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Building Emulation Box, Need Advice

V

Veracity

Emu Controller Freak
OK I'm building a new computer and I'm turning my old one into a Emulation box. Here are the specs, and any input is helpful! My main question is about the video card. Obviously TV Out is a must, but cost is a issue. I was planning on buying a Voodoo 3 3500 TV OUT because glide graphics kick total ass for n64 emulation, and the TV is supposed to be adequate. I also might upgrade the CPU, but thats only if you guys think its necessary. Anyways the specs are:

Win XP Pro
40 gig Seagate 7200 RPM HD
900 mhz Duron (upgradeable to 1.4 ghz Athlon XP)
512 PC133 RAM
Geforce 2 MX 400 64 MB (will be gone)

Adaptoid + Factory N64 Controller
PSX/N64 Adapter + Yellow Factory N64 controller and Factory PS2 Controller
SNES to PC Adapter + Factory SNES Controller

In addition I would love to be able to play Genesis games again, but I have been unable to find any adapters that allow you to use you Genesis controller with your PC (and the Factory 6 button smaller Sega controller was the best ever) nor have I found any that are similar to the Genesis controller. Does anyone have any recommendations? Thanks
 
R

revl8er

That Damn Good
For best emulation results you might wanna go ahead an upgrade your processor to the 1.4ghz. For the gfx card, pretty much it depends on how much you are willing to spend for one. The voodoo 3 would be good enough for emulation but you could go for a newer video card.
 
OP
V

Veracity

Emu Controller Freak
Mystic Gohan said:
For best emulation results you might wanna go ahead an upgrade your processor to the 1.4ghz. For the gfx card, pretty much it depends on how much you are willing to spend for one. The voodoo 3 would be good enough for emulation but you could go for a newer video card.
Click to expand...

Well like I said, price is a factor. I dont want to spend 100-200$ on a card thats going to go in an emulation only box. In addition, I was under the impression that glide owns the N64 emulation scene.

I also did some research and a rev BIOS was released for my mainboard that supports up to an Athlon XP 2100, so I think I'll go for the 1.7 ghz.
 
Clements

Clements

Active member
Moderator
Bare in mind that the Voodoo 3 only offers limited Hardware framebuffer support in Glide64 which is a pretty important strength of Glide64 over the other plugins. V4/V5 support all the Hardware Framebuffer features Glide64 offers.
 
OP
V

Veracity

Emu Controller Freak
Clements said:
Bare in mind that the Voodoo 3 only offers limited Hardware framebuffer support in Glide64 which is a pretty important strength of Glide64 over the other plugins. V4/V5 support all the Hardware Framebuffer features Glide64 offers.
Click to expand...

I was under the impression that the Voodoo 3 3500 is a fairly strong card and that Glide only requires HWFBE for a handful of games (and it runs those games well). Is this incorrect?
 
C

cooliscool

Nintendo Zealot
Veracity said:
I was under the impression that the Voodoo 3 3500 is a fairly strong card and that Glide only requires HWFBE for a handful of games (and it runs those games well). Is this incorrect?
Click to expand...

The Voodoo3 doesn't use the VSA-100 chip. It had alot of non-standard and quite advanced techneques, such as different FB method. Glide64 can utilize the VSA-100s (2 on a V5, 1 on a V4) to its full potential.
 
Tagrineth

Tagrineth

Dragony thingy
Better to go with a Voodoo5 5500 if you can. They're ~$50 in most places (they still command a moderate price because of their utility for Glide).
 
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