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[SGP]

Originally Posted by Scatty

Just a note - wouldn't a S3 Virge 3D graphics card be far too modern and overpowered for pure Dos games? Unless there's specifical drivers already set to loading on bootup for it, which provide support for Vesa 1.2 / 2.0 specifications, or the BIOS has the options to enable Vesa support, I doubt programs for Dos like UniVBE 5.1 (which enable Vesa software support) would recognize the card. Most, if not all, Ms-Dos games which run in resolutions of 640x480x256 colors and higher though, require either a hardware supported compatible card, or Vesa support active for it - and this card might be too modern to be hardware supported for Dos games. Also some games might have problems with the AGP 2x...

Technically, the Celeron 333MHz on that rig, is faaar too modern for dos games. - I mean, it's got 128K of on-die L2 cache baby!

But in using a Socket 370 mainboard we enable a lot of advanced features like very thorough cpu throttling, so you can play games like Fantasy World Dizzy, even on a Pentium 3 while you can't even play it on a Pentium 1, 100MHz because that's too fast and it gives an overflow error. A lot of games work at normal speed, or have speed settings. But for the picky ones which don't run the right speed and have no speed options - there's the throttle software.

I always thoroughly test them and I've never ever encountered such problems to be honest. Bearing in mind my own dos-box is one of the P3-based WinXP / DOS boxes which are much more powerful, but they work brilliantly with DOS, and I've played a *lot* of DOS games on that one . A lot of people build similar dos rigs / dual boot rigs to this at Vogons.org.

The Pentium 3 Dos Boxes also have GeForce 2 MX's (AGP 4x) graphics cards - an insanely powerful card with respect to the DOS era - but again, work absolutely fine. The reason we use a GF2 MX is, when you're dual booting both DOS and WinXP you really need a card that can handle both, not just one.

If you watch the video of me playing games on the auction site, that's with my own dos gaming computer (a Pentium 3 with a GF2 MX which dual boots dos, and xp), and as you can see, it works pretty well - I also have a video of me surfing the internet in DOS on the Pentium 3 based Dos box I'm selling, and it's Geforce card seems to do Vesa modes just fine with Arachne web browser @ 1024x768 in high colour.

The next "dos-only" one I build however, does have a somewhat weaker 8MB SiS 6326 graphics card, which was AGP 1x. (although still an 8MB card, the performance is drastically less than the S3 card - but by far still good enough to play our favourite DOS games on.