Asus P5sd2-vm Sound Card Driver
Lisandra Okumoto
I am trying to build a Win98 SE gaming PC that can run up to Hitman Contracts and NFS Most Wanted (2005). Being able to run these games, plus seamless compatibility with Win98 SE, is my goal and it's enough to run these games at 800x600 resolution, as long as it's at comfortable FPS.
What motherboard(s) should I look for to achieve my goal? (running Hitman Contracts and NFSMW 2005 plus native compatibility with Win98SE)
I am really at my wit's end and could use your help, since there are so many members here with a lot of experience in this stuff
But if you do insist, a PCIe Radeon X800 series card paired with an LGA775 motherboard and a Core2 Duo should be able to do what you want. There are a lot of hoops that you'll have to jump through to get such a system running though.
But if you do insist, you can use a PCIe Radeon X800 series card and pair it with an LGA775 motherboard and a Core2 Duo CPU. There are a lot of hoops that you'll have to jump through to get that running, but the final system should be able to do what you want.
Thanks for the response! A couple of questions: what hoops are you referring to? Is there any thread or link I can refer to to get an idea about the pitfalls you mention? Secondly, do you have any recommendations for LGA775 motherboards?
For starters, there are no official Win98 drivers for later Intel chipsets like P35 and such. You can find some unofficial ones to clean up the unknown entries in Device Manager, but that's about it. Also, these systems typically have more than 1GB of RAM, which will prevent Win98 from booting without using third-party patches. Installing the GPU drivers is a bit convoluted as well, as Phil shows in his video.
What you are looking for is the most high-end platform you can find with good Win98 support i.e. with AGP not PCIe. That could be Intel (P4 late So478 or early So775) or AMD (any So754/939/AM2 without PCIe). Once you find a potential candidate, look up the chipset on it and google its name + Windows 98. You should quickly see if it's easy, problematic or a no-go.
I would stick with intel 865G chipset with native 478 socket . Combined with 3 Ghz pentium 4 prescott/northwood does give reasonable performance and perfect compatability . Good boards asus p4800 vm , asrock p4i65g . On other hand socket 754 is another good choice . As for graphic card Geforce fx5900/ ati 9800 would fit perfect for this build . Anyway anything depends on what budget you have /willing to spend
You have conflicting expectations. Either target Windows 98 or 2005 games, not both. Windows 98 is good enough up to 2002. Socket 754 is just a bit faster and BIOSes tend to have problems with AGP in Windows 98. You should build a double core or quad core rig with PCIe 2.0, targeting late Windows XP era. For Windows 98 era, have a 2nd rig with any Athlon XP.
As others have said, this is going to be a problem. I happen to have a boxed copy of NFS Most Wanted so I went and checked the system requirements, and here is what it says:
- OS - Windows XP or 2000 [1]
- CPU - 1.4GHz or more
- RAM - 256MB or more
- GPU - DirectX 9.0c compatible (minimum of 32 megs of memory and ATI 7500/NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX/GTS)
Keep in mind an important rule of vintage computing: Win98SE hardware costs more than Windows XP hardware. You could go and pick up an ivy bridge, put something like a 7970 or 780 Ti in it, and have an absolutely insane XP rig (that happily dual boots 10 or unsupported 11) that runs modern SATA drives, PSUs, coolers, etc. for... probably way less money than an LGA775 AGP system with a GF4 Ti4600. (Those Asrock boards that run i865 chipsets with 45nm C2D/Q support may not be as highly desirable as Voodoo cards, but they're certainly among the most sought after items in the retro community) Or you could go PCI-E C2D/C2Q, ideally the 45nm ones, for absolutely dirt cheap.
I can see why this would seem like a confusing decision. The time period you've chosen represented a great deal of technology change. Graphics devices changed from AGP to PCIe, integrated audio changed from AC97 to HD Audio, Intel moved from Socket 478 to LGA 775, AMD and later Intel introduced 64-bit instruction sets, chipsets began to phase-out USB 1.1 circuits, manufactures phased-out smaller memory capacities, and manufactures dropped Win 98 support. Motherboards at the time supported a hodge podge of these changing standards.
You've chosen a pretty late preformance metric in a 2005 video game, but you didn't mention any other metrics. Do you want or need advanced audio processing (like EAX)? Do you want or need networking support, and, if so, how fast? Do you plan to multi-boot with other OSs? Do you want upgradablity (i.e. options to make improvements in the future)? What is your budget? Are you able and/or willing to make board repairs given aging components.
The answers to these questions might drive you in a particular direction. I wouldn't be afraid of unsupported hardware if you don't mind patches or a bit of instability. If you prefer period-correct components, though, you may have to consider some compromises given the unique time period of the mid-00s.
Thanks so much for the input! So I don't really need advanced audio - basic will do. No networking support needed. Not necessary to multi-boot also. And if by upgrades you mean capability to upgrade the OS - then I don't want that either. I see two options - one is Asrock 775i65G with core 2 duo E6700 processor (2.66 GHz), while the other is Asrock 775i65GV with P4 631 3GHz. I know definitely the first one will have better performance, but will the performance difference be substantial? The latter doesn't seem to have AGP or PCIe, so I wonder if a great graphics card can be put in it. If the performance difference is great, then I guess I'll consider buying the first option.
And I would add one additional thing: you probably don't actually want exactly period correct unless you're trying to play games with CPU speed restrictions or you are really nostalgic for the exact real-world experience of a game on release day.
Plenty of games shipped in this era that would not run at high framerates, high detail settings, and high resolutions on the highest-end hardware available at the time they were released, but run their best on the hardware from maybe 1-3 years later. Really, that's true of all software, not just games, back then (yes, there was an era when you had to buy an expensive new computer to run MS Office... as hard to believe for anyone who has seen the hardware requirements for Office in the past 15 years) - Moore's law and hardware was improving so fast that something that strained high-end hardware in 1997 would be expected to run great on 2000's el-cheapo hardware.
Also worth noting for those who weren't around back in the day - with the move from CRT to LCD, people's expectations for what resolutions games would be played at changed dramatically. The past 10-15 years, you've seen GPU benchmarks at 1920x1080, 2560x1440 (which I will absolutely refuse to call "1440p"), even 4K. But in 1998-2000, I think many people would have expected that some games would require them to go down to as low as 640x480 or 800x600. That was just life back then - you ran your nice CRT at 1280x1024 for productivity applications and then went down to lower resolutions for games as appropriate. But if you show up with even a 1280x1024 LCD, plug it into a period-correct 98SE system from 2000, and expect to play 2000-era 3D games at 1280x1024, I think you're bound to be disappointed.
Interestingly, even games that didn't use 3D graphics, like Age of Empires II, had weird resolution restrictions... Civilization III I think was hard-coded to 1024x768 or something unless you edit an .ini file. It's so weird because those restrictions were clearly not existential in the game engine given a simple config tweak gets rid of them... yet they had all those restrictions.
b37509886e