/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.9858672]

Do you have an old PC to play old PC games? I'm finding it's becoming harder and harder to play pre and early 2000s games on recent hardware and OS.

[Anonymous No.9858691]

>>9858672
Nah too fucking annoying, even if you had the real hardware you'd still find shit incompatible throughout different eras. I think it's great but I just can't be fucked dealing with it. I have a really good rig so I just use PCEM with it set to a pentium p166 and it plays everything I want to play pretty well for win98 and below games.

[Anonymous No.9858694]

>>9858691
seconding this, win98 emulation has gotten quite good.

[Anonymous No.9858697]

I'm actually finding it easier. Wine, Dosbox, PCem, Dosemu all seeing steady improvement.
I guess if you want to run old software directly on modern Windows: no, that doesn't really work anymore. I don't know what happened to Microsoft. They used to be fanatical about backward compatibility.

[Anonymous No.9858721]

486DX2 66MHz, Trident VLB 1MB, Soundblaster 16 1770 (with the good DSP revision to avoid hanging notes bug)
Pentium 133MHz, Voodoo Rush, Ensoniq Soundscape S-2000
Pentium MMX 200MHz, S3 ViRGE, Voodoo 1 4MB, Soundblaster AWE64
Pentium II 450MHz, S3 ViRGE, Voodoo 2 8MBx2 for SLI, Aureal Vortex AU8820
Pentium 3 1GHz, Voodoo 3 3500, Aureal Vortex AU8820
AMD Athlon XP 1700+ 1.4GHz, Hercules 3D Prophet II MX (Geforce 2 clone), Soundblaster Live
Pentium D 2.80GHz, Geforce 6800, Soundblaster Live

Those are the stable retro PC builds I have right now.

[Anonymous No.9858730]

>>9858721
I never did any research but how difficulty and costly is it to find old 90s hardware?

[Anonymous No.9858741]

>>9858730
It's expensive these days. I got a lot of that stuff either from people throwing it away or Craigslist. Ebay prices are insane.

[Anonymous No.9858746]

You can run DOS natively on completely modern machines with SoundBlaster support now via SBEMU; no reason not to use real hardware. You can boot your whole rig from a USB drive and be good to go.

[Anonymous No.9858754]

>>9858672
Always have. Kept my old rigs plus a number of macs ive gotten.

[Anonymous No.9858765]

>>9858721
>>9858754
How did these hardware never break? I've had PCs since the early 2000s but never managed to hold on to them because either the ram or the gpu or the mobo stopped working.

[Anonymous No.9858782]

>>9858765
The most common fault with old hardware is capacitors. It's mainly down to certain motherboards from certain eras. Anecdotal but I own four Pentium 4 motherboards and three of them have bulging caps. Meanwhile that 486 is from 1994 and it still works perfectly.

[Anonymous No.9858787]

>>9858672
Hate to be an asshole but have you tried trying harder? Dgvoodoo, nglide, OTVDM, VMware, PCem, Dosbox, pcgamingwiki... though you might not get an elegant and ez solution it's possible 99.99% of the time.

[Anonymous No.9858791]

>>9858787
>>9858672
To answer your question though, do have one with Win98 + XP complete with 17" CRT but it was more of a passing fancy and I rarely use it instead of just using the aforementioned tools.

[Anonymous No.9858801]

>>9858694
Sort of... it's not great when you start needing Geforce/P3 level specs. Most Lithtech games want that. Most games that run on a Voodoo 3 + 400mhz are a lot more enjoyable on the above. On the other hand VMware + XP/7 32bit kind of suits that need, if native OS fixes don't work.

[Anonymous No.9858802]

>>9858672
Can't you just use a VM? I have some ancient PC lying around downstairs but it still uses serial ports. Anyway, most of the old PC games I care about are on other platforms as well.

[Anonymous No.9858807]

>>9858746
Run Ultima 7 and Turrican 2 with that. Almost anything but an ISA Soundblaster will require a TSR and memory manager those hate.

[Anonymous No.9858812]

>>9858802
Sucky solution for Win9x. No hardware acceleration
. PCem or bust at this point, really. That said, MANY 9x games run in XP/7 32, virtualized or otherwise.

[Anonymous No.9858814]

>>9858787
>trying harder
Well that's the point, I have to try harder each passing year. Last decade I used to be able to play Tomb Raider out of the box or maybe tick a compability check but now I have to jump through many hoops just to get it to work.

[Anonymous No.9858828]

>>9858814
Eh, if you familiarize yourself with some regular tools you can more or less get anything to run.

[Anonymous No.9858831]

>>9858814
Could just dualboot into a more compatible OS too.

[Anonymous No.9858841]

>>9858765
Ive had more issues with hardware dieing from the last 15 years.

[Anonymous No.9858842]

>>9858697
they don't care anymore, why should they there's no competition. It's the equivalent of OS slop now.

[Anonymous No.9858846]

>>9858842
I don't know why they don't just finally shrug the NT boulder at this point and provide or rely on people to use emulators/VMs. I guess old biz software is still fairly compatible.

[Anonymous No.9858849]

>>9858846
They literally don't care. Apple proved something of that magnitude is possible with Rosetta and went out and did it. MacOS is garbage in its own ways but when Apple feels like moving the needle on something they put all of their blue hair troongrammers behind it. Microsoft tends to have less focus as a company I've noticed.

[Anonymous No.9858860]

>>9858721
I know there's no way you use them even close to regularly, but hey, I'm sure you had fun and like looking at them.

[Anonymous No.9858862]

>>9858672
The easiest way to play on modern systems is WINE on Linux. Your old Windows games will work much better than on modern Windows.

[Anonymous No.9858867]

>>9858860
I use them all the time. Here's the Pentium 3 with a Voodoo 3 3000 and Soundblaster Live before I upgraded them to a V3 3500 and a Aureal Vortex.

[Anonymous No.9858876]

>>9858812
>PCem
love this software. is it perfect? no, but it's still pretty amazing for what it is. even my crappy old laptop from 2011 can run win98 with it now.

[Anonymous No.9858882]

>>9858849
Microsoft as it currently exists is run by conmen and designers (who are essentially lesser conmen).

[Anonymous No.9858920]

>>9858867
Yes, great, I know. I have one too, I just doubt you spend all that much time on them or you ADHD-ily bop between them. Why 7? You don't need that many to cover most old PC games. All the Voodoo equipped ones are redundant and you can easily consolidate down to the P3 with cache settings/speed limiting TSRs. I bet it can replace the 486 too if it has ISA. That and the Pentium D are fine. Why no PCJR/Tandy compatible or CGA + composite build?

[Anonymous No.9858957]

>>9858920
>I just doubt you spend all that much time on them or you ADHD-ily bop between them
The only one I don't use all the time is the Pentium 200. It was made exclusively from other computer parts I had lying around + a Voodoo 1.
>Why 7? You don't need that many to cover most old PC games
I like playing games on different hardware configurations because I think it's fun.
>Why no PCJR/Tandy compatible or CGA + composite build?
I'm not as interested in 80s computers. I own some Commodore 64s/128s but those I rarely use.

[Anonymous No.9858968]

>>9858691
PCEM has been dead for a few years now, try 86Box.

[Anonymous No.9858973]

>>9858746
>You can run DOS natively on completely modern machines with SoundBlaster support now via SBEMU; no reason not to use real hardware. You can boot your whole rig from a USB drive and be good to go.
I've just made a 1GB USB stick, gonna test this theory. Will report back with results.

[Anonymous No.9859013]

>>9858672
I have a nice Pentium III machine I use for playing sovlful late DOS/Windows 9x games. It's pretty nice but don't expect it to be a fully-viable solution for playing any old old PC game compared to a modern machine with wrappers and emulators- a lot of games will still shit the bed on a fast CPU or need a specific DOS configuration to work correctly which can be a ton of trouble to set up. There's something called SetMul that's supposed to help with that but I can never figure out how to get the damn thing to work.

[Anonymous No.9859141]

if it's late 90s 2D win16 games then it's easier to run those on wine
but if it's early 2000s 3D games, then you shit out of luck because wine trannies decided to double down on zoomerware like dxvk and break old compatibilities, so your bet bet is still windows 10 with patches like dgvoodoo and whatnot

[Anonymous No.9859143]

>>9858968
That's actually what I use, I'm just so used to calling it PCem.

[Anonymous No.9859162]

>>9858672
Use a VM or DOSbox, it's not like most of those used hardware acceleration at all. Maintaining an old PC is fun and all, but then you'd have to keep a few because DOS games aren't compatible with WinXP, Win16 games aren't compatible with Vista and some XP games aren't compatible with 7. It's simpler to just virtualize alla that shit. Keep a decent PC with a hypervisor and let it rip.

[Anonymous No.9859187]

There's a literal army of older PCs out there.
If you're not picky and a PIII/4 does not bother you, it's also pretty cheap too.

[Anonymous No.9859191]

>>9858957

Nice collection.

[Anonymous No.9859206]

>>9858691
But but do you have a CRT? No? Then it's not retro.

[Anonymous No.9859230]

I have a couple, and they're a fucking PAIN, but I guess it's called a labor of love right?
If you want to easily play older games, Linux + Wine is the way to go.

[Anonymous No.9859269]

>>9858672
I play old PC games on my Steam Deck like a normal person in 2023.

[Anonymous No.9859271]

>>9858973
>make bootable USB DOS stick with Rufus
>the DOS it puts on there is some crippled version of the command prompt "DOS" in WindowsME
>it technically runs, but not even mem.exe will work and just complain about being the wrong version of DOS
>make bootable USB DOS stick using unetbootin and a copy of Dos 6.22 I have
>computer won't even boot off of it
Next step will be to make it bootable with Rufus and just copy everything off the 6.22 over. Will report back later.

[Anonymous No.9859706]

>>9858807
>>9858973
Of course it's not perfect, but you had memory management nonsense to deal with on period correct machines too.
>>9859271
Yeah 6.2.2 or FreeDOS is the way; I've been using 6.2.2. FreeDOS has a lot of niceties on modern hardware but is less compatible with games. I had a FreeDOS bootable stick with SBEMU in the config.sys/autoexec and it just boots and is good to go. I was DOSMID with the OPL setting to jam out on a shitty celeron lenovo I got for $40.

[Anonymous No.9859719]

>>9859706
I wasn't being rhetorical, I want you to actually try them.

[Anonymous No.9859726]

>>9859719
Oh I know, keep us posted anon. You should be able to make a bootable DOS 6.22 stick with unetbootn, that's how I did it but who knows

[Anonymous No.9859749]

>>9859269
Probably not the thread for you then is it?

[Anonymous No.9859894]

>>9859726
I mean Turrican 2 and Ultima 7. No one's tested SBEMU with it. Highly doubtful, but I gotsta know.

[Anonymous No.9859930]

>>9859894
Gotcha; doing gods work anon

[Anonymous No.9860051]

>Do you have an old PC to play old PC games?
Pentium 3 1000, 512 Mb, Millennium 2+Voodoo 2 SLI/Voodoo 3 3000/TnT2 Ultra (depends on what I'm playing), SBLive, Win98.
I'm perfectly fine with that rig (games I'm mainly interested in were released prior to 2001), but GeForce 256DDR and GeForce 3 Ti500 are two things I wouldn't mind owning again indeed.

[Anonymous No.9860407]

>>9858672
I have a few from 386DX-40 to Athlon XP, but I don't think you really need that to play games

[Anonymous No.9860437]

Yeah, I've got some 9x-era PCs.

[Anonymous No.9860449]

I don't know why /vr/ got so pissy about this PC.

Does the case have to be retro too or what?

[Anonymous No.9860459]

>>9858672
My favorite is Gateway Desktop 486 VLB. I have several others, but that one's my favorite.

[Anonymous No.9860595]

>>9859726
>You should be able to make a bootable DOS 6.22 stick with unetbootn, that's how I did it but who knows
I tried, but I couldn't make my computer recognize the USB stick with unetbootn. I could with Rufus, but not unetbootn. I tried making it with Rufus and transfering the 6.22 files over, but it didn't work. I can't make my computer recognize and boot off of a 6.22 DOS usb stick.
Either I can get it to boot using the crippled DOS 7.1, or I can make a DOS 6.22 USB stick that dies shortly after boot and doesn't even bring up the command.com. And my BIOS is using Legacy mode, not UEFI in case anyone wants to point to that as being the problem.
After the time I wasted on it, it would be easier and more time-efficient to just roll up an 86box VM.

[Anonymous No.9860619]

>>9860595
I don't know what you're working on, but retro PC's and USB don't mix.

[Anonymous No.9860629]

>>9860619
If you bothered to follow the conversation, you would know it was about booting DOS on a modern PC off of a USB stick.

[Anonymous No.9860645]

>>9860629
Okay, I wasn't going to bother following the conversation. That's why I said I didn't know what you were talking about. I have no expirence running DOS on newer hardware since that doesn't interest me. I prefer my hardware to be from the early 90's.

[Anonymous No.9860748]

Did people really buy this kind of stuff when going for a gaming PC? I mean, all that useless garbage like a ZIP-drive, joystick, stereoscopic VR-glasses (I still can't believe people actually bought it, or spent money on "deluxe revisions" of video cards) etc. Such a waste.

[Anonymous No.9860768]

>>9858672
>>9858782
Celeron 300A, 3dfx V2, and an Abit BH6 here. Would be a kickass setup if it fucking worked.

[Anonymous No.9860965]

>>9859206
I do actually.

[Anonymous No.9861145]

>>9860748
It used to be more numerous because a lot of the things were not built into computers and so to get what you wanted for certain aspects like storage and networking and etc., you had to buy and install third-party hardware and software to fill those gaps. But nowadays, it's really only down to your monitor and the accessories game is whittled down to just controllers like fightpads or flightsticks depending on games you play and your mouse and keyboard. VR is niche, sounds cards are niche, use built-in audio is good enough, 3D is dead, etc. It's a lot simpler now.

[Anonymous No.9861341]

>>9860595
Damn. If you want something nearly instant that will likely boot fine, write a FreeDOS bootdisk directly from rufus. SBEMU does work with it, and I think I played Treasure Mathstorm fine.