Earlier this summer I wrote my Building A Vintage 486 PC guide which documented my hunt for 486 parts and getting MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 installed. For general usability, I found myself running into odd problems and system crashes which limited the amount of old software I could successfully run on it. Rather than try to buy up more 486 hardware for testing, I decided to go with a Pentium MMX grade Windows 95 PC with gaming abilities. My goal for this build was to duplicate the kind of system a power user may have built in the mid 90s.

We start this build off with an AT style socket 7 motherboard. This was one of the cheaper boards available on eBay with a coin type battery so I jumped on it without doing much research. There doesn’t seem to be any visible brand markings and the BIOS string 07/04/97-VXPro+-USB-Ultr-2A5LDH09C-00 only revealed few clues as to who really made this board. Fortunately I lucked out with this board being able to support pretty much every Pentium and compatible CPU around at the time. I wanted to go with an MMX based CPU but my personal collection didn’t include any, so I ordered a 200MHz MMX Pentium off eBay. I may bump this up to a 233 but it doesn’t seem critical at this time. The one large issue I did encounter with this board was the outdated BIOS not allowing more than 32 MB RAM per SDRAM slot unless the sticks had a certain chip count. Having a pair of 128 MB SDRAM sticks for this build, I wanted to get all of my available RAM for Windows. This led me down the rabbit hole of Google searches trying to identify this board and locate a BIOS update. I never found the exact match, but the absolute closest I could find was the PCChips M537DMA board. I took a chance and fired up AWDFLASH to force a 1998 BIOS image (PC_Chips_M537DMA.zip) to my board. After setting all the BIOS options to default after first boot and then enabling what I needed, the system seems completely stable and I have all 256 MB RAM. If you happened to read my previous 486 build guide, I’m reusing the same AT case as my 486. CD-ROM is apparently a Hitachi 8x, and I ordered an 8 GB compact flash card for this build as opposed to using spinning disk.

Now we take a look at filling our board slots up with goodies. Every expansion card I list here came from my own parts storage and was at some point used by me in a past system.

Video Card (Primary): I’ve got a stack of various PCI cards ranging from Cirrus Logic to ATI, but I think the best card I own from that era is a Diamond Stealth II S220 with the Rendition V2100 chip. While this card does have both 2D and 3D abilities, I’ll be using an accelerator for most of my 3D needs. This card currently drives an LCD at 1024×768 resolution with 16 bit color. I don’t have room for CRTs and I would prefer having the LCD anyway. The driver for Windows 9x/NT can be found at ftp://ftp.atlas.altexxa.net/software/win9x/driver/STEALTH_s220_win9x-nt.exe

I’ve got a stack of various PCI cards ranging from Cirrus Logic to ATI, but I think the best card I own from that era is a Diamond Stealth II S220 with the Rendition V2100 chip. While this card does have both 2D and 3D abilities, I’ll be using an accelerator for most of my 3D needs. This card currently drives an LCD at 1024×768 resolution with 16 bit color. I don’t have room for CRTs and I would prefer having the LCD anyway. The driver for Windows 9x/NT can be found at ftp://ftp.atlas.altexxa.net/software/win9x/driver/STEALTH_s220_win9x-nt.exe Video Card (Accelerator): In my collection I found an original Diamond Monster 3D (3dfx Voodoo1) and a Creative Labs 3D Blaster CT6670 (3dfx Voodoo2), so I went with the more powerful Voodoo2 based card. Unfortunately while I recall owning a pair of these which ran in SLI, the second one is seemingly misplaced so this will just be the single Voodoo2. The driver for Windows 95 can be found at ftp://ftp.atlas.altexxa.net/software/win9x/driver/3dbvw95.exe

In my collection I found an original Diamond Monster 3D (3dfx Voodoo1) and a Creative Labs 3D Blaster CT6670 (3dfx Voodoo2), so I went with the more powerful Voodoo2 based card. Unfortunately while I recall owning a pair of these which ran in SLI, the second one is seemingly misplaced so this will just be the single Voodoo2. The driver for Windows 95 can be found at ftp://ftp.atlas.altexxa.net/software/win9x/driver/3dbvw95.exe Sound Card: It was a choice between the Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit PCI card or the Sound Blaster PCI512. The PCI512 card won as the Live! didn’t have a game port on the back and I wanted to try out an old Gravis Gamepad saved from my early 486 days. I’m only using a 2 speaker system so I’m sure I’d never notice a difference between the two cards. I’ll also note finding the PCI512 driver seemed oddly hard as the Creative support site only listed PCI64 and PCI128 models. Eventually snagged a copy and it can now be found at ftp://ftp.atlas.altexxa.net/software/win9x/driver/e512w9xu.exe

It was a choice between the Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit PCI card or the Sound Blaster PCI512. The PCI512 card won as the Live! didn’t have a game port on the back and I wanted to try out an old Gravis Gamepad saved from my early 486 days. I’m only using a 2 speaker system so I’m sure I’d never notice a difference between the two cards. I’ll also note finding the PCI512 driver seemed oddly hard as the Creative support site only listed PCI64 and PCI128 models. Eventually snagged a copy and it can now be found at ftp://ftp.atlas.altexxa.net/software/win9x/driver/e512w9xu.exe Ethernet Card: My collection included a number of 3com network adapters along with some generic no-name cards which probably wouldn’t auto-detect under Windows 95. I went with a 10/100 card based on the 3C905 chipset but the card ended up being too new to be auto-detected. After realizing there were too many “3C905” variations to guess from, I had to pull the card and get the full model string which turned out to be 3C905CX-TX-NM. Searching for this led me to a random file named windiags.exe which I was able to just right-click and expand (on a later Windows PC) to access all the driver files. This file is now available at ftp://ftp.atlas.altexxa.net/software/win9x/driver/3c905cx-tx-nm-windiags.exe

The fun part of software installation now begins! I’ll be linking either to direct download URLs or to the download page at WinWorld for the software I used in my build.

What’s next for this build? I’ll probably poke around some of the DOS games I was originally planning on playing with my previous 486 PC. I’m also keeping an eye out for more games and applications I used back in the 90s but forgotten about.

UPDATE: After running the system for a couple days, I noticed that textures in certain games running the 3dfx driver were covered in large dots. Doing some research into the issue brought up some old newsgroup postings from the early 2000s and the conclusion is hardware fault on the Voodoo2 card. Instead of trying to find another Voodoo2 I decided to hunt down a single video card which would offer 2D and 3D to free up a PCI slot. In my collection I did have a TNT2 M64, but decided to buy a Voodoo3 off eBay to stay within the 3dfx product. The new card tests good and my textures show up properly without any weird glitches. So far I’m not seeing any actual performance increase but I’m likely limited by the speed of my CPU in that regard. For Windows 95, the latest official 3dfx driver seems to be voodoo3tm_driver_kit_1.07.00-whql.zip and is working fine for me. I may try poking around with some later drivers created by third parties.