Project Voodoo

[KiiYzOo]

I have been wanting to make a 'retro' gaming PC for a while now after starting to play star wars dark forces and watching a lot of videos about older hardware on youtube. I decided after looking at a lot of the older components that I would like to make a PC from the late 90's. Because I was so interested in the slot 1 CPUs I decided that I wanted to get a P3 based PC and since I was looking at around that sort of time I had to get a bouple 3DFX Voodoo 2 cards and put them in SLI.

After looking at various places over the past few weeks I have bought quite a few different components and probably spent more money than I should've on this project already!

So on with the hardware:

Overview of the case with some of the components that I got, along with my spare bequiet 630w psu which is overkill for this (I'm probably going to buy a different PSU for this build):

P3 PC by Kron_95, on Flickr

Closer shot of the motherboard:

ASUS P3V4X by Kron_95, on Flickr

The P3 667mhz that I currently have for this build:

P3 667 by Kron_95, on Flickr

P3 667 by Kron_95, on Flickr

When I got this PC I was surprised to find this inside:

Geforce 256 DDR by Kron_95, on Flickr

SCSI card:

SCSI Card by Kron_95, on Flickr

Network card:

NIC by Kron_95, on Flickr

My RAM, all 384MB of it!!:

RAM by Kron_95, on Flickr

My lovely looking Audigy2 ZS soundcard:

Audigy2 ZS by Kron_95, on Flickr

I bought a Sata raid card which works with W98SE, but I am unsure as to whether I will actually use it or not:

Sata Raid card by Kron_95, on Flickr

And lastly my favourite part of this build currently, my 3DFX Voodoo 2:

Voodoo 2 by Kron_95, on Flickr

I have bought a second Voodoo 2, but it hasn't arrived yet sadly

I do have some other parts that I got when I bought a spares or repairs PC (mainly because of the case that it was housed in) which I will show in my next update, although I am currently unsure if I want to use the case for this build or use it for my secondary PC and get a case with a window to show off the internals of this build, as I think it is a shame to keep them hidden.

I have managed to get the build to boot so far but since I have no install CD for W98, I am unable to get past the BIOS really (although there is an install of CentOS on the 80GB drive that I salvaged from the spares PC which I can't get into)

The main idea for this project is to get it up and running with games like Dark forces and Thief etc and also to possibly add a few more modern touches to the build like possibly a sata drive with the raid card and maybe even individually braided cables

 

[KiiYzOo]

Windows 98 is proving much more difficult to install than i thought it would, i thought that i would just be able to format the drive that was in my spares pc and install onto that, but it didn't seem to like that at all

On the bright side, i know all of the parts work since i managed to get the system running under both lubuntu and XP. Everything seems to be registering although i am getting some weird artefacts which may just be because i didn't install drivers for the geforce 256, but i want to sort w98 before i check

I managed to finally get the 80gb drive sorted to let me start w98 setup after going through a lot of formatting etc in both puppy Linux and DOS, but when it was going through the disk checks it got a large amount of bad sectors and bombed out of the installation, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to use this drive or not

I may end up just getting an SD to ide convertor and use an SD card instead of an HDD, it's not exactly from the period i want but if it's the only way i can get it to work then it's better than nothing, i am also considering getting a floppy emulator to have just incase i get bad floppys etc