Specs of XP machines

[Anonymous No.7897327]

What were gaming pc specs like in the early 2000s? Do you remember yours? I have a old laptop I’m trying to use for a dedicated late 90s early 2000s gaming machine.

it has 512 my of ram (should i upgrade to 1 gig or would it be useless? Star Wars battlefront 2004 says it only needs 256 mb, doom 3 says something like 312 mb of ram)

the laptop has a pentium 4m cpu which shows up as 1.6 ghz/ 1.20 ghz. Not sure what that means or what speed it normally would run at.

the graphics card is a GeForce 440 go. Which is a 64 min graphics card. Seems to only support direct x 7 but I’m not sure.

anyway how do these specs hold up for the age? Do you remember your specs from your late 90s early 2000s machine?

[Anonymous No.7897347]

>>7897327
I'd go for a faster CPU but its fine for the late 90s/really early 2000s kind of stuff. Having a perfect Windows XP system is kinda annoying because XP lasted so long you have hardware that doesn't display older games properly. Yours should be fine but people going out and making Core Duo/8800GTX machines won't have some games like Black and White render properly.

I had a Pentium 3 with an ATI 7000 and 512 megs of ram. Worked perfectly fine until Age of Mythology started making it crash all the time.

[Anonymous No.7897359]

you need at least a ryzen 3600 for 90s dos games

[Anonymous No.7897360]

>>7897347
Thanks for the reply. does the 1.6 /1.2 ghz spec mean it only can reach 1.6 in bursts and it usually is 1.2? I want sure how to interpret that. Supposedly the pentium 4m line goes up to 2.4 2.5 and 2.6 ghz. Is it worth upgrading it? I found some results on some old forums where people say it’s possible to swap them as long as you stay in the pentium 4m line.

if I doubled up the ram, to 1 gig, would it take any theoretical load off of the underpowered cpu? Or the graphics card which seems to be too old to play doom 3? Doom 3 flat out refused to launch. Doom 3 I remember being cutting edge so I wasn’t surprised i couldn’t play it, but I was shocked it didn’t start up at all, and I think it’s a graphics card issue.

what year would you say my hardware here would have been phased out by? Mechwarrior 4 runs perfectly and is amazing, so battlefront 1 on low settings works perfectly as well other than occasional FPS dips.

[Anonymous No.7897397]

>>7897327
Target specs for someone serious about gaming in that era were Geforce 4 TI/Geforce FX/Radeon 9700 + Athlon XP ~3000/P4 ~3ghz + 1gb of RAM.

That machine smells for all ambitious titles from 2003-2006 like UT 2003/4, Doom 3, Far Cry, and Deus Ex Invisible War. It'll run Q3, Unreal, and Dark engine titles fantastically, though. Hitman 2, NWN, Morrowind, GTA3 are probably the most ambitious games you'll run on it. It scoots in as just barely acceptable by 2002 standards.

[Anonymous No.7897412]

>>7897360
I wouldn't sink too much into it unless you just love the feel and portability on it. It's in a weird position where it'll smoke 90s games but be eh at best at 2000s stuff. But sure if it's inexpensive just max out the RAM. Your P4 is a pretty good match for the 440 Go. The jump to 2003+ gaming won't happen without a high end DX8 or 9 GPU anyway. Bear in mind that the faster CPU will run hotter too.

[Anonymous No.7897635]

>>7897397
I did grow up with this machine playing quake 3 and had a ton of fun on it. do you think it would be worth upgrading the ram from the single 512 stick to two 512 sticks? Or do you think the bottleneck is just the graphics card and gpu? Will doubling the ram do anything? if you can toss some games my way you think would be fun to run on this I’m open to listening and trying them out. Do you think it would be worth swapping out the cpu? I don’t think most laptops support that but allegedly on this laptop you can use any of the pentium 4m series cpus and they seem to go up to 2.6 ghz. Not sure if it’s a big enough leap from the 1.6/1.2 ghz cpu I have now though to bother.

[Anonymous No.7897643]

>>7897327
My Presario was a 733MHz P3 with 64MB of RAM and a 20GB HDD. I upgraded the CPU to a 1GHz P3, 768MB of RAM (MAX) and added an ATI 9200 before selling it.

[Anonymous No.7897645]

>>7897412
it’s a fun little machine I’m mainly just nostalgic about it because I grew up with it. I thought it would be fun to see what I could do with it. I think I need to open it up and get the dust out of it though because the fans don’t shut off even when propped up if a game is running.

do you know if the pentium 4m series is compatible with dx8 or dx9? doom 3 refused to start up, and even if it won’t work, I’d like to understand what the conflict is. I’m not sure if it’s driver related or if the gpu I have just doesn’t have some rendering ability or specific trick that doom 3 uses. As I said I wasn’t expecting it to run doom
3 above like 2 FPS, but I was surprised it refused to run at all.

[Anonymous No.7897646]

>>7897643
What did you play on that?

[Anonymous No.7897723]

>>7897646
Some deer hunting games, The Sims was popular, emulators. I was more in to gaming on the PS1/2. My PC originally came with Windows ME and my uncle purchased XP for me around the time of its release.

[Anonymous No.7897730]

I don't remember my specs. But i remember my old windows xp computer was good enough for games like Medieval total war 2 but not good enough to run a game like Doom 3 smoothly.

[Anonymous No.7897752]

>>7897327
The ideal Windows XP gaming build in 2001 would have been something like this:

>Pentium III/IV or AMD Athlon at 1.0Ghz at-least, you could get away with running XP on weaker CPU's but most games from the near future would not run well at all if they didn't hit the 1Ghz threshold
>256mb of RAM (and later 512mb, it was still pretty overkill for a couple of years)
>80-120GB HDD (anything more was ungodly expensive, you could get away with running a smaller HDD system but it wouldn't be ideal or futureproof unless it was a faster drive)
>Nvidia GeForce 2/3 or ATI Radeon 7000/8000 GPU, 3Dfx was already dead by 2001 but it was still nice to have an older Voodoo card to support games that were just a few years old
>DVD-ROM drive + CD Burner drive if you needed one (all-in one drives were fucking expensive and impractical at the time), regular CD-ROM drives were still commonplace for a few more years though

[Anonymous No.7897772]

>>7897327
>Do you remember yours?

I had an Athlon XP 2400 OC's to 2.2GHZ with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 4 ti that I later upgraded to a GeForce 5700. Windows XP is an incredibly popular OS back in the day. It may have came out in 2001. But people were still using it all the way up to like... 2012. Windows Vista couldn't dethrone it. Windows 7 basically replaced Windows XP. If you are going with a 32bit Windows XP, Pentium 4 3+GHz max with a Geforce 6800 or 7800 AGP should be top end. Maybe 3GB RAM. 64bit XP , less limitations.

[Anonymous No.7897789]

Thing about XP is that it supports a ridiculously wide variety of hardware and had software made for it for a long time so you'll never be able to have perfect compatibility with all games on it.
Really though for early 2000's I'd say an Athlon XP 2800+ with a Geforce 4Ti 4600, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 and 1 gigabyte of ram should do you just fine for the most part.
There's some games that break completely when you put in things like dual core processors, more memory and newer video cards while others will require all that
Games that officially supported XP appeared right up until everything moved to Steam. Pic related released in 2011 and has official Windows XP support.

[Anonymous No.7897818]

>>7897635
A gig would be best so you can browse a little more comfortably on it, and I never ran into any games during the XP era that needed more except maybe Battlefield 2. All the games that would run well on your CPU/GPU should be happy with 512, and it's not til those idtech4/Unreal 2+ games that a gig or so becomes necessary. MyPal is about as compatible and modern as you can get for an XP browser, on that note. I'd say just get the gig if it's chump change like 50 or less. Know if your laptop will run in dual-channel too?

[Anonymous No.7897832]

>>7897645
Your CPU won't have any bearing on DX8/9, that will be your GPU, and your Go is basically a DX7 card poorly pretending to be a DX8 one. You should actually be able to run Doom 3 but you'll wish you didn't. Nothing technically stopping you. CPU meets requirements. It runs on a P3, even.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXgbvzyeTJE
Not your GPU but close enough in features/specs. Probably just your drivers or something not installed.

[Anonymous No.7897839]

>>7897818
>A gig would be best so you can browse a little more comfortably on it, and I never ran into any games during the XP era that needed more except maybe Battlefield 2. All the games that would run well on your CPU/GPU should be happy with 512, and it's not til those idtech4/Unreal 2+ games that a gig or so becomes necessary.

back in the day when I used my XP machine as a multi-tasking system. 2GB worked well. These days, you are not going to be running Windows XP with 50 different processes running in the BG. 1GB should be good. Windows XP maxes out at 4GB. But your videocard will take up some of that memory.dedicated to the GPU. For example, I had a Pentium 4 3.4GHz with 4GB RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 Pro AGP with 512MB RAM. Windows XP would only see 3.5GB because the other 512 was used for the videocard.

[Anonymous No.7897862]

I started the 2000s still using my '98 purchased P2-400/96mb/Voodoo3 machine. Then upgraded to a store bought Athlon XP 1900+/256mb/Geforce 1 DDR machine in 2001. God seeing Deus Ex and System Shock run so well was worth it. Put a Geforce 4 and another 256mb in it and played NOLF2/UT2K3, all the popular meme shit of the era. Then, it catastrophically failed and I built my first computer in 2003; an Athlon XP 3200+, Radeon 9700, a gig of RAM, and put a bunch of LED fans in it because making an obnoxious gay disco box is what you do with your first build.

Your computer sucked within a year from 1995-2007, but it was a fun ride.

[Anonymous No.7897903]

>>7897772
>64bit XP
Don't. Pointless. Had some production applications back in its day, but useless as shit for games and will present more compatibility issues overall.

[Anonymous No.7897908]

>>7897903
>Don't. Pointless. Had some production applications back in its day, but useless as shit for games and will present more compatibility issues overall.

I guess Windows Vista 64bit is a better option.

[Anonymous No.7897917]

>>7897772
>4TI to 5700
Hindsight's 20/20 eh?

[Anonymous No.7897937]

>>7897917
>>4TI to 5700
>Hindsight's 20/20 eh?


I t was a Geforce 4400 and the fan ceased and overheated. The Geforce FX 5700 was the replacement. I have no problems with the 5700, it has 256MB RAM, and DX9. I really didn't complain about the 5700 performance.

[Anonymous No.7897962]

>>7897723
Op here I was more of a console gamer myself I liked the Xbox and GameCube, but for fun I have been trying to play some old pc games and I thought what better way to do that then to experiment with old hardware that would have been current at the time? Ps2 is based, unfortunately I ignored it as a kid

>>7897752
At what point do you think games started benefitting from (but not expecting the user to have) a solid gig of ram? my project laptop has two ram slots, that on paper each support up to 512mb of ram, but some people say they each can actually utilize 1 gig of ram each. Despite it being a 2002 or so laptop.

[Anonymous No.7897968]

>>7897772
op here the project laptop I’m
Working on (and learning with) has a 1.6 ghz/1.20 ghz cpu called a pentium4m. supposedly with this laptop you can take that out, and replace it with a 2.0 ghz version or if you can find one a 2.4 -2.6ghz version. Do you think it would be worth the trouble of risking breaking anything to swap this cpu out for that? Is it a big enough jump relative to that time period of game?

[Anonymous No.7897974]

>>7897789
>1 gigabyte of ram
I asked another anon but a second answer wouldn’t hurt, when did games start to benefit from a gig of ram? not the time they assumed you had it but when it was an option they accounted for?

[Anonymous No.7897979]

>>7897327
AMD K6-2 450mhz, 96 MB ram nVidia TNT ultra was my unreal Tournament/broodwar machine, kind of 99/2000

[Anonymous No.7897991]

>>7897974
I'd say around 2006 or so.
Really though having more ram in an XP machine is less about games needing it.
Multitasking is way better with a lot of memory, so if you're running stuff in the background like UI tweakers or virtual disc drives while gaming then it's very much recommended.

[Anonymous No.7898001]

>>7897818
maybe you would be able to help me out with some of those questions because I’m actually learning as I go. this old little project laptop is a Inspiron 8200. I’m not sure what dual channel means which is the only reason I dumped that question on you. There seems to be some wiggle room in terms of upgrading ability that it has which surprised me. It supports a handful of graphics cards and cpu within the p4m family. I don’t think it’s soldered in.

I’m just using it as a dedicated gaming only pc so won’t be going online with it, don’t want to get a virus on it since it’s an ancient pc and OS at this point. I could probably get a more powerful computer for this task but I’m also doing this to learn and have fun so wanted to see what I could accomplish with this.

[Anonymous No.7898006]

>>7897832
so for the sake of argument and knowledge, do you think that if I upgraded the drivers on the gpu, doom 3 would run? it would be entertaining to see how badly it ran. I mainly only have this old laptop to run mechwarrior 4, and it’s absurd how different the graphics are between that title, and doom 3, in such a short time.

[Op No.7898013]

>>7897839
Yeah I am purely using this as a dedicated vintage gaming platform. I can only think of maybe using windows media player for music or something in a fringe unlikely case.

it’s interesting you say xp caps at 4 gigs because this laptop I have wouldn’t have ever been able to have supported 4 gigs. did xp always support 4 gigs? Or was that a service pack addition later?

[Op No.7898031]

>>7897862
Too bad you don’t have a photo of it, I would have probably done the same thing with the lights if I was proud of what I made and it was my first build


> Your computer sucked within a year from 1995-2007, but it was a fun ride.

I remember around 2007 crysis was the yard stick people used, was it possible during the xp era to just make something powerful enough to run that game? Despite vista being the thing at the time?

[Anonymous No.7898052]

>>7898013
>it’s interesting you say xp caps at 4 gigs because this laptop I have wouldn’t have ever been able to have supported 4 gigs. did xp always support 4 gigs? Or was that a service pack addition later?

4GB is a hard limitation of 32bit. It's not just an issue with XP. Even 32bit phones cap off at 4GB. Windows Vista was Miccrosoft's first leap t0 64bit. At the time AMD had the AMD64 line, and Intel released the Quad2Core 64bit CPU's. The jump to 64bit decreases the memory limitations considerably.

[Anonymous No.7898054]

>>7898013
>it’s interesting you say xp caps at 4 gigs because this laptop I have wouldn’t have ever been able to have supported 4 gigs. did xp always support 4 gigs? Or was that a service pack addition later?

4GB is a hard limitation of 32bit. It's not just an issue with XP. Even 32bit phones cap off at 4GB. Windows Vista was Microsoft's first leap to 64bit. At the time AMD had the AMD64 line, and Intel released the Core2 64bit CPU's. The jump to 64bit decreased the memory limitations considerably.

[Op No.7898063]

>>7898054
Oh, I see. For some reason I thought 32 was limited to 2gb? maybe that is old hard drive formats. Not sure. it’s hard to remember all of these little things.

I actually had a very good experience with vista, I think by the time it got patches it was incredibly stable and worked with every game I used it for.

was there really ever a game that benefitted from 4 gigs during the xp life cycle?

[Anonymous No.7898068]

>>7898054
Technically 64bit windows XP also existed but I heard it was buggy

[Anonymous No.7898089]

>>7898063
>was there really ever a game that benefitted from 4 gigs during the xp life cycle?

Nope. I would imagine that most games targeted 1GB or 2GB on the extreme end. Back in 2005-2006 when all I had was a AMD 2400+ with 2GB of RAM, I would have web browser open, with a media player, and AIM chat running, while running a photo manipulation program, and maybe a few other things, and 2GB could full up pretty quickly. But that is running a lot of crap at once without ever restarting my PC and keeping it idle when not in use. I'm not sure if there are any web browsers that work with XP in 2021. Standard XP use should be good with 512MB or 1GB.

[Anonymous No.7898091]

>>7897327
I got one of these, I haven't tried gaming on it.
http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/hp-nc8230-review-pics-specs/

[Anonymous No.7898101]

>>7898063
>was there really ever a game that benefitted from 4 gigs during the xp life cycle?

FEAR from 2005 required at least 512MB of RAM, and that was considered a high-end game.

[Anonymous No.7898105]

I remember my old Acer laptop having some really shitty ~1ghz single core processor, 256mb of ram and a 10gb hard drive. It ran WoW at like 10fps no matter where I was. Those were the days...

[Anonymous No.7898106]

>>7898031
A 6800 + Athlon X2 + 2gb woulda done okayyy.

[Op No.7898109]

>>7898101
man I remember playing FEAR on a Xbox 360. It looked amazing. 512 being all that is required shocks me. Is that 512 to get it to run at low? Or would you need a gig to get it to run at full blast? Not sure if I’m thinking of the original fear or a sequel.

[Op No.7898113]

>>7898105
I was never a big wow player but my friends were and I remember watching some of them rage, I can’t imagine trying to do anything like pvp or some dungeon with low FPS trying to keep track of it all. simpler times.

[Anonymous No.7898118]

>>7898063
>Oh, I see. For some reason I thought 32 was limited to 2gb? maybe that is old hard drive formats. Not sure. it’s hard to remember all of these little things.

No. You might be thinking of the FAT32 file format from Microsoft, which is limited to 2GB chunks of data. Meaning: no singles files bigger than 2GB. 32bit CPU memory is limited to 4GB, and sure there are workarounds. The push to 64nit in 2006 was because computers were hitting a brick wall with 32bit memory restrictions.

[Anonymous No.7898130]

>>7898109
>man I remember playing FEAR on a Xbox 360. It looked amazing. 512 being all that is required shocks me. Is that 512 to get it to run at low? Or would you need a gig to get it to run at full blast? Not sure if I’m thinking of the original fear or a sequel.


I remember playing it on a friends PC in 2006. He bought an ATi x1600 pro, which was a great card for being one of the last AGP cards from ATi/ AMD. Framerate in FEAR was smooth with that ccard.

[Anonymous No.7898160]

>>7898006
Yes. You're probably running too new of a driver or some crappy manufacturer supplied, or running an old DX9 runtime. The Go may or may not be one that needs manufacturer drivers, but try different ones, or 3rd party ones. You generally want drivers a month or two newer than the game for the best results.

[Op No.7898161]

>>7898130
it was a good game, the slow mo stuff seemed ahead of its time, but the game didn’t seem like it was too heavy on gimmicks, it seemed like a no nonsense FPS aside from that.

Is there any simple way to compare graphic card strength?

[Op No.7898167]

>>7898160
I would be running the stock drivers that came with the machine in 2002 or whatever, since the hard drive failed a decade ago and is gone, and I’m running a blank new hd with a new windows xp install dedicated to just games.

to get the drivers for my graphics card what would I do? I don’t think Nividia would still be hosting them would they? I guess I’d have to download the driver file onto a storage device on a second computer and transfer it to this one? because the OS is so out of date it would get taken out by a virus immediately I think.

[Anonymous No.7898178]

>>7898167
>I don’t think Nividia would still be hosting them would they?

You better believe they do:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/win9x-8198/

[Anonymous No.7898189]

>>7898178
>You better believe they do:

Nvidia is really good at archiving everything online. It's also not hard to find the old ATi video drivers, or most default drivers that the cards came with:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/winxp-2k-archive/

[Op No.7898201]

>>7898178
Fuck yeah, thanks anon. I’m surprised any modern company gives a fuck about customers and their old legacy products anymore. based.

I wonder if this will fix the random but non vital bug I’m having in swbf 2004 where none of them menus play footage in the background and only have a black screen with a menu overlapping it? I thought it was a issue with my options in game but I think it’s possibly a driver issue, which means that likely is the reason why doom 3 refused to boot at all.

I think that as far as battlefront is concerned my pc is missing two years worth of driver updates if it’s using the stock oem 2002 software

[Anonymous No.7898205]

>>7898178
>>>7898167
>>I don’t think Nividia would still be hosting them would they?


You want the Forceware driver packs. The last official releases should be fine for the majority on Nvidia legacy cards.

[Anonymous No.7898210]

>>7897327
>What were gaming pc specs like in the early 2000s?
Not old laptops dug from the dump

[Anonymous No.7898214]

>>7898201
>I think that as far as battlefront is concerned my pc is missing two years worth of driver updates if it’s using the stock oem 2002 software


If you are using a Windows XP machine offline, I don't think updates really matter much beyond the basic service pack.

As for game bugs, take a look at the PC Gaming wikipedia. Sounds game specific:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Windows

[Op No.7898217]

>>7898210
Fuck off anon I’m having fun learning and playing with old hardware. This pc ran quake 3 and mechwarrior 4 perfectly when I was growing up as a kid. It may not have been the most powerful system around at the time but it was serviceable for while.

[Anonymous No.7898226]

>>7897327
if it could run Counter-Strike and you had broadband you were good to go

[Op No.7898229]

>>7898214
I’m purely using it offline as a dedicated machine for old games, the only driver updates I might need it seems (according to some anons) are for my graphics card.

wow check out this chart, the suggested settings are a big leap from what they ask on the bottom of the box. I may end up trying to swap out that 1.6ghz cpu for the 2.0 ghz version. (a little nervous I will break it since I’ve never messed with a cpu before let alone on a laptop).

if I break it, it is just a project computer I’m using to learn.

[Anonymous No.7898230]

>>7898205
>You want the Forceware driver packs. The last official releases should be fine for the majority on Nvidia legacy cards.

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

[Op No.7898234]

>>7898229
Actually this is a good time to ask, where is says suggested, what is

Hardware vertex
And pixel shading?

Is there a website where I can see if my cpu is capable of these techniques?

[Op No.7898238]

>>7898230
if you were in my position and you were trying to keep any viruses off a severely outdated machine but you wanted to update its drivers, what would be a safe way to do it? there isn’t anything on the hard drive other than games, but I would prefer to avoid accidentally getting a virus on it from another pc and having to reinstall windows and my games which would take like 2 hours. thank you for all the help I’ve been learning a lot in this thread and it’s fun messing with old PCs and laptops.

[Anonymous No.7898250]

>>7898238
>if you were in my position and you were trying to keep any viruses off a severely outdated machine but you wanted to update its drivers, what would be a safe way to do it? there isn’t anything on the hard drive other than games, but I would prefer to avoid accidentally getting a virus on it from another pc and having to reinstall windows and my games which would take like 2 hours. thank you for all the help I’ve been learning a lot in this thread and it’s fun messing with old PCs and laptops.


I wouldn't worry about viruses for Windows XP. They don't exist anymore cause the OS is so old. Not sure how you can connect XP online. Maybe the best way is to just transfer everything to a USB stick? Not going to lie. Been forever since I actually used Windows XP. Like 2008 forever.

[Anonymous No.7898265]

>>7898250
You can most certainly connect in XP, and do just about everything you could on a modern machine. Even Windows 98 can barely limp along with browsers like K-meleon.

[Anonymous No.7898269]

>>7898234
>Hardware vertex
>And pixel shading?
>Is there a website where I can see if my cpu is capable of these techniques?

Those are video-card specific features. It sounds like a DirectX 9 card requirement.

[Op No.7898273]

>>7898250
well as I said I wanted to have a dedicated windows cpu computer just for old games, so I am going through a few hoops to do it.

the usb stick may be the safest method I think.

Not that I’m
Expecting to play doom 3 on this machine but for the sake of learning I’d like to try to get it to run anyway. this image is of the doom 3 minimum specs, my GeForce 440 go isn’t listed on here, does that mean it won’t work? Or that it just isn’t one of the likely cards someone would have been using? My computer on paper seems like it meets these specs even if it will probably only
Run in on low at 5 FPS.

[Anonymous No.7898278]

>>7898265
>You can most certainly connect in XP, and do just about everything you could on a modern machine.

I didn't know that. Interesting. I still think maybe just copying files to a fat32 usb stick and copying them to Windows XP might be the easiest way.

[Op No.7898281]

>>7898269
That image you commented on was the Star Wars battlefront 2004 specs, I’ve been able to run it on low fine, but from what you’re saying, are there visuals and effects I wouldn’t be able to see unless I had a different graphics card? Not one that was just strong but of the correct generation? (Supports dx9)

I’m able to run battlefront 2004 on low/medium settings and it’s completely playable but it doesn’t look perfect and it would make sense to me if maybe my graphics card flat out is incapable of performing certain actions.

[Anonymous No.7898297]

>>7898273
>GeForce 440 go

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce4-440-go.c1555

Looks like an MX for laptops. Doom 3 doesn't require DX9. It's an OpenGL game. I almost think that Doom 3 should be able to run on that laptop, but not very well. Install the Nvidia drivers and try the Doom 3 demo.

[Anonymous No.7898298]

>>7898281
>That image you commented on was the Star Wars battlefront 2004 specs, I’ve been able to run it on low fine, but from what you’re saying, are there visuals and effects I wouldn’t be able to see unless I had a different graphics card? Not one that was just strong but of the correct generation? (Supports dx9)

Yes. Exactly. later graphics cards have pixel shaders that are supported by DX9.

[Anonymous No.7898306]

>>7898297
>Looks like an MX for laptops.

Doom 3 on a Geforce 440 MX:
https://youtu.be/riLaBmlnNdA?t=125

[Op No.7898318]

>>7898306
I don’t think the mx series is the same as the go series, I found it confusing because it seems like there are 3 or 4 nvidia families that came out around the same time. and idk if they are all different or if the names are just sued interchangeably at times.

regardless that looks way better than I expected, funny though that the cutscenes look almost like FMV videos.

[Op No.7898323]

>>7898297
On the bottom
Of the doom 3 retail box it says

3D hardware accelerator card required (guessing this is an old way to say gpu or graphics card) - 100% direct x9 compatible 64 min hardware accelerated (not sure what that means) video card and latest drivers

I guess the last part confirms it could be a driver issue, but I don’t think my GeForce 440 go is dx9 compatible.

thanks for all the help, I’m having a lot of fun and I can apply this knowledge to other computers and different games later so it’s really useful.

[Anonymous No.7898325]

>>7898318
>I don’t think the mx series is the same as the go series,

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce4-440-go.c1555

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce4-mx-440.c781

Tech Power-Up specs sheet claims that their are identical. But the go is running at a lower clockrate and is embedded into the main board.

[Anonymous No.7898330]

>>7898323
>3D hardware accelerator card required (guessing this is an old way to say gpu or graphics card) - 100% direct x9 compatible 64 min hardware accelerated (not sure what that means) video card and latest drivers

I think it just needs a shadders comparable to DX9 set. The version of OpenGL that Doom3 uses has some DX9 comparable level shadders.

[Anonymous No.7898337]

>>7897962
I would say around the time seventh gen games were coming out (circa 2005-2006), good for games like Oblivion, Unreal Engine 3 games, and essential for MMO's if you were into those, etc.

[Op No.7898351]

>>7898325
from everything I’ve read, this old project laptop (Inspiron 8200) has a graphics card one can swap out with a “Quadra4 700goGL” or a “ATI Radeon 9000 64mb” the reason I put them in quotations is because I’m not familiar with the cards.

so if it’s possible to swap them out the GeForce couldn’t be embedded into the board right? Or does that mean people are actually desoldering them to achieve this?
>>7898330
I see. That makes more sense. I played doom 3 on my dads desktop tower back in the day and it had amazing lighting. Frankly even today I think it holds up a bit. it looks good on Xbox as well.

>>7898337
so any 05-06 game is a good benchmark to make the assumption one should have a gig of ram at least for those? I can see why some anons said it’s hard to have one xp machine because games changed so damn much I that decade.

[Anonymous No.7898354]

>>7898351
Presumably- but chances are that laptop's going to be bottlenecked out of being able to run pretty much any of those games because they're far more graphically intensive. You might be able to get away with trying Half-Life 2 and Oblivion at low settings, and maybe older versions of Minecraft or certain toaster-friendly indie games.

[Anonymous No.7898359]

>>7897327
I had an AMD 64 3200+, an ATi Radeon X800, and 2GB RAM. But I didn't upgrade from 2000 Professional until late 2005.

[Op No.7898364]

>>7898354
well, to recap, this machine at the moment has
1.6ghz/1.20ghz p4m processor, geforce440 graphics card and 512 ram

If I was to upgrade the modular cpu (assuming it didn’t become too hot) to the 2.0 ghz version or 2.4 ghz version, updated the graphics card to one of the two mentioned in my last post, and double the ram from 512 mb to 1gb, do you think it would be able to run more?

I understand going through all of that effort may not be practical, but again I’m really enjoying just learning, and playing with old hardware.


>>7898359
What did you use those 2 gigs of ram for?

[Anonymous No.7898370]

>>7898351
>>>7898325 (You)
>from everything I’ve read, this old project laptop (Inspiron 8200) has a graphics card one can swap out with a “Quadra4 700goGL” or a “ATI Radeon 9000 64mb” the reason I put them in quotations is because I’m not familiar with the cards.

Not sure without looking at the board. I almost want to say go with the Radeon 9000, I think it is a better card than the warmed-up Geforce 2 (440mx). The Radeon 9000 supports DX 8.1, while the MX440 supports DX7. The Mx440 tier is not good performance wise. But its a stable card.

[Anonymous No.7898394]

>>7898370
>Radeon 9000 supports DX 8.1

3DGAMEMAN's "this product is great" review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGXiIR-NuX4

[Anonymous No.7898413]

>>7898351
>from everything I’ve read, this old project laptop (Inspiron 8200) has a graphics card one can swap out with a “Quadra4 700goGL” or a “ATI Radeon 9000 64mb” the reason I put them in quotations is because I’m not familiar with the cards.

Looking this up: The Inspiron 8200 has a removable "display board" which can be swapped with other boards without any soldering. Looks like the CPU is socked as well? Looks like you can replace the graphics board.

[Anonymous No.7898419]

>>7898351
>from everything I’ve read, this old project laptop (Inspiron 8200) has a graphics card one can swap out with a “Quadra4 700goGL” or a “ATI Radeon 9000 64mb” the reason I put them in quotations is because I’m not familiar with the cards.

Looking this up: The Inspiron 8200 has a removable "display board" which can be swapped with other boards without any soldering. Looks like the CPU is socketed as well? Looks like you can replace the graphics board.

[Op No.7898447]

>>7898370
Both cards are a bit pricy right now for what is essentially a weekend project but I’ll keep an eye out for one. for the time being I think I might upgrade the ram and double it with a second 512 stick, or swap the 1.6 ghz cpu for the 2.0 or 2.4 ghz cpu. My main concern is just if the increase cpu would generate a significantly higher heat or if it would only be negligible. When you say stable card what do you mean?

[Anonymous No.7898465]

>>7898447
>When you say stable card what do you mean?


I just mean, Nvidias drivers have always been fairly stable. ATi drivers should be fine, I would imagine.

[Anonymous No.7898473]

>>7897327
8800gt sli and 4GB ram. Get a cheapy athlon 64 x2

[Op No.7898484]

>>7898394
Seems like a good cpu to me

>>7898419
Yeah from what I saw online this laptop allows one to change the cpu with one of the same family at a higher ghz, and allows you to put in one of a few graphics cards that fits the form factors of the laptop.

since this laptop gets a bit hot even when elevated I’m considering trying to get all the dust out of it, and learning how to apply thermal paste since whatever paste is in there is like two decades old.

do you think going from 1.6ghz to 2.0ghz would lead to a substantial heat increase? Or is the heat mainly from it just being taxed to max capacity?

>>7898465
I see that’s good to know, nvidia seems like a solid brand so far.

[Anonymous No.7898539]

>>7898484
>do you think going from 1.6ghz to 2.0ghz would lead to a substantial heat increase? Or is the heat mainly from it just being taxed to max capacity?

I don't think so, as long as you use some thermal paste.

[Anonymous No.7898547]

>>7898539
alright thanks man. It’s appreciated. what kind of games would you suggest I try for this hardware?

[Anonymous No.7898558]

>>7897327
I remember still being on Windows 2000 Pro at the time around the early 2000s. Since I was poor, I had to go with the poverty AMD option. Athlon XP 2600+ (Thoroughbred), GeForce 3 (loved the blue Hercules card), Asus A7N266, 1GB RAM, SoundBlaster Live!, Adaptec 29160 SCSI card for 10000rpm C: drive and Plextor CD-ROM/RW drives. Eventually upgraded the GeForce 3 to a 6800 (non-Ultra) because it was a great deal when someone didn't know how to install an aftermarket cooler for it.

It was real good computer for me but eventually I did change over to different hardware in a whole new build for a Win XP32 machine.

If you are talking about the late 90s, I was still on a 486 DX4-100 and often visited cousins with a Pentium-75 or K6-III.

[Anonymous No.7898590]

>>7898558
What xp games did you end up running on your machine? Windows 2000 was a bit before my time unfortunately, I think I played Hexen or heretic though on a 95 pc once or twice

[Anonymous No.7898597]

>>7898364
>What did you use those 2 gigs of ram for?
Firefox

[Anonymous No.7898618]

>>7898597
>>What did you use those 2 gigs of ram for?
>Firefox


I wouldn't say that 2GB was never really required for gaming back in 2004-2005. But for the desktop experience as a whole, it didn't take much to fill up 2GB when running Mozilla Suite, AGV-Antivirus, Windows media player, a chat program like AIM or Yahoo messenger (sometimes both), and other things in the BG. I use to work with large photos that could take up 512-1GB of memory in the paint program because of undo data. Windows XP should be fine as an 'offline' OS with 512MB-1GB of RAM.

[OP No.7898681]

>>7898597
Why are browsers so fucking bloated? Just using Firefox and YouTube sometimes makes some computers lag. I had a shitty Asus with 2 gigs of ram a few years back, and at times it couldn’t handle more than a tab or two open. it just is mind boggling to me that browsers today run so poorly. is it just poorly optimized code?

[OP No.7898685]

>>7898618
>aim
Take me back

I remember being able to run aim and RuneScape on this laptop simultaneously with no slowdown with the 512 mb of ram it had. And it didn’t ever lag playing YouTube videos or browsing the internet. Old websites just strike me as being better optimized.

[Anonymous No.7898741]

>>7898217
>asks question
>gets legit answer
>answer doesn't circle jerk his literal garbage haul
>waaaaaaaahhhhh!
kwab

[Anonymous No.7898781]

>>7898068
It wasn't buggy, it just had fuck-all for driver and app support. And since it was based on Server 2003, some programs would pick up on that and force you to buy their server versions (a lot of anti-virus software pulled this shit)

[OP No.7898823]

>>7898741
It’s not an answer same fag

[Anonymous No.7898878]

>>7898590
My XP32 or the 2000pro machine? I described my 2000 machine earlier, which I am somewhat recreating with the parts in the previous pic, instead of using the GeForce 3 I originally had. At that time I was playing a lot of Ragnarok Online and Sexy Beach 2. I remember the first game I tested the Hercules card when the build was completed was Deus Ex, which came with the Soundblaster Live! and it was a smooth experience. I now remember the Hercules card was replaced in the machine with a BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC.

The XP machine I had was an Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (again, AMD poverty option), in an MSI K9N Diamond motherboard (to save money by using the onboard SoundBlaster X-fi instead of a discrete card), with video from an eVGA GeForce 8800 GT KO. Spent more time emulating on that machine in those days.

[Anonymous No.7899081]

>>7897839
>Pentium 4 3.4GHz with 4GB RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 Pro AGP

And I just want to say that this card, the ATi x1600 Pro AGP was a really big surprise. So, I put this card into a friends HP Pentium 4. This card came equipped with 512MB RAM. DDR2. But 512MB. The first game we tested was FEAR. The framerate jump from whatever the fuck he had before was amazing at 1800xwhatever the resolution of his monitor tapped out to. It was above 60fps. And yes, the last AGP card released by ATi. possibly the best one,

[Anonymous No.7899091]

>>7897327
Pentium 4 2.4GHZ
1GB DDR 400 single channel (upgraded from 256MB)
PCI Geforce 5200 128MB (upgraded from intel extreme graphics 2)

playys half life 2 at 20-25fps, very nice

[Anonymous No.7899168]

>>7898823
>words mean whatever i say they do
zoom. not even once.

[Anonymous No.7899190]

I had a discounter prebuilt with a Pentium III with 1 GHz, a GeForce 2 MX or GTS and 128 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 384 MB) between 2000 or 2001 and 2004, and an electronics store prebuilt with an Athlon 64 3200+, a crummy GeForce FX 5500, 512 MB of RAM and later a Sound Blaster Audigy between 2004 and 2008.

I wouldn't advise anyone to build a retro computer with these specs though, and if I were to build an early 2000s gaming machine today I'd go with peak 2006 hardware and install a tape modded, overclocked Xeon 5160 in an nForce 680i SLI board with two GTX 8800s, 2x2GB DDR2-800 RAM and a Sound Blaster X-Fi.

[Anonymous No.7899208]

>>7899190
i'd rather build a rig with the lowest power components that have good compatibility with games from the win32 era

[Anonymous No.7899216]

>>7899208
Fair, but what this seems to boil down to is installing old software on a fairly recent low end laptop or office mini.

[Anonymous No.7899704]

>>7899190
>I'd go with peak 2006 hardware and install a tape modded, overclocked Xeon 5160 in an nForce 680i SLI board with two GTX 8800s, 2x2GB DDR2-800 RAM and a Sound Blaster X-Fi.

A Core2Quad 6600 with 6 or 8GB RAM, and a pair of 8800's in SLi would have been real top-tier in 1996. An AMD Athlon 64 X2 would be the alternative, with an x1950. But, you are getting into 64bit territory. In 2006, lots of people were still happy using their 32bit Pentium 4's and the Athlon 64 line to a lesser extent.

[Anonymous No.7899724]

>>7897327
I still use my 2001 Sony Vaio to play StarCraft, Diablo 2, Quake 3, etc.

[Anonymous No.7900184]

>>7897832
>>7897412
By the time you get up to dx8 and 9 games i feel you might as well use a modern computer. if you want to use xp to have eax or something like that, the ideal would be anything with a gtx 900 series and a pci slot. perhaps one of those sandy bridge mobos. For pre-dx8 i have a pentium 3 that dual boots 98se and xp.

[Anonymous No.7900248]

>>7899724
sounds based, perfect year machine for those games, what are the specs like?

>>7900184
>eax
What’s that?

>>7900184
why do you think dx8 and 9 would be better with a modern computer? Not arguing just curious.

[Anonymous No.7900254]

>>7899704
I've specifically picked 2006 because it constitutes a year when both processing power (Core 2 architecture) and graphics power (GeForce 8000 series) jumped considerably - the 9000 and 200 series were merely mildly tuned rebadges of the 8000 series and AMD wouldn't challenge Intel for almost 15 years after Core 2 came out - and frankly when games were really interesting for the last time before the seventh gen of consoles took full hold of the industry and started ruining everything.

[Anonymous No.7900286]

>>7900248
in my experience, dx8 and dx9 games just work fine on modern windows and the modern nvidia drivers. i've played a lot of them. The modern pcs are just faster, have shorter load times, I don't have to switch to a different computer and desk, etc. Thats without any improvements in frame rate. The only reason to go with an older computer, for me, is to use older hardware with it like a soundcard for hardware accelerated sound, and older gameport joystick, etc. even if you want the hardware accelerated sound, creative alchemy works pretty well. While there may always be some obscure older game that needs special attention, you can generally get games from that era to run buttery smooth on new pcs. If there is a gog version it's all patched up not to mention drm free. Most of my old cds have been working fine though. like i just played microsoft combat flight simulator 3 on win10. The only adjustment it needed was enabling securom while i played it. To me it seems the dos to win98 era games are the ones that really like old hardware.

EAX was a hardware acceleration for 3d sound processing that was popular on the sound blaster sound cards. A good sound card used to be essential for pc gaming, equally important as the gpu. Now we just do sound processing all on the cpu, but in the older games that relied on EAX, they do not have the same level of sound processing without the hardware or a program to emulate it. You can find a version of "creative alchemy" on pcgaming wiki for that purpose. There were competing accelerators too, like Aureal's A3D. To my knowledge there is no emulation for those, so if you want it you just need old hardware.

[Anonymous No.7900818]

>>7899190
What kind of cost do you think that would be? 2006 seems like a pretty agreeable sticking point for a “windows xp do it all machine” I think.

[Anonymous No.7900824]

>>7899704
Were there multicore cpus in the early 2000s?

[Op No.7900830]

>>7900286
The game that made me want to have a vintage computer, is mechwarrior 4. The pc is dedicated to that game to run with a joystick but I’m trying to use it for other games of the era. for some reason mechwarrior 4 refuses to run on anything past windows 7 I believe. Something to do with modern systems not playing well with the security check on the game even if you own the retail copy and the cd key.

[Anonymous No.7900845]

>>7900830
That's cool if you have the older computer to play it. If you do want to use win10 to play mechwarrior 4, there was a free release download version years ago. Find a copy of it. It should not have the drm, which is the only thing stopping it from working. I didn't scan it for viruses or anything but here is a link you could follow. https://www.reddit.com/r/mechwarrior/comments/8ji77y/is_mw4_still_available_for_free_download/

[Op No.7900853]

>>7900845
are you talking about the mektek packs? I remember getting that and running it on a vista machine. It was really fun. idk if it will really run on w10 though.

Regardless as great as the mektek pack is, it’s a modded version of mercenaries, so you can’t play the original or black knight campaign. but if that mektek pack really works on windows 10, that makes me wonder if people can play it online with hamatchi, which is exciting and cool to think about.

[Anonymous No.7900861]

>>7900824
>Were there multicore cpus in the early 2000s?

Maybe from IBM? AMD released their first multicore CPU: AMD 64 x2 in 2005, Intel released the core2duo's and core2quads in 2006.

[Anonymous No.7900875]

>>7900861
Pentium D was 2005
Also “core duo” was a few months earlier than the core 2 series and was mac exclusive.

[Anonymous No.7900951]

>>7897327
Upgrade options for Nvidia FX5200 for XP machine?

[Anonymous No.7901492]

OP here ran into a strange issue with the laptop. found out it has two ddr1 ram ports, but I suspect port 2 may be broken. there was a 512mb stick in slot a and a 256 stick in slot b. the machine ran at 512 mb ram despite both sticks being in the laptop. when I swapped the positions of the sticks, it wouldn’t get past the bios start up and kept hanging. When I had just the 256 stick in slot a instead, and left slot b empty the machine ran at 256 just fine. does this mean something is up with port b? or could this be a hardware issue because the sticks are two speeds and two manufacturers? not sure if I should get a matching 512 stick for slot b or if I should try to get a 1 mb stick for slot a and cross my fingers that works.

any ideas? So ram ports go bad? it looked like there was a bit of lint in the ram port, a very small piece, could that be what’s causing this? I can’t seem to get it out.

[Anonymous No.7902325]

>>7901492
>or could this be a hardware issue because the sticks are two speeds

Maybe. Does the BIOS see both RAM sticks? Laptop SO-DIMM is really cheap. Maybe try a replacement?

[Anonymous No.7902347]

>>7900951
>Upgrade options for Nvidia FX5200 for XP machine?

Geforce FX 5500 - FX 5700, Geforce 6500, 6600, 6800, Geforcce 7xxx series cards. ATi X700, X800, X1300, ATi x1600.

[Anonymous No.7903456]

>>7902325
laptop doesn’t recognize both sticks as far as I can tell in the bios. maybe there is a chance the second port isn’t working. Can you boot with ram only in slot 2? I might test that.

[Anonymous No.7903481]

>>7900824
No, only multi socket CPUs, but those weren't particularly common either. The first consumer multicore CPU was the Pentium D in 2004 or so which was two Pentium 4 dies taped together, and Pentium 4s were housefires already so the Pentium D was a nuclear furnace.

[Anonymous No.7903808]

>>7903456
OP here that old laptop has two ram ports, DIMM A and DIMM B. seems like DIMM A has a malfunction and isnt working, will try to buy a “high capacity” 1 g stick for DIMM A, if I can’t have a 512 min stick in DIMM A and DIMM B.

it seems like with early 2000s laptops there are varying reports that even though they are only rated for 512 ram in each slot, some people could get them to accept and recognize 1gb ram. Anyone have experience with that?

[Anonymous No.7903964]

Were Alienware laptops any good or is it just a brand name?

[Anonymous No.7904140]

>>7903808
Depends on what the MOBO accepts at most (in some cases they can accept higher than official specs). Too bad you will not have superior Dual Channel RAM if you have to utilize one port.

[Anonymous No.7904389]

>>7904140
when did games start utilizing dual channel ram? If I am only playing games up to about 2005 I’m guessing most games didn’t use that but I could be wrong.

[Anonymous No.7904571]

>>7897974
>>7897991
it's crazy to think skyrim came out in late 2011 and needs a fan patch to utilize 4 gigs. yeah, it was based off essentially the same engine as morrowind but still, they didn't think it was necessary to implement it themselves even though fans figured out how to do it with that engine years prior.

[Anonymous No.7904580]

I don't know the specs, but in Simpsons Hit and Run the loading screens had a newspaper gag you could read. Now my computer is so fast, you can't read the newspaper gag because it completely skips the loading screen.

[Anonymous No.7904679]

>>7904140
>Depends on what the MOBO accepts at most (in some cases they can accept higher than official specs). Too bad you will not have superior Dual Channel RAM if you have to utilize one port.

Sometimes higher capacity RAM just comes out after the official listed spec. 1GB RAM sticks might have not even existed when the 512MB spec was put in place.

[Anonymous No.7904938]

>>7904580
Kek

[Anonymous No.7904952]

> Study: 90% of video games start with easy tutorial level

> "Wuddyagunnadoaboutet?"

[Anonymous No.7905780]

>>7904389
It's not really like that, i mean it's the underlying OS that's simply utilizing Dual Channel as soon as it's available. The game just grabs whatever free memory is available and doesn't care which type. Dual Channel RAM is just faster than the same amount of Single Channel RAM because the 2 slots are basically 'cooperating together' and hence doubling the simultaneous bandwith.

[Anonymous No.7907160]

if I have a direct x 8 supporting card can it play direct x 9 games?

[Anonymous No.7907485]

>>7897327
>late 90s
>early 2000s
You need two separate machines here unless you want to run Win98 games under XP's terrible compatibility layer. Dual booting Win98/XP on an Intel P4 or equivalent is also kind of out of the question because Win98 doesn't run on such hardware (or run well*).

*For the fuck of it I tried installing it on an Intel P4 with 512 megs (max that Win98 can handle) and got it to work somewhat after painstakingly looking for suitable drivers, especially for the ATI X300 I put in there. Wouldn't recommend it, get a P2 or P3 and a card of the era instead. My current Win98 build is an Intel P3, 512MB memory, with an ATI RAGE 128. For XP I use an Athlon 64 X2, 4GB of memory, and an ATI X1550.

[Anonymous No.7907668]

>>7907485
What games didn’t work on xp?

[Anonymous No.7907689]

>>7907668
>What games didn’t work on xp?

That is hard to really compile a list. Windows 95, 98, 98SE and ME are all built on the Windows 9X kernel. Which runs on top of DOS. Windows XP uses the NT kernel. The NT Kernel does not use DOS at its base. NT Kernel was first introduced with Windows NT (server/ workstation), and then Windows 2000, followed by XP, Vista, Windows 8.1, etc. DOS games do not run in XP, but there are also other titles from the Win9x kernel that has issues on XP.

[Anonymous No.7907739]

XP lasted for so long that I actually had two different XP computers. The first was my parent's shitbox dell that I upgraded and included a 1ghz PIII with 384mb ram and a 9600XT. The second machine was an Athlon 3500+ with 1ghz ram and a X800XL. I still have both machines but I'm pretty sure the mobos for both are completely fucked as they wont boot anymore. Where is a good place to get retro mobos? I don't want to try my luck buying some garbage off of ebay.

[Anonymous No.7907746]

>>7907689
What were the differences between 98 and 98SE? I went straight from win 95 to XP so I have no idea.

[Anonymous No.7907749]

>>7897974
>when did games start to benefit from a gig of ram?
For me, it was 2004. Half-life 2, Doom 3, Far Cry, and WoW all benefited from 1gb of ram.

[Anonymous No.7907760]

I remember in 2004 thinking a machine was hot shit if it had a gig of RAM. I was pretty clueless though, so that may not be true.

[Anonymous No.7907772]

>>7907746
>What were the differences between 98 and 98SE? I went straight from win 95 to XP so I have no idea.

Biggest update was USB 1.1 support.They focused more on USB support with 98SE, and by releasing a lot of USB devices around it.

[Anonymous No.7907780]

>>7907760
>I remember in 2004 thinking a machine was hot shit if it had a gig of RAM.

Nothing to sneeze at at 1GB in 2004. But there were people out there with 2-4GB's. I had a system with 2GB in 2005.

[Anonymous No.7907998]

>>7907739
If it won't boot it could also be the PSU that's broken right? In my experience that's a component that at some point just dies, even if you didn't use it for a while.

[Anonymous No.7908065]

>>7907749
I’ll try to have a gig in my Xp gaming machine then, and I’ll try to use it for 1999-2005 games.

[Anonymous No.7908213]

>>7907668
Not him, but I remember back in the day when I finally got around to trying Riven on the PC and had nothing other than a Windows XP Dell at the time. Getting it to work was absolutely fucking grueling and even once I managed to install it (and just that specific legacy version of quicktime), the game crashed whenever it felt like it, so I made it a habit to save pretty much after every frame. I never did finish it in those days. I'm thankful that the game is on Steam and I have been able to play it without hassle now. For some reason the steam version has never given me any problems, but I'd imagine playing it on Windows 98 would be a definite step up from XP.

[Anonymous No.7908389]

>>7907689
>Which runs on top of DOS
Stop perpetuating that lie. Win9x does not run on top of dos.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24063

[Anonymous No.7908393]

>>7908389
it literally runs on top of dos, you can launch windows from dos literally, it has its own hi memory driver etc

[Anonymous No.7908436]

>>7908393
Yes it runs on top of dos, just like linux runs on-top of grub.

[Anonymous No.7908623]

>>7908436
>Yes it runs on top of dos, just like linux runs on-top of grub.

I was simplifying things. Like how Android requires Linux, but still runs independently.

[Anonymous No.7908627]

>>7908393
>it literally runs on top of dos, you can launch windows from dos literally, it has its own hi memory driver etc

Part of the reason why NT exists was to remove all the DOS components for security reasons. Windows 9X is horrible for servers because DOS was like a back door.

[Anonymous No.7908715]

Was thinking of getting an older Dell Tower with a 2nd or third gen Intel CPU. They have XP drivers, thinking i'd toss in a older GPU, one that can do VGA since I have a CRT I want to use. Might dual boot with Win10 and XP just so I can have easier access to modern tools and not need a second computer in my retro game room. This seem like a good idea?

[Anonymous No.7910018]

OP here my laptop apparently supports a small handful of different graphics cards. It shipped with one called a GeForce 440go, but apparently, supports two cards, the Radeon 9000, and the Quadra 700. did these two cards come in different formfactors? 1 for laptops and 1 for laptops? Or are they all going to fit in this laptop? I found a lot of old forum posts of people using one of these two, to upgrade the graphics capability of this laptop.

would I need to download new drivers for these? Or would they just work when I pop them in? Supposedly these two support newer versions of direct x than the GeForce 440go did.

[Anonymous No.7910136]

>>7900875
I still have that macbook. It was a great laptop for the time compared to all the p4s and ppc. (briefly until the c2d came out). Then apple dropped support for 32 bit immediately and i switched to using windows on it. And the graphics are so dogshit that it cannot even play touhou 8 without dropping frames.

There was in fact a thinkpad with the core duo, and back when I was using that, I kept wishing I had got the thinkpad instead.

[Anonymous No.7910150]

>>7907689
the win32 api is not based on dos even if win9x did run on top of dos. 32 bit windows 9x games like unreal still work in 64 bit win10 which has no dos support. they are just programmed in the same old win32.

[Anonymous No.7910521]

>>7897327
I don't know what you first worlders had but mine was
>P4 1.6GHz
>128MB DDR
>20GB HDD
>TNT2 M64
This was 2004 I think

[Anonymous No.7910570]

>>7907998
The PSU was the first thing I tried so I know it's not that. I always had shit luck with mobos from that era. The first PC I ever built the mobo came DOA and I had to wait 2 weeks for fucking Gigabyte to RMA my replacement.

[Anonymous No.7910973]

>>7910570
>I always had shit luck with mobos from that era.

Blame bad capacitors from that era. Do you see any that look bloated or leaky?

[Anonymous No.7911019]

>>7910973
>Blame bad capacitors from that era. Do you see any that look bloated or leaky?

Image related is an AMD Socket A motherboard made by Gigabyte. It is mine. I used this with a Duron, Athlon 2400+ and an Athlon 2700+ . I used this PC all the way up to 2006, where it finally died. The capacitor in this board were popping one by one, over the course of a few years. I never bothered to replace them. By the time the board stopped functioning, I had another desktop PC. But, I could just replace all the capacitors now, and get this board working again. I have replaced capacitors before in the past. But I haven't done it in a decade.

[Anonymous No.7911349]

>>7910521
The p4 at 1.6 ghz seems normal but that ram is abysmal it’s a weird matchup. Idk the graphics card

[Anonymous No.7911350]

>>7911019
You think if I buy an old graphics card this will happen to it?

[Anonymous No.7911359]

>>7908715
sounds like a great idea, VGA output on something like Sandy Bridge is the tits man

[Anonymous No.7911365]

>>7911350
Almost all non-premium capacitors from that era were affected with only a few exceptions
It wasn't just like a single bad batch or manufacturer that caused the capacitor plague but a manufacturer of one of the essential materials for making electrolytic capacitors in the first place
It's quite a fun story too and really teaches you quite a bit about chinese culture. Such a shame it resulted in millions of tons of electronic waste though

[Anonymous No.7911369]

>>7911365
I know the Xbox original had a capacitor issue, is it the same company

I’m the anon aski mg about the Radeon 9000 and the Quadro 700 cards. I didn’t look too close but I think they had a capacitor on them. Never bought a graphics card before.

[Anonymous No.7911432]

>>7910521
>I don't know what you first worlders had but mine was
>>P4 1.6GHz
>>128MB DDR
>>20GB HDD
>>TNT2 M64
>This was 2004 I think

That's an interesting mismatch, the TNT2 was like 1997? Even a low grade Pentium 4 was pretty good.

[Anonymous No.7912680]

>>7911019

And I want to say that this motherboard was still functioning with a Geforce 5700 pro and 1GB RAM, with an XP 2700+ running at 2.8GHz with 4-5 blown caps, and was still functional. But then it got to the tipping point where it just stopped functioning. I would shove an extra fan into the machine, cause I was too lazy to replace the caps. I knew the final "weak capacitors" finally gave out and the machine was inoperable. I just didn't care to fix it.

[Anonymous No.7912736]

>>7911365
>Almost all non-premium capacitors from that era were affected with only a few exceptions


I guarantee you Gigabyte was one of them. Gigabyte AMD and Pentium III era motherboards have batches of bad caps. The one that I posted above, all of the smaller capacitors were blown, slowly. But the larger caps all are 'fine'. This wasn't a premium board. Mid tier.

>>7910570
>>7911019