The eMachines eTower 466ix was a budget desktop computer released in 1999 by eMachines. The system was made available with an Intel Celeron clocked at 466MHz, 64MB of RAM, 4.3GB of storage (which varies based on the model) and integrate Intel graphics. Windows 98 Second Edition is the operating system used here.
Recovery Install Process
Recovery is started by booting from the CD. As with other eMachines recovery software we need to have a pre partition disk (does not need to be formatted but must be initalized using the FDISK utility) before we can begin the install.
Had to switch motherboards after the recovery was complete as I got hammered with IOS errors upon bootup, changing to the ABIT LX6 worked much better. Plus it had the advantage of having a similar if not the same chipset as the original motherboard, albeit with no onboard ATI video. The eTower also had a Crystal sound chip onboard along with the software but we can sort of substitute it with the Crystal 4236B ISA soundcard that is supported in 86box. Windows 98 does not seem to come with a driver, so a third party driver must be installed.
Desktop First Boot
Windows 98 boot screen, with the Microsoft logo on the top right.
Looks very similar to the eMachines eMonster that was also a Windows 98SE based install, but we see a lot less software bundled and installed.
The eMachines website, or whats left of it
OEM Customisation
We get a few emachines desktop backgrounds for us to use: E – Windows 98 dark blue background with the emachines logo centred Emachine – the emachine logo in 800×600 Ewall – same as Emachine but zoomed out slightly, also 800×600 Ewalls – low resolution of Ewall, at 640×480
The Musica sound scheme is set as the default with no customer schemes included or set.
Included software
eWare
The eWare bar come bundled and appears at the bottom, but on top of the Windows taskbar. This will show shortcuts to popular internet website in addition to a few adverts right on your desktop. There are dedicated buttons for shopping and search engine sites.
Most of these are custom affiliate links which haven’t been archived by the OldNet, so we just get an error page.
There is also an option to take a survey. There is also some sort of search function that similar to Sherlock that’s included on MacOS 9 that can pull search results from Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista.
Voyeta AudioStation
An audio/MIDI playback application which functions only on Crystal soundcards, at least for the one bundled here. This means it wont function on say a Creative Soundblaster but if we use the Crystal 4236B ISA soundcard in 86Box and install the appropriate drivers (they’re not bundled in Windows 98) we are able to use the application. Again it gives the appearance of a mid 90s home HiFi.
ATI Video Player
A simple video player that makes use of the video acceleration that some of ATI’s RAGE chipsets had supported. 86Box does not exactly emulate a RAGE based chipset but we do have the ATI Mach graphics cards to use instead. It does work somewhat, I can playback AVI files with the exampling being one pulled from Microsoft Garden Home software. The video can be scaled in size and mentions support for MPEG video.
Other Software
Microsoft Works: A basic office Suite, Works 2000 Version 5.0 is installed here. Netscape Communicator: A shortcut exists on the desktop but it not completely installed opening it will launch the 4.6 installer. This will also install RealPlayer G2. AOL 5.0: Also has to be installed from the desktop Adobe Reader 3.01: It’s a bit old as its copyright is dated from 1997 and Reader 4.0 was released in April 1999 Microsoft Money: Finance management software
An early 2000s desktop PC running Windows 98SE, designed as a basic desktop PC for simple web browsing as evidenced with its included software which is geared to the casual home user.
The Pavilion is HP’s brand of conventional desktop PCs tailored to the home market, similar to IBM’s Aptiva and the Dell Dimension line.
According to an archive CNET page, it has a Celeron 500MHz processor with 64MB of memory and a 10.2GB hard drive. For 86Box I used a smaller 4GB hard drive and a slower processor to ease on the emulation. Variations of this model exist with different optical drives, hard drives and processor combinations with some coming with AMD K6 processors and CD-R drives.
Starting the recovery process, which just inflates the OS files from a previous install. There is no instillation wizard, HP just took an install and made a restore image out of it. This does mean a lot of New Hardware dialog boxes will appear due to this, and I had originally intended to use it on a HP Brio motherboard in 86Box, but had great difficulty with resource conflicts and BSoD’s. The Virtual PC profile/motherboard worked much better instead.
With the old VM it even thought the floppy drive controller was a tape drive.
Post Restore
We are booted into a wizard that asks us to confirm the licence agreement, set the keyboard layout, confirm our region and our OEM product key. After a reboot, another wizard starts:
Before we get to the desktop, we are invited to complete the registration wizard where we enter our name, address and our product key which would have been provided in a separate booklet.
And then after that we are given a tour of the operating system, as some users may have been upgrading from a Windows 95 system, or might even be their first PC. This goes around the basic elements of Windows 98 and gives an animated demonstration of navigating Windows Explorer. This also complement’s the built in Windows tutorials for Microsoft.
Desktop
The Windows desktop with some of HP’s customisations. You will notice the HP Internet Manager, which provides easy access to various internet sites and are sorted by categories affirming that this computer was designed for the consumer that wants to browse the internet.
Clicking on any of the links (Such as Shopping) will open Internet Explorer with a customised link to that page. It sort of works in a similar manor to the internet channels included with Windows 98 and is HP’s replacement for the channel bar. Also, when you click on a link, large green text appears to the bottom left of the screen showing which button you clicked. I think this is supposed to replicate the OSD of many TV’s of the 90s where volume would be displayed in that style of display.
Sadly most of these links are long since dead, and the wayback machine does not hold any archived copies, possibly because they were not designed to be indexed. All of them lead to a paviliondownload.com domain.
Whilst we have Internet Explorer open, we can see the Yahoo! Toolbar that was preinstalled. Yahoo was popular at the time and was the common homepage for many users, similar services were AOL, Lycos and AOL. As for Internet Explorer, version 5.00.2614.3500 is installed.
HP have also bundled a few favourites (Bookmarks) of their own with links to their corporate and dedicated Pavilion homepage.
Also another look at the green OSD, it appears when you adjust the volume too. You can actually customise this in the HP keyboard utility. Changes that can be made include the duration of the message, colour and font size.
Themes and Customisation
We can see HP have included a customised desktop wallpaper, in fact there are four of them provided in different colours (Purple, Green & Blue) and HPStndrd which is a lighter version of blue.
HP also added three custom colour schemes that can be selected in the appearance tab, again the choices being Blue/Green and Purple
Also a shot of the system properties box, with the OEM logo and support information.
Bundled Applications & Utilities
Microsoft Encarta 2000 – Preinstalled but requires the Encarta 2000 disc in order to do anything.
Microsoft Money – Finance management software, the 2000 edition is used here.
Microsoft Works – basic productivity suite that includes a word processor, organiser and a spreadsheet application.
Trellix – Some sort of website builder that included a few templates that allowed for users to create and build their own website. I wonder if they will work with WordPress?
Quicken – Basic 2000 comes preinstalled and is a personal finance management utility, similar to Microsoft Money which was also included. I guess here you’re supposed to populate this with you bank statements and recent purchase’s, so you can get a rough idea of your balance history.
There’s a few online services included within the Online Services folder – AOL, AT&T WorldNET, Disney’s Club Blast, EarthLink, GTE Easy Sign Up, MindSpring, Prodigy internet and Compuserve.
Also, a Games and Entertainment category in the Start menu. Here you can find links to RealPlayer G2 and MusicMatch JukeBox which was a popular MP3 music player, along with a link to Emusic.com. There are also shortcuts to Windows games like Solitaire.
There is a My Yahoo program in the Start Menu, clicking on that takes you to an internet connection wizard that is HP branded. Since we are connecting via LAN, we can breeze past this. Dialup internet was a very common way of accessing the internet and would have been the de facto way of getting online, but was also around the era where cable and DSL broadband internet was starting to become mainstream.
HP Help: Help and support centre for novice users. This can give information about your HP system and comes with a link to the user manual. This does require a separate CD that has this contained, it is not saved on the hard disk.
FAX (QuickLink III) Fax application, if you cannot use the built in Windows fax utility.
Lastly we also have McAfee security suite which can be found in the system tools folder. This includes the anti-virus and the V-Shield that acts as a firewall. A necessity as Windows did not come with any virus protection at all, that was left up to the end user or the system builder and may would bundle either McAfee or Norton Security.
The typical Windows 98 experience
Additional Links
Recovery Image – Archive.org – This version is cracked which allows for it to be installed on any PC or virtual environment and is an alternative to a regular install. There are two versions with the November 1999 being linked, an August 1999 version exists but has not been tested, perhaps that’s regular Windows 98FE?
The Acer Extensa 700 was a high end business class laptop released in 1998, and came with a Pentium II processor running between 233 – 300Mhz, offered 32 or 64MB RAM and came with an integrated 56K dial up modem. Optional docking accessories were made available supporting DMI 2.0
Although 86Box has a few Acer branded motherboards, there are a few issues in getting them to run due to the erratic keyboard controller they implement. For these its recommended to use the VirtualPC BIOS which can be found in the miscellaneous section of the motherboard list.
The Restore utility
Originally these restore images were designed to be used on the system they had shipped with, as often they will contain software that is either licenced to that particular machine / model, or uses specific drivers that the hardware requires.
That said, I used a modified recovery image that can be found on the Internet Archive. From the looks if it, it appears a few files on the boot floppy image have been modified to allow instillation on non Acer machines.
A Windows 95 version also exists, I guess this system was released between the two OS’s.
Boot up was pretty straightforward since this is a bootable CD, we are booted directly into the recovery utility where the system immediately begins its restore. This does require us to have initialized the disk in FDISK prior.
Initially the recovery seemed to be going well, and it immediately quit and dumped us to an A:\ prompt. This was a little odd, as normally recovery software informs the user the recovery process has completed and that they can restart their system. Still I rebooted, only to find it was stuck on an missing operating system error. I decided to run the recovery again, thinking maybe it has crashed the first time but to no avail. IT would exit to the a:\ prompt after reaching 100% completion and upon reboot there would be no bootable OS. I fired it up with the Windows 95 boot disk and check to see the status. Running a dir command on C:\ shows no results, and running FDISK showed no partitions, despite me creating and formatting to FAT32 prior to running the software.
It was defiantly writing files to the disk, as I could see the status icons in 86box light up for the hard drive, and the VHD file has grown to around 550MB meaning that files had defiantly been written to the hard disk (VHD image files can be set to dynamically expand as they are used).
This was bizarre and I wasn’t sure what was going on, was the recovery program nuking the partition table? Or maybe the virtual HDD wasn’t big enough and it was overwriting data. Unlikely since I had created 4GB image, and FDISK defiantly detected the full amount, along with the BIOS.
The Solution
I decided to try an alternative method, there is a way to manually invoke the recovery program which might let us see whats going on.
To manually start the recovery process, point your command line to the TOOLS folder, then run GHOSTRO.EXE
To do this you must be in a command prompt that has been booted into the recovery image, this is located in the [BOOT] folder and is the Boot-1.44M.img file
You will need to manually locate the image file, this can be located in the IMAGES\PRELOAD.HDD location on the CD. Its worth noting the CD drive gets mounted to a different drive letter for the recovery only, it follows the standard Windows conventions after restore has completed.
The image field is password protected, the password being ACERMSU in block capitals. This was found in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, located in the floppy image file on the CD 9 located in the [BOOT] folder and is the Boot-1.44M.img file)
You are then given the option to select which drive or partition you wish to recover to
Recovery started again, looking similar to the original process, but this time we are told to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot the system
Look! An OEM customized boot screen for Windows 98. It wasn’t uncommon to see these on Dell, Compaq or TIME PCs of the era.
Since we are running this on completely different hardware, we need to go through the hardware detection process which will take a while and will require a few reboots. Window s98 should have the drivers on the hard disk in CAB form so it should not prompt for the install CD-ROM. It’s a good idea at this point to keep the 86box hardware as simple as possible, don’t install any sound/network cards or SCSI controller just yet.
Never seen this before, appears Windows 98 has to reconfigure itself. I guess this cleans up the old hardware that is no longer used.
Once we have the graphics card drivers installed, we can explore the install fully, An S3 ViRGE or Trio32 is recommended as 98 has built in drivers and support for hardware acceleration, plus you get basic 3D capability though for some serious gaming you will want to give it a Voodoo.
The included background wallpaper, which is an active desktop wallpaper.
The system properties box, showing the OEM logo and support information.
Despite the VM not having IrDA support, we still see the icons for it in the system tray and the My Computer.
A utility to change the modem region, but the system cannot find the included modem.
A full guide to the notebook computer, presented in HTML form. This acts as an user manual of sorts. It seems Acer neglected to update this for Windows 98 as much of the documentation refers to Windows 95 or NT.
A look at the notebook manager which is the program that interacts with the laptop BIOS, Which does not function on this VM sadly, we only have the screenshots from the manual to go by.
Intellisync
Seems to be a PIM (personal Information Manager) management tool which makes sense as this would have been marketed as a business computer. Developed by Pumatech
After loading we have this small window that lingers on the desktop
We first need to create a sync relationship, possibly with an external PDA or drive
The file transfer utility
The support screen, which just gives you the opportunity to register the software and view the readme
Lastly the synchronize tool to connect with another drive. I’m not sure if this is for a specific device that Acer might have bundled with this laptop or if its using a standard protocol to exchange data. This could be intended to sync files with a remote server, like a workplace domain for when the user needs to take their system home for the day. They can then later upload their files back to the server when they come in the next day This was way before the days of cloud sync service like Dropbox or OneDrive You could also use this to backup files to another hard drive, or an external Zip or Magneto optical disk (which 86Box supports)
Trying to backup the entire PC to a 100MB ZIP disk, I assumed it would only backup the documents folder.
AudioRack32
Some soft of MIDI/CD player and mixer that makes use of the soundcard built into the machine. Probably not much use with the SoundBlaster we have instead. The DAT section has me curious, can this play digital audio tapes if one is connected?
MIDI files can be played, but you need to add them as part of a playlist first.
SafeOFF – some sort of utility that refuses to run, possibly an ACPI power standby utility.
And that’s it, very little bundled software with notable exceptions like Microsoft Works or Quicken which seems weird for a business laptop, perhaps they expected the user might already have access to Microsoft Office from their business or workplace?
There isn’t much included in the way of these or colour scheme, overall it’s a nice install of Windows 98 and not bloated like the Sony VAIO was.
The game based on the popular TV show, came out very early in the shows life, along with a hit number 1 single
Story mode does not make for a good game, with the enemies being repetitive to the point of tediousness. The first level starts you off in your home town where you are attacked by deranged Turkey’s (who have the most horrible sound effect, and it’s horrendous if there’s 3 or more enemies present) and throughout the first three levels its just ongoing Turkey’s, with the occasional cow thrown in (only on the PC version, I’ve not seen the cow in the console versions on this level).
A Tank version of the turkey.
On the next stage you encounter Tank enemies which are larger Turkey’s that have the ability to spawn more turkeys that will attack. The tank’s have much more health than regular turkeys and will start to run into the beginning of the level when their health goes below 30%. If a tank manages to make it to the start point of a level, than another stage will need to be completed after you complete the level, where you have to kill the tank enemies that escaped, with a replenished health bar. You will need to do this before they destroy the town, of which depends on how many tanks had escaped. For this reason its a good idea to kill the tanks in the main game, since you are going to have to beat them regardless. What’s frustrating to me is they speed run back to the start of the level, meaning you have to chase them whilst firing, and causing you to backtrack. This makes the level much more tedious since you hare going through areas you have already passed.
The next levels don’t change much, replacing the turkeys with clones, robots, aliens and moving toys, however its mostly the same type of enemy throughout the level which become boring fast. Some of the later enemies becoming literal bullet sponges, taking 20-30 hits before they go down.
The multiplayer on the other hand is rather fun, playing as a regular FPS with a interesting selection of guns. The console versions let you play with two players, whilst the PC version supports LAN netplay. If there is one reason to play this game, its for the multiplayer mode.
The Nintendo 64 version has 17 different maps to choose from, all with a variety of weapons. The PC version has the most maps, with 26 in total This includes all the N64 maps, plus some PC exclusive maps. PlayStation has an alerted version of the multiplayer mode, discussed in its section.
Nintendo 64
The first release of the game, and was the best version of the game until the PC version, however it remains the most accessible. Multiplayer supports up to four players on one console with a range of multiplayer options, including deathmatch. This version also features a high score table and supports 16:9 aspect ratio and a ‘High-Res’ mode with the use of the expansion pack.
Downside to this version is the significant frame drops when there’s a lot of action on the screen, and the short draw distance being disguised as fog.
Below is running on Retroarch Mupen64plus with Angrylion RSP plugin, I do own a copy of the PAL version of the game, but my N64 is one of those models that only supports composite out (No RGB or even S-Video, way to go Nintendo)
PlayStation
Released a year later (1999) and used a revised soundtrack compared to the MIDI N64 version, the cutscenes are captured from the N64 version instead of being pre-rendered on a workstation like many other games of the era. Graphically its a downgrade compared to the N64 version, and the multiplayer only supports two players, known as head to head in this version.
The PlayStation version comes with a head to head mode that has 6 maps, some of which are modified from the Nintendo 64 version. DM1 is based off the Ravine level from the N64, but with some alterations like the removal of water. DM4 is based of the badlands level, DM5 off badlands 2 and DM6 is based off the Gym Class map. DM2 and DM3 look to be unique maps for the PlayStation version.
Captured on Duckstation emulator with bi-linear filtering and rendered at twice the original resolution, with GTE accuracy enabled
Windows
The definitive port of the game, with better graphics and CD audio. Also comes with a proper multiplayer mode that use the Gamespy client (now defunct) to organize games. However there are issues running this game on modern systems, as the game only seems to work on Windows 98/Me systems (95 untested but assumed to work) this could be down to DirectX/Glide support on modern systems.
Below is running on the PCem v17 emulator running Windows 98, emulating a Pentium Overdrive MMX 200Mhz, 3DFX Voodoo graphics, with a Aztech sound galaxy soundcard.
There is also a software rendering mode that renders the games graphics in just the CPU, ideal if you do not have a dedicated 3D accelerator or one that is unsupported. Unfortunately it gives PlayStation level graphics at a weird screen aspect ratio.
Cheats PC
These were hard to find, so I thought i’d put them here
Press the Esc button, select Options and move the mouse cursor to the lower left of the screen and then click, you can then enter the below cheats. Sometimes you may have to move the cursor so it goes off the screen before you can enter a cheat.
One of the Beta 3 builds, closer to the final release build.
Despite being a beta 3 build, the boot screen used is from Beta 2.1
Install
Initial installation, looks very similar to the released product. The welcome program comes with an extra item dedicated to the beta guide which details whats been added in this beta phase.
Desktop
Booting for the first time
This build seems to have issues booting up in normal mode due to a botched device driver instillation when the OS was installed for the first time. To rectify this you will need to boot into safe mode and uninstall the corrupt device, in this case this was the network adaptor which was missing its hardware title. I’m not sure if this is an issue specific with this build or if its due to the hardware PCem is emulating (Could be with the emulator itself)
Tutorial
When Windows 98 boots for the first time, a welcome screen is shown giving the user an option to start a tutorial on showcasing the new features of Windows 98, and a section for users who are new to Windows itself. This is stored on the Windows 98 CD and is required to be inserted to run the tutorial. In this build there are some differences with the images and layout used from the final build.
WebTV Windows
Microsoft acquired WebTV and was intended to be used as an early precursor to the media centre applications as seen in Windows XP Media Centre edition. WebTV for Windows was to bring the WebTV guide interface to the desktop using the computers TV tuner. A TV Guide would be offered which delivers TV listings over the internet, whilst using analogue TV (Digital TV wasn’t widespread yet, US wouldn’t launch its digital terrestrial works from late 1998 onwards and cable slightly later)
Wavetop was a protocol to receive data from terrestrial broadcasts and was an early form of interactive TV. Web pages would be transmitted between the VBI of the analogue signal and would be related to the program being broadcast. A competing system was Intel’s Intercast
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer 4 is bundled with the operating system and was integrated into the explorer shell.
Active Desktop
Active desktop was a feature that allowed a webpage to be set as a desktop background, with clickable hyperlinks.
If explorer crashed whilst active desktop was enabled, an active desktop recovery page was displayed instead which gave the user the option to re-enable the active desktop, this was to prevent explorer from crashing repeatedly should the webpage be the source of crashing.
Windows Explorer
Windows Explorer was updated to be remodeled giving folders a web like view which was meant to be more visually appealing to the end user. In practice this made the explorer shell more sluggish and buggy, taking longer for the computer to rendered the explorer page. This could be toned down to a basic interface view, but the explorer shell would still be rendered in Internet Explore.
Internet Channels
Channels could be opened within a web browser such as Internet Explorer. These acted as an earlier method of RSS where website updates are pushed to the user, rather than having the user checking the website manually
Using theoldnet.com, we can try to pull these websites as they appeared in 1998, which this browse should have no issues rendering. Unfortunately these links seem to be special active desktop links that load an exclusive page which the internet archive has not had a chance to index.
DVD Player
This build features a standalone DVD player application, however this requires a dedicated MPEG2 hardware decoder since CPUs of the time could not decode in real-time. Some video cards also featured partial MPEG2 acceleration and would feature their own DVD player software such as Cyberlink PowerDVD
No hardware MPEG2 decoder detected
Pressing F1 bring up the Windows help, which provides an HTML based help interface. Third party programs can also use this help system.
My Computer, with the channel sidebar enabled.
When Windows explorer crashes whilst active desktop is enabled, the recovery screen is enabled in the event of the web page being the source of the issues. The user can then manually restore the active desktop.
PCem Specs
Motherboard: Intel Advanced/ZP
Processor: Intel OverDrive MMX 200Mhz
Video: ATI Video Xpression (Mach64 VT2)
3D Accelerator: 3DFX Voodoo Graphics 3D Accelerator
Sound: Aztech Sound Galaxy Pro 16 AB
Mouse: Intellimouse PS/2 (Allows scroll wheel to be used)
A SSF (Small Form Factor) desktop class PC powered by the Pentium 2 processor.
Internal view of the GX1 showing the replacement PSU with adaptor
Power Supply replacement
The power supply in this desktop was well over 20 years old, and was in dire need for replacement, since the system had issues remaining stable after adding two PCI cards. Unfortunately with these old Dell Optiplex machines, changing or upgrading the PSU is not an easy task since Dell opted to use a different pinout for their ATX connector, alongside a proprietary connector than provided 3V to the mainboard. Using a regular AT power supply will damage the mainboard since the wiring is completely different, therefore an adaptor is required for a PSU replacement.
One downside to this adaptor is that it adds additional slack to the ATX main power cable, which was already long to begin with, this means I had to tie up the excess cable and shove it under the CD drive.
There are various other Dell models which use this type of power supply wiring, generally models from the Pentium 2 and 3 era. The website linked has a list of affected models that use this type of power supply.
Seriously! Don’t use a regular ATX power supply without this adaptor!
Operating Systems
The Optiplex GX1 had a range of officially supported operating systems to use;
Windows 98
The go to operating system for PC retro gaming. Whilst its not the most stable operating system in the world, its widespread support and popularity and to an extent charm means it deserves an install. The GX1 has native support for 98, and most likely came preloaded on most shipped systems for this model.
Windows NT 4.0
The GX1 had full driver support for NT4, since it was designed as a business class system to be used in offices, however with limited DirectX support, the games we can run on NT4 is a lot more limited comparted to 98.
IBM OS/2
The GX1 has official drivers for OS/2 Warp 4, I’ve not tried installing on this system, however I am interesting in getting it running on the system since I have only used OS/2 on virtual machines or PCem.
Red Hat 6.2
One of the officially supported GNU/Linux distro, at least going by the Dell driver support page, which offered official downloads for the GX1. I’ve not tried installing Red Hat on this system (yet)
PCI Expansion
This system has 2 PCI slots and 2 ISA slots, a maximum of three cards can be installed because the middle slot is shared between the PCI and ISA
A must have upgrade since the USB bus on this system is limited to the 1.1 standard, and maxes out as 12Mbps. VIA still provide Windows 98 drivers for their cards. Plus the 4 extra USB connectors are useful.
Some older motherboards can be picky in regards to the USB chipset used, apparently VIA chipsets are considered more problematic compared to NEC ones, due to the way IRQ’s are handled and reserved with different chipsets.
Surprisingly Windows 98 supported 1394 Firewire/iLink cards, and drivers for 98 exist for this card. By adding a 1394 card, this become one of the faster interfaces on the PC, the other being the USB 2.0 PCi card. The onboard ethernet maxes out as 100Mbps.
Spare ISA Slot
Not sure what to put here, a modem? Gameport card? (useful since I have a Microsoft Sidewinder that has a Gameport)
Compact Flash Card
Could be used in the slave IDE channel with the correct adaptor, in order to add additional storage, or to install another operating system like one of the many supported OS.
ATI Rage II – This is the main graphics adaptor built onto the mainboard. Internally it uses the AGP bus and has 4MB of VRAM with the ability to upgrade to 8MB via onboard memory upgrade.
The graphics processor, with the VRAM to the right along with the VRAM expansion slot. The white IDE looking connector to the top right is the ATI video connector and is meant to connect to an ATI MPEG2 decoder.
This graphics card support the ATI CIF 3D API, which was ATI’s graphics library used with some early 3D titles before the widespread adoption of DirectX. Games such as Wipeout, Tomb Raider used this API. This API was only supported on Windows 95 and 98, it had no support for Windows NT, also later ATI drivers versions remove the CIF support.
There are 3 SDRAM slots available, with one slot populated with a 64MB module, and an extra 64MB module was added to the GX1 to bring the memory up to 128MB. According to the Dell documentation, the system can handle a maximum of 768MB of memory.
Desktop
ATi RAGE utility, showing information about the onboard graphics
wipEout
Oh my… lets try a different resolution
Ah that’s better, Wipeout running at 640×480
South Park
South Park had a PC port, in addition to the console PSone and N64 releases, running in a higher resolutions with Anti-Aliasing
Driver
ATI CIF
I plan on looking at further ATI CIF powered games, in addition to Wipeout listed above (Driver/South Park are DirectX games)
A full list of CIF supporting games is available here
Drew1440: Blog 