Retro PC Gaming?

[Shabba]

Yes, I am reviving this thread, but I have a good reason.

I bought an old Pentium II 350 mhz 256mb ram machine many years ago at a yard sale for $5. I've recently gotten it out, purchased a decent keyboard/mouse/flatscreen at the thrift store (all told, I have $35 invested) and have started getting the machine back in order. Built in 1999, it has an old 8 GB HP tape drive for back up, an Iomega 250 zip drive, 4.1 GB maxtor HD and the obligatory 3.5 disk drive. It had XP professional on it and 2.5 gigs worth of ads and malware on the HD. I wiped it clean and reinstalled XP home SP3. The little machine is humming along and with a wireless USB thumbdrive, I have internet access as well.

I intend to use this computer solely as a gaming machine for my vintage collection (think Duke Nukem, Myth, World of Warcraft II, Quake, etc.). As I would like to also use the machine for even older games like Might and Magic or Ultima, am I barking up the wrong tree with XP? I know that XP does not support formatting on a 5.25 drive, but it will read and write. I intend to put a working 5.25 drive in the machine and play the older games. Will these games even work in XP? What about using Windows 98 and still having USB support so I can still go online?

No, I do not want to emulate. The whole point of this is to pull out my old floppy discs and cd-roms and play the games as they were 20 years ago. I use dosbox on my desktop now and MM3 is great fun, but there is a lot to be said for playing that game (and others) straight from the disks.

[CRTGAMER]

I bought an old Pentium II 350 mhz 256mb ram machine many years ago at a yard sale for $5.

I intend to use this computer solely as a gaming machine for my vintage collection (think Duke Nukem, Myth, World of Warcraft II, Quake, etc.). As I would like to also use the machine for even older games like Might and Magic or Ultima, am I barking up the wrong tree with XP?

Will these games even work in XP? What about using Windows 98 and still having USB support so I can still go online?

No, I do not want to emulate. The whole point of this is to pull out my old floppy discs and cd-roms and play the games as they were 20 years ago. I use dosbox on my desktop now and MM3 is great fun, but there is a lot to be said for playing that game (and others) straight from the disks.

Great price on the PC! Most Win95 games will work in XP in compatibility mode or you can use Win98 SE which supports USB. Getting the driver to work in the older Windows for the wireless online USB driver might be an issue though.

Since it is an older PC which will work with older DOS Video and Soundcard drivers, maybe install a removable IDE drive bay? You can have a separate boot hard drive just for DOS. The separate DOS drive can even be select booted with the CHOICE command in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files for EMS, HIMEM or no Memory Management Clean Boot depending on what a particular game might need.

One thing nice about DOS Floppy Drive games is most of them are a full install to the hard drive. Once installed, the floppy can be put away. The installed games can also easily be backed up to a CDR since the entire game resides in its own directory and not partially buried in a Windows system file. A good preventative measure utilizing the CDR backup since magnetic floppies are not as durable.

[Shabba]

I bought an old Pentium II 350 mhz 256mb ram machine many years ago at a yard sale for $5.

I intend to use this computer solely as a gaming machine for my vintage collection (think Duke Nukem, Myth, World of Warcraft II, Quake, etc.). As I would like to also use the machine for even older games like Might and Magic or Ultima, am I barking up the wrong tree with XP?

Will these games even work in XP? What about using Windows 98 and still having USB support so I can still go online?

No, I do not want to emulate. The whole point of this is to pull out my old floppy discs and cd-roms and play the games as they were 20 years ago. I use dosbox on my desktop now and MM3 is great fun, but there is a lot to be said for playing that game (and others) straight from the disks.

Great price on the PC! Most Win95 games will work in XP in compatibility mode or you can use Win98 SE which supports USB. Getting the driver to work in the older Windows for the wireless online USB driver might be an issue though.

Since it is an older PC which will work with older DOS Video and Soundcard drivers, maybe install a removable IDE drive bay? You can have a separate boot hard drive just for DOS. The separate DOS drive can even be select booted with the CHOICE command in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files for EMS, HIMEM or no Memory Management Clean Boot depending on what a particular game might need.

My thinking was exactly that: perhaps the drivers would be an issue with WIN98. I want to have a machine that can do it all that has its foot in the past and now. I should mention that I also have an old Packard Bell 80386 that I currently play my old 5.25 games on with DOS. The 10 mb HD is fried so I just boot from my DOS disk. It would be nice to be able to have one machine for it all.

[Shabba]

One thing nice about DOS Floppy Drive games is most of them are a full install to the hard drive. Once installed, the floppy can be put away. The installed games can also easily be backed up to a CDR since the entire game resides in its own directory and not partially buried in a Windows system file. A good preventative measure utilizing the CDR backup since magnetic floppies are not as durable.

Also true. When I went to the thrift store, I also found a 16x DVD-RW drive for 5 bucks, which I included in the price. It hooked right up and works perfectly, so I can burn back ups for the games.

I was looking at Quake this morning and it said under "game requirements" that it needed 80 MB of hd space. That was a titanic amount back then...

[RyaNtheSlayA]

I'd definitely go for Windows 98 SE. XP wont support many DOS games well, but, there's not a huge reason to just use DOS on that machine either.

Some software designed for 386 might not run correctly on that machine anyway FYI. Speed-limiting code wasn't included in all games for quite a long period of time. That machine should handle just about everything just fine though.

I have a VooDoo 1 card laying around here somewhere if you're interested in getting Glide 3D support in your machine.

[gtmtnbiker]

What about the virtualisation in Win7? More and more older games refuse to run in Windows v5.1 and later. Does virt. support Win9x?

Of course if you get a quad core CPU it's pointless to stick to XP. The more advanced your new PC is, the better it is to stick to modern OS iterations.

I just recently tried Lode Runner Online (Win95 game) in Win7 virtual PC and it was crap. The problem was that every few seconds, there was a brief slight pause. There might be some tweak that I could do to resolve the issue but I haven't investigated.

[Shabba]

I'd definitely go for Windows 98 SE. XP wont support many DOS games well, but, there's not a huge reason to just use DOS on that machine either.

Some software designed for 386 might not run correctly on that machine anyway FYI. Speed-limiting code wasn't included in all games for quite a long period of time. That machine should handle just about everything just fine though.

I have a VooDoo 1 card laying around here somewhere if you're interested in getting Glide 3D support in your machine.

I might take you up on that.

I went to the thrift store again today...found a Bigfoot 8GB HD for $1. I bought it thinking that for a buck it would be worth it...yep. HD works. I installed it in the retro machine today and it's updating XP as I type this. I think I'll use the older 4GB as a slave drive or pop it in my old 80386.