[Kiwi]

Since the hardware now seems "closer" to actually being ready, I wanted to make sure I haven't taken any wrong turns to get here, at last.  

Starting last winter, I went through my stash of old PC parts, and thought I could assemble / reassemble all over again, three oldies / Vintage gaming systems at three ages / speed levels:

133 MHz Pentium P1, 266 MHz K6-2, and 500 MHz K6-3.  Freespace was supposed to be the TEST game for the middle one.  By late spring, it looked like I had numbers two and three mostly ready.  

But my P5A MB (I have two, and both have done it) won't keep track of its USB ports.  I want to use a Logitech Wingman USB joystick, and an i-rocks backlit "slim" keyboard, because both fit (at the same time) onto the shelf of the PC Cart in the room where the oldies reside . . the reviewer consensus back in the day had been very well impressed by this P5A board.  

I also have a Soyo 5EM-something, with a Via MVP3 chipset.  Now, that chipset did get some bad reviews then, and since.  It happens, however, that I owned an off-brand ("VIP") socket 5 board with that chipset that served me very well, so I may try the Soyo, with a K6-2.  Right now, it has Intel's 200 MHz MMX processor in it and I don't remember ever having anything that takes so excruciatingly LONG to run through a POST.  

Last, I have on hand another example of the "worst" motherboard I ever owned, that was uniformly praised from all quarters.  My original SE-440BX was an unmitigated disaster.  Now, I have another, but I probably will try an Abit BX-6 (same chipset) instead.  Right now, I have HSF fans for 350 and for 400 MHz slot 1 P2s, but only passive coolers, or HSFs with broken fans, for the 233 and 266 MHz P2s.  

I've run some tests with the SE-440BX breadboarded, using the 350 MHz P2, and it's acting like a proper good citizen.  I've also learned, perhaps, from the VOGONS forums, that Acer's ALi5 chipset had a faulty AGP function, so I may test with plain PCI video (eventually), including an old VooDoo2.  The upshot of all this is that I now have quite a bit more of this classic / vintage era hardware than I did six months ago.  

I can pick and choose from an array of components (wouldn't that have been a luxury back when all this gear was brand new?).  I've probably spent 5-7% of the 1998 MSRP figures for this (the eBay purchases) stuff.   I can use any of the 32-bit Windows OSes except for Vista.  

IMO, Win-NT is not viable, and Win95, even OSR2, is too unstable, needs too much maintenance.  

I think that Win98se and Win2000 are the two best choices.  WinME was bad, I thought, and still think so.  

So: given all of the cheaply acquired riches of components, and my preference to start out from scratch without the SCO or SCP or whatever, until I've played some the way it would've been if I'd had the hardware and the game ten years ago, how about opinions of what works best in Freespace?  I have several sound card options, a really broad spectrum of video cards to try, etc., and will appreciate opinions.     

{Edit: Answers were a little slow trickling in.}

[Kiwi]

A goodly number of visitors to the forums seem to have viewed my thread-starting message, without offering comments. 

I think that the one thing I want to be sure of the most is in regard to Direct3D vs. Glide vs. OpenGL -- if the base game favors OpenGL the way that the SCP does, how can I take advantage of that?  Or vice versa, how can I avoid poor graphics most easily with the patched, but still stock, FS1?

[castor]

Shortly: Glide is the best choice, OGL was not supported at all.

[Kiwi]

Shortly: Glide is the best choice, OGL was not supported at all.

If that answer is because of any misunderstanding about Descent: Freespace, the original game, being the initial test subject for the oldies PCs built to 1998 standards, I haven't really lloked hard at Freespace 2 yet.  I would have no immediate need to differentiate between Direct3D, Glide, and OpenGL for FS2 at this point, although I will try to remember it if that's the case. 
 
Sorry, that seemed to be at odds with what everyone else, and the on-CD readme (FS1) seemed to be saying (when some answers did start showing up).  I never achieved what I would consider a decent setup to play games with using the Asus P5A motherboard and AMD K6-2, as long as I was trying AGP video (experiments with PCI and VooDoo are coming), and in spite of having had horrible bad luck back when the systems were firstline, began experimenting with MBs using Intel's 440BX chipset.  The genuine Intel, SE440-BX, was quite stable, no problems, just no excitement either -- without the kind of adjustments that an Abit or Asus or DFI offers me, I feel deprived.

I found an Abit BX-6 on eBay with a "99 Cents" auction that was fairly close to its end.  A P2/400 was included, with the active heat sink I hadn't been able to find for the Intel steup (breadboarded only).  I made a lowball offer, that would've totalled about $15 with the amount of shipping cost the seller wanted.  No one else put in a bid, so I got it for the 99 Cents plus shipping.  That model Abit got great reviews when it was new.  The seller managed to screw the transaction up awfully, never took it to the post office until after I was asking for a tracer, and that sort of etc.

With the default 100 MHz front end bus speed, and the same PC-100 DIMMs that worked fine in the Intel board (three of them, at 128 MBs each), Windows 98se ran marvelously, but Win2000 couldn't run ten minutes without a BSOD or worse, a STOP error.  The errors varied, but appeared to be based in RAM.  I swapped DIMMS around twice, no help.  

I didn't think I needed 400 MHz for the stock, original Freespace 1 game, and when I dropped the FSB and multiplier from 100 and x4 down to 66 and x3.5, Win2000 loved that!  I prefer W2K anyway, and the game should run in either one, I think, but here's something weird -- Win98 literally HATES the new CPU setting.  From running very well, it's now running as slow as a Zilog Z-80A instead!  

It's particularly awful when attempting to surf the 'net with it.  The thing is, back in the real times that the P2/400 lived in, I had two Pentiums, a P1 MMX/233, and the P2/400 that was such a pain that I got rid of it as soon as I could.  Back in '97/'98, I used Mosaic, I think, the predecessor to Mozilla, as a browser, and Netscape.  The P1/233 was running Windows95 and the P2/400 was running Win98, first edition.  Both handled the 'Net nicely enough.  

Awhile ago I tried to log in with it onto this site.  Damn!  It was mired in molasses!  I'd visited a goodly number of web sites with the breadboarded Intel system, running a P2/300 with an anemic passive heat sink -- huge, but not a good conductor, whatever it was made from.  With that one, you hardly realized it was so old and slow except if you ran into a lot of "flash" ads or other uses of animated screens.  

You know, it's just too bad the Vogons people put up with the excretory orifice (OK make it a singleton, but one is enough)  that they have there; anyone here know of any other oldies hardware for oldies games type sites that are moderated more professionally?  

[Flipside]

Hmmm.. One post complaining about the lack of responses, and one post that includes a complaint about 'professional moderation'? That doesn't bode well.

Castor is right, the original FS2 didn't support OpenGL, it supported Glide as available on the Voodoo cards, and DirectX5 iirc.

If, however, you want to play the SCP, that requires OpenGL. I seem to recall that the GoG version requires DirectX 7+, but that may just be because no-one has DirectX 5 any more.

Edit: I will admit that it's been a while since I played vanilla, but I'm pretty certain those were the graphics options available. Unfortunately, searching online doesn't reveal anything, and I don't have the vanilla version any more to check first-hand, it's buried in storage at the moment.

[Kiwi]

Hey, folks, Flipside and all of y'all.  Maybe I will become as rabid of a fan of these games as some of you, but I have a big handicap.  I flew real atmospheric airplanes 50 years ago -- I wasn't a greatly skilled pilot, and the cost of flying was pretty steep on part-time work pay.  I never got as far as being licensed before running out of money.  

Add that up.  Fifty years ago I was old enough and big enough to be a legal student pilot.  I did a lot of other things over the next 45 years, including "trying" to "fly" atmospheric- type flight sims twenty years ago.  I wasn't very good at all with it then.  I never had loads of free time until quite recently, but the fact is that nowadays I don't have a lot more money (comparative buying power) than when I was in college, taking flying lessons on weekends, and working nights as a DJ on a CW station.  

Because I do have more time now, I'm hoping I can control my impatience and keep practicing at it enough not to be as terrible with hand-eye coordination as in 1990. ( Last, at my age, I don't want to play at flame wars.  That's just plain stupid, but I expect moderators to slap the alimentary orifice types around when they try to start it up. )

[Flipside]

That's fine, 20 years ago I was a trainee avionics engineer, so whilst I don't have the history you do, I can understand what it's like being one of the older members of the Forum I'll treat all people the same, if they start being unhelpful or rude, they'll hear about it, don't worry about that.

People in here will be happy to help you if you need it, there's a lot of dedicated people who work very hard to help people having problems with Freespace 2, but I'll just ask that you hold in mind that some of the people here are 13-14 years old, and so can be somewhat over-exuberant or seem to give strange answers, don't take that too personally, sometimes there are language barriers, sometimes there are maturity barriers, it's a bit of a juggling act

The Voodoo is probably your best bet for original Freespace, since it supports the graphics engine very well (used to have a Voodoo 2 myself, damn good card in my opinion), as for sound, basically anything soundblaster-supportive should do the job effectively, Freespace 1 doesn't support surround-sound I think, but I'm not certain of that, but Freespace 2 can do so if you have a card for it.

As for Joystick, as someone who has to change between 2 USB ports for his keyboard every time he boots his computer, I wish I had an answer for you, and if I ever fix that problem on my own computer, I'll be sure to let you know

[Kiwi]

Although GameFAQs is now part of GameSpot, it's still not as "bad" of a place as its parent, and I had a thread there, from which this next is an edited, one-sided summary: 

This next is from my thread in the GameFAQs Freespace2 forum:

Meanwhile, the most likely setup remained a loosely scattered collection of parts breadboarded together on a shop table, while I try to locate a working fan-type cooler to fit the Pentium-II I wanted to use. I had only a passive heat sink at first, that didn't seem to work very well.  It's huge, but is not either copper or aluminum, and the smaller "active" coolers with fans seem to work better, whatever the choice of material, if they would fit. 

It seems that Intel's engineers couldn't make up their collective minds about the P2/P3 (Slot1) coolers. There are three different heat sink attachment systems, and locating the right one for "my" choice is apparently some kind of problem. 

When a very seriously delayed Abit BX-6 mainboard finally arrived, that one's Soft Menu options allowed me to bypass the cooling problem by downclocking a faster P2 to the core speed I wanted to use (it also permitted me to use Win2000, which flat out wouldn't run more than 5 minutes at a time without a memory error / BSOD or "Stop", as long as I had the board running with the memory bus at 100 MHz).  The Abit might not be the right one yet, if Freespace(1) doesn't like W2k.  Changing to slower speeds threw a big wrench into the Windows98 setup, to the extent that I may need to start all over with it (runs snail-like now, especially when using it for the Internet). 

There has a lot of discussion over the years about the dominance of 3dFX's various VooDoo (1 & 2) cards and "Glide", for the tail end of the 1990s. During that period, I was able to play my own preferred game genre (when I had the free time), turn-based, party oriented, Role Play games, on PCs with economical, mid-range priced video cards.  I wasn't interested in any of the fast action shooters (and continue not to be), the RTS genre barely existed, and I was "all thumbs" in every flight sim I'd tried back then, so I ignored the VooDoos, happily, given the comparative high cost at the time.

Another period game, a cross between a combat sim and strategy, was "Independence War", and according to the data available now, the American version was essentially a "Glide-only" game. I do have VooDoo2 cards now, but would just as soon pass them by if I can, so the Direct3D vs. Glide question was a key element (I've made an edit removing OpenGL from the sentence there).

I may not get very far as a sim pilot, whether it is at 800 by 600 or at a more modern 1280 by 960. When the game was new, and the hardware I plan to use was new as well, I had a job that included long hours at home preparing  lessons, which were a constantly changing series of PC productivity mastery classes that the local college's CAE program offered for on-site education in employers' facilities, or on campus in the PC labs.

The only gaming I made time for was short sessions in games such as Might and Magic VI, although I bought two or three titles for any one I ever got to try. The work was interesting, but changed way too often to easily try winging it without serious preparation, no matter how high my talent for learning new things might have ranked. I had tried normal atmospheric flight sims when I did have somewhat more free time, and my hand / eye coordination had deteriorated a great deal after my adolescence, when I was taking flying lessons in the full size J3 cubs and 140s of the time.

I was a pretty terrible sim pilot in the late 1980s; I am hoping I have the patience to overcome any similar difficulties in this current foray, when I have more time on my hands than funds to spend to entertain myself (these old PC parts I have collected are CHEAP now, for the most part).

Only after I am halfway successful with the stock, original game, and the best combination of old parts anyone back in the day might have had, then I may upgrade to the SCP's version {I do have the required original Freespace 2 CDs on hand), and move the playing platform closer to 2003, just as you suggest ( for which I have a system with an NF2 chipset, an XP-M mobile CPU {unlocked multiplier}, a BFG 6800 GT OC, and my choice of three Windows versions. I kept that one on hand to replay KotOR-I and NWN-1 on) }.

Just remember that the time I spend getting the oldie PCs to run well is low-cost compared to green fees at the golf club, a weekend at the casino in Louisiana, even lower cost if it's compared to the current lane fees for some bowling, or even the Senior-discounted per ticket cost at the theater, if there were more than a very few movies I would find palatable to this elder citizen's antiquated sense of what movies ought to be like.  Since seeing the disparity in functional speeds on Abit's BX-6 in the two OSes, I tried again for something at the "bottom end" of the oldies range I would consider worth playing a game at, a P1/MMX 166.  But neither an AN430TX, nor a Micronics clone of that board, want to work.