spotlight! Love your channel.
I have a 505 and a HT 631. the former is nothing to write home about, but the 631 is quite nice. 3 GHz, and could run mine easily at 4 GHz, even with reduced multi for more bandwidth. The platform can be really bandwidth starved and even when staying at 3 GHz, going from 15x200 to 12x250 improved performance by roughly 15%, so if you have a system where you can reduce the multi, do it and push the fsb up.
Obviously still slow and my 2 GHz Celeron 440 completely crushes it at less than half the power draw.
@@lurch789 No one uses one like you're thinking in 2023. Definitely better options even for XP machines. And for a free CPU I'd say I got my money's worth with that P4 over a decade ago. 🤷🏻♂️
P4 was one of my favorite eras. I have an extreme edition chip for my 478 that bought way, way back then and it got great performance in HL2. It was also a great dosbox rig.
I love how the Aussie humour rubbed off on you. At the start of the video "SiS chipsets are somewhat sought after....to use them precious 3DFX Voodoo cards on a fast motherboard..." and later in the video, "today we will use the nVidia FX5200 graphics card." Ooofff!! Lol! 😅😅
This is a BIG help for me as both my voodoo 5 and voodoo 4 are AGP. Thanks Phil!
I could do a video on Voodoo cards with Pentium 4...
@@philscomputerlab you definitely could! I just noticed your Wing Commander desktop background, love it! Did you get it from wcnews or somewhere else?
@@aaldrich1982 Comes with the GOG release under extras 🙂
This project really confirms me how important it is to pick your chipset platform carefully when your using MS-Dos.
If it is the late era such as a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 I find that VIA has the best compatibility, and my VIA based system doesn't run into any of these issues.
I also don't recall any of phil's VIA builds ever running into any of these issues, so for me SIS is definitely not worth buying if it ends up like it shows in the video.
Or, you just pick a 486 to get something appropriate. P4 for DOS? Come on.
@@miljororforsprakpartiet290 In my case a Athlon 64 X2 2005 build. Gets me a lot of versility from Crysis 1 all the way to the 80s. Very stable on DOS to. These things can be done, you just need to be careful with your hardware choices.
yeah's he said many times VIA chips are best.
The SB Live or just about any PCI based Creative cards were notorious back in the late 90's for having issues with DOS games, system freezes and so on. For real a really stable DOS gaming rig you really want something with an AGP or PCI graphics card and ISA for sound.
Also, some games that use the DOS4GW extender (like Doom, Warcraft 2 as examples) do not like running on machine faster than around 750 Mhz or so. I'm not sure why but I think that's the source for the crash you got in Doom.
The reason for this is Creative Labs recycling AudioPCI's emulation they obtained through the Ensoniq acquisition. The AudioPCI itself was rebranded and resold as various Creative products. So whatever DOS problems there were with Ensoniq's early to market PCI products were duplicated across basically Creative's entire line of PCI products.
You know what i always wanted to test? Some of those AM2 boards that had an AGP port, like the Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2, those things should be able to handle W98/DOS gaming very well and have a pci slot for a sound blaster live. The IGP should also work for W98, altrought its similar to a Savage 4/2000 so you cant expect much out of it.
If I'm not mistaken the Asrock AM2NF3-VSTA had not only AGP but also a BIOS update to support AM3 CPUs. The epitome of anachronism?
By the time of the AM2 socket, AGP had been dead and gone for several years at that point. The few motherboards that still offered "AGP" were usually fake jimmy rigged proprietary vendor specific solutions that weren't really AGP, but instead some cobbled together black magic that relied on hopes and dreams to work.
The K8M800 chipset was probably the last chipset to offer a real AGP bus, but not without some significant limitations and compatibility issues. Multi-core CPUs required specific driver setup to work, had a limited number of guaranteed compatible cards, and 64 bit operating systems didn't support fast AGP texture support, which significantly reduced performance.
The "fake" AGP slots like AGI, AGX, XGP or AGP Express all had varying levels of compatibility and performance. AGP Express was probably the worst, since it was basically a rewired PCI slot. You lose 99% of the performance of the card going from 2133 MB/s to 133 MB/s shared bandwidth, plus the loss of AGP texturing, sideband signalling, etc.
@@MixerVM Oh, thats true, you can run a Phenom 2 CPU with that, i wonder how well that AGP slot works, i think it runs under a pci bridge.
@@GGigabiteM ASRock had lots of these mutant boards. On the other hand, that sounds fine for a Voodoo 3, those don't really use the advanced AGP features anyway.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Unless you find one of those boards with a universal AGP slot, no Voodoo AGP card is going to work, because they're all keyed to 2x. AGP 4x/8x has a different key so 1x/2x cards won't physically fit. They also run at different voltages (3.3v vs 1.5 or 0.8v) so they won't work regardless.
The only exception is MAYBE the Voodoo4 4500, because it is the only model with a universal keyed edge connector. I've heard mixed responses about it working in newer 4x/8x slots though.
The last known motherboards with universal AGP slots were in the middle of the P4 era with chipsets that usually only supported the 533 MHZ FSB Northwoods. Or earlier Athlon boards, but those are less useful since they only support SSE, where the P4s support up to SSE3 and can still run modern software.
Recently started playing Tomb Raider 1 again, surprisingly fun game once you get passed the controls. They become easier to manage as you play because when you start it feels like tank controls lol. Surprisingly good.
Good you are back! You do a lot of content for people who do not own the super rare hardware! I own one of these infamous SIS "nuggets" from MSI. It is a well made board I am using for testing suspicious AGP cards 😂 It survived a lot! I can give it a chance and test if I gonna have more luck with this. 😆
Always happy to see a video from you Phil and even happier when it’s about an SIS chipset ❤
Like! The Pentium 4 is very nice for retro gaming. It’s fast enough for games from 2000-2003 and it can also be underclocked, if needed, for older games.
I find the only time you can under clock is on non proprietary OEM boards. I have both 478 and 775 dell and neither allow CPU speed changes from bios.
@@vardekpetrovic9716 Agreed
I guess I'm a little biased because I was never impressed by the P4, but even trying to look at it objectively it seems like it's in a bad spot compared to other architectures like the Athlon/Athlon64 and Pentium II/Pentium III. The Pentiums, particularly when paired with the 440BX chipset, win in compatibility with older games.
The P4's main advantage is that there are so many of them that the platform is basically free in some situations, e.g. they still show up on street corners and public works collection sites. I wouldn't invest much in it, though. If you're going to overpay, a P4 isn't the place to do it in my opinion. Either upgrade to a Athlon64/Core2, sidegrade to the Athlon, or "downgrade" to a Pentium II or III. P4 is the platform to use when you already have it and didn't spend much to get it.
If Voodoo 3 is a requirement, the truth is you're fairly limited in compatible options due to the company's limited time in the market. You're just not going to be able to stretch to the late 98/early XP era and also back to the DOS era with a platform like this, which is apparent in the video.
@@vardekpetrovic9716 I think you completely misread my comment.
I have also seen where SiS chipsets were very unstable running DOS on Windows 98, but they run XP quite well.
this one came right on time, i'm going to use this video as a guide.
Just ordered a LGA 775 Early pentium 4 motherboard kit with pcie and agp ports and with suport for both ddr and ddr2 ram. Next order of business is to buy an FX 5200 for windows 98 and a second sound card to pair with my SB Live! (both because of compatibility with dos and for some good OPL3 support)
Tomb Raider was capped to 30, and the game's software mode had an imperfect or absent Z buffer so some PS1-like distortion is to be expected. If you use Glide natively, emulated, or wrapped those artifacts shouldn't be present but the cap will remain.
Texture distortion has nothing to do with the Z buffer, it's because of the lack of perspective correction. Games at the time used per polygon affine texture mapping because the host CPU didn't have enough processing power to do perspective corrected per pixel rendering and maintain an adequate level of performance.
The Z buffer is used for sorting which objects are rendered in the camera view frustum. Many games also didn't use a Z buffer, in favor of the painters algorithm due to again limited resources. Z buffers use quite a bit of processing power and memory, something which PCs of the time didn't have in excess. Anything below an 8 bit Z buffer and you may as well just use the painters algorithm because Z fighting will become a big problem with everything being rendered clashing for priority.
Mini GL + Glide is supported, Voodoo cards only.
always weird running it on TNT cards.
Thanks for the video! Would be cool if you could also test the SiS 645DX chipset. There's a motherboard that looks tempting to me for the P4 that uses this chipset.
I enjoy all your videos, always learn something new, today why some of my Windows 98 installation freezes at some point :)
Thank you for the video, Phil. I've had great experiences with SiS chipsets on Socket 754 motherboards, but SiS's USB drivers often cause a headache under Windows 98 (especially for the 760 chipset). SiS's integrated Mirage graphics could deserve a look on the channel - from my testing, they're surprisingly competent in games from Wolfenstein to Half-Life.
I have an i815 chipsets board under my pentium 3, that comes with USB 1.1 already, but I added a pic card with USB 2.0, Ide and SATA just for the higher speeds. Haven't tried the SATA yet, but ide works.
SIS was always a bag of tricks and often required driver downgrades. Tombraider was always like that, a TNT Ultra would be a good choice and the fx5200 was awfull. Audio with Live also gave a few issues on DOS Games, if you can get a AWE32 or a SB16 ASP those are beautiful pieces of HW and fully compatible. sb16 ASP over AWE32 in general unless you want the Midi quality. this was a trip to memory lane, thank you.
Pentium4 and the whole Intel's Netburst architecture with exceptionally long pipeline made the whole CPU family so inefficient that it required much higher the clock speeds to match P3 performance. I think it's the last genecation of CPUs we can consider being retro. Great review, thank you!
Later P4s are in a weird spot with their support for x86-64. With that it would seem fair to include single core Athlon 64s in the mix. Multi-core seems to be the dividing line at this point.
Here in the US PS/2 optical mice are still easily available; I have one and I always use it with Windows 98 computers.
For Windows 98 on most titles that don't require a CPU fix I've had no issues using a P4, but many DOS titles I had a bunch of problems with crashing caused by the soundcard (IndyCar Racing II was ultra-temperamental on soundcard when I used a Rendition PCI video card). ISA cards can fix the issue, but P4 board with ISA slots for the soundcard are so rare.
try sb live 5.1 its good for win 98 and dos games.
I love pentium 4 system for ms dos win 95/98 gaming, in few years retro people will start collecting them
Hey Phil, Thanks a ton for your thorough and insightful videos! Always enjoy your content, no matter if it's about old or new tech :-) Always gives me nice ideas or helps me out. Greetings from Germany, Moe PS.: Somehow your homepage is shown as completely blank page - tested in Edge and Firefox...
Another great video. Thanks for checking out the SBEMU project. Shame that it didn't work out for you.
Pentium 4's A and B were a disaster but C and D were great. I still have my P4 2.4GHz (C Northwood). I have a HDD with Win98SE and another with WinXP SP3. I can play all the old goodies. My old P4 never let me down. It works non stop since Nov 2002 (third power supply and second CPU fan). I originally had an AGP GeForce 4200 Ti 128MB VRAM and then I bought a Sapphire HD4650 1GB VRAM. One can also go with a Pentium 3 (800-1400 MHz) for a retro game machine, however P4's are easier to find, cheaper and newer.
You do not need more than AGP4X, thus do not look specifically for a motherboard that allows AGP8x. Even the Sapphire HD4650 does not bottleneck at 4x over 8x (1-2fps will change nothing when you already have 50+ fps).
Keep it up as you make great videos. 😊 Cheers from Bulgaria! 🎉
My favorite is still the SIS 5591/5592 AGP chipset, which runs at twice the speed, gets super hot over time.....But 75Mhz FSB isn't so bad anymore when you can access overclocked AGP and SDRAM at the same time! Too bad it's limited to only an AMD K6-3 at 450Mhz at best.
i was happy on early Quad Core models back then, last AGP builds ?
Wow you're right! I have opinions on the Pentium 4!
GEFORCE FX? Wow, when I heard that, it gave me the creeps! Also, voodoo2? LOL, RIVA TNT2 M64 FTW!
I bought a Dell Dimension 4550 OEM PC, back a few years ago. I had the same model about 11 years ago, but that one had bulging caps to it and thus I had to throw it out. Anyway, the Dell Dimension has a Pentium 4 2.0 processor ( no hyper threading) an AGP at 4x and 512 MB of memory. It's great for Windows 98 gaming. I used to have a Geforce4 Ti4600 card for the PC, but it started to artifact on me about a year and a half ago so I use a Geforce4 MX400 for it. I lent the PC to my brother because he likes to mess with old Windows 98 machine from time to time.
P4 was flawed and it made me an AMD guy back then but nowadays I'm not that biased anymore and I'm planning to make a P4 time machine which is easier then a Athlon XP machine. I have used a SIS chipset in the past but is was a 735 on the famous K7S5A socket A board.
Had 2 retrogaming Systems with p4 and sis chipset. One was skt478 and The last one was 775. Never had issues with 98...now i'm working on a new more updated machine to run Games up to 2005/06 equipped with a pentium D 950 and Intel 945 chipset with PCIExpress for 98se/xp...found some modded intel chipset drivers for Windows 98 but i still haven't found the right balance, still unstable.
Was always glad that I was able to dodge SIS chipsets most of the time. When people were complaining about reliability issues in the 2000s they had SIS-chipsets. VIA also had some pretty bad chipsets, like the kt133, that was able to eat your data if you copied something while listening to music over your sound card. ^^
Intel chipsets were fine, Nvidias Nforce for Athlon too.
Awesome video! I'm working on a Windows 2000 rig myself that, funnily enough, is using the exact same processor and GPU! I found an FX5200 in box at Goodwill and couldn't say no
Happy Friday Phil! As far as the SiS chipset, I’ve had better experiences in MSDOS when the board is using an AMD processor with SiS chipset. The board I had was a socket 754 or 939 I believe. Might be worth a try. 👍
I always enjoy Phil's videos, so informative, and you can tell how passionate he is about retro computers, and games. I have a P4 machine running a 1.8ghz CPU, I use the FX5700 (256mb) video card which supports DirectX 9.0a; using Nvidia driver version 56.64, and nGlide version 1.05, I have 2gb of PC3200 ram, a 120GB SSD, and a SB Audigy 2 sound card. This configuration lets me play 62 Windows 95 & 98 games. I have a second Windows 98 machine running a Celeron 400mhz CPU, FX5200 (256mb), a 40GB IDE HDD, I use DirectX 9.0a, driver version 45.23, nGlide 1.05, 500mb of PC100 ram, SB Audigy sound card. This machine will run the speed sensitive games like Wing Commander Prophecy just fine, I have 42 Windows 95/98 games for this computer. I love retro gaming, and finding the games, buying them, and building, or upgrading old computers is half the fun, then getting all the software loaded, and working properly...........I also built a high end Windows XP computer, I have 92 games for that machine.............it's a labour of love...........every guy needs a hobby! :) SUBSCRIBED
nostalgia my old pc first time.....
My First Pc? 286 25 mhz, 😢
@ means you are older than me😁
Thanks for the Video Phil. I still have my P4 Intel 875 System .A good cheap system to get startrd in retro Gaming
I have a similar board with sis chipset and man its so good for dos gaming and running 98
Regarding Tomb Raider, @PhilsComputerLab 2 words: Glide wrapper.
Interesting build though, thanks. I have the parts to replicate it to hand.
Tomb raider is capped at 30fps. In software mode the graphics lack perspective correction and I believe all of the vertex math is integer instead of floating point. This means wobbly polygons. Same thing on consoles like the PS1, but 3d accelerated version (3dfx/powerVR ect) fix it because that is what 3d accelerators are designed to do.
As for Quake, it has no frame buffer enabled by default. This isn't a problem if you are running at less than 72 fps, but is a problem if you are running at a higher framerate. Either up the resolution until your framerate drops or you can enable vsync with a launch argument.
Sweet I will check V-Sync option next time!
This was my go-to mainboard chipset for my Mame cabs many years ago...One of the few motherboards where the onboard sound ran perfectly with DOSadvancemame/vsync/ac97, with no dos drivers & zero configuration, also able to utilize a cpu fast enough for reasonably decent games (for back then). also used NvidiaGF-MX400 PCI cards for perfect custom 15k modes
Hi Phil. Sorry to hear about your SBemu issues. I've tried it on a few old laptops with AC97 and it worked amazingly well.
If I ever manage to find an identical SiS board (the only branding on its box was SiS, so probably reference) to the one in my first PC that was capable of 3D graphics...I'm pairing it with another Celeron D at 2.4GHz, and "drag racing" the iGPU next to an SiS 315 and 315E.
Maybe GLQuake won't be bugged unlike the non integrated 315 (it is worse than with the SiS 305 - dedicated or integrated). Fun fact - the 315E is cut down more than the iGPU found in some of SiS's Socket 478 chipset.
Edit: Yeah, definitely is better with GLQuake. Still find it amazing that the SiS Mirage was more capable than the Mobility Radeon 9000igp (the version without a vertex unit) - and that it could run Halo.
i remember back in 2003 ..i bought SiS mboard for us$40. The cheapest s478 for Pentium4..nvidia .GF 4 mx not able max out HAlFlife2 800x600 60fps . 2 year later save some money replaced the old gpu to Radeon 9700 ..
and the Fps different was night and day compare 4MX.... Even Doom3 run butterry smooth ..
That effect in Tomb Raider I think has something to do with the fact that it was a Playstation game, that is a common effect in most if not all PS1 3d games. Maybe they ported the engine and didn't bother trying to fix that for the PC. It's weird the way it works, like the screen is divided up into squares that don't perfectly synchronise. That doesn't happen when running on the Voodoo cards in Dos though. Aopen = Acer. Another Great video thanks Phil.
I think Tomb Raider is primarily a PC game. It was developed before the PS1 was invented. I don't know what 3D engine they are using but it is something common on all Tomb Raider DOS games. There is the texture sliding effect, is that what you are talking about?
In the video, I think he was talking about something else.
@@louistournas120 You may be right, but it does look similar to what You see on PS1 3d games.
It says this ---- It was originally released in 1996 for Sega Saturn, MS-DOS, and PlayStation.
You are right! I was recently playing around with a PSX emulator and it has some options to correct these render errors. Apparently it has to do with limited calculation precision of the chips...
I prefer to use Dosbox Staging on a modern system if I want more speed. I just can't be bothered with the hardware issues under pure DOS; sound cards, usb, vga issues, mouse...
5:30 Wow, till now I'd never seen that issue again. This freeze at that point was exactly what I got when I tried to install Windows 98 SE on my then brand new MSI K7-Master/1.4 GHz Thunderbird C. I had a floppy drive connected & enabled though. I tried several things but it wouldn't work so I had to switch to Windows Me, which I wanted to avoid due to the scrapped real DOS-mode (didn't know about the workarounds for that which are well known today).
I have a pentium 4 at 2,8ghz socket 478 with geforce fx 5500 agp and it rocks with all windows 98 games.
I really like your vintage videos. I entered pc retro scene last year and I am still discovering new awesome videos from your channel history.
That SBEMU is soo interesting.
Can you please make a video about SBEMU in some cool thinclients you tested before: HP t5530, 5720 etc.?
All have AC97 and are great for dos gaming if you can get sound to work with SBEMU.
Yeah I tried a SiS 662 Socket 775 and while Windows 98 was fine, I couldn't get sound effects from Live / YMF or Vortex under DOS. Vortex gave me FM which was surprising.. But another board I have from ECS, I'm running a C2D E8500, 6600GT DDR3 and a Aureal Vortex and everything works, from Win 98 to the SFX in DOS..
Thanks for the cool vid! I've never done a pentium 4 dos/win98 build, but feel inspired to give it a go now😁 Will have to go take a look at my boards and see if I've any with a universal AGP🤞
Go for it!
I think you hit the nail on the head about the FreeDOS memory manager likely being the issue with the sound card in DOS.
FX5200 was so bad... I got it when it was new, but drivers that not crashed in games (including my favorite NFS-5) was released years after... And included in XP-SP3 drivers was bsod-ing right during installing windows (not on all m/b but most of them, and all of what i had) and not only one brand, I tested 5-6 of them on 5-6 motherboards, same issue...
love all your videos! very informative.
The things that we do for DOS gaming!
It's a SiS chipset thing, they just don't work properly with Soundblaster Live soundcards. I had a newer SiS 661FX chipset, experienced the same issues you did. I also have a Socket A motherboard. A PC Chips board that had the SiS 741GX chipset. Everything worked except the Soundblaster Live DOS drivers. It just simply wouldn't work under Windows 98, I had to leave it disabled on device manager on Windows 98.
I had similar problems with Pentium M 1.4Ghz on the ThinkPad.
i feel the 1155 socket is the ultimate all arounder in 2023 , you have single core cpus , dual core cpus ,quad core cpus , quad core cpus with hyper threading , descent ipc even for today , also a youtuber recently could get windows 2.0 to run natively much better on the 3770k system than he could his pentium D platform , not perfect but theres obviously some suprisingly good legacy compatibility in the platform considering how modern and readily available :) the platform is
I have a Sempron system with a WinFast mobo which has SiS chipset that I built three years ago. It has 512mb ram and an nVidia fx5500 gpu. Has windows xp on and I use it with a great Philips Brilliance CRT and it can go up to 145Hz at 480p. I love playing games and tinkering old software with this machine.
i have an intel board 875p i think for 478 and a 3.2 ghz extreme edition im thinking ill install 9x
the fastest agp 3.3v chipset is the kt333, if you can find a mobo with it then you can run some high clocked 333mhz fsb cpus, this makes it probably the best platform for 3dfx cards because of the fast effective fsb clock of 166 mhz
Asus A7V333 probably 8)
That has nothing to do with the FSB, even the 266MHz FSB Athlons were faster then P4. But going for a P4 can be cheaper today, because those KT333 Boards are very sought after. And if you are not after the longest benchmark bar the P4 is enough because the Voodoo 5 5500 is mostly the limitation anyways.
I have a love / hate history with the P4. I had a powerful HT version back then and was RAW power. It lasted longer than I expected because of that, before an upgrade was inevitably needed. However, it was a power consumption and heat nightmare. Similar to nVidia nowadays, but the P4 was possible to buy. 😅
Phil I have been using an ECS 661GX-M7 with a Pentium 4 processor. The motherboard uses the SIS 964 chipset. I have run into exactly the same issues as you. Doom crashed with low tic rate error. Duke3d just freezes. I also noticed sound playback is slow. Having seen that you have the same problems I think it could be the chipset. If you turn off expanded memory the problem goes away but of course so does the sound!
Thank you for sharing, this helps a lot. I will for sure test again with Intel chipset soon 😃
Phil just an update for you. Having had the issues you had I managed to get hold of an Asus A7V266E which is a Socket A motherboard with the VIA VT8233 chipset. I used the hard drive from my previous build and made no changes. I just let Windows install the newer drivers for the new board. I then went into DOS mode and guess what no glitches. So I guess that proves the SIS chipset has issues
@@Roadkill7878 Thanks heaps for the update, that is good to know and confirms things 🙂
@@philscomputerlab Phil since you also mentioned trying the intel chipset I have tried this as well. I used a Gigabyte GA-81848P775-G Rev 1.0 motherboard. The northbridge used is the Intel 848P MCH and the Southbridge Intel ICH5. Again I used the same hard drive as previously but kept it in DOS mode so I didn't have to worry about windows. I have only tried it for a short while but it seems to work very well. I also set up IPX drivers to network. Doom played with no issues over the network with a dedicated DOS PC. However when I tried the same with Duke3d it kept freezing. Now I am not sure if this is an issue with the chipset or something else. I am going to have to look into it further. The Intel chipset defo works better than the SIS chipset. I would love you to look into this and hopefully compare results. All the best
I like the fact I can go to your website and get's rare drivers because sometimes nvidia links are broken (funny that on official site too). Great video I might revive that old sis p4 board I have it has built in mirage but does also have the uni agp slot.
SiS suck lol.
Honestly it works ok with xp. For some reason SiS forgot 98/dos when they went to socket 478 and then dried up for any future platforms because of intel's licensing issues.
Sorry man I feel like a troll but I keep remembering things I am old lol. I also have one of the last fastest SiS chipsets for the socket 478 and the socket 775 platform the FX series. Ths 775 one worked like silk with windows vista the motherboard is made by the now defacto foxconn. Collectors item now by today's standards. Limited to only core2duo support on the 775 one. The 478 I paird with a Radeon x-800 AGP card and it works fantastic with xp. So I can only assume it is a lack of instructions or driver algorythem to include true dos support. FYI the 478 is one of those rare Gigabyte that supports all the preshott's with the sisfx chipset.
I think there is a resource issue. I had similar issues with an audiopci sound card in dos but it worked fine in windows. This was with a compaq Willamette P4 system using pc 133 ram. Dos games worked fine in windows. No freezing but in Dos, they would freeze. I think some motherboards just won't cut the mustard if you want pure dos. Unless they have options to assign irq to legacy isa. Since pci sound cards emulate isa cards in Dos, this could be the problem. Resources
I had the Dell equivalent of this machine, XP, 2.4GHz P4 pre-HT, AGP FX 5200 128MB ‘crap edition’. Upgraded to 2GB RAM DDR and Radeon 9600, though :)
I found the bottleneck was definitely the Pentium 4 or the chipset, because I got an athlon 64 with board at some point, shoved the Radeon 9600 onto it, and my frame rates got so much better…
This PC is pretty similar to my Windows 98 machine except I went for a GeForce 4 graphics card for driver compatibility reasons. I wouldn't discount drivers to be the source of the issues seen here. I would suggest down-grading the GPU and sound card to ones that had more support in the Windows 98 era like the GeForce 4 or and an older sounblaster series card.
GeForce 4 is an awesome Windows 98 card!
Glad to see more people embracing the P4 for retro gaming. My current retro rig is Windows 98/XP, Asus P800-E Deluxe MB, Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz, Asus P800-E Deluxe, 2GB RAM 400MHz, Geforce 4 Ti 4800 128MB and Sound Blaster Live!. This machine is not aimed for dos games thoug, but as a platform for the games using shaders not supported by newer graphic cards than the Geforce 4, spesifically Splinter Cell 1-4 and the like.
Oh nice! Yes this machine is perfect for the splinter cell games with their picky graphics requirements. Great games!
I have an aopen mx-800n with a celeron (SiS chipset). I've used the ymf724 on mine and dos compatibility is great. I also have dos in real mode because the sound blaster emulation is supported by the chipset via a tech called Distributed DMA, although the ess solo-1 doesn't work on this platform for some reason.
there is also a Avance Logic ALS4000, has a decent OPL clone in it, unfortunately it is quite hissy and too quiet and the VxD driver is kind of buggy
I've used a p4 for dos and 98. Advantages are it's cheap and its easy to obtain a safe modern atx power supply. Disadvantages are the motherboards are right in the middle of the capacitor plague and there are no isa slots in 99% of boards.
I would move up to a core 2 duo/quad for xp but for cheap and easily avail 98 the p4 is a good choice
I have a sis board for 754. This might make me dig it out and try DOS on it. I found years ago Intel P4 and newer don't seem to go any faster FPS in DOS games natively than what you saw, 16 bit compatibility is more of a novelty by this point it seems. I wanted to see Quake doing like 1000 fps
I just Oc'd my P4 3.0ghz Prescott to 3.6Ghz and there was some modest performance boosts. ATI Radeon x800 256mb agp.
Populate the ISA slot, & you should be able to run a more compatible sound card for DOS games. I notice the through holes are there but no slot is included.
That's not an ISA slot, it's for what is basically a LAN/Modem card.
AMR, of course. My mistake
I would lilke to see a voodoo 3 build with the universal agp slot and p4
Great idea!
I was using my P4 CPU with VIA chipset and later ATi Xpress 200. Never had SiS chipset motherboard so this is a good one.
Interresting ! hoping to see more retro setup (maybe an AMD Duron or K6-2) :).
I miss AOpen boards
First i loved P4 then hated when knew him already well, now after years i like him again with nostaligic. ;)
Hehe Pentium 4 hot and cold 😀
I always avoided SiS chipsets, I always felt they were the bottom end of the market. However I believe the Aladdin V chipset on the Pentium platform was possibly quicker than the i430VX/HX? I The only time I moved away from Intel was when I bought my Athlon C 1.4 and Athlon 64 processors, I went down the VIA route with those.
Phil, you may need my experience with the S478 platform. I tried several motherboards on the S478 on Intel chipsets and VIA chipsets and on all my motherboards there was one "glitch" in FPS games under native DOS. It was expressed in the fact that when you run as a player, for example in Doom, sometimes there is a kind of "sticking" of the keys forward / backward and strafe left / right and the player himself runs and rests against the walls. I have tried everything, but I have not been able to overcome this ailment. I tried it on S462, 754, 939 platforms on VIA chipsets, there was no such "glitch" there. I don't know if there will be such a "glitch" with sticking on the VIA S775 platform or not, if it works, then I will try to check it. But after an unsuccessful experience, the S478 platform is no longer closed to me. It remains only to check the motherboard with the ICH2 south bridge, if one comes across. But I believe there is little chance of success. It is very sad to see that Doom does not work properly on the SIS 651, I had high hopes for this chipset.
I think I've seen this glitch before. Did using PS/2 devices solve it?
@@philscomputerlab Thanks for the quick response, Phil. I always use only ps/2 devices for better compatibility.I tried everything that came to mind. Different Dos versions, different EMS/XMS managers, different keyboards, video cards, sound cards, different RAM, changed the keyboard settings in the Bios. Nothing helped!
New to the P4 club. Got mine 2 months ago for free but had one back in the days. A bit off topic from the SIS chipset:
I got a Biostar mobo with via p4m266 chipset, 1.5 GB DDR RAM, 2.26Ghz s478 P4 cpu (could not tell arch right now), good modern fsp 300w power supply, SB Live 5.1 and a Voodoo5. I installed Windows 7 "Lite Edition" to have access to my steam library and now valve is going to discontinue Win7 from steam lol. Had to install the SB Live driver from the KX project, works fine for windows. I can run the steam version of UT99 with glide and runs beautifully, better than i remembered it. The steam version of Serious Sam does not work for me, only the classic stand alone one.
As Phil said in other videos: For P4 systems try to get an intel chipset, if not then go for Via, compatibility is true, they are everywhere* and never had any issues with any of my via based pcs.
I stopped buying a single Steam game since they abandoned XP. Only buying in GOG and games like Serious Sam work fine under 98 😊
I had Celeron 1.8GHz@2.2GHz on MSI board with SiS 645E chipset with 256MB ram. Despite bad rep SiS chipsets got I remember having no issues with either DOS or Windows 98. Actually board was very stable in Win98 and there were no AGP, sound, etc. issues at all.
This was the SIS chipset used for Chineses arcade multi games boards!
I have used SiS chipsets with theirs integrated video on few laptops. While they performed well under XP, they were quite sluggish under Win7 (being single core P4, dualcore, or with hypertreading). For some (the old ones with DDR RAM) I found drivers for Win98 and they were great for retrogaming (altough I remember some incompatibilities and being unstable sometimes).
The Videochip was not good enough to run vesta or later
I have an abit SG-71, which has an SiS 651 chipset. I was using the same CPU you were using. No matter what I do it will not boot from a HD with a SATA to IDE adapter. Bios sees it and it will install windows but when it's the boot device it hangs with an error. The motherboard has the same southbridge 962Lua, so I don't know what it's deal is. My PIII machine with an Intel 815E chipset has no issues with the adapter! My main Pentium 4 machine(from which I'm writing the comment, more fun this way) has a Gigabyte board with an Intel i865PE which has two Sata ports, so the SiS board is a decoration for the time being.
I'm currently using a micro-atx Socket 7 motherboard with SIS 530 and 5595 chipsets. Works well in MS-DOS 6.22 . In windows 95/98, it works well too but runs out of steam with 95/98 games using a Pentium 233MMX. Using AMD K6-2 350 works better but staying at lower resolutions. I ordered a K6-2+ 500 to check out if I get a better gaming experience and better score in futuremark99. The card I'm using is a Riva TNT on PCI. Motherboard doesn't come with AGP. On windows 98, I use Driver version 8 and on windows 95, I use version 6 because 8 freezes on start up. Those were the best drivers for good scores in Furturemark99. Games ran a bit smoother too
*A caveat for some Universal AGP slot SIS boards, looks can be deceiving.*
I have an Asus P4S8X board with the SIS 963ua chipset. While the AGP slot is also universal in it's physical appearance, it does not support 3.3V cards.
A red warning LED will engage at power on, and the board won't start the boot cycle.
An excellent video Phil :) As an old AMD'er, K6 - Athlon 64, I'm only just now digging out some P4 hardware, for a trip down the road not taken
Interesting stuff with the P4 and AGP. The hardware might be just ever so too new for reliable DOS capability. Some of those modern, but backwards compatible chipsets like to do some funky stuff. I recently found a socket 775 ASUS P5S800-VMS with AGP 8x from the local recycling center. It has drivers for Windows 9x but seems to be a bit finicky with drivers, the board is from some parkard bell machine
You can get the Akasa AK-675-S, skt 478 cooler brand new still, I have 1 in my 478 P4 build, I have even swapped the fan for a Noctua item, hoping to make it a bit quieter, not that it helped much, lol.
I checked the photos online and to be honest it doesn't fill me with much confidence. The fins are massive, I have my doubts of it cooling a 3+ GHz CPU...
@@philscomputerlab I've got a 3.2Ghz Prescot with Hyper Threading and I don't have any issues Phil. Old Intel are like ice cubes compared to modern stuff like 12900K, lol. I'll have to boot my P4 machine up and take a look at the temps, but pretty sure I've investigated that before and it was all fine. After using modern stuff you get paranoid about temperature.
I don't think I need more computing power than something like this tbh. It can watch videos in 720p, surf the web(well, maybe a more non-bloated web) and play games from like 1998-2005ish. And you can play all those DOS classics natively!
Ahhh... Yes... Another Green Motherboard + SIS Chipset and Pentium 4... That was a common build in a Japan/Korean PC Surplus Shop here in Philippines in Mid 2000s along with Celeron, Pentium 3 Slot Type and Socket 370 Tualatin. Pentium 4 is a dream for me in 2005 but mom can only afford Pentium 3 Slot Type 533 Mhz PC (Korean Surplus and loan from a friend) for my thesis in my 4th year highschool days... Seeing that EXACT MOTHERBOARD board in a display of a JAP/KOR Surplus PC Shop (can't even afford Brand New in early days of Core 2 Duo era) makes me drool in those days... Thanks for such nostalgia Phil... =')
I had 2 pentium 4 PGA478 retro gaming PCs, but my AGP GPUs I had both died and didn't buy a replacement one, had 2 boards one is Intel and I still have it has 4 DDR slots and dual channel butno overclocking, and the secondr I had was an orange PCB Abit (first time I learned about that brand) one with 3 DDR slots, It supported overclocking but not by much before my soundblater live 5.1 SB0100 stopped working, unfortunately my mumthrew it out with a bunch of other retro hardware I had collected , had only one LGA775 board that only supported pentiums but gave it away because I had a core 2 Quad q9400 system already, that Intel board was the first time I learned about that PGA478 exists
just checked my local site that sells refurbushed and retro hardware and they have some good AGP cards now an ATi Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB (256bit) GDDR3 AGP for 72€ so compared to other AGP cards they have for 32€ seems expansive but from what I found it's one of the most powerful AGP cards so I -ot with my soldering skills and tools, they also have an Sapphire HD4650 1G DDR2 AGP for 72€ but I guess it's not as good even with the extra VRAM and ddr2 vs GDDR3, and hopefully I can find drivers for the intel board after they don't have them for download anymore. Edit: compared the specs amd the HD4650 1G is newer and better overall apart from the ddr2 and 128bit bus