Ultimate 1998 Gaming PC Build | 3DFX Voodoo 2 12mb SLI, Pentium 3, Diamond Stealth, SoundBlaster AWE
678Since my Ultimate 1998 Gaming PC build video a couple of years ago I’ve learned a few things both from friendly, helpful YouTube comments and from continuing my own research into building 90s gaming PCs. I build my first gaming PC in 1998 but managed to avoid any troubles, probably because I couldn’t afford any really good components. I’m rebuilding my “Ultimate” 1998 Gaming PC, with hardware changes and updates to make the build more accurate; a humdinger of a gaming PC that 14-year-old me would have been over the moon to muck about with in 1998. If you’re into old PCs then press that like button.
Sticking with the same Chyang Fun case, the internal parts which have stayed the same are the Soyo 6BA+4 Motherboard. This is a 440BX chipset board with four DIMM slots and an ISA port, which will come is useful later. I bought a Slot 1 Pentium 2 from eBay but after checking the serial number on the top, it turns out that it’s a 700mhz Pentium 3. This is a 1999 CPU but I bought it in good faith expecting a 1998 Pentium 2 for my retro PC.
I’m filling all four DIMM slots with 512mb’s worth of PC100 RAM. No point going any higher than 512mb as Windows 98 just starts playing up otherwise. I’ve got the usual CD-ROM, floppy and hard drives going in. Nothing special. I was getting CMOS errors on bootup, so it struck me as good practise to replace the CMOS battery on the motherboard.
The inception of this Ultimate 1998 gaming PC was for it to straddle Windows 98 and DOS. Plenty of 90s PC games only ran in DOS and even with Windows 98’s wicked DOS support there’s a few games which require special attention to run properly.
The PCI SoundBlaster Live! Sound card failed to live up to expectations, so that’s been chucked out of the 1998 gaming PC and replaced with a SoundBlaster AWE64 ISA card. Old DOS games often play up by not accessing PCI sound cards. Creative did invent the “SB-Link” which helped the PCI bus look for the I/O headers as if they were ISA. But frankly I don’t understand enough about that technology, so buying an ISA sound card was the easy option. The Gold version of the AWE64 nearly came out in 1998, but that card is stacked with Hipster Tax. I managed to pick up this AWE64 for a tenner just after building the original Ultimate 1998 gaming PC, so I reckon you can forgive the minor timeline discrepancy. Once installed both in DOS and with the Windows drivers, the AWE64 is terrific for both DOS and Windows 98 PC gaming.
I had completely forgotten how to install DOS drivers, which I was gutted about. It’s really rather important. But I’ve brushed up on that and I’m actually pretty chuffed with how the whole PC is working now.
I’ve pulled that old OEM Riva TNT2 graphics card out of the machine. It was giving me false positives on my PC benchmarks as the graphics card is already a smidge better than the combined Voodoo 2s. I’ve replaced the TNT2 with a Diamond Stealth II which is a very interesting card. I could have gone with the Matrox Millennium II, the Diamond Viper 330 or a couple of other 2D cards which could have been considered “ultimate” for a gaming PC in 1998. I chose the Diamond Stealth II because a) Diamond were brilliant and b) the card is based on the elusive Intel i740 chipset which made gaming headlines in the late 90s for being the first 3D chipset designed specifically for AGP. The Diamond Stealth II supports OpenGL but only has 8 MB SDRAM so will be used for 2D gaming. I will be using the incredible 12MB Voodoo 2 3D accelerators in SLI for 3D gaming using the Glide API. In the case of any games not supporting Glide I can fall back onto the Stealth II if needed.
With the new graphics setup I’m re-running those 1998 PC benchmarks and I’ll be running some gaming benchmarks too. Stay tuned for the all-new benchmark video and watch me stress testing the machine to its absolute limit by playing old PC games it was never intended to run.
Cheers for watching. If you’re into old PCs then please like the video. Subscribe to The Game Show for more retro PC gaming content in future.
www.twitter.com/thegameshowuk
www.instagram.com/thegameshowuk
www.facebook.com/thegameshowuk
www.thegameshow.co.uk
------------------------------------------------------------
"Come Back Down" by Midwest Collective is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
https://midwestcollective.bandcamp.com/album/odyssey