Some notes from this mornings blast from the past, been a real long time since I heard the Windows 95 start up sound!
Win95A will run Rampage without too much problem but there are more cons than pros in my opnion. To run it you will need a copy of Win95A, the Win9x driver, DX7.0 and thats pretty much it unless you wish to run a few more things noted below. Do NOT install the Microsoft USB upgrade patch as that also adds offical AGP support. I wanted the OS to treat the board like it was a PCI device.
1) DirectX 8.0A (last DX that supports Win95) works but I tried a wrapper or two that requires DX8 but even with DX8 they would not run. If running DX8 you also need to install DCOM95. The AGP info (enable/disable) in the DX control panel was clearly grayed out.
2) If installing 3dfx tools you need Internet Explorer 4.01 with service pack or higher! I had IE5.01 on a disk and was good to go but I did not notice any increase in gamma control under D3D when using the 3dfx tool app.
2) Here is System Shock 2 running under Win95A-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIQ68xNwTE&feature=youtu.be
The video runs for SEVERAL minutes and I'm sorry for the poor quality, I did not know the camera was on the low rez setting. Rather than do a run through again as I'm behind on chores already I'll post this up and try to redo some time in the future. The next week is going to be very, very bad for time and odds are this will be the last major update you will see for a week.
3) Rampage REALLY likes Thief engine games, they ran mostly fine aside from a single crash during testing Thief. Thief the Dark Project is really dark though and cranking the gamma only helped a little. Runs the same under Win95 or Win98SE so no advantage to continue testing under Win95.
Still blue screens under some applications, the blue screen above is a D3D "draw primitives" test which really seems to make the card cranky. Same "OD" error as in Windows 98SE.
