Unraid with PCI Passthru for Windows 98SE Virtualization with 3D Acceleration

Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)

Author

Posts
February 19, 2020 at 12:56 PM #583

Voodoo
Keymaster

I started thinking about this watching SpaceInvader One’s video which shows you that you can do passthru to a Windows 98SE machine. The biggest issues with the 9X operating systems and virtualized gaming deals with the 3D acceleration. This is because DirectX was introduced and then grew up on those systems. We saw DirectX 3 and finally level off around DirectX 9. So all of those games between seem to have the most issues making it hard to virtualize 3d acceleration for them. But…

And that but is exactly what I started thinking…. If you can do a PCI pass thru, there is no reason why you cannot use one of the PCIe x1 riser cards with cables to have a mini box plugging into the back of your Unraid Server that will house a few PCI ports for you to plug in a PCI video card such as the FX 5500 and a Soundblaster 16 to get the gameport for your 9X system.

The PCIe data transfer speeds are:
PCIe x1 v1.0 = 250MBps
PCIe x1 v2.0 = 500MBps
PCIe x1 v3.0 = 984.6MBps
PCIe x1 v4.0 = 1969MBps
and so on

Then we have the PCI data transfer speeds:

PCI 32bit/33MHz=133MBs
PCI 32bit/66MHz=266MBs
PCI 64bit/33MHz=266MBs
PCI 64bit/66MHz=533MBs

Other speeds to note:

SO…. Could we do this? I am going to see if I can figure this out sometime.

This right here would be AWESOME for Windows XP/98 gaming without changing out the hardware around…