Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

Back in the day (circa 1999) I used to run Snes9x on a Pentium 166 overclocked to 200 MHz, a Pentium Pro should wipe the floor with my old machine clock for clock.

An ancient version of MAME should also run reasonably well but it all depends on the arcade hardware being emulated (e.g. Pac-Man is much lighter on system resources than Mortal Kombat). Personally for such an old machine, I wouldn't go higher than 0.106 as that's when a major core upgrade happened, but YMMV depending mostly on the video card and the game itself (you might be able to get away with versions up to 0.179 with a mid-2000s AGP card, as MAME took its next performance hit when 0.180 was released as deprecated DirectDraw/Direct3D code was junked in favor of newer code that mostly only works with modern PCI-E cards, rendering almost all AGP video cards useless unless they were happy with non-power-of-two textures - if your video card doesn't support certain things like NPOT textures, MAME will dump you in GDI mode, but can be forced to OpenGL in most cases although some cards hate OpenGL for some reason e.g. mid-2000s ATI Radeon cards and run a lot slower compared to an identical D3D mode).

I was happily running SNES games on the IBM Aptiva (C32, IIRC) Pentium 133 box at my family's back in 2001, IIRC. Ironically, the CD-ROM drive was manufactured in China! I think I just had a heart attack! (JK)
Because it was rare for major PC components (pre-1999) to even have a lick of China! (excluding tiny cheap ass speakers, LOL) It certainly wasn't like 2002, where by then, China was all over the place in the PC world!
It wasn't even 1998, when my family got it, IIRC, LOL! The PC was made in 1996, IIRC! A Mitsumi 6X CD-ROM, IIRC. I guess that's why it seemed meh.

But even the speakers, which were better ones, even though without a subwoofer, were also manufactured in China. That was a surprise, too, but not as much as with the CD-ROM drive!

I think that a lot of SNES games are at least fairly playable even on a 486 DX 100, (maybe 66 Mhz or 75 Mhz as well) if not an SX as well.

Nintendo 64=Forget it, you need at least a 700 Mhz CPU or near there. And you'll be lucky to play Harvest Moon 64 at 500 Mhz or near there with some slowness. (and that's with the recompiler!) (interpreter requires more CPU!)
And thus, Nintendo 64 emulation, is mostly a Pentium III class or higher project.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

The GPU's came in. Huge improvement! FF12 is still sucky but much better, but I blame that more on the lack of processing power. 3.6.28 seems to be the pentium classic happy place.

I'm also working on a couple more GPU combinations. One is a Matrox G450 + a voodoo2. The Matrox GPU is great for 2D stuff, and the Voodoo2 can certainly pick up the 3D slack with OpenGL stuff....great Quake1 system, with a dual head 2D GPU. The voodoo2 was given to me in a junk box, I found the g450 on ebay for $15 shipped. Yes, this combo is more pentium2 era....but with something I'm working on will make this era appropriate....Ratdude figured it out....

Another GPU is the nvidia fx5500 256mb PCI. Cheap and plentiful!

[Heihachi_73]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

Now, it should be possible to run at least most SNES emulation without being slow.
And even PlayStation 1 games should run fine, but I expect Gran Turismo 2 to be the toughest! The graphics hardware should exceed the requirements for Gran Turismo 2, for Direct 3D 7 and possibly Direct 3D 8.1, but I dunno about the CPU.

Perhaps, for old skool games, like I mentioned, would be better with a Voodoo 2!

Back in the day (circa 1999) I used to run Snes9x on a Pentium 166 overclocked to 200 MHz, a Pentium Pro should wipe the floor with my old machine clock for clock.

An ancient version of MAME should also run reasonably well but it all depends on the arcade hardware being emulated (e.g. Pac-Man is much lighter on system resources than Mortal Kombat). Personally for such an old machine, I wouldn't go higher than 0.106 as that's when a major core upgrade happened, but YMMV depending mostly on the video card and the game itself (you might be able to get away with versions up to 0.179 with a mid-2000s AGP card, as MAME took its next performance hit when 0.180 was released as deprecated DirectDraw/Direct3D code was junked in favor of newer code that mostly only works with modern PCI-E cards, rendering almost all AGP video cards useless unless they were happy with non-power-of-two textures - if your video card doesn't support certain things like NPOT textures, MAME will dump you in GDI mode, but can be forced to OpenGL in most cases although some cards hate OpenGL for some reason e.g. mid-2000s ATI Radeon cards and run a lot slower compared to an identical D3D mode).

[kc8adu]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

i have 2 of those dual ppro boards rat-holed.
had 3 but a client lost a server to lightning and i used one to revive it.
having old hardware saved back=WIN!

[kc8adu]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

i guess i have been lucky.
worst ones have been foreign hotel/motel owners.
every stinkin one of them is an ungrateful cheap SOB.
had one who went off the deep end when i offered to program his new UNT for half what johnson controls quoted him.
ok find someone else or bend over for jc.
his business partner later apologized and was happy to have me do the job.
but he was the lone example.
now when those guys contact me i am permanently too busy.

LOL.....I can relate....I've encountered more than a few like that in my 27 year career.... You brought a similar individual to the front of my memories, and I could have gone the rest of my life without remembering what a pain in the ass this guy was...

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

Now, it should be possible to run at least most SNES emulation without being slow.
And even PlayStation 1 games should run fine, but I expect Gran Turismo 2 to be the toughest! The graphics hardware should exceed the requirements for Gran Turismo 2, for Direct 3D 7 and possibly Direct 3D 8.1, but I dunno about the CPU.

Perhaps, for old skool games, like I mentioned, would be better with a Voodoo 2!

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

Finding the sweet spot slowly. Put bigger fans on the CPU's of the PR440FX, since it has headers for them on the motherboard...

...and a closeup of that famous VRM:


Testing an adaptec aaa-131u2, a controller that can be a little fickle with older hardware....but it worked without issue on this board.



2x 36gb 10k RPM drives in a mirror. I normally stripe them.....but I just didn't this time....



majorgeek's 'unofficial' SP5 for Win2k installing...



The MSI MS-6107 fanless sinks got the fans originally on the PR440FX, since this board doesn't have fan headers on the motherboard.



This time around I also went down to FF3.6.27, as its far happier with this lame old GPU....it actually functions very smooth, all things considered with this all-around gutless system! More when the GPU's get here.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

wow good score with the quadro4s there. those gf4 ti based cards are going for 30-40 bucks on junkbay!

[brethin]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

I picked up 2x quadro4 400 64mb GPU's....which are basically geforce 4's with dual processors....and 4 monitor support. They're a little newer than this board, but they're PCI.....and well I only paid $7 for them, and have driver support all the way back to NT4.....We'll see what one of these can do....surely it'll beat a Matrox Millennium.

It should by a good bit, those are awesome retro cards.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

I picked up 2x quadro4 400 64mb GPU's....which are basically geforce 4's with dual processors....and 4 monitor support. They're a little newer than this board, but they're PCI.....and well I only paid $7 for them, and have driver support all the way back to NT4.....We'll see what one of these can do....surely it'll beat a Matrox Millennium.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

I remember when I worked at the shop in fort worth. We had this investment company (small one) that contracted our work. (2010?)

The owner hired his old (really old) man as the it guy for this...like 5 person company.

They had a VPN connected between the lan and the old mans lan at his house. He backed up the dell xeon poweredge onto like 4 PPro servers at his house. You could tell this old guy had lost his skills. sooo much unnecessary crap. I know the cloud concept was kind of new then but shit, you could achieve the same backup with an expensive raided NAS, not these desktop-based servers.

last time I worked for him he refused to pay because he said *I* knocked their internet offline. I was going between the company and his house trying to figure it out when I noticed a bunch of guys were working up in an elevator. I wondered if the internet was down because they were doing maintenance on it or if the elevator work cut it off at his floor. The guys at work were already up the shaft and no one was around for me to question them if there was an interruption, an the old guy was impatient and telling me to come drive him home

LOL.....I can relate....I've encountered more than a few like that in my 27 year career.... You brought a similar individual to the front of my memories, and I could have gone the rest of my life without remembering what a pain in the ass this guy was...

[Uranium-235]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

I remember when I worked at the shop in fort worth. We had this investment company (small one) that contracted our work. (2010?)

The owner hired his old (really old) man as the it guy for this...like 5 person company.

They had a VPN connected between the lan and the old mans lan at his house. He backed up the dell xeon poweredge onto like 4 PPro servers at his house. You could tell this old guy had lost his skills. sooo much unnecessary crap. I know the cloud concept was kind of new then but shit, you could achieve the same backup with an expensive raided NAS, not these desktop-based servers.

last time I worked for him he refused to pay because he said *I* knocked their internet offline. I was going between the company and his house trying to figure it out when I noticed a bunch of guys were working up in an elevator. I wondered if the internet was down because they were doing maintenance on it or if the elevator work cut it off at his floor. The guys at work were already up the shaft and no one was around for me to question them if there was an interruption, an the old guy was impatient and telling me to come drive him home

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

and the old AMI bios editor still worked on alot of those, enable hidden features etc.

You know what's funny, I've hacked up a lot of award bios's with cbrom and modbin, but I've never modded an AMI...

[brethin]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

and the old AMI bios editor still worked on alot of those, enable hidden features etc.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

Funny thing is, a lot of modern AMI BIOS's shortly before UEFI looked just like that. No, mem count doesn't 'tick', and it rolls through it pretty quick...and like any modern system, it can be skipped. The PR440FX OTOH, the mem count takes forever....and there's no skipping it....

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

That AMI BIOS looks at least much like the one on my 486 motherboard, LOL.

[kaboom]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

Gotta love classic AMIBIOS.

Does yours do the "tick, tick, tick, buuzzzzz" RAM count?

IIRC, the 386 and 486 AMIBIOSes did. There was a 3rd party utility, AMISETUP, that could toggle CMOS options if your particular CMOS setup program didn't expose them.

With something like that, one could go in and manually set the "audible RAM test."

Late AT/ATX crossover boards with AMIBIOS did not have the audible count.

Don't sweat the graphics issue; PCI vs AGP kills performance more than the difference between any period cards.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

So the second board arrived today, MSI MS-6107....yup, Dallas RTC dead as can be, which means it won't hold settings....only boot option is floppy, which it boots from just fine.....but I couldn't get it to boot from cdrom to run diagnostics, but I don't really forsee issues. To my surprise, it has a matching pair of 200MHz 512k L2 CPU's in it, I was expecting 256k chips, those were the most common.

It also had BIOS v1.0 on it, which is known to be problematic (research I did pre-buy) for installing OS's and other graphics card compatibility issues. MSI removed all traces of this board from their site ages ago it seems. I searched and found MS-6107 BIOS v1.1 in some obscure place, so I downloaded it and tested it on a spare chip first to make sure it was legit, and it was..... I have attached it to this thread, so in the unlikely event anyone ever needs it in the future, it won't be so hard to find...and its been verified good/legit.

Anyway:

The board!




Flicked a couple DIP switches, on the first try, instant 233MHz!


...BIOS v1.1
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1545086544

...and for such an obscure board, I did track down the manual....
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/attach...1&d=1545110441

More later...

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

^
I don't remember there being portable version of firefox. Waterfox OTOH did have, but they're 64 bit only....hell, if there were a 64 bit version of win2k, I'd still be running it mainstream!

I was thinking 6-series or 7-series. If they can come in old-PCI form.

There is no such animal. I'm really not too worried about it choking under load....it won't be used for anything mainstream...in the end its just a weird oddity & novelty....but with a little function.

[Heihachi_73]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

I'm surprised Firefox 12 still works on today's websites, most HTTPS-based sites give a security error on older browsers due to the ever-changing encryption standards and the browser war where a new or facelifted version is out every few months or so (almost like the car industry), while blocking the older versions just for the sake of blocking the older versions.

Speaking of Firefox, apparently you can actually use much later versions on Windows 2000 (and also XP gold/SP1) by moving a few system files across from XP SP3. I haven't currently got a 2000 machine to test whether Firefox will work with a simple copy+paste though, but AFAIK the installer also does an OS check which may have to be patched if it is the case (of course Firefox only offers an installer and no other download option, it's too hard for people to decompress zip files in the 21st century).