3D Accelerating a mini Industrial Embedded PC
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- čas přidán 18. 10. 2022
- I finally build a retro gaming PC that has 3D Acceleration, in the form of a 3DFX Voodoo card.
Experimenting on a similar 386 board - • DOS Games On A Tiny In...
Designing the PC104 soundcard - • Mini DOS Gaming PC Par... - Věda a technologie
Embedded systems always held a strange fascination for me. Can't even explain why. Love em.
Same
and they love us for keeping them alive :D
That is by far one of the most motivating retro gaming setups I have witnessed yet. Thank you!
I was thinking the same...
Oh man, I SERIOUSLY love these videos! I have TWO industrial PCs (both based on the AMD geode) and I just love the retro feeling you get out of these. Even better when you customize them, as you greatly show on your videos. Awesome content as usual!!! Greetings from Argentina!
Always a joy when a new video of you pops up! Thank you!
the term "VGA spitroast adapter" is one of the most cursed things i have ever heard
Could be worse, The other name I've heard for those things is "gender bender"!
@@mrrandomperson3106 nah that's actually based and cool :) 🏳️⚧️
I was eating phở at the time and now I literally have to clean my keyboard…
Love watching these types of videos!
thank you very much for a great review for these industrial boards! i was completely unaware about their existance!
Someone should make an isa and pci based fpga sound card where you can run a simple dos program to switch between various sound cards. Maybe a dual implementation for a pair of sound cards for those that want.
I've been thinking about a project like that to really learn FPGA. (I've done a little tinkering, but I need a goal to really get deep into it.)
For me, I would be happy with SB Pro and switchable dual-OPL2 / OPL3, and stereo Covox Speech Thing / DSS (kinda just for fun.) I'm not sure what else you really need in DOS. Althought, pie in the sky and all that, I would love to add GUS and/or EMU8K and/or MT-32. GUS would probably be easiest because it lacks the DSP algorithms the others have.
Will I ever get to this? Probably not. But it's fun to think about.
Very knowledgeable video and sick style man! I like this type of content, keep it up!
Awesome content, as usual!
I love all the clever use of adapters and wires on this. Definitely takes this thing outside its intended realm. I love it.
Well that's certainly a neat-lookin' little brick of boards you've put together! Pentium MMX 200 plus a Voodoo 2 would make a sweet little portable rig IMO!
There’s something magical about the the original voodoo
I love how you worked that 200Mhz thing out with the jumpers. Seems so logical for you... and the resister.. Wish I could do that.
Did you check that bios enabled L1 cache on the unsupported CPU which is MMX one? Maybe you need to enable it via dos control program.
coool. always happy to see more of your adventures. also seen you around on vogons recently in the fast doom thread; would be awesome to see that new feature they are adding where you can add a second hercules monitor just for the automapping while playing the game in VGA
Love the Skye Paw Patrol engineering pad 😋 great video again tho, highly entertaining small form factor board content!
I had a voodoo card, literally a piece of history. Wish I had it still
you have an awesome channel Bro!
You adapt well to each situation.. :)
Welp. You get my subscription.
Odd PC hardware and They Live references were all I needed.
thank you for sharing this with us!!!
Great video... much appreciated.
Nice to see the pull-up trick! Never knew about that.
Lovely post with helpful information. This tutorial ha really helped me a lot. I do like and enjoyed this cool video.
Great video! Strictly speaking my last few PCs have been in the embedded category, if laptops are to be counted. I have not used a desktop/tower PC for personal use since 2007. I'll be looking forward to seeing more of your experiments.
Best episode ever
That looks a perfect size to make a 3d printed "PC Mini" desktop case and add a screen like odd and obselete made!
you have the best riser and adaptor options for making It work, cool rig
Excellent vid, SFF os the 90s
Super Cool !
'spit-roast' adaptor earned you a sub. lol
Great video. Really entertaining. I think if it had 50 or 60 more jump cuts it would have been perfect! Thanks!
I remember drooling over an Avantech SBC when I was in college in the mid 90's, for use in a music rig for a band.. and my contact stopped talking to me when they learned I wanted only one of them.
The best 3dfx 1 , was some 6mb model o can't remember which one , but it blew my 4mb version away. I think it was a Canopus 6mb 3dfx 1
loved it. subed
I'd try it with a tnt2. Great 2d and 3d for the era
TNT2 was the "big one" - first to put the voodoos in the corner. Probably not going to get the best out of that card until you're in the 300Mhz to 400Mhz zone
@@JohnnyWednesday that is true but at least uou know the bottle neck will be the CPU for both 2d and 3d.
First watch of this channel. Nice. Strong BigClive vibe.
GTA 1 was really nice with 3Dfx. Dos only if I remember well.
The reason that the 300MMX was detected only at 166Mhz is due to the Pull up/Pull down resistor changes for the MMX line. Necroware did a piece on that, required adding a resistor to the BF0/BF1 pins ont eh CPU
Interesting. I was able to get a PCM-5864L and so far, had only been messing around with Debian 3.0 on it, but the wired LAN connector it came with was broken, so I wasn't able to get it online, but was able to use APT to install some packages that were included on the install CD set. I do plan to mess around with Windows 95 and NT 4 on it eventually.
I remember going to lan parties in the late 90s playing Rainbow 6 all night, chainsmoking and drinking 2 litres of coke. Loved my 3dfx card
3dfx made enermous difference on the p100 i had when i got mine with any early 3dfx enabled titles/demos like quake, turok and such. It made them run them better than a p166 plus in software
Note that early 3D APIs were very very CPU bound, as the CPU had to instruct copies to GPU memory or the GPU had to be instructed to read main memory and DMA shenanigans for every frame, often re-sending data to the GPU repeatedly.
Aww yeah this is the stuff right here
12:10 this part was genius, lost my mind man!
I like how there's a huge space on the board for the clock battery but they put it dead close to that voltage regulator 👍
(Edit) oops I just noticed you had to change that at some point - maybe the proximity to the voltage regulator didn't do the old one any favours. I've had the clock battery in a thin client die at 4 to 5 years old from excess heat.
The voltage regulator gets SUPER hot too :/
@@TheRasteri in my case it was something near the DC jack that had gone dead short, it cooked the battery and got hot enough to add 20°c to the idle CPU temp! The whole board is just under 10x10cm so all pretty close together.
I took the part off the board and it works fine without it, might have just been a diode for reverse polarity protection or something like that.
@@TheRasteri Was that after the upgrade tho? The 200MMX will be pulling a lot more than the 90 especially at 3.3v
@@ljrretropcs naw it always ran really hot, even on 90MHz
@@TheRasteri hi sir, I've just discovered the existence of those industrial motherboards and I'm literally crying: I can't believe this technology (that i love) is still manufactured!!!
That riser card is ideal height. Small overal package, yes. But if you add power supply and any kind of I/O drives, then it'll approach micro-ATX build scale, unless parid up with a pico PSU and maybe a slim CD reader... I used to love making miniature PC's back in the day. Cramming as much into a small space as possible, to the point where I had parts burn if the fans weren't roaring like a blowdryer.
I've seen cool industrial PC's that fit into a car stereo rack. Pentium 3's, but I don't remember what models they were, and power would have to be external 12V, like in a vehicle. I regret not buying one of those when I had the chance.
Pentium mobile 600 most likely
MiniATX formfactor ( *not* MiniITX or MicroATX), I have one with a Socket 478 Pentium 4... Which would not have been my first choice to shove into a DIN slot due to heat, and doesn't support Socket 479 Pentium M even with adapter. Got it cheap though, was planning to put it into a random thing that wasn't made for computers like I had seen people do to MiniITX boards, but never completed it. Takes ATX power, and seems to have been intended for an external DC-DC converter board whose standard name I forgot (still around in mini systems too powerful for picoPSUs).
@@tom611 Interesting. I ended up just cramming a Micro ATX build into my old Chrysler. What was cool, is that I hooked up video glasses to it. That was early 2000's, and I don't think consumer LCD's were common. Still CRT days. And I could drive to the middle of nowhere, put glasses on, and watch a movie in some revolutionary new compression format like DivX (lol). I was running a 1GHz P3 with 256MB of RAM, which is a lot for an early 90's Chrysler. That setup had no real practical use. All I did was watch movies on it. Could get maybe 6 hours of runtime off the inverter before draining my car battery dangerously low.
I have the video of the machine on my channel under "Retro PC Revival Attempt". That pack used to sit in my car, before becoming a table item.
I remember competitors thought this card were fake and too high end for its time before it launched. I still own Voodoo 1 and 2 cards.
SO KAWAII! :D
the thing that holds quake back is floating point performance. other 3d games around that time used fixed point math (descent for example). since the voodoo card only does polygon fill, its going to be held back. if you could find the 3dfx accelerated dos version of descent, you might get pretty good performance.
I had a 486 DX100 and I thought I got more frames than this - but I prefer the software renderer. - I wonder how a Pentium-3 - 800mhz would do - would that get us to 60fps?
@@brentgreeff1115 even software renderer makes heavy use of the fpu. i remember something along the lines of "absolutyely must have math coprocessor" in the system requirements. no x87, no bueno. pretty sure the 486dx had one and all the pentiums and later.
ran pretty good on my 120mhz pentium. i think i had one of those sec pentium 2s but by that time i was already playing q3a on a voodoo 3.
Nice little DOS board
Wasn't surprised about Unreal, the Voodoo1 was pretty outdated by the time Unreal came out. If you would have popped a Vooodoo 2 in there (or you could have just popped in a Voodoo 3 and not needed the passthrough!) you should have got easily playable FPS at 200 MHz.
No comments on the "spit roast adapter"?! ROFL, best part of the video!
I think these little SBC boards are cool and cute, but is it really worth it? I think most people don't even want to use a small cabinet for themselves, and in the end they are expensive and laborious to make. I think that a socket 7 (or super 7) baby AT board, besides being cheaper, can be mounted in a custom case that will end up being the same size as you would get with an SBC. The space problem on retro machines boils down to a full-sized at/atx font, and their cards (especially sound cards) that are large.
But for SBC or Baby AT/ATX you can use a small font like the ones found in dell computers, or external fonts, xbox 360 fonts, adapters that convert notebook font to atx... And pci, isa cards, there are several solutions, from simple risers, to customized boards that you can print on the pcbway.
I don't mean to disparage SBC, I'm just arguing some facts from a financial standpoint for someone who just wants a small retro computer.
My dream right there
Dudes rock
This is the perfect canidate for the original GeForce 256 if you can find one super cool project!
The Cacheis callled a COAST Module (Cache On a Stick), very popular in 96. That board was designed to be used in fruit machines and quiz games,, Dransfields in Leeds UK was a major purchaser of the units. Had to fix plenty back in the dy
I gamed hard in this era, the P90 should easily reach 50fps in doom, Quake should be about 16 to 25 fps - the 200Mhz processor should be able to hit anywhere between 40 and 50fps in Quake on a 200Mhz Intel at 320x240 - I suspect that the onboard graphics card's framebuffer is very slow - try a good 2D capable graphics card perhaps? (that onboard one might be ISA and abysmal internally!) in terms of the voodoo with a 200Mhz mmx your sweet spot is deffo the Voodoo 2 - that's a 50 to 60fps experience in quake and games that use MMX for mixing colours like sub culture should run really nice too on that Intel chip.
Yeah the 2d chip is really bad. I bet the RAM/cache/chipset are major bottlenecks too
@@TheRasteri - yeah man - even so? a 200MHz MMX on that little board is lovely :D off the top off my head Sub-Culture had binaries for x86, MMX and 3DNow respectively - 3DFX and others too if memory serves. It was a a great game for benchmarking back in the day! that and the second reality demo lol
@@TheRasteri - But deffo don't neglect MMX builds of games in that era - I was a 3DNow fanboy but at those clocks? the vector instructions added a huge boost to performance when implemented in an engine - MDK had a MMX binary and it was night and day on the same system!
Oh! check the IDE controller too - if it's DMA capable but in PIO mode? old VIA chipsets were notorious for tanking windows performance when in PIO and I remember having to enable DMA manually in device manager on many a machine back then - might be worth checking :) hope you're well!
@@TheRasteri - ooh! get a voodoo banshee - great 3DFX compatibility after the fact and lighting fast 2D too :D
Here we go again 😀
9:55 As someone used to modern systems, I did a double take at "Only 0.5 volts"
The TI-83+!
I was using a laptop in latter 90s for a while with a chips and technologies for graphics. It was pretty decent when it came to vesa 2.0 modes supported, 15 bit modes and all
Those 16MB 72-pin EDO-modules were super expensive back then.
Sure were.
I’d love to see a hat for MiSTer that connects to PC104 and PCI on these embedded systems. That way the MiSTer doesn’t have to use FPGA resources on the base PC hardware and can be used instead to replicate something like 3Dfx Voodoo, Sound Blaster, or Roland MT-32.
Excellent work!!!!! Are you going to make a case for it? How about a wooden case? Hope to see more!!! :D
5:04 Reaper Evaluation License
My kind of guy 😎
- TheRasteri: It's time to test the soundcard and chew bubblegum.
- Me: Visibility confused.
- Duke: ☢️ Radioactive symbol appers.
- Me: Spitting coffee all over the place.
Well done, sir.
What an odd combination of the PC104 header and a PCI connector.
there must have been a specific goal in mind for that.
I will say when it comes to Glide games under DOS, they can be a bit tricky with anything other then an original Voodoo.
some had the drivers as a separate file and those tend to be ok if you replace them with a later version (iirc its glive.ovl).
but others had the drivers statically compiled into the game and those tend to be much harder to run on later cards.
That looks to be an EBC formfactor board. That's the size of a 5-1/4" drive bay. Get an extrnal CDROM box or the like that's two bays high and you could probably fit that all in, then you'd just need a front plate to cover things and to sort the power supply, pending the internal one wouldn't work, which it might not as the board I have needs several Amps off the 5-volt rail (12V just for CPU fan).
Interesting, in 11th grade (Around 1998) I had a cobbled togather Intel 486-50 that I overclocked a 66MHz, later I installed an AMD 586-133. 16MB RAM and Windows 95. Played mostly DOS games on it. Had a Soundblaster knockoff (Cant remeber the brand) though I couldnt afford a true 3D Accelerator I did have a Matrox Millennium I bartered for.
Thing is: while most older 3dfx (DOS) games run just fine on a voodoo rush, banshee, 2, 3 or what have you, some odd games specifically require a real voodoo 1 and won't run on anything else.
I had a K6-2 + Voodoo 2 at some point and always wondered why I could not get some games to run with 3dfx acceleration ... carmageddon being a prime example.
I got a MMX pentium 1 now and a real voodoo 1 to go with it and those games magically work.
Stuffing the voodoo 1 in a faster machine makes no sense either, as games that could benefit from more CPU speed usually don't have that "voodoo 1 only" limitation ... and there are also some games that don't like fast CPUs ... wipeout XL for example will run at the right speed on a 200mhz pentium 1 but the game engine isn't fps-locked in any way and will go as fast as the machine will let it so the 450 MHz K6-2 was already a tad fast and the game becomes unlplayable on a 500 MHz pentium 3 ... if you run it on, say, a 1+ GHz athlon, it goes crazy fast and looks like a quake timedemo would look on that same machine.
What I'm saying is: you wanna keep a pentium 1 + voodoo 1 machine around for these odd games, so, make a nice little case and put that pentium board and the voodoo 1 in there.
That is some really sloppy coding. haha I expected better of Psygnosis.
"Spit roast adapter" I'm tapping out, I'm done.
I have something similar I'm going to be doing a video with for DOScember this year, though it does concern me a little, as I'll be doing much the same things as you in my video, even down to using one of your PC/104 soundcards, I don't want to be seen as copying, it's been planned for a while. There are some key differences though in my video, currently on getting some of the bits for it. Mine won't have a Voodoo, but i'm trying to figure out a good 3D accelerated video card that works well under DOS
by all means do related content, there isn't enough PC/104 stuff on youtube :)
Seeing that boot up screen, lots of our machines run on boards like this still. It’s #PC 1,2,3,4…. IPC’s from the company Beckhoff…
21fps glquake at 480p ain't bad for the p90, better than expected. The dos 2d performance seems a bit slow, I would have thought the doom frame rate would hit the 35fps cap. Were the games that support it running in vesa video modes (duke3d, dos quake) or was it mode 13h. I suspect gaming performance not emphasis for industrial board video chip though.
9:46
The distorted vocals in the background song made me think that someone was screaming or shouting somewhere in my apartment. (Am wearing headphones).
xD
Gave me quite a scare and I didn't get a chance to listen to the particulars about Socket 5 and 7 xD
Awesome!, you should put some voodoo2 or tnt to see the difference
I'd add Descent if you want a test of FM synth music.
god im just thinking about a nice. buckling spring early 90s commodore 128 or sony MSX equivalent machine; 3dfx, DOS, the works, all in a little (big) keyboard PC!
Could you get your hands on a current-gen PC104 or COM based PCs to review it? I'm an SFF enthusiast and I've only seen a few pico/nano/itx form factor computers. I've know they're usually for industrial environments, I'm just curious about how they would perform against something like, let's say, a NUC or a RaspberryPI. Thank you.
133/166/200 pre mmx are the same chip, if it works with 1 it works with the other, it might not have the multiplier for beyond 166, but you can set it like a 133/166 then overclock the bus to get a stable 200 mhz pc. its faster doing it that way anyways.
You are reaching the limit of the pci bus, if you clocked the cpu lower than spec and then overclocked the bus until the cpu was back to spec... you would see bigger framerates than you would from overclocked cpus... also you should unlock vsync, and overclock the voodoo and get the Fastvoodoo2 or Wicked 3d Drivers....
its not undoable, to get 50-60fps in Quake on that setup. You will know if done correctly by running the drect3d test, the spinning cube should be spinning so fast that it looks like a 3d porcupine star.
8:07 LOL
I used to call those "gender bender" adapters, but I'm not sure even that is "PC" these days.
@@electronash instead of just offending trans people I thought I'd offend everyone :)
Something's wrong with that. Unreal didn't run THAT bad on my 200mmx with voodoo1
Yeah the board probably has a million other bottlenecks (chipset, RAM, cache). Maybe fiddling with BIOS/jumpers could help but I can't be bothered :)
His issue is power that molex doesn't supply enough
I just had a look on Ebay USA for one of these boards. Being on Ebay, you know the price is a bit steep. But Pentium III you say? My search term was "Advantech 5890" and one of the results was a decendant of thime board in this video: SOM-5890 Rev. A1 (RAM slot had a sticker with SOM-5890FG printed on it) running a 1.1 GHz Celeron. I couldn't tell anything about expandability from the usual not-so-great Ebay photos, but it would be interesting to see what could be run on that board. Fortunately, the price of the later board was less than 1/3rd that of the older boards.
Side note: My mother in law once unintentionally referred to the Celeron CPU as "Sell -ya-wrong".
Pentium 1 he said. At 90mhz.
@@hicknopunk he mentioned Pentium III towards the end of the video for early 3D gaming. I know the one he displayed is a Pentium 1.
@@JVHShack ok, ok. I like your username.
That looks to be using some sort of header that is not something really hobbyist usable for basically everything, probably needs a backplane board or breakout board. Try the search term "EBC Motherboard" instead to more of the formfactor of this one, usually with a PCI slot and headers for the rest, though take close look at or research the manual to find what /size and pitch/ the headers are, as one I have uses the pitch of a notebook IDE header (1mm?) for most of the connectors which is more of a pain than the usual size (0.1 inch?)
This would work great for some old MS Flight sim 😀
Glide version of Dos Tomb Raider?
I feel like Maybe quake should have been faster if the MMX instructions were actually working?
Was WinQuake slow because of running 640x480 (compared to DosQuake's 320x200)? Or was it slower because of Windows+DirectDraw? The 200 MHz fix was magic!
I should have mentioned in the video that Winquake ran similarly to DOS in 320x200 (maybe 1-2FPS slower). The 2D chip on the board is really crap...
I'd be interested in something small for Win 98 era games (i. e. Pentium III level), and if there's something smaller/easily sourceable for 3d.
So, what keywords or model numbers does one need to use on eBay to find examples of these?
A processor upgrade will still make a good difference
i wanna see how well this runs w/ a more modern PCI gpu like a Gforce 6200
Probably huge bottlenecks on the mainboard bus .and the ram speed as well
The problem with Unreal may be the lack of ram.
I played it with a 233 MMX and Voodoo1, and discover it stopped swapping with 96 Mo ram, not above this.
the joys of old video games, back when anything could be controlled by processor speed.
I have an Advantec integrated display/PC104 compatible computer. Bought at goodwill for $10
Runs Win98 and a weird Dairy Products industrial control program. No sound. I'd love to build or buy your PC104 sound card for it. Any plans to publish your sound card design?
one of those USB dongle sound cards, tiny and has headphone/line out, mic/line in
I believe the MMX 233 takes multi 1.5 as 3.5
I was hoping for an embedded board that happened to have a 3Dfx card
What about Quake 2 Windows and DOS port , and Voodoo 2 :)?
@TheRasteri You should get a 12MB Voodoo2 and try again.