ATI Rage XL

[kbuzz]

Trying to find a pci video card I can use with an ibm thinkcentre with pentium 4 w/ HT. Used to have a 9250 but can't seem to find any at a reasonable price.

I didn't see it listed so I'm guessing it wouldn't work. But I did see a lot of NOS Ati Rage XL on ebay and aliexpress so I figured I'd ask if it's at all possible to run groovymame/groovyarcade with this card. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002400968995.html

[lilshawn]

a p4 should have at least an AGP slot. i'd seriously check into it...any PCI video card is not going to perform very well.

that said, a rage 120 pro which is AGP 4x will have at least 2x the performance of an XL over pci in just memory speed access alone... and should be available for the same price. whether or not this is going to affect you depends on what kind of games you plan on playing on it and how it utilizes the video card.

https://technical.city/en/video/Rage-128-PRO-vs-Rage-XL

[Zebidee]

a p4 should have at least an AGP slot. i'd seriously check into it...any PCI video card is not going to perform very well.

Pentium 4 with HT mostly required LGA775 or later motherboards, and they used PCIe slots pretty much exclusively from then on.

I've never used an ATI Rage card for retrogaming but I recall people complaining about them a lot. You can get ATI X300-X1050 cards in PCIe formats pretty cheap. They come with as little as 64MB RAM, but that is enough for most MAME games. Be aware that these older cards are not supported by latest versions of MAME (after MAME 0.182 iirc) under windows (limited to DirectX 9), and if you use windows will be limited to XP if using CRT_emudriver.

I'd try looking for an ATI HD6XXX+ card as these are fairly low-power but have plenty for MAME, are easier to install and supported by Win7+, latest MAME and CRT_emudriver.

[kbuzz]

Thanks guys. This particular IBM Thinkcentre M52 doesn't have AGP or PCIe (at least not in the way that we need).

It uses classic PCI with a riser card.



There is a non-standard PCIe 1x slot on there. Originally these were used with IBM's PCIe dvi cards but probably no use to us here.

I've used a similar setup for a GroovyMame Arcade cabinet build with the PCI version of the ATI 9250, but they seem to be in short supply these days.

[lilshawn]

well, it's non standard in the sense that you can only put a 1x videocard in there.

the 9250 is about 4 generations above the rage XL (rage 7 vs rage 4) and about 10x the performance. the DDR memory it uses really helped with that.

the GT610's and GT710s are available as a 1x slot card. should be able to score one of those for 50 bucks or so... and their performance will be about 50x for the 610 and somewhere around 98x for the 710. (synthetic benchmark test)

[Zebidee]

I suggest you get another computer and a newer video card. It doesn't have to be much newer. Core2Duo with PCIe would be enough. Not expensive. Otherwise you are relying on older hardware and software (that is not longer supported) to emulate even older hardware and software.

I've actually used IBM thinkcentre M52 for arcade before, long ago, but it was the desktop version that supported a proper PCIe card iirc. The SFF version doesn't.

If you can step up to Windows 7, you'll be able to use the latest CRT_emudriver and Groovymame with a much wider range of cards produced over the past 10-15 years.