Retro Review: nVidia Geforce 256 DDR Part 4
6th March 2025
OK, so I'm back after replacing the failed mechanical hard disk with a CF card, formatting it, installing Windows 98, and then installing the games again - phew!
B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th (2000)
Arriving in December 2000, the second B-17 title gave you more of the same, only with enhanced graphics and sound, including support for Aureal 3D. It had these minimum system requirements: Pentium II-300, 128 MB of RAM, DirectX 7.0a, and an 8x CD-ROM drive.
Attempts to run the game were very quickly met with an "Invalid Page Fault" before it even started the intro. I discovered this was caused by me disabling the virtual memory in Windows 98 (because I'm now using a CF card, and Win98's virtual memory/page file/swap file functionality does an absolute ton of writes and reads to the 'hard disk' which can shortern the life of it dramatically). I re-enabled this, and it got a little further - right up to actually entering a mission, and then it dumped back into Windows - no error shown - right before it started to render 3D, so most likely a driver problem. Upgrading to the latest nVidia drivers, version 44.03, fixed the problem.
B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th intro
The Mighty 8th can run in resolutions from 512 x 384 at 16-bit colour depth up to 1280 x 960 at 32-bit. This is set on game startup only. There are some further graphical settings in the in-game menu to set things in either low (speed), medium (balanced) or high (detail), such as object comlexity, environment effect, interior shadows, special effects, etc.
As expected, B-17 ran really well on this PC - smooth graphics and decent frame rates in at least 1024 x 768.
I will try and get some time to give this game a more thorough review at some point. It's very much a resource management game more than a flight sim, but is no less immersive. You can have the computer pretty much control everything and sit back and watch, or you can take control of any of the ten positions in the bomber, play through historical WWII missions, and even switch to fly any of the fighers, both axis and allies.
Need for Speed: Porsche 2000 (2000)
The fifth game in the Need for Speed series, Porsche 2000 (Porsche Unleashed in the US) came out in 2000. When I first ran this last week using the Creative Geforce 256 drivers, the game would run right up to the point of rendering the 3D game, and then dump me back to DOS. The game requires a Pentium II-400, 96 MB of RAM, 900 MB of free hard disk space, DirectX 8, and a 4x CD-ROM drive.
After installing the latest nVidia reference drivers, the game ran without any problems.
Need for Speed: Porsche 2000 intro
In 16-bit colour depth Porsche 2000 can run in resolutions from 640 x 480 up to 1600 x 1200. In 32-bit colour depth, your options are limited to a maximum of 1024 x 768. Even at this highest setting (all these videos had highest graphic details on), the game was very playable indeed. With the ability to save entire replays for later playback, Evolution mode that took you right through Porsche's history, and much more, there was a lot of game here if you're a Porsche fan. Gran Turismo 3 it wasn't, but the PC was certainly starting to overtake the consoles at this point, and was able to run in much higher resolutions.
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640 x 480 x 16, 24 - 38 fps |
1024 x 768 x 32, 19 - 34 fps |
It wasn't until this second run that the game crashed and upon reboot it had defaulted back to a 400 MHz CPU speed - this has been an ongoing problem with this motherboard for some reason - so expect fps to be a fair bit higher when running at 700 MHz+.
Call of Duty (2003)
The first Call of Duty title arrived in October 2003, with minimum system requirements of a PIII-600 or AMD Athlon 600 (Pentium 4 recommended), 128 MB RAM, and a DirectX 9.0b-compatible graphics card with 32 MB of video memory. So my system here just scrapes in here - I'm not expecting great performance but is it playable?
Upon startup with DirectX 7, you get a message 'Your video card appears to be missing one or more features required to run Call of Duty.". Since COD runs on the Quake 3 engine like MOHAA, it should work with any OpenGL-compatible graphics card. It probably just checks the version of DirectX and reports this error unless DX9 is installed, so I will retest once I've upgraded to DX9.