General retro PC gaming thread

[Anonymous No.10515056]

Talk about all aspects of retro PC gaming, from the very beginning up to the 2007 retro cutoff point. IBM PC-compatibles only, including Tandy.

To start us off, here's a question: assuming you only want to use real hardware (putting aside how hard it is to do that in current year), how many machines do you need to cover ALL of retro PC gaming, from the very beginning up to the 2007 retro cutoff? What hardware should go into each machine?

[Anonymous No.10515201]

>>10515056
bro i use a crappy 2003 comp for emu it can handle up to ps2 xbox gc.. while you may need something stronger for xbox360 ps3 and wii.. thats kinda when games shit the bed anyways... fk em

[Anonymous No.10515227]

>>10515201
>bro i use a crappy 2003 comp for emu it can handle up to ps2 xbox gc
I call bullshit. Specs?

[Dave No.10515516]

>>10515201
you are a lying fucking bitch lol

[Anonymous No.10515520]

>>10515056
i had that pc when i was happy

[Anonymous No.10515525]

>>10515201
post the specs bitch

[Anonymous No.10515590]

>>10515201
>crappy 2003 comp for emu it can handle up to ps2 xbox gc
lmao it absolutely cannot. Your GPU needs to support integer math for workable GC emulation and that only really became a thing in consumer GPUs in the 2010s.

[Anonymous No.10515879]

>buy a cheap Socket7 mobo without a BIOS chip
>flash a replacement with the ghetto hot-swap trick
>it fucking boots
>but the keyboard is not working, and it's not a key-lock issue
I got so close, and yet so far
probably a loose solder on the AT connector (I hope)

[Anonymous No.10515975]

>>10515201
Epic bait anon

[Anonymous No.10515979]

Is building a PC that can run win98 actually worth it or is it a youtuber meme?

[Anonymous No.10515994]

>>10515979
How would one even build a Win98 PC in this age? Is this with period correct hardware like a Shuttle motherboard and Pentium CPUs, 3DFX cards and the works? or running Windows 98 on a modern PC and praying that there is forward compatible drivers?

[Anonymous No.10515995]

>>10515979
It depends I guess. If you want the authenticity of the experience then it is actually a lot of fun, I've found at least. If you just want to play vidya then there are much easier and cheaper alternatives. You can also do very well with just an old laptop.

[Anonymous No.10515998]

>>10515994
>How would one even build a Win98 PC in this age?
eBay's a rip off unless you're lucky, I've found the best option to go looking around waste electronics bins. I've found so much stuff over the years digging through my local university tech bins.

[Anonymous No.10516003]

>>10515979
>>10515995
I'd say beyond the whole authenticity thing, it's only worth it for playing games made during that awkward period around 95-99 or so where games are an absolute bitch to get working on modern Wangblows, but then again a lot of XP-era games are similarly stricken due to the shitty DRM bullshit that was going around at the time.

For me, the biggest benefit of building a Windows 98 rig would be having proper compatibility with both Windows 9x games and many DOS games without any emulation, provided you're using a sound card with good DOS support, that is. There'll always be the odd speed-sensitive game that won't work beyond a certain CPU speed, but whatever.

[Anonymous No.10516070]

>>10515056
>how many machines do you need to cover ALL of retro PC gaming, from the very beginning up to the 2007 retro cutoff
Realistically I'd say two.
Machine 1
>Super Socket 7, Pentium 1 133MHz
>S3 graphics card and a 3DFX Voodoo 1
>Sound Blaster 16
>32MB RAM and boot from a Compact Flash card
>Dual boot into Win 95 and DOS 6.22 w/ Win 3.11
This should cover all DOS gaming that's not super sensitive to CPU speed and even then there's workarounds, basically any Windows 3.1 games, and most Windows 95 games up until DirectX 8-era
Machine 2
>Any Intel CPU between Core2Quad and Haswell
>Radeon HD 7970
>SSD for a boot drive, max RAM your mobo can do
>Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
>1440p high-refresh rate monitor
>Dual boot into Win XP and 7
With XP gaming you'll get identical compatibility with any GPU made after the Geforce 6000-series or the Radeon 9700. After that it's not dependant on your hardware but rather if drivers still have the correct game-specific fixes in them.
However Nvidia cards don't support high-refresh rates at high resolutions on XP over DisplayPort because fuck you, so I'd recommend a Radeon.
Sound Blaster audio for that sweet EAX.
Dual boot to 7 for games that can make use of DirectX 10 or need some sort of compatibility layer for stuff like GeForce 4-specific features.
Anything that won't run on these two machines will require specific hardware like games that only support Roland audio or need a PowerVR 3D card for hardware acceleration.

[Anonymous No.10516242]

>>10515979
There's a like a very specific period of games between the last DOS releases and the advent of DirectX that the machine would be good for. It used to be you'd build such a system to play the games that relied on glide and shit but nowadays you can even get around that.

desu unless there's a specific release you want to play that you can't get working on a modern system, I wouldn't bother.

[Anonymous No.10516248]

>>10516003
>building a Windows 98
Were there any games that specifically required Windows 98 instead of 95? I don't remember anything straight-up requiring 98 over 95.
>>10516070
>DOS 6.22 w/ Win 3.11
Based, that was the OS of my first PC.
However I'd go for a 150/166 MHz Pentium MMX for CPU.
And potentially add a WaveBlaster 2 (if one can be found for humane prices) to that SB16 (which should be carefully inspected, to make sure the OPL3 chip is a genuine article, rather than the inferior clone Creative used in later revisions).

[Anonymous No.10516253]

>>10516070
I'd say if you want to cover all the really early 80's shit, you'll want a Tandy 1000 with an 8088 running at 4.77 MHz, which would cover all the early CGA DOS and PC booter games as well as games that are best played with Tandy graphics and sound. I believe the early Tandys also had composite out, so it would work for the games that look best on that, I think. This period of PC gaming is so archaic and frankly niche, though, that I don't blame you for not including a compatible rig for it.

[Anonymous No.10516417]

>>10516253
If you absolutely needed to cover every possible DOS game ever made, you'd need a genuine IBM PS/1 and at the point you own one of those it's no longer a hobby but rather a sickness
The, admittedly few, IBM PS/1 specific games that exist actually make use of the special floppy drive in that thing. Unlike a regular IBM PC it has a feature often seen on other machines like the Amiga but never before or since in a PC, it makes use the ready signal.
This means that whereas a regular DOS PC you'd need to always confirm when you've inserted a new disk, the PS/1 instead automatically recognizes when you've done so. So if you're installing PS/1 software on a PC without the ready signal you've no way to signal you've switched disks and are shit outta luck.

[Anonymous No.10516453]

>>10516417
Interesting, I didn't know about this. Are any of those games actually notable?

[Anonymous No.10516483]

>>10515201
Pff, amateur. I regularly emulate Wii games with sufficient framerate on my unmodded C64.

[Anonymous No.10516513]

>>10516453
None of them are worth bothering with, AFAIK all the exclusive stuff is educational games.
You might run into PS/1 specific versions of games that also have regular DOS releases so it's still worth keeping in mind if you're a DOS collector.
Personally I ran into this problem because of pic related. This collection originally shipped with a Disney Sound Source and includes many Disney games that are hard to find packed seperate.
There is a later similar Disney Collection that includes many though not all of the same games which doesn't have this issue.
You can still install this using a PS/1 emulator called IBMulator on a modern computer. But a real non-PS/1 retro PC or DOSBox? Not happening, which sucked for me because I wanted to play these with my Disney Sound Source. Thankfully it's only the installer here that's PS/1 specific rather than the games themselves.

[Anonymous No.10517152]

>>10516513
Cool, so not really worth the trouble unless you have strong nostalgia for those things specifically.

[Anonymous No.10517209]

>>10515520

I had that joystick when I was happy. Wing Commander Prophecy, Hellbender and the Motorcross Madness Demo over and over.

[Anonymous No.10517452]

bump

[Anonymous No.10517928]

>>10515879
I dug up a usb header and it works with a usb keyboard at least

[Anonymous No.10517935]

>>10517928
USB was such a godsend when it arrived.

[Anonymous No.10519564]

>>10516070
>This should cover all DOS gaming that's not super sensitive to CPU speed and even then there's workarounds
I know there's lot of ways to slow down a CPU but can you actually slow a Pentium down to 4.77MHz 8088 levels? I don't think that's possible

[Anonymous No.10519627]

>>10519564
Anything after the 8086/8088 couldn't reach 4.77 MHz anyway. The 286 has a minimum clock speed of 6 MHz and I think the 386 has a min of 10 MHz.

Even if you could clock a pentium down to 4.77 MHz though, it still wouldn't perform the same since it's superscalar.

[Anonymous No.10519638]

You're gonna need a bigger turbo button.

[Anonymous No.10519742]

>>10519627
Yeah, that's what I thought. So you absolutely need something with a 4.77MHz 8088 (IBM 5150, Tandy 1000, etc) if you really want to cover everything

[Anonymous No.10520103]

>>10519742
Yeah, pretty much. Everything above it that's also speed sensitive can be covered by a Pentium of some kind that's appropriately slowed down. I've seen Pentium builds that can be slowed all the way down to the performance of a 386, just right for a game like Wing Commander, while being able to play all the early Windows 9x stuff well. Past that point, like the other anon said, you can usually make do with a cheap semi-modern machine.

If you don't care about speed-sensitive games, though, A fast Pentium III with an ISA slot for a Sound Blaster 16 or AWE32 could, in theory, cover an incredible range (there are some boards for newer architectures that have ISA, but they're rare and niche). Or if you can get a good DOS-compatible PCI sound card, you can use a Pentium 4/Athlon or even Core 2 Duo, and get even greater compatibility (though I'm sure more older DOS games would run into issues here).

[Anonymous No.10520160]

Anyone knows a good database for /vr/ Windows games that covers EVERYTHING including minor freeware and Japanese doujin soft? Or something that specializes on those more obscure PC titles? Gamefaqs doesn't really cover that. Seems like a lot of PC titles have fallen through the cracks as people only focus on major releases

[Anonymous No.10521167]

>>10520103
You can use SBEMU on a newer system if it has issues with DOS sound.

[Anonymous No.10521808]

>>10520160
Mobygames? I don't know if it has everything, but its games list is very large.

[Anonymous No.10521813]

>>10515979
Not if you have to ask. It's only worth doing for the sake of doing it. I very rarely come across a game that doesn't work in Linux, so I imagine these compatibility issues people talk about are just modern Wangblows memes. Might as well just spend the time setting up Linux instead, or a VM.

[Anonymous No.10522334]

>>10521808
Right, I forgot about that one, it is a much better database, thanks. Even has dirty games on it

[Anonymous No.10523036]

>>10515979
If you have to ask, then it's not worth it (for you).

[Anonymous No.10523175]

>>10515979
As others have said, if you have to ask it's probably not worth it for you. If you have a good CPU I suggest playing around in 86Box, it's the closest experience without having a physical machine

[Anonymous No.10523339]

>>10523175
Does 86Box support USB passthru now? I've been using PCem, because I can use a dedicated mouse and keyboard next to my main PC with a dedicated CRT, without it affecting my main PC usage. But as far as I know, 86Box has far better performance and compatibility.

[Anonymous No.10523361]

>>10523339
>Does 86Box support USB passthru now?
I actually don't know about that since I've never tried
>But as far as I know, 86Box has far better performance and compatibility
PCem actually has slightly better performance, but has way less emulated hardware and machine configurations. For example you can't even emulate the MT-32 in PCem. 86Box is also more accurate and it's still under active development with new builds almost every single day:
https://ci.86box.net/job/86Box/

[Anonymous No.10523870]

>>10523361
I love that I can set it to use just about all sound options available with a bit of fiddling. I have a VM set to use a Sound Blaster 2.0 with CMS enabled, together with MT-32 emulation, and another with an AWE32, a GUS, and System MIDI routed to Sound Canvas VA. Now I just need to set up a Tandy machine to cover that niche.

[Anonymous No.10523931]

>>10523870
>System MIDI routed to Sound Canvas VA
Yeah, that's another really cool feature of 86Box, being able to use any soundfont from your host computer

[Anonymous No.10523951]

>>10515201
based ignorant 3rd worlder trying to larp

[Anonymous No.10524172]

>>10515979
If you already happen to possess or can easily/cheaply access most of the parts needed to make it work then yes, if not no you're better-off with GOG releases, fan patches, emulators, and source ports.

[Anonymous No.10524183]

>>10516003
>There'll always be the odd speed-sensitive game that won't work beyond a certain CPU speed

You can always try things like moslo or whatever but I've found all that shit to be garbage that doesn't worth a damn so I just play those specific games on Win98 DOSbox lmfao my Pentium III's powerful enough to do it reasonably-well too, and then there are other games that fall into an unfortunate middle ground like many Origin Systems games wherein you just have to hope and pray a sourceport is available that's compatible with your OS and optimized for your CPU

[Anonymous No.10524191]

Collection chamber is doing their game a day thing right now if you guys are interested, those repacks there and on magipack are convenient if nothing else

[Radiochan !!8R5IcuH3PgQ No.10524214]

>>10515056
Do you count the FM Towns line as IBM compatible since they ran MS DOS and were Intel insides?

>>10515201
why must you make /vr/ into a house of lies?

[Anonymous No.10524253]

>>10524214
>FM Towns ran MS DOS and were Intel insides
Interesting, could FM Towns computers play regular PC games? I'm not op, but I'd probably include it if they could.

[Anonymous No.10524327]

>>10524214
>Do you count the FM Towns line as IBM compatible since they ran MS DOS and were Intel insides?
Isn't that also the case for the PC-98?

[Radiochan !!8R5IcuH3PgQ No.10524408]

>>10524253
it could run MS DOS games and you could install Windows 95 on it.
>>10524327
Yes, indeed, but I had to choose between the FMT and the PC98 and I chose the FMT.

[Anonymous No.10524776]

>86box
>Pentium II build
>SC-55 soundfont
>install Doom
>install novert and run it
>setup sound to Sound Blaster and music to Sound Canvas
>setup controls to WASD
>circle strafe the absolute shit out of the demons while rocking to a killer MIDI soundtrack
Am I doin it rite guise?

[Anonymous No.10524784]

>>10515056
Divine Divinity, Diablo 1 and 2 were peak Win98 "3D" gaming.

i love Desu Sex 1 and style of Unreal 1 engine games, but that shit was ugly and UNREAListic compared to the fake-3D or so called "2.5D".

[Anonymous No.10524789]

>>10524776
>novert
I personally just play with this port instead which has vertical mouse movement disabled:
https://github.com/viti95/FastDoom

[Anonymous No.10524790]

>>10516070
does that include Apple PCs?

[Anonymous No.10524794]

>>10516253
>early CGA DOS and PC booter games
ugly and disgust. and TandySound was just PC Speaker?
>>10516417
you might as well include nippon-only DOS PCs if you wanna go full-autist.

[Anonymous No.10524796]

>>10522334
VNDB.org

and there's a VN thread open right now?

[Anonymous No.10524797]

>>10524794
>TandySound was just PC Speaker?
Not at all. It sounds closer to the Master System chip

[Anonymous No.10524804]

>>10524797
>Master System chip
i hate that too!

[Anonymous No.10524819]

>>10524776
i play DOOMRL with the MIDI version, BASSMIDI with Roland MT32 +SteelGuitar+AcousticDrums soundfonts, and hide behind walls with my shotty.

[Anonymous No.10524851]

>>10524804
Shut up.

[Anonymous No.10524854]

>>10515056
>how many machines do you need to cover ALL of retro PC gaming
Probably 3. Tandy 1000, Pentium 3, and an Athlon 64.
The tricky part is Graphics and Sound Cards for the Pentium 3 and Athlon 64 systems. You have to know what you're doing.

[Anonymous No.10524861]

>>10515056
I built a P2 celeron 433 in the late 90s and it was a pretty decent gaming rig when I added a Voodoo3. What is interesting about my setup is I gamed exclusively on Linux back then. I had Debian 2.1 and I had upgraded from a 386SX 20Mhz with 10MB RAM running Debian 1.3 as there were a lot of games coming out for Linux from 99 on.

I had the obvious stuff Doom, Quake series. I bought boxed Linux NATIVE versions of all of these games:

>Doom II/Final Doom
>Quake 1/2 + expansions
>Quake III Arena
>UT
>Heretic II
>Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold
>Jagged Alliance 2
>Soldier of Fortune

A lot of these were Loki games and I see their website is still up. https://www.lokigames.com/

It was a pretty good time and I also enjoyed some other ported games at the time like Kingpin. Now of course Linux is the best platform for gaming.

[Anonymous No.10525050]

>>10516513
What's a Disney Sound Source?

[Anonymous No.10525054]

>>10524191
Goshdarn I love me some Collection Chamber. He repacks some decent releases.

[Anonymous No.10525062]

>>10515056
Why is 2007 the cutoff year? Seriously...

[Anonymous No.10525120]

>>10525062
mods love PS2 and GBA

[Anonymous No.10525124]

>>10525050
digitalised speech functions, and low quality sound that's worse than 8bit Sound Blaster.

[Anonymous No.10525129]

>>10525050
Parallel port 8-bit DAC. Direct CPU bitbanging.

[Anonymous No.10525135]

>>10525124
You can actually do 48kHz 8-bit with it, the limitation is your CPU speed, original Sound Blaster was limited to 24kHz IIRC.

[Anonymous No.10525139]

>>10525129
Like a Covox Speech Thing.

>here's your sound card bro

[Anonymous No.10525989]

>>10525139
The fuck is that?

[Anonymous No.10526006]

>>10525989
looks like a really crappy resistor-ladder DAC

[Anonymous No.10526012]

>>10526006
That's some techno-grug-tier engineering.

[Anonymous No.10526019]

>>10526006
>>10526012
Was just a prototype, final version is neater.

[Anonymous No.10526029]

>>10525135
>the limitation is your CPU speed
That's also true for PC Speaker PWM sound. Mind you, it only works with real diaphragm speakers, not those shitty piezo buzzers.

[Anonymous No.10526039]

>>10526029
But the PC speaker is only 1-bit.

[Anonymous No.10526061]

Do you guys know about Doom8088?

https://github.com/FrenkelS/Doom8088

[Anonymous No.10526062]

>>10526039
You could do some electronic trickery to force the PC Speaker to output actual sound, but it was immensely taxing on CPU cycles.

https://youtu.be/pzNbGa05dfg?si=zrwLyZJY1MQu26W_

[Anonymous No.10526075]

>>10526039
Bit depth is a thing with PCM, not PWM.

[Anonymous No.10526085]

>>10526061
Interesting, though if it runs like that on a 386, you'll probably run at 1 frame per minute on a 8088
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoGhgmhArKw

[Anonymous No.10526128]

>>10526061
I should finish my 386 fastDoom playthrough

[Anonymous No.10526674]

>>10526029
>Mind you, it only works with real diaphragm speakers, not those shitty piezo buzzers.

every motherboard i had ,the "PC Speaker" sounds were hardwired to those tiny speakers IIRC. plugging in earphones/speakers did nothing.

[Anonymous No.10526687]

>>10526674
Anon means pic related, before the piezo ones became standard.

[Anonymous No.10526924]

>>10524214
No. IBM PC, FM Towns, and PC-98 all use different memory layout, I/O configurations, and interrupt numbering (as well as just general differences in peripherals).

Games could be easily ported among them (which is why big chunks of the FM Towns and PC-98 libraries are IBM PC ports) but you'd have to make some manual code changes and do a little refactoring.

[Anonymous No.10526960]

>>10524796
>covers EVERYTHING
>VNdb
As long as everything you need is just vns

[Anonymous No.10527549]

>>10526924
>IBM PC, FM Towns, and PC-98 all use different memory layout, I/O configurations, and interrupt numbering (as well as just general differences in peripherals).
So this is why 86Box doesn't emulate those machines

[Anonymous No.10527710]

>>10526960
it pretty much covers all the eroges. and bishojo games, including RTS and shooters with cute anime grills. it's not just NOVELS, AI chat bot.

[Anonymous No.10527740]

>>10526687
Yeah, those. Unfortunately, by around 2003, motherboards started dropping diaphragm PC Speaker headers, since they came with a piezo buzzer as standard. Case manufacturers stopped mounting them as well (though you could usually find some brackets tucked away in a corner).
I don't think my Abit AN7 had a PC Speaker header anymore, so it couldn't output native PWM (well, it technically could, but it would sound like shit out of the buzzer).

[Anonymous No.10529273]

bump

[Anonymous No.10529332]

>>10515979
I would like to put together a Windows 98 PC specifically to play Mechwarrior 3 and 4 with a Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro. It used the game port, and won't work with USB adapters because it made non-standard use of the game port. The FFB Pro 2 uses USB but is not as good. Might be better off tracking one of those down instead though, I have found out very quickly that I don't know jack about building old PCs, back then I was in middle school and just got pre-built bullshit from Gateway/Dell.

[Anonymous No.10529584]

>>10529332
I would say buying a complete unit might be better that getting separate parts and assembling, at least you should have all the cables you need(fuck CD-Audio cables in particiular)

[Anonymous No.10529782]

>>10529584
Good idea, buy a unit close to the specs you want and add or swap any hardware you wish
Cheaper too

[Anonymous No.10529881]

Running windows xp
Gpu : nvidia quadro

[Anonymous No.10531110]

>>10529881
It's interesting that there are some GPUs in the Quadro and FireGL line that are lowkey pretty good for retro PC gaming since they're not as well known as their GeForce and Radeon counterparts, which also makes them cheaper to acquire.

[Anonymous No.10531572]

>>10531110
I think i upgraded the cpu also it was just one small step up. Intel 4400 i think.
Maybe G4560 ? I dont remember . But its good. It runs any game i have well. I just remembered recently playing max payne and igi2 also command and conquer.

[Anonymous No.10533031]

>>10515056
I have a few time machines in the works, but at minimum my guess is 2 or 3 to cover FAT32 and NTFS times. My issue is finding someone that repairs CRT monitors or how to search for services in capacitor replacement.

[Anonymous No.10533037]

Would retro games and early directx titles run fine with a GTX 900 graphics card and Windows XP or do I have to downgrade?

[Anonymous No.10533091]

>>10515879
>>10517928
It genuinely weirds me out seeing Socket 7 computers with USB. Sure it only showed up at the end of the socket's life, but having it on there at all.
I always mentally consider it Super Socket 7/Slot 1 thing

[Anonymous No.10533097]

>>10515979
If you've got to ask, you're likely just better off with DosBox-X and 86Box.
I'm not even saying that to be a shit or put you down, they're both great software but unless you know WHY you're putting one together or have a specific use case, you likely just wont befit from it.

[Anonymous No.10533117]

>>10533037
Yes, some games might have problems, like missing effects, etc

[Anonymous No.10533120]

>>10533037
>>10533117
Nothing a wrapper can't fix though

[Anonymous No.10533126]

>>10533037
It should work plenty fine for 99% of things, the only issues you should be running in to is the lack of dithering support and a few other small things, but this is missing on every Nvidia card after the FX series.
So if you want the /true/ experience, you'd want a GeForce 2 though the FX line, or an ATi up to the 9000 series.
But this is really nitpicky, the 900 series of cards will still do very well on XP

[Anonymous No.10533127]

>>10533031
64bit Server 2k3?

[Anonymous No.10533161]

>>10527549
Yup, but DoxBox-X does have fairly solid PC98 support

[Anonymous No.10533381]

>>10533127
Windows 2003 is a lot closer to XP. A nice in-between from XP and Windows 7.

[Anonymous No.10533786]

i guess it's unrelated to gaming but i feel good about the win98 system i built for capturing/saving some old home movies. i guess i also used it to play the original need for speed se with a thrustmaster steering wheel

intel se440bx-2
pentium 3 katmai 500mhz
128mb ram
ati rage 128
3com etherlink 10/100
"RAFFLES NTSC" capture/tuner pci card i found in the garbage
3gb system hdd
40gb data hdd
capture card hooked up via composite to a sony ccd-v8af
cigarette yellowed pc clone case
packard bell crt from 1993, running out of range at 800x600 makes the picture tall and narrow

running virtualdub it has barely adequate cpu, pci bandwidth, and disk bandwidth since huffyuv is the only compresson it's powerful enough to run realtime without dropping frames, and 5 min of video ends up being almost 2gb. just about fills the 40gb drive capturing an LP tape, and then takes another hour at least to ftp over to my main machine for re-encoding

[Anonymous No.10534213]

Trying to remember the names of some games I had in the 90s. I remember it was a 2d game with digging for treasure. I remember it having gnomes ir dwarves or goblins, and mineshafts and digging for stuff. I used to play it on the family PC when we were kids. So... We gad it in 1992-1999. Cant recall if it was for windows or dos.

Anybody remember wtf it was called?

Thanks.

[Anonymous No.10534365]

>>10533381
>>10533127
ok... how is a Server OS gonna run XP or Win7 games? AFAIK they would be detected as WinNT machines by games?

[Anonymous No.10534382]

>>10534365
It's just Windows XP with server features. The games themselves don't even care. Same way most XP era games run on Windows 10 too.

[Anonymous No.10535295]

>>10533031
Imagine trying to use some chink motherboard.

[Anonymous No.10535365]

I kind of want to get a nostalgiafriend PC set up to run DOS games. How much am I looking at spending for a decent-ish setup?

[Anonymous No.10535386]

>>10527710
>it's not just NOVELS, AI chat bot
https://vndb.org/d2
Only non-VNs you see there are VNs that have some non-VN elements. They still need to rely on a VN story structure. AI chat bot would know that so you don't deserve to get called that, retarded meat bag

[Anonymous No.10535393]

>>10535365
Zero idea since you never specified what era of setup you're aiming for.
8088 DOS 3.0?
486 Win 3.1?
Pentium 2 Win98?
Pentium 4 XP?
All of which have different price points and different hardware needs. XP machines being far the most dirt cheap to do since you can find Core2 boards practically for free to do those with.

[Anonymous No.10535552]

>>10535393
How much do you think I'd wind up having to pay for a middling Windows 98 setup?

[Anonymous No.10535572]

>>10535552
Do you know how to put together the machine at all or are you relying entirely on someone else to do it for you?
If you're relying on someone else and you want good hardware it's going to cost you.

[Anonymous No.10535710]

>>10524784
>Desu Sex
Let's test if there's a filter for Deus Ex.

[Anonymous No.10535859]

>>10535552
What makes it worth hunting down original hardware as opposed to something newer, either through compatibility layers (or dosbox for dos games), or setting up a VM? I still play a lot of the 1990s and early 2000s PC games I had as a kid, but I didn't keep my old hardware over the years, it's been gradually replaced with newer machines. Is it mostly for the simpler game setup process and CRT displays?

[Anonymous No.10535865]

>>10535386
>AI chat bot would know that so you don't deserve to get called that, retarded meat bag
wot? you're admitted you're a bot . and you're pretending to be offended?

[Anonymous No.10537298]

bompo

[Anonymous No.10537346]

>>10534213
Diggers. Perhaps diggers 2

[Anonymous No.10538256]

It's funny that 1080p being the standard "full HD" resolution tricked people into thinking that one simply has to choose between correct aspect ratio and perfect scaling of 320x200 DOS games on modern square-pixel displays, when in fact all you need is 120 more rows of pixels to do both.

[Anonymous No.10538258]

Is there an advantage to spoofing CompactFlash cards as internal drives by force-installing that Hitachi Microdrive firmware over their standard drivers?
Windows XP still doesn't like using them as boot drives (been trying to trick it into booting from one, no luck yet), but they show up as regular drives instead of removable.

[Anonymous No.10538272]

>>10538258
Depends on the card, some work better than others. Might depend on the controller too. I didn't have issues using a CF card for XP, but I can't remember the brand I used.

[Anonymous No.10538295]

>>10538272
I'm currently trying with a 32GB Sandisk. I attempted some tricks to flip the removable media bit (should improve compatibility according to some old forums), but neither BootIt nor the old Sandisk fixed drive conversion utility seem to work (according to some users, Sandisk disabled bit flipping after said utility got leaked on the net).
Apparently Transcend cards are fully-compatible with fixed drive conversion, but I haven't found any locally for sale.

[Anonymous No.10538392]

>>10535859
There's a few old graphics and sound standards that haven't been kept around - pre-DirectX 3D apis for some games that require special 3D cards and also EAX shit for sound that a lot of early-to-mid 2000s PC games used.

For DOS games, it's usually sound because SoundBlaster and AdLib emulation don't sound the greatest in DOSbox. And also the handful of games that don't behave correctly when your CPU is too fast.

[Anonymous No.10538396]

>>10538392
Aureal A3D, my beloved ;_;

[Anonymous No.10538402]

>>10538396
Seeing so many of my friends claim that they can't hear the difference with the dingy built-in sound hardware on modern PCs vs a proper high-quality DAC makes me believe that PC gamers deserve the shit sound we get in games nowadays.

[Anonymous No.10538415]

>>10538396
too bad the Vortex 2 cards make Voodoo 2 seem affordable, and Vortex 1 cards are not that great (I have one)

[Anonymous No.10540149]

>>10538415
True, it's ridiculous

[Anonymous No.10540585]

>>10538295
Update: I eventually managed to boot from it after doing a bunch of hoop-jumping, however I've had to install another XP version on it (probably MBR-related shenanigans), so I've wasted a bunch of space, and it keeps prompting me to select XP version at start.
Is there an easy way to remove one of the XP versions without having to wipe the drive (which would be counter to my previous efforts)?

[Anonymous No.10541550]

>up to the 2007 retro cutoff point
>Mass Effect is retro according to nu rules

[Anonymous No.10541584]

>>10541550
It's not. It was never released on the OG Ecksbawx. Read the rules more closely.

[Anonymous No.10541590]

>>10541550
By that logic, Crysis would be retro too, but it's not, because it doesn't run on PC hardware from 2001 or older.

[Anonymous No.10541635]

>>10541590
Yeah, Crysis being "retro" is the oddest and most glaring consequence of the rules as stated, but people often sleep on shit like Unreal Tournament III and, to a lesser extent, The Orange Box collection. Those are old games now, but can we really say they're retro in any sense? I'd understand 2007 being the cut-off point for consoles since that's pretty much the last year anything of note came out on them besides shit like Persona 4 on PS2, though I would've gone with 2006. But on PC it feels more questionable. Even 2004 has Half Life 2, Doom 3 and Far Cry, which had Xbox ports but were easily more at home on 7th-gen hardware.

[Anonymous No.10541652]

>>10541635
No, it's hardware until 2001 and games until 2007. Homebrew after 2007 is a gray zone.

[Anonymous No.10541858]

>>10534365
Very few games actually give a crap about what your operating system is called. Functionality wise there is no difference between client and server versions of windows, they are built from the exact same code, server just has a few extra installed components.

[Anonymous No.10541891]

>>10541858
Didnt the old server versions of windows leave out some home/pro features? I remember one of them having less screen settings on the server version or something.

[Anonymous No.10541916]

>>10541584
>It was never released on the OG Ecksbawx
That doesn't mean anything. By that logic you wouldn't be allowed to talk about Half-Life 2 if it didn't get an OG Xbox release

[Anonymous No.10541927]

>>10541891
In the case of win2k3, it could run games fine. You did have to enable it though, graphics acceleration was disabled by default. I assume because you don't want a server crashing, which is something graphics drivers are notorious for.

[Anonymous No.10541947]

>>10541652
>hardware until 2001
So basically, up to a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 with either a GeForce 3 Ti500 or Radeon 8500. What's the most demanding game you could play on such hardware, I wonder? It'd have to be limited to D3D8, so I can't imagine it would be much beyond 2004 or so.

[Anonymous No.10541983]

>>10541947
Actually, scratch that, I forgot Thunderbird Athlons shit all over Willamette P4s, let alone the Palomino Athlon XPs that came out later that year.

[Anonymous No.10542790]

>>10533091
There was fuckall to plug into them at the time but people were excited to get away from a million and one standards for peripherals. So it sold hardware even that early.
I have a FIC PT-2006 board that not only has headers for both USB and a PS/2 mouse, but the AT connector also overlaps with a set of working pads for a PS/2 keyboard. Pic related, the 4-wire ribbon just above the AT port was hand soldered to said pads and goes to the same slot cover that houses the PS/2 mouse port.
With nothing plugged into the AT port it's a fully PS/2 + USB socket 7 machine.

[Anonymous No.10542801]

>>10538392
>SoundBlaster and AdLib emulation don't sound the greatest in DOSbox
i never heard real Adlib, but Soundblaster and its clones never really sound that good anyway? esp if you bought one of those budget prebuilds that came with an 8bit Soundblaster.

[Anonymous No.10542802]

>>10541635
>>10541590
>2007 being the cut-off poin
yeah that's fugging weird and the mods never thought this out. many of the 2007 games won't work on 2001 hardware or older. unless by "hardware" they meant "platform", then any hardware that can install WinXP would count as /vr/.

[Anonymous No.10542810]

>>10541947
>It'd have to be limited to D3D8
>>10541983
still greatly limited by GPUs. so most "rice" game would be Deus Ex 1 and other Unreal 1 engine games? and Quake 3.

[Anonymous No.10542830]

>>10541927
>because you don't want a server crashing, which is something graphics drivers are notorious for.
WinNT in this era tended to shove everything including its display system into kernelspace because Microsoft was scared shitless of Linux eating its lunch in the server space (which happened anyway). That's why you got shit like BLASTER where crashing the RPC system in XP could take down the entire operating system.

[Anonymous No.10542868]

>>10541947
>>10542810
>>10541983
Half Life 2, which is /vr/ anyways. It would cap out at games around the same time, mostly because API limitations.

[Anonymous No.10542878]

>>10542802
>many of the 2007 games won't work on 2001 hardware or older.
That's the point...

>unless by "hardware" they meant "platform", then any hardware that can install WinXP would count as /vr/.
Yes, platform, same applies to consoles. But in this case, the PC platform ends in 2001. Imagine no new PC hardware was never made after 2001, if that helps.

[Anonymous No.10543023]

>>10542868
Doom 3 would run like absolute dogshit on even the very best 2001 hardware. Even something like UT2004 would struggle for that matter mostly due to the GPU. 2004 "benchmark" games really want 2002/2003 GPU hardware like the 9700 Pro at the very least.

[Anonymous No.10543058]

>>10543023
Doom 3 would run easily over 30 FPS on a GF3 Ti / P4. Same with UT2k4. So I'd say they count. I was stuck with aging hardware at the time and remember.
Check gameplay videos on said hardware if you don't believe me.

[Anonymous No.10543108]

>>10543058
Yeah, at low settings with shadows turned off, and this only with the original release of the game before updates. The Xbox's Nvidia GPU is actually better than the GF3 Ti500 and can better handle the game with shadows, though with the caveat that it only runs at 480p. So indeed, it is playable, but it's not really what the game wants.

[Anonymous No.10543140]

>>10542830
Linux has nothing to do with anything.
The only drivers that are relevant to servers, are disk and network drivers, which have always been in kernel space.

[Anonymous No.10543864]

>>10543140
The window manager is also in kernel space for XP.

[Anonymous No.10543886]

>>10543864
Yes, but that is not in any way relevant to competing against linux servers, as the gui is not important for servers.

[Anonymous No.10543894]

>>10543886
>the gui is not important for servers
All interaction with Windows servers prior to the Win7 era happened via terminal services which ran over RDP, necessitating the window manager. Administering the server itself required the window manager.

[Anonymous No.10546294]

What's your favorite sound card?

[Anonymous No.10546510]

>>10546294
for ISA I mainly use SB clones, OPL-3Sax in two win98 builds and an old OPTi in my 386
the only Creative ISA card I have is a regular AWE64(ct4520)
for pci I use the Live! in WIn98 and Audigy 2ZS for XP

[Anonymous No.10546524]

>>10546510
I bought the cheapest wavetable module from Serdashop

[Anonymous No.10546543]

>>10541550
It only came out on PC in 2008. People forget it was a 360 exclusive
So no, the rules rule it out

[Anonymous No.10547647]

>>10546524
Why are they called wavetable, anyway? From what I understand (which admittedly is limited), wavetable synthesis refers to a wholly different type of synth, whereas what sound card "wavetable" boards do is sample-based synth, or something like that.

[Anonymous No.10548396]

>>10535295
Most the parts that would work in the time machines are above 7nm which China could provide at a low price. I'm not looking to do any AI work, and I couldn't afford quality parts designed by better engineers. It is shameful to use poverty AMD and Chinese parts, but inflation has been kicking me in the butt.

>>10534365
I would prefer something better than XP home so it could utilize more than 3.6GB of RAM that those mobos utilize, but MS no longer offers the editions I want anymore. I figure the quad-channel should help in bandwidth. If I could get a XP Pro license without calling some MS service center to activate, maybe these could be utilized.

[Anonymous No.10549570]

>>10533031
>how to search for services in capacitor replacement.
Learn how to do it yourself otherwise it'll be more costly than just buying a new board.

[Anonymous No.10549578]

>>10541550
>>10541590
I think the retro line should be MW2. idk why but I feel like 2007-2008 games still had a tiny bit of that retro feel left

[Anonymous No.10549654]

>>10515994
If you don't care about having period-correct hardware then a Windows 98 build is cheap and easy. Something like Socket 754 has full Windows 98 support, isn't in demand amongst retroomers, works just fine with modern PSUs and Windows 98 will fly on it. Same cooler mounting as AM2/AM3 as well, so finding a good cooler isn't a pain in the ass like it is for something like Socket 478.

Obviously if you want a 3dfx card for Glide support you're going to pay through the nose, but otherwise an e-waste-tier GeForce4 MX 440 will be fine for Windows 98 gaming, or an FX 5500 if you want DX8 support. Anything newer than that you may as well just run on modern hardware, or at least XP where you have infinite hardware choices.