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Retro Gaming PC Build Help

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RobotPirate99

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Joined
Dec 27, 2014
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Ohio
Hello!
My name is Jackson Miller, and I've been interesting in computers for years. Specifically vintage computers. Now, I have basic knowledge on building PC's, but where I'm having trouble at is retro PC's. Specifically Win98 Era.

See, I want to build myself a retro/dos gaming PC, that would of been totally bad-ass back in the day. And, I'm going to admit it. The era I want to build is the era I was born.(99 as in name) Some of you may laugh at the sight of me on a forum such as this one, but nevertheless, I am determined to build a retro gaming PC, as my start into the vintage PC community.

So, here's my question...
Ya, basically, any got any suggestions on parts from the era? I have no idea and can't seem to find much on the internet.

If anyone could help my on my project, It would greatly be appreciated.

Do have yourselves a good rest of the day or night!

~ Jackson E. Miller
 
Well it depends on how much money you wanna invest, what features/specs and periphals you want and how original it should be.

Generally you can even use some older 20 Dollar thin clients as a windows 98 machine. Here in Germany we have that Russian guy who is always selling old thin clients as "Windows 98 gaming machines".

http://www.ebay.de/itm/ALTE-DOS-SPI...-HERETIC-OK-/311240168687?hash=item48775c14ef

The advantage of these is that they barely consume any power, something around 15 watt and at 1 GHz they sure beat your typical Pentium 3-450.

An old laptop for 20 Dollar might also do the trick...



Well but if you want something "really from that era" and with a nice gfx card then maybe it has to be a Pentium III desktop or tower. The Pentium III was introduced February 1999, so prolly the era you're looking for. Originally at 450/500 MHz. The best gfx card of this year would be the Geforce 256, which was released 31st of August 1999 and was the first card with hardware based T&L. 10 million polygons per second and incredibly expensive. However, few games made advantage of the T&L GPU and with faster (pentium III) processors you would get better results with the older Voodoo 2. So much for the most hyped gfx card (And first GPU ever) that year...

In 1999 if you were a cool kid you'd also have a CD writer (they got cheaper that year which means "just" a few hundred bucks...) and the coolest kids of course had a SCSI cd writer which usually yielded less failed burn attempts by buffer underrun.

If you have an ISA slot free then a typical bragging item was the original Sound Blaster AWE 32. Even though already an "older" card (Released in 1994) it had some bragging value since you could throw the SIMM from your old computer onto the card and be like "Ahaha, my sound card has 16MB RAM". Don't tell anyone but for gaming a cheap SBPro compatible generic card would usually yield the same result. But there were a few nice games which had support for the AWE32 - Syndicate wars was one of the titles which really made use of it.
 
You could also try an AMD Socket A board, as Socket A was introduced in 1999. That would get you 600MHz+. That's what my 'Ultimate' Windows 98 machine uses, actually, although mine's a 2003 motherboard (Soyo Dragon SY-KT600 v2.0) with a 2.08 GHz Athlon XP processor (I have read that 2.1+ GHz requires a patch to Windows 98).
 
Intel 440BX chipset on the motherboard, PIII 500 Processor, Gateway "Bonesteel" video card, Soundblaster 16. Can't go wrong there. Cheap, easy to find, uses modern ATX case and power supply.
 
RobotPirate99 said:
Hello!
See, I want to build myself a retro/dos gaming PC, that would of been totally bad-ass back in the day. And, I'm going to admit it. The era I want to build is the era I was born.(99 as in name) Some of you may laugh at the sight of me on a forum such as this one, but nevertheless, I am determined to build a retro gaming PC, as my start into the vintage PC community.
Click to expand...

Vintage means different things to different people; don't worry about people laughing. Everyone is welcome in the hobby.

This site is perfect for building the era you are looking for: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/whats-this-site-about.html Specifically, check the build guides.
 
IBM PC 300, IBM NetVista and Compaq DeskPro are also nice Windows 98 Pentium III machines.
 
Around 2000, I built my first "new" PC - an AMD Thunderbird-based system. 1.4ghz AMD Thunderbird, not overclocked, Asus P5A-B motherboard, a Sound-Blaster Live! Gold card, a whopping 4gb hard drive, my trusty Teac 4x SCSI writer with Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI card, and the original ATI Radeon card, originally running 128mb of RAM. This was housed in a "hydraulic" case which was used in the previous year's Maximum PC Dream Machine. Most of this was purchased at computer shows and ebay, and ran a college kid a pretty penny at the time. But I couldn't have been happier with the results. (I still have this machine up and running to this day)
 
Typical high end system for that year I think, except for the hard drive. New PCs then had around 20GB.
 
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