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Which PC config for vintage gaming?

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Nicolas 2000

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 23, 2022
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Belgium
I currently have 8 and 16 bit sega, Amiga, PS2, XP PC (fast enough up to half life 2) and modern gaming PC. So I think I'm mainly missing DOS titles not available on Amiga and early Windows stuff that doesn't run on XP.

What config would be best for this stuff, without going too expensive? Games like Slicks 'n' Slide, Doom, Duke Nukem, SimCity 2000, Warcraft, first Need For Speed, Road Rash...

I was thinking a late Socket 7 PC. It apparently can run in 386 and 486 mode by playing with the cache settings, never tried it myself. Win95. Do I also need a certain separate DOS version for dos games or how does that work, with 7.0 being the Win95 DOS? Any specific budget friendly suggestions for hardware?

Ignore the fact that I had a P200mmx pc with 512kb L2 and a Voodoo2 12MB as a teenager and gave it away...
 
Once you get into the 90s, most DOS games are pretty well-behaved and not speed sensitive or version specific. You can run most DOS games directly in Windows 9x, and the rest should run in "MS-DOS Mode."

Pentium 233 with a decent PCI graphics card and ISA sound card is a good choice, but maybe not the cheapest. If you don't have any parts already, an old Dell Dimension or Optiplex with an ISA slot is probably the most cost-effective.
 
Does 233 still exist as socket 7? I thought it stopped at 200 and it was Pentium 2 from there.

I have no parts except for some cd and diskette drives.

I'll see what I can find locally as trade for an Atari 1040ST(e)
 
Pentium MMX 233 is socket 7, but there is also a Pentium II 233.
 
Slower MMXs would be perfectly adequate for most games of mid to late 90s.

You may have problems with games designed with the IBM PC in mind. Clever trickery can slow the CPU considerably but it is difficult to get the CPU running at less than 10% of its designed speed.
 
I'm not looking for those really old games. I've got the C128D for that. So most games would be post the speed issue era (no more turbo button trickery). Wing Commander being the notorious exception, which is no must-have. But I'm looking for games like Stunts, CyberDogs...so not exactly 4.77MHz stuff.
 
For those DOS games sound is where you do the choice, it is probably the most expensive component of everything. A Creative SB ISA may cost as much as the entire PC case.
Try to go for auctions like this one https://www.ebay.de/itm/335815777227

If you're not picky about that stuff any Windows 98-era PC will do. Don't trade in the Atari for that sort of a junk.

I have an unused MMX computer in a AT mini tower, P5A-B board, GeForce2, SD card reader...drop me a PM if you are interested, I ran it with 166MHz MMX and K6 550 (to which is currently set)
 
Do DOS games only work with ISA Soundblaster compatibles? That would make things a bit trickier to find than PCI cards.

Back in my 386 days I only had PC speaker, but I wouldn't mind an upgrade from that.
 
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An alternative approach, which lets me keep my spare ST's for the time being (I have two ST's as spares for the one I use as the heart of my MIDI music studio), is to play around with 68Box first. As I have a very fast modern PC (i9/4070), I could virtually rebuild my old P200MMX with Voodoo2, as well as a nice 486 system that does everything my 386 didn't. That way, I can taste both systems, see if I like either of them, and if I like them enough to consider taking the step to real hardware. The thing is that I already have a ton of old electronics between my computers and synthesizers, and I don't want them to own me. So maybe not jump into the real hardware directly,and first see how much fun those games truly are today.
 
Nicolas 2000 said:
Do DOS games only work with ISA Soundblaster compatibles? That would make things a bit trickier to find than PCI cards.
Click to expand...
It depends.

See here for an example of a PCI card that is known to work pretty under DOS, but even then there are a lot of gotchas.
www.philscomputerlab.com

Yamaha YMF744 PCI Sound Card

The Sound Card shown in the images below is the AOpen AW744 II, a typical PCI Sound Card with the YAMAHA YMF744 chip. Under Windows 98 the YAMAHA YMF744 has compatibility with 3D APIs such as EAX and...
www.philscomputerlab.com

Phil's entire site is pretty good for gaming on older hardware. I'm not much of a gamer, but I like the hardware so I watch his youtube videos pretty regularly.
 
Thanks for the input all! I'll likely first try to play around with 86Box a bit and reconsider whether it is wise to part with one of my spare ST's. I'll also have to research a bit which of my old games would work on the XP computer, to more narrowly define which era I'm currently missing.

So far I've found that HL1, Total Annihilation, AoE 1, Falcon 4, GPL, NFSSE...all can run on an XP system and some even on my current PC (without emulators or VM). So we're looking at the older end of Windows games and DOS games that might fall in between my currently available hardware.
 
I would get DOS laptop, one of this:

Compaq Amada 3500:
www.benl.ebay.be

Compaq Armada 3500 | eBay

Compaq Armada 3500 | Computers/Tablets & Networking, Laptops & Netbooks, PC Laptops & Netbooks | eBay!
www.benl.ebay.be

or (if you don't care about Neomagic video card and proper screen strech)
Sony VAIO PCG-505G:


I have PCG-505G in my collection and like it.
 
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I have seen a few interesting laptops locally, but they don't scratch my nostalgic itch as I had beige towers back then, not laptops.

By the way, I still have the original packaging of the voodoo2 12mb that was in the PC I gave away as a reminder of poor choices made. :cry:
 
Well then, I found a Socket 7 Pentium 166MMX with 32MB EDO RAM. I have already overclocked it to 200MMX (it's not a true MMX if you haven't overclocked it :D) and I had another 32MB EDO laying around, so now it has 64MB. I have the motherboard documentation in German ja. It's a PCChips M538 or really similar. 512KB L2 cache onboard, a bunch of ISA and PCI slots.

It has a 4MB S3 Virge GX and an ISA Soundblaster 16.

Some stuff I'm still looking into:
-the motherboard has a USB 1.0 header. What do I need exactly to give it USB ports? Or would I be better off buying a PCI USB card? Running Windows 98SE by the way.
-It has a 20GB Seagate hard drive, but it only sees 8GB at the moment. What is the easiest way to solve it and how to do it exactly? BIOS upgrade, partitioning...?

Apart from that, the main "task" will be installing my old games. And hunting for someone who wants to trade a good Voodoo card for some excess hobby stuff that I have catching dust. I used to run the Voodoo² 12MB back in the day. Voodoo³ 2000 and 3000 also exist in PCI. This motherboard does not have AGP or PCI-E.
 
One more question. I have the PC hooked up to a (somewhat) widescreen LCD from around 2010, as that was all that I had left in the attic. The PC runs 1024*768. Is there any way to avoid the image from being stretched across the LCD? Or would that be a monitor option, rather than a setting in the PC? I'm OK with black bars left and right.
 
Nicolas 2000 said:
Some stuff I'm still looking into:
-the motherboard has a USB 1.0 header. What do I need exactly to give it USB ports? Or would I be better off buying a PCI USB card? Running Windows 98SE by the way.
-It has a 20GB Seagate hard drive, but it only sees 8GB at the moment. What is the easiest way to solve it and how to do it exactly? BIOS upgrade, partitioning...?
Click to expand...
It looks the motherboard has a standard USB pinout, so you can plug in a cable like this. Since the motherboard has all 10 pins, you will either need a non-keyed cable or cut off pin 10 on the motherboard. Make sure you get the orientation correct. Pin 1 is 5V (red).

Keep in mind USB 1.0 is very slow. Fine for input devices, but for any kind of storage you will want a USB 2.0 PCI card.

Easiest way to get large drive support is probably a Promise Ultra33 or Ultra66 card, which will also improve performance.

Nicolas 2000 said:
One more question. I have the PC hooked up to a (somewhat) widescreen LCD from around 2010, as that was all that I had left in the attic. The PC runs 1024*768. Is there any way to avoid the image from being stretched across the LCD? Or would that be a monitor option, rather than a setting in the PC? I'm OK with black bars left and right.
Click to expand...
Aspect ratio will have to be corrected on the monitor side. Unfortunately not all monitors have this option.
 
Nicolas 2000 said:
One more question. I have the PC hooked up to a (somewhat) widescreen LCD from around 2010, as that was all that I had left in the attic. The PC runs 1024*768. Is there any way to avoid the image from being stretched across the LCD? Or would that be a monitor option, rather than a setting in the PC? I'm OK with black bars left and right.
Click to expand...
It's up to the monitor to determine whether or not to stretch the image to fit the display.
 
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