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Is this a good graphics card for a retro win95/DOS build?

hunterjwizzard said:
But the Intel AL440LX is supposed to be famously the first-ever motherboard with an AGP slot !!
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Go buy a cookie for that knowledge. You are dealing with 1997+ technology, far newer than Windows 95 itself.
Windows 98 at least had a chance to have heard of this newfangled technology.
 
Well OP wants the Windows 95 experience. A lot of that was buggy stuff that barely worked. 🤓
 
Plasma said:
A lot of that was buggy stuff that barely worked.
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Yes, that :p lol. I mean, the machine going to have one of those IDE-to-CF adapters, so really the operating system is "whatever image I feel like loading today". I really like being able to save and load images or just having a stack of CF cards so I can re-configure the system at will.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
I mean... Windows 98 is Windows 95 but slightly less broken, where's the list of games that actually, for reals, only run on Windows 95 and not later versions?
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I have only ever seen one game work on 3.x and 95 and nothing newer and that was GORD@K which was released in 1997 and was essentially a QuickTime game with no need for 3D acceleration but under 98 and later would throw Macromedia Director script errors and Illegal Operation crashes regardless of using the 16 or 32-bit binaries they shipped it with.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
where's the list of games that actually, for reals, only run on Windows 95 and not later versions?
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I don't actually know that these games don't run on windows 98. I'm not even suggesting that they don't. I just saw that "Windows(R) 95 only" printed on the box and thought to myself "You know what sounds like fun? Windows 95."
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I don't actually know that these games don't run on windows 98. I'm not even suggesting that they don't.
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Trust me, they say that because Windows 98 wasn't out yet and they didn't want people yelling at their customer support people that they weren't told in sufficiently absolute terms that Windows 3.1 or DOS wasn't going to cut it.

hunterjwizzard said:
I just saw that "Windows(R) 95 only" printed on the box and thought to myself "You know what sounds like fun? Windows 95."
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But that's the thing... it just isn't. ;)

I mean, I guess the proper way to put it is it usually sucks to try to install *any* sufficiently complicated OS on a computer that has features that didn't exist or is just plain newer than the OS revision you're trying to use. Yes, Windows has installable drivers and a hardware abstraction layer, but when it comes to "big" features or completely new subsystems you're setting yourself up for some pain trying to patch everything together, and with the consumer versions of Windows Microsoft clearly leaned towards the expectation that you should be getting your copy of '95 from the OEM who built your computer, using the latest OEM release and *not* from a two year old retail copy that MS *arted out for people to try on their old 486.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Trust me, they say that because Windows 98 wasn't out yet and they didn't want people yelling at their customer support people that they weren't told in sufficiently absolute terms that Windows 3.1 or DOS wasn't going to cut it.
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Yes I assume that's the case.

Eudimorphodon said:
But that's the thing... it just isn't. ;)

I mean, I guess the proper way to put it is it usually sucks to try to install *any* sufficiently complicated OS on a computer that has features that didn't exist or is just plain newer than the OS revision you're trying to use. Yes, Windows has installable drivers and a hardware abstraction layer, but when it comes to "big" features or completely new subsystems you're setting yourself up for some pain trying to patch everything together, and with the consumer versions of Windows Microsoft clearly leaned towards the expectation that you should be getting your copy of '95 from the OEM who built your computer, using the latest OEM release and *not* from a two year old retail copy that MS *arted out for people to try on their old 486.
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The great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on mount Everast, was asked "Why do you want to climb it?" he said "Because it is there."

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Also I couldn't find any pine cones.
 
Silly thought: given that some cards work with some games, and others work with others, is it possible to build a PC with multiple video cards. You could buy two or three lesser cards nowadays for the cost of one Voodoo3 or other prime card. Not sure how you'd get the games to use one monitor or the other, short of disabling the adapter you're not using, but still, it's a thought.
 
NHVintage said:
Silly thought: given that some cards work with some games, and others work with others, is it possible to build a PC with multiple video cards. You could buy two or three lesser cards nowadays for the cost of one Voodoo3 or other prime card. Not sure how you'd get the games to use one monitor or the other, short of disabling the adapter you're not using, but still, it's a thought.
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Legends speak of a motherboard with dual AGP slots. I've seen pictures. The other day I think I even found a model number. But I've never been able to locate one of these legendary boards. The only reason I'm convinced I didn't dream it is because I've read other people's accounts of them.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Legends speak of a motherboard with dual AGP slots. I've seen pictures. The other day I think I even found a model number. But I've never been able to locate one of these legendary boards. The only reason I'm convinced I didn't dream it is because I've read other people's accounts of them.
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PCI was on the way so I don't think a dual slot AHP had much of a shot. I built a lot of PC's around that time and never saw one in the wild in my area. Perhaps it was some last ditch effort by our 'eastern' suppliers
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Legends speak of a motherboard with dual AGP slots. I've seen pictures. The other day I think I even found a model number. But I've never been able to locate one of these legendary boards. The only reason I'm convinced I didn't dream it is because I've read other people's accounts of them.
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Was it this picture? Because despite having two AGP slots it didn't actually support two AGP boards simultaneously; this oddity apparently had one AGP slot connected to the CPU on the motherboard, and the *other* AGP slot was wired to the CPU upgrade slot next to it. (IE, if you upgraded your CPU you had to move the video card from the onboard slot to the upgrade slot.)

Anyway, AGP didn't have arbitration to support more than one card. Or at least AGP 1.x and 2.x don't; I think it might have been theoretically possible with AGP 3.0 but nobody ever actually made one.

Re: multiple video cards, you can stuff multiple video cards into an AGP computer and Windows 9x understands that fine, but only one can be AGP, the rest will need to be PCI. It's my recollection that some BIOSes had an option in them to chose whether the AGP or a PCI card will be the "primary", so you could in theory switch which one of those two DOS uses by going into the BIOS and choosing that way. (Basically only the card that gets selected as primary gets the DOS legacy memory/IO mapping plumbed in, but all the cards can be used by 32 bit OSes via slot-specific addressing.) But I don't remember seeing any BIOSes that would let you choose which of *multiple* PCI cards would be the primary, I suspect it would just pick whichever one was on the lowest enumerated bridge/slot.

FWIW, there's no advantage to putting a Voodoo3 in an AGP slot, other than getting somewhat faster memory access; Voodoo cards can *only* use onboard memory for textures, they can't leverage AGP DMA. So *if* I were in the market to put together a late 90's gaming rig that was intended to support multiple video cards to achieve "the best of everything" I'd put a GeForce or something in the AGP slot and seek out a PCI Voodoo, not an AGP one.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Was it this picture? Because despite having two AGP slots it didn't actually support two AGP boards simultaneously; this oddity apparently had one AGP slot connected to the CPU on the motherboard, and the *other* AGP slot was wired to the CPU upgrade slot next to it. (IE, if you upgraded your CPU you had to move the video card from the onboard slot to the upgrade slot.)
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That's probably it. Its neat to finally come face to face with a legend.
 
The advantage of using the AGP slot is that you can use a different graphics card in the PCI slot and not having to share bandwidth (like a Matrox PowerVR PCX2 card).
 
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