Retro PC gaming part2

One problem I encountered which I may or may not have already mentioned is that as Windows 98 is no longer officially supported by Microsoft I couldn't get the OS to automatically update. It appears there is a problem with the Win98 update site itself. You can still however find what looks like most of the old updates in the Windows update catalog. Here again though it is a bit of a pain to have to search through and download the ones you need. A better alternate I think (at least for me) was the unofficial service pack for windows 98 I found floating out on the internet. You can grab it at http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html. I don't know that much about it as far as security goes but being as this is not my main machine and will be primarily for gaming with limited access to my home network I figured it was cool to use. I am also running the free version of Zonealarm so it should tell me if anything funny is taking place, maybe. You can get that here http://www.download.com/ZoneAlarm-Firewall/3000-10435_4-22231.html?tag=mncol. There is a free pro version too and I don't know what the difference is off hand but you can check it out for yourself. One more of several annoying issues I had (and I don't think this just applies to Win98) was that internet explorer kind of stinks. It was constantly giving me errors so I decided to do away with it and use something else. You can get your hand on a version of Opera web browser that will work great with 98, and it's pretty darn fast too.

Ok so I installed a few old games like Unreal and European Air War and had some pretty pleasing results. One thing that I realized pretty quickly was that the integrated sound card on my motherboard was crap. I went on ebay and found an Sound Blaster Live! value for 7 dollars shipped and what a difference that made. I also ordered an Asus TNT2 32 meg video card for $10 and a Geforce 2 GTS 64 meg card just to experiment with. It only cost me 15 dollars shipped. I may have already mentioned that. Anyhow, the first video card I started with was the integrated onboard AGP rage 2 pro which quick frankly is only really good for very basic usage. The next one to go into the rig was the TNT 16 meg AGP card I had laying around. This was a big improvement over the Rage 2 integrated but it still wasn't all that great even for something as old as Unreal. Finding the right driver to work with it was a bit of a hassle too. The only Nvidia driver I could find that would work was something like version 25.xx. I would have thought that the Nvidia Detonator drivers would have been the best choice for this card but I happened to find the original disk for my Diamond TNT laying around and using that actually made a hugh difference in performance gain, go figure on that one. Still that card is not really that great so I tried out the TNT2 64meg next. That gave me a real nice boost in not only performance but picture quality as well and the option to use anisotropic filtering. It also seemed like some old games liked that card better as I didn't have as many problems with compatabilility and in game rendering options. I was actually really inpressed with Unreal when using direct 3d rendering. Compaired to OpenGL it was night and day. The direct 3d not only looked incredably better but it also ran a lot faster and didn't show hardly any artifacts of graphical glitches. I can't say the same for OpenGL which basically looked and ran like garbage in comparision to the D3D. So next I popped in the Geforce 2 GTS hoping to see big gains and while it did seem to make things run a good bit faster I was actually pretty supprised to find that my picture quality suffered a little bit. I don't know but everything seemed to look a little cheesier for some strange reason. Kicking the digital vibrance up a little helped and it ran pretty good set to 32bit color. I also had more options in the way of antialiasing an anisotropic filtering. I was now able to set the drivers up for x4 anisotropic filtering but this actually didn't look as good and made everything a bit blurry. It was either that or the higher antialiasing level this card could achieve. There is one other funny thing that I had not seen for years. It's hard to explain but at certain times there was now some kind of funny hex patterned overlay or filtering that you could see vagely over the images. It's almost like looking through a screened window. I am actually considering putting the TNT2 back in but I will give it some time and see if I can tweak the Geforce 2 to clean up the picture a bit more before giving up on it. All in all there is a trade off as far as I can tell between the two. The Geforce 2 has better performance, options, and to some degree compatability but that Asus TNT2 just seems to look nicer.