IGemini
Platinum Member
This issue's been sitting around for a while, so I've been wondering if anyone here had some thoughts/info on this...
I have some old PC games still around the house that I've been wanting to play again for the longest time...MW2 Titanium, Starfleet Academy etc. basically Pentium I-III, Windows 9x into the 3dfx era. Some time ago I came into possession of an old eMachines eTower 600is: Intel i810, 600MHz Celeron Coppermine, 10GB Quantum Fireball, 32 MB RAM, all in working order. I thought I hit the jackpot for what I'm looking for, except...
Tigerdirect has had a consistent stock of Rage 128 Pro PCI cards sitting around for $20, perfect. Picked one up, installed it, and it gave me a video error POST beep. The onboard still works, but it turns out there's no AGP slot and eMachines blocked out the BIOS as far as onboard video control. Plus I can't find any jumper info about this particular board model to see if they soldered the jumper or just haven't marked it. The card itself works, I was able to boot with it in another machine.
I've considered:
- Trying to flash the BIOS to something that supports onboard control, if I can find an appropriate version.
- Getting a different motherboard, though I have less experience shopping for socket 370 hardware. If anyone can point me to someone selling a board (uATX) that doesn't resist video card upgrades, that would be good.
I don't really have any newer hardware that I could put this on, they're all serving other purposes. I'm not looking to virtualize or emulate (i.e. native, a lot of these games won't work with that anyway), please don't suggest it. Other ideas are welcome.
I have some old PC games still around the house that I've been wanting to play again for the longest time...MW2 Titanium, Starfleet Academy etc. basically Pentium I-III, Windows 9x into the 3dfx era. Some time ago I came into possession of an old eMachines eTower 600is: Intel i810, 600MHz Celeron Coppermine, 10GB Quantum Fireball, 32 MB RAM, all in working order. I thought I hit the jackpot for what I'm looking for, except...
Tigerdirect has had a consistent stock of Rage 128 Pro PCI cards sitting around for $20, perfect. Picked one up, installed it, and it gave me a video error POST beep. The onboard still works, but it turns out there's no AGP slot and eMachines blocked out the BIOS as far as onboard video control. Plus I can't find any jumper info about this particular board model to see if they soldered the jumper or just haven't marked it. The card itself works, I was able to boot with it in another machine.
I've considered:
- Trying to flash the BIOS to something that supports onboard control, if I can find an appropriate version.
- Getting a different motherboard, though I have less experience shopping for socket 370 hardware. If anyone can point me to someone selling a board (uATX) that doesn't resist video card upgrades, that would be good.
I don't really have any newer hardware that I could put this on, they're all serving other purposes. I'm not looking to virtualize or emulate (i.e. native, a lot of these games won't work with that anyway), please don't suggest it. Other ideas are welcome.
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