Quoting: Xaero_VincentDoes internet browsing work at all?

Yes, but also no. Any website secured through HTTPS will not load as the old web browers can not authenticate. You can browse unsecured websites and download files directly through wget and the like.

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Quoting: x_wingProbably a better contender for RH9 is WXP, as the memory usage also went quite up compared to W98.

Indeed. If you go past 512 MB you can run into issues with Windows 98.

Quoting: x_wingBy the way, do you have any bench for your games? Results for runs on Windows (98 & XP) and Linux (RH9 & RH7.3) would be great in order to compare performance on those early gaming days for Linux.

I will be doing some timedemos with Quake at the very least once I settle on a Linux release.

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Quoting: HamishNot a huge difference between my Rage 128 Pro and a Radeon 7000 although both can be made to work with later Red Hat Linux releases. If I were to go that route I would either want to max it out with a Radeon 7500 or just install a later Linux with support for my Radeon 9200.

Sorry to quote myself here, but I just realized there actually is a third option which is using the Radeon 9200 with Red Hat Linux 9 and fglrx 8.28.8 which supports XFree86 4.3 as seen here:
https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/legacy-graphics/ati-radeon-9xxx-series/ati-radeon-9200-series [External Link]

By the time I was using the card fglrx had already dropped support for the Radeon 9200 so it might make a fun article later on just to see what I missed by not using the binary blob.

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Quoting: scaineIt was life-changing. I mean that genuinely - it was the moment that crystallised the potential of PC gaming for me. First I played Deus Ex, then I played Quake.

I am actually a good way through playing Deus Ex again from the Windows 98 install. Performance varies quite a bit depending on the complexity of the level but that is likely as much due to running a Pentium III 500 Katmai as a Rage 128 Pro as Deus Ex is notoriously CPU intensive.

Nice little bit of Linux trivia: if you look at the patch notes from the Deus Ex GOTY release you can see that Loki Software is thanked for supplying the OpenGL renderer for the game. Apparently Loki was very close to releasing the Linux port before they went bankrupt.

Quoting: The_AquabatBut I wonder what would this machine achieve with the latest bleeding edge AGP card ever released, a Radeon HD 4xxx I think

Likely nothing great I would imagine. You would be horribly bottlenecked by both the CPU and RAM and of course not all AGP is created equal. Even my Rage 128 Pro is being held back just a bit by being an AGP 4x card inserted into my motherboard's AGP 2x slot.

Quoting: x_wingBut those game works way better with a Voodoo card?

Well, it depends. But that is a subject for a future article, so I will come back to that later.

Quoting: x_wingI still think that there are better alternatives in the market that should give a way better Linux experience for that time period. For example, in my country I can find a Radeon 7000 for around 5 USD

Not a huge difference between my Rage 128 Pro and a Radeon 7000 although both can be made to work with later Red Hat Linux releases. If I were to go that route I would either want to max it out with a Radeon 7500 or just install a later Linux with support for my Radeon 9200.

Quoting: x_wingin fact, for the price of one Voodoo card I can actually buy 4 to 5 old PCI/AGP GPUs

That I can believe. Again, I am not rushing to get a Voodoo for this exact reason.

Quoting: whizseActually, The Weather Channel used Linux for some project and demanded FLOSS drivers. ATI payed Tungsten Graphics to develop them.

Now that is interesting to find out about. And yeah, Radeon R200 cards were the last to receive Mesa drivers from ATI before they were bought out by AMD.

That being said, things did improve after the AMD buyout as I remember in 2010 I could finally launch both Doom 3 and Penumbra on my Radeon 9200. By that point I had already started using Radeon HD cards though.

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Quoting: x_wing

Quoting: HamishCertainly an interesting option, if I can find my way past the 3dfx tax. :whistle:

It's pointless. The only "beauty" of a voodoo GPU in a build is glide support, but you can already get it with nglide (and it's probably the way to go on Linux).

Keep in mind we are talking about building a period computer here, so doing it with the original hardware is kind of the whole point of the exercise. Just for the fun of it.

There are also a few commercial games using SVGALib on Linux that will only provide full acceleration with 3dfx hardware. Still not enough to make me shell out hundreds on the dumpster computer though.

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Quoting: BumadarYou can still add a voodoo2 pass through ;)

Certainly an interesting option, if I can find my way past the 3dfx tax. :whistle:

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A few contemporary articles from early in the development of the DRI:

The Puzzle of 3-D Graphics on Linux
By Matt Matthews and Daryll Strauss published September 1, 2000 (Linux Journal)
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4083 [External Link]

Graphics: Pick a Card... Any Card
By Matt Matthews published October 1, 2000 (Linux Journal)
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4152 [External Link]

Linux Video Card Comparison - October 2000
By Jeff Brubaker published October 9, 2000 (AnandTech)
https://www.anandtech.com/show/632 [External Link]

A New Generation of 3D Gaming in Linux
By Matt Matthews published October 2000 (LinuxGames)
http://www.linuxgames.com/articles/nextgen3d/ [External Link]

XFree86 4.1.0 and ATI RADEON
By Robin Rowe published November 1, 2001 (Linux Journal)
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5425 [External Link]

DRI Beginner's Guide
By Frank Worsley
https://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/DRIbeginner.html [External Link]

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Quoting: scratchiLet me know if you need parts. I'm in Toronto, so if you're from this part of Canada, I can drive it over to you...cuz I'm definitely not gonna power it up for another 12 years but just don't want to trash a fully functional PC no matter how useless :)

Thanks, I appreciate the offer, but you would be in for a long drive. Clear across the country from you.

Quoting: BogomipsYou need to put a 3dfx Voodoo card in that setup. But I'm not sure if it is a retro build or just an old build. To me retro is more the era before the Pentium. I still have around 286, 386, 486 DX2/66, Pentium II and Pentium III machines. But I ditched all the CRT monitors.

I would love to have a 486 machine turn up at some point. Or a Voodoo card for that matter. :wink:

Quoting: NanobangThat looks alot like our old Micron PC, Hamish. Of course, everything looked like our old Micron back then: big beige and boxy. It came from Micron with Windows ME installed from the factory. It was around $2,000.

I kept the OEM system information from the original Windows 98 install before I wiped it just for the novelty. It looks like the computer was put together special by a local IT outfit.


Macrotronics - Edmonton
10577 109 street
Edmonton
(403) 428 0916

They are still operating out of Cold Lake now apparently:
http://macrotronics.com/ [External Link]

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Quoting: GuestIf you can get Win98SE running on it though, Shadow of the Horned Rat and of course the Mechwarrior 2 series.

Not going to disclose too much obviously, but the previous owner seemed to have kept the machine around as an Age of Empires II box. He had saved games dated as recently as 2011 on it. My guess would be he just switched over to the Steam version at around that time.

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Quoting: FaalagornI would also like to remind that Chromium is losing sync among some other functionalities; it will work only in closed-source Chrome. Here's the recent news from Arch Linux: https://archlinux.org/news/chromium-losing-sync-support-in-early-march/ [External Link]

I turned off Sync about a week ago in Chromium and have noticed no difference. It thankfully was not a feature I ever became reliant on, but others are not so lucky.

Considering I am currently using a Galaxy S4 I am damn sure I could get away with switching to a Linux phone when this one finally succumbs to time. My requirements are minimal.

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