Halo (E3 2000 build): How it runs on a 1998 PC — Pentium II 400 MHz / 3Dfx Voodoo 2 / SB Live
109REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.
A.K.A. E32K build and blam.exe !!
Here is the considerably more fleshed out E3 2000 build of Halo (Bungie, 2001), featuring just as much nice environment mapping as the Speartest (called the “MacWorld 1999”) build but, sadly, not as much detail texturing. As with the 1999 build, the real-time shadow maps casting from characters look really good here, fairly similar to the quality found in the final product! Since I’m not using a fancier year 2000 GPU (GeForce2 GTS says “hi”) it’s possible not every bell and whistle is enabled here but it still looks pretty solid on a Voodoo 2 card! Runs surprisingly well too, all things considered, excluding the lack of culling in certain places.
How does this build of Halo perform on this high-end mid-1998 system with a Pentium II 400 CPU & Voodoo 2 card? It varies quite a bit and some locations clearly tax the computer a bit harder than others. It does strike me as a transitional build of Halo, where new code and assets have been added but not fully performance profiled yet. Large vistas with structures, rolling terrain and lots of on-screen characters will certainly slow down performance but it's the odd location with insufficient hidden-surface removal (HSR) that will really make your system crawl! The Warthog also kicks around a lot more dirt this time around, even from casual driving, which will translate to a lot of frame-rate penalties whenever you accelerate or decelerate. Still, outside of these scenarios it doesn't perform any worse than the 1999 build in most instances. You can tell that the underlying code is quite sound across the board!
Just like with the 1999 build, this version of Halo also features positional 3D audio (HRTF). You can hear the filtering of sounds as they emit from around and above/below the camera’s view. Sounds really good! On top of that, this E3 2000 build also makes use of EAX features like reverb (only used for the outdoor echo, as far as I know) and occlusion (sounds get subdued when occluded/blocked by level geometry between the sound source and camera view). These features are automatically activated when a Sound Blaster Live card is installed in the PC and EAX is enabled in Windows.
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Operating system used: Microsoft Windows 98 (First Edition/FE).
Drivers used for Voodoo2 card: Glide 3.03.00b DirectX 7.0 beta drivers.
Drivers used for Sound Blaster Live: VXD 4.06.704 (Liveware 3.0, September 1999) drivers.
Renderer used: Glide.
Texture quality settings being used: High Res 16 Bit.
Resolution settings: 640x480 pixels.
This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Dell Dimension XPS R400 case and motherboard (manufactured on April 30th 1998 according to case label)
Intel 440BX motherboard (all board components are manufactured before April 30th 1998)
Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL2S7, manufactured week 14 1998)
Matrox Millennium II AGP (8MB) video card (manufactured somewhere in Q1 1998, don’t exactly remember)
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (CT6670) (12MB) 3D accelerator card (old variant with dark-colored circuit board, maybe manufactured around March or April 1998, don't remember)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! (CT4620) sound card (manufactured around August 1998, don't remember exactly)
Turtle Beach Montego (Aureal Vortex) (A3D) sound card (manufactured around March or April 1998, don't remember, need to check again dammit!)
192MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM (all DIMMs manufactured around 1998, some earlier and some later in the year probably)
The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i7-2600K using 8 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM and an nVidia GTX 580 video card installed (basically, using my 2011 “vintage” PC). A VGA cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 3200x2400 was done using VirtualDub2.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 — Start-up
0:28 — Particle effects
0:50 — Populated landscape
1:22 — Marines
2:50 — Warthog drive
3:59 — Weapon firing test 1
5:05 — Weapon firing test 2
6:27 — Explosion test
7:04 — Wildlife exploration
7:57 — Demanding tower view!
8:37 — Tower base
9:19 — Entering tower base
9:49 — Cool hologram device!
10:08 — Exiting tower base
10:32 — Ghost drive
11:34 — LOL
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