The Quake PC project was a six months trip down the memory lane. I had a blast. A Windows 9X machine is rather simple to manage. I felt like I had superpower by being able to afford hardware and software that were grossly expensive at the time. The OS is snappy. Every application opened fast. And I played everything I couldn't back in the day. The box has been checked.
That being said. Here are three things I learned the hard way.
I wish I could say that no PCBs were injured during the writing of this series but that would be a big lie. I don't know if the hardware was always that unreliable (and I had forgotten), if the components have aged poorly, or if frequently swapping components impacted their health but something was constantly broken or dying in the Quake PC.
The Matrox Millennium II AGP G200 died with no warning. Not even a goodbye letter. I just booted the computer one day and the screen just remained black. The card just went "poof".
The Sound Blaster Live CT4830 died in a weird way. It also happened without warning. Overnight it stopped working with VxD drivers. I had to switch to WDM. I bought a SB0410 Live 24-bit to replace it and discovered it killed the framerate of Quake by 50% (Winquake ran at 24fps instead of 48fps). I replaced it with a SB0100 to restore operations and a decent framerate. I called these "mini-adventures" or "side-quests" to keep my sanity.
It once rebooted the PC to find out the whole D: drive has been erased and the C partition was unstable. I had to completely re-install Windows 98 and the problem never came back. I called these "I learned nothing" side-quests.
Amusingly, the one component I thought was going to fail, the 3dfx Orchid Righteous 3D and its mechanical relay, held strong the whole time. Together with the Matrox Mystique they were the rock of the Quake PC!
Windows 9X driver model is hell. Installing a driver copies files in C:\Windows\system and there is usually no way to perform a clean uninstall. There are always leftover inf/dlls/xvds which can have weird side-effects.
The Sound Blaster Live is incredibly peculiar in this regard. So much so that a full tutorial on vogons[1] had to be written to help confused users. Here is an example of a "here goes my Sunday" problem one can encounter. A property installed card with working drivers allows you to view the SB16 emulation settings as follows.
Somehow it is possible to enter a state where everything looks up and running but emulation is in a zombi state where settings are not even accessible.
Another example of the rather messy driver model happened with the 3dfx cards. Let's say you start with a 3dfx1 and you enjoy glquake. You upgrade to a 3dfx2 and install the 3dfx2 drivers. Now you can't just swap back to the 3dfx1 card. The 3dfx2 drivers overwrote part of the 3dfx1 drivers and the 3dfx2 drivers are not backward compatible. You need to install the 3dfx1 drivers again and hope the left over from the 3dfx2 drivers don't crash the PC.
I was on Ebay a lot to find parts and it quickly taught me to be shed off some of my naivety.
The obvious issue is to receive parts that were advertised as "tested" but don't actually work. Out of the 64MiB of EDO I bought, 32MiB was faulty.
There is the case where sellers are honest but don't really know what they are dealing with. The first v1000 I bought had been tested...but only to boot Windows 9X. As soon as I tried to run vquake, the PC crashed.
Even buying things "in the box" can be surprising. Here is an example of an ebay listing for a SoundBlaster Live 5.1 with the box...where the sound card is clearly an Audigy 2.
Another example is when I bought two Voodoo2 cards. I got both of them with the box and tested them individually. They worked. But later I tried to make them work in SLI mode and they failed. Upon closer inspection it turned out that one was indeed from Creative (CT6640).
But the other one was not. It only had an id "600-0027-03" on the back (not a Creative identifier). Obviously the card did not match the box.
By then I had lost track of which card came from which box and I was unable to return the item. Failing to properly verify a component upon reception is one of these eBay "stupid" taxes that hopefully one only pays once.
It was fun. I would do it again. And I highly recommend it!
| ^ | [1] | Guide: Installing Windows 9x and DOS drivers on Sound Blaster Live! cards |
