How many of you own a dedicated retro machine for PC gaming? Is it worth the effort?
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How many of you own a dedicated retro machine for PC gaming? Is it worth the effort?
How many of you own a dedicated retro machine for PC gaming? Is it worth the effort?
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I know some people who have them. THey're J-PC obsessives who ship crates and craets of stuff from Japanese importers. Obviously they think it's worth it. For me it is too much stuff and too much space. Trying to lessen my stuff quantity, so I mostly run emulators for old PCs. The oldest I have now is a thinkpad t42 that I really just use to run things that install more easily on WinXP. If I had the space I would get something with a dedicated MIDI device; That Roland sound is the only thing I really miss out on, I think. Maybe there's a way to emulate it; I just don't know about it if there is one.
oh, and once upon a time I had a win98SE box, but I gave up on it because getting some things to work was a PITA, and I could run most everything I wanted from it on the XP laptop instead. DOS in particular was a b***h; Being DOS-compatible didn't mean that it was easy to get things to run.
IME The vast majority of DOS games work better through simply dragging the .exe onto a DOSbox shortcut than they ever did natively.
Plug and Play really was a game changer.
The only exception, and the reason perhaps in some cases these machines may be useful are games that run in DOS via a Windows 95, 98 or XP Shell, those games are a bit more challenging to emulate.
I have several. It requires almost no effort, as they were all built many years ago. I think most people who complain about "the effort" are kiddos who are obsessed with building one perfect machine that does everything. That's impossible, so they're constantly chasing the dragon, fricking things up, and having to fix them.
Yes, old machines do take up a lot of space. Not something you want to get in to if everything has to fit on a 24" ikea shelf unit at the foot of your racing car bed.
Not really. It was neat for a few months anyway. Then you realize DOSbox, PCem, VMware, and wrappers do the job pretty well and it sucks to go to another station just to play games you can play perfectly well on your daily driver. It's nice to look at and see it running on a 17" CRT now and then, though.
It's impossible but you can cover a lot of ground with 2 machines. One with ISA, one without with AGP 2.0. So like a Pentium III and a Pentium IV/Athlon XP or 64. Even the latter will get you a long way minus some really bothersome DOS shit like Turrican 2 and Ultima 7.
>b buh P3 is too fast
Disable cache, underclock, slowdos.exe. Even a P4 can be wrangled pretty well this way to run ancient shit. Anything newer than say Doom 3 is just better off running natively on new machines. I guess 3 machines and a 15khz TV/monitor if you want composite CGA + Tandy and you're nutty enough to care about that shit.
I'm tempted to get a Mac, though. Pic related is basically unemulated, and Mac emulation in general has been a janky experience every time I've gone about it. (no emulator seems to handle Marathon's mouselook correctly, for instance)
The MT-32 can be emulated through MUNT. The SC-55 is another matter. There's soundfonts that can be loaded through FluidSynth that purport to use the SC-55 instruments, but they're not exact. There is also Roland's own Sound Canvas VA software, which is supposed to work perfectly, but it's payware. There is an actual SC-55 emulator in the works, but it's still in the preliminary stages, so it'll be some time before it's ready to go the way MUNT is.
When you say payware, do you mean it's a subscription, or you just buy it once and it's yours?
It's available in both forms, apparently.
Yeah, gotta hand it to Applel, they (or rather Steve Jerbs) knew from very early on the value of becoming a "lifestyle brand" and etching themselves into the very identity of their user base, or rather consumer base.
Forgot to add, so that their base would eagerly open wide for whatever shit came out of their bowels and more readily accept obsolescence or whatever else Apple considered convenient for themselves. You see it with a lot of brands nowadays, but Apple really took it to another level from very early on.
SC-55, -55Pro and -88 can be emulated by pirating the ROMs and loading them up in a virtual machine. You then set DoxBox (or whatever emulator) to use that machine as audio source. It's an admittedly messy solution.
I have multiple
I don't know the answer to the second question
I guess it's worth it if you like to tinker
A hoarder is never a hoarder with enough space to store the junk. Seems like a waste yet a lot of times I try to play games older than 95, I hit a brick wall somewhere that wouldnt happen on a real pc of the era.
Dosbox handles a lot of the problems that took hours to solve like tinkering with boot disks and memory management bullshit. It's mostly Win 95 through early XP games that won't run well today but a lot of the good ones worth playing just have fan patches anyway.
If you think you wouldn’t hit brick walls with pcs of the era, you’ve never used pcs of the era.
I have a win98se box. It’s not really worth it unless you get enjoyment out of screwing with things until they work. There’s precisely one game that I’ve come across that works better on it than on my modern machine (shogo). In fact a lot of old dos games are cpu speed dependent and want a 386 or something, so they run better in dosbox on my modern machine.
I've kept a lot of parts, and I hope to complete some dedicated retro PCs, but I have to stabilize my rent/housing situation before I could dedicate the space/time to enjoy it as I used to. I am hoping the effort will pay off. I was really close to completing a J-Win98SE build, but they don't make power supplies with a fan/fans on the bottom to exhaust out the back anymore. Another issue is figuring out -5V for certain hardware configurations. There are a lot of parts which may need capacitor replacements, and the labor/expertise for such work is in very short supply. No one even repairs CRTs in my area anymore so getting one going is difficult. Still with just those few complications, if they can be overcome, I imagine greater joys to be had.
>CRT repair
Yeah these things are fricking toast once they go out. That's why I have spares and once they're gone I'm giving up the dream. This boomermancy is utterly lost except for old arcade repair guy with rich clients and random ass autists.
The good thing is, we're only a couple of flat panel generations away from finally having displays that, when combined with the right shader, are worthy enough to serve as complete CRT replacements. The best shaders, together with HDR, on the best OLED displays are capable of VERY accurately replicating a CRT image. However, they're not yet bright enough to combine said shaders together with strobing/BFI, which is what's needed for the other part of the CRT equation, namely smooth motion. And even then, you'd also want VRR on top of that so you're able to smoothly emulate all those weird CRT refresh rates, and it's currently not compatible with strobing for some reason. So once all of that gets ironed out, we may finally be able to set the CRT to rest.
I still have a couple too, but finding anyone that can help in repair/restoration of CRT monitors is near impossible in my area. People restore cars from even longer ago, and there are enough people who enjoy vintage cars that they are willing to produce the parts in small batches for even some of the more obscure ones, yet so much fewer people even care about CRTs that their destiny is extinction. Even though I want to keep the few CRT displays I still have healthy and functional for game playing purposes, I don't earn as much as car owners to have restoration work done. With each passing day, there are fewer and fewer that understand the technology and has the technical skills that can recreate/repair the old magic which will be lost to time.
As you can see, some retro video cards alone that I have could use that 4-pin molex, to the 6-pin, up to combinations with 8-pin power delivery that requires significant wattage. In these old computer cases, you can see the power source is situated at the rear top, expecting the exhaust out the top-rear of the case, and the modern power supply there has its fan blowing up to the top plate since it expects its rear grille to be intake vents for modern cases that has the power supply situated on the bottom rear. I have a lot to learn about electricity before going any further in my path of using old computers. Especially when I am mixing modern (SSD/power sources/drive emulators/etc.) with the old.
if you're trying to do some all original 'tism thing with the PSU good luck, but you can drop in a pico PSU. They go up to 250 watt for a reasonable price. I revived a pc88 and sharp x1 that were parted out and had no PSU. There's no -5v on those, but there's some discussion on eevblog about converting the -12v to -5v with a regulator and apparently arcade PSUs have some 1A negative voltages to work with if you need something more. A non-amplified sound card should need something in mA range.
I wouldn't go loading the capacitor cannon unless there's an issue. at this point, I have so much shit, it's like a restoring a car. Pick a problem and fix it and just enjoy the car and keep it running. There's always 1000s things you could do but just using the hardware is the point.
I have a HP Pavilion Elite desktop PC from 2010 with these specs:
Intel Core i5-750 processor (2.67Ghz)
Samsung 8GB (2 x 4GB) Dual-Channel DDR3 desktop RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 1GB GDDR3 graphics card
MSI Indio motherboard
Apple/Toshiba 256GB SSD boot drive
Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD storage drive
LightScribe DVD-RW optical drive
LightScribe BD-ROM optical drive (HD-DVD compatible)
FireWire (IEEE 1394) inputs built-in to chassis
Multi Card Reader built-in (SD, CompactFlash, Memory Stick Pro Duo, etc.)
AVerMedia H789 PCI-E Hybrid DVB-T TV tuner card
HP Pocket Media drive bay built-in
Windows 7 Ultimate operating system
The only upgrade I've done to it was the SSD from an busted iMac I found, and I can't remember if it originally came with 4GB of RAM. It is plugged in to my ViewSonic 21" CRT monitor.
>Core i5
>8gb ram
>SSD
>retro
Where are you right now?
Are you drunk or high or both?
The machine is nearly 14 years old, though. A PC from 1997 would have been retro in 2010, just like an N64 console would have been?
By that logic, Dark Souls, Skyrim and GTA V are considered retro.
Utter BS.
Those three games were all released on PS3 and Xbox 360... why couldn't they be considered retro in 2023? Just because game mechanics haven't changed much since then doesn't mean they aren't old games.
It's not that my OS is old; I'd say it's that my PC has things like FireWire inputs built-in that make it retro. The i5-750 was literally released 14 years ago in 2009. I even have this PC plugged in to a CRT monitor.
Still not retro, even after all your coping.
both those computer arent retro by any means.
putting an old OS on a recent computer doesnt make it retro.
Get a retro laptop and restore it. It’s much comfier and more compact. You can easily put it away when you’re done
They're cool, but imo you're missing out on the biggest advantage of having a retro machine, which is games displaying properly on a CRT.
Most had VGA out back tehn
Retro laptops are arguably even worse than desktops, mainly the ones with shitty drivers, weak hardware, awful keyboard and screen. Even older laptops around 80's suffer from lack of ways of standardized IDE ports, because the previous owner decided to remove the HDD controller out of it, rendering the laptop useless. Not even the parallel SD-card reader worked on this piece of junk.
Second biggest issue with old laptops (apart from dodgy proprietary connectors) is screen technology.
If you have a laptop from the mid-late-90s, there's a good chance it will have a DSTN screen. They had one advantage over the TFTs which eventually replaced them, namely power consumption. In terms of everything else, they're fricking terrible.
My 1997 Compaq Armada 1530DM has a DSTN screen and holy shit it's bad. Thank frick it has a VGA-out.
>DSTN
As a kid I never used laptops but when I later saw one of these screens for the first time, I finally understood why Windows has a pointer trail option
Yea, the ghosting is so fricking terrible you barely see the pointer half of the time.
if you have to ask then I guess not moron
I have a secondary PC used exclusively for retro gaming.
i5-3570k
Nvidia GeForce GTX 950
Asrock z77E-ITX
Kingston HyperX Fury 16GB (4GB for Windows XP)
eMachines eView 15p
Samsung 870 Evo 500GB SATA SSD
Windows XP, Linux Mint (don't know what WM to pick so I went with Mate)
Dell external optical drive
Specs seem too new but I don't have issues with any games so far
One? I have ten
And because no one beliefs it:
Top left to lower right
>Win7 xw4600
>DOS P3 450
>DOS P1 200
>XP AMD64
>SGI PC Mod i3 2120
>XP Kayak XM600 single P3 600
>XP Kayak XU800 dual P3 800
>Win2000 Kayak XAs dual P2 400
>XP AMD64
>Win98 P3 800
Not shown
5 Laptops
Dual P3 Tualatin
Ultra 40
Why? Because i can and LANs with frens at my place
>SGI PC Mod i3 2120
What the frick is wrong with you?
No working machine was harmed in the process
That mips machine better be alive
I rather collect the great ones
They are all great. Is that your Tezro?
Compare the floor: Yes of course. Also got an Indy R5k
Did you ddos me one time? I bet you did
>The guy who posts to Ganker and says old SG machines are “the greats” is also a massive homosexual
Color me surprised
>that sgi case
kino
Those sun workstations were ahead of their time, I'd have no problem using one for a modern computer.
The ones in the pic surely not, they're standard x86 boxes on tyan boards (S2865) which you could simply purchase. Standard ATX too so yes, you could use it as a basis for a modern computer.
Why do zoomers do this? Are you're trying to fit in but so ignorant your moronic attempts have the exact opposite effect? Enquiring minds want to know.
>Enquiring minds want to know.
If you are going to use an insult about intelligence, then at learn to properly spell.
-50 points. See me after class.
>If you are going to use an insult about intelligence, then at learn to properly spell.
>then at learn to properly spell
>then at learn
should take your own advice moron. your grammar sucks
Ask your gramps about "Enquiring minds want to know" zoom zoom.
>If you are going to use an insult about intelligence, then at learn to properly spell.
I was asking about knowledge, not intelligence. But since you don't understand the difference and can't make an intelligent post clearly you have neither.
At learn to properly sentence. lmfao.
>LANs with frens at my place
jealous of this. sounds fun.
>How many of you own a dedicated retro machine for PC gaming?
Mine is P3, 512, Voodoo 3 3000, Win98.
>Is it worth the effort?
What effort? It's not like you have to go through water and fire to get yourself "a retro machine". Sure, Voodoos aren't that cheap anymore nor Tualatins, but getting some Athlon/P4 and GeForce 4/5 that would absolutely suffice for everything released up until 2003 isn't hard and expensive.
I'd say the biggest issue is all this stuff (including a CRT) takes quite a lot of space.
Also, like it was already mentioned above, if you're not sure, just get yourself an old notebook. It's just that most probably you'll fiddle with that "retro" thing for a day or two and then forget about it.
>no one believes i dig in the trash
You gotta eat somehow
1/2
>How many of you own a dedicated retro machine for PC gaming?
I got one. It's running a Pentium III 1ghz, 512mb DDR RAM, Windows 98SE, a 16GB CF-IDE adapter with a 120GB IDE HDD, a DVD burner, a Linksys wifi USB adapter for browsing TheOldNet and CleanTalk, a Soundblaster Live, and a GeForce 4 MX 4000 (considered an absolute-dogshit card at the time but it runs UT99 and Quake III Arena like a champ which is good enough for me).
>Is it worth the effort?
To me? Yes it was, only because this was once our family PC from around 2003 to 2007 where it originally had Windows XP and a Celeron 633mhz with only a basic CD drive, 256MB of RAM, and a 10GB HDD. Mostly just used for my mom and grandma to do their taxes but also had fond memories of playing Runescape and Mall Tycoon on it, it was never powerful enough to play anything more complex or demanding very well though but I kept it in my closet for years and over time found a nice Daewoo CRT monitor and Altec Lansing speakers at a thrift store, then found a really nice old Zenith keyboard in my grandpa's workshop after he'd passed-away and I felt an overwhelming desire to restore the system and turn it into a retro gaming PC to compliment my console collection so I upgraded the Hell out of it with everything seen in my earlier paragraph and use it to play basically any PC game made before 2004. I also enjoy emulating Japanese home computers on it since it feels more authentic despite the old emulators' inaccuracies.
2/2
For most people though? I don't think it would be worth it I'm afraid. gays on eBay will fleece the shit out of you for a complete system and any vintage parts that are worth a damn because of YouTuber hype. It's very cool if your living situation allows for it but otherwise I'd recommend just sticking to VM's, source ports, and emulators on a modern system. Also as soulful as Win9x is it can be a real unstable b***h too and troubleshooting software problems is a lot more difficult than on modern PC's. Making regular backups is a must if you don't want to spend hours reinstalling the OS anytime you frick up and make a little mistake with a driver install.
This. Genuine hardware from that era is a minefield of dud caps (inb4 "hurr, just lern2solder"), dodgy connectors and tired chips. Also good luck finding expansion memory chips for those cards that could mount them.
Refurbed stuff is expensive, and purpose-built new cards (like those audio cards that have started appearing recently) are even more so.
>Refurbed stuff is expensive, and purpose-built new cards (like those audio cards that have started appearing recently) are even more so.
What's wrong anon, you don't want to buy an Orpheus II?
Honestly thats about what that shit cost back in the day for high end shit. Market is getting big enough that chinks might start cloning them like they did with flash carts.
>Honestly thats about what that shit cost back in the day for high end shit
True, but I don't think you should be paying the same for old tech 30 years later. Things are supposed to get cheaper. For example we now have cheap chink handhelds complete with decent screens and everything that can emulate a surprising amount of consoles for the price. It's a bit silly to pay more for just a sound card in a system that can't even emulate a Super Nintendo
I think the Orpheus uses original old stock, hence the high price. I'm seeing Zilog, Yamaha OPL and Crystal Semiconductor logos on the chips. Those wouldn't be there if the chips were clones. Also, it looks like it has several different audio cards blobbed onto one board.
Though I don't understand why they put a RAM expansion slot on it, instead of one or two on-board chips. Expansions SIMMs haven't been a thing since the Gravis Ultrasound.
Yeah. It's a cool novelty for those lucky enough to have stumbled-on good components over the years but not practical at-all for someone simply looking to play a few games from that era, even less-so than collecting a console would be. Thankfully emulation options are much better now than they were even five years ago.
Look at this pleb with his low radiation monitor!
I got a 486, from around 93
To me it was worth it, I wanted to get into restoring old PCs and tinkering with old software and that PC allowed me to learn how to do just that.
It's currently hooked to a spare 4:3 tft display and some shitty speakers I had around as spares. At some point in the future I'll likely be getting period accurateish peripherals too, at the very least a proper CRT for it
I have multiple.
They're all gathering dust.
Please come take them.
No, it’s not worth the effort when most older games can be emulated one way or another. And like many have pointed out, more popular retro pc games usually have patches for running on modern systems. Macs are a bigger problem for retro stuff: it was never much of a gaming platform, and OS X plus the various architecture shifts they’ve done over the years have rendered many unplayable. You can emulate, but it’s tricky for some. I used to have a few older iMacs for games, but honestly, they weren’t built to last, despite Apple’s claims of quality. Once the CRT starts to decline, it’s over. A lot of games will probably be lost in time like a lot of the games Victorian children played.
apple shit is always a frickfest; It all goes back to their target users failing to understand why you would want to use something that isn't new, and not comprehending keeping things backed up or stored in repos somewhere. I ran into this a lot when I was helping relatives fix older macs, or when I tried to jailbreak an old iPad I was given and install IPAs on it. Maybe it is better now, but at the time there was shit all; Comments sections were all "why would you want to use 32-bit software if there is 64-bit now?" or "call apple or get a new one".
this but with my father in law's pc, it's all but earmarked for me since only he and I care at all about it.
Ironically, it was my uncle's PC from when he got it in 1997 until ~2007ish when he gave it to my Nana. She didn't want anything with a good internet connection because my grandpa was notorious for doing dumb shit, so she feared he would get a virus on it by clicking any generic "Hot Ladies In Your Area!" ad. They really just used it for puzzle games like Bejeweled. I have a lot of fun memories on it as a kid because it was the only remotely fun thing at her house after I had my share of socializing with family. Years later, I did a few tests on it by burning a CD of Princess Maker 2 DOS on it and it ran beautifully so I think it'd be great as a gaming rig for games of that ear.
lmao nice on the burn. Maybe your grandpa could have been placated with princess maker instead. Good of you to share the story. My wife's dad only uses his 98 now to burn CDs. I can't imagine it turns on more than a few times a year, but I haven't seen any problem with it.
well if I can just buy it then I might bite the bullet. Having that nice sound would be worth some money out of my pocket.
And yes, applel is truly brilliant at throwing their product at people who don't know any better and who don't use their hardware for any critical or essential role or operation (as much as we love entertainment, no one would say that it is needed to keep the lights on or the trains running). The rare exception I can think of is probably idSoft, since carmack built Doom (and maybe Quake? cannot recall for sure) on a NEXT computer.
Actually, this jogs my memory; I remember a few years ago reading a forum thread for mac powerusers, and there was a lot of frustration that they couldn't easily buy or upgrade normal desktop towers anymore; Apple wanted to funnel everybody into these crazy crapboxes that were beautifully designed, but absurdly expensive and guaranteed to be obsolete in 3 years. Some jobs see 3 year turnaround on hardware as standard cost of doing business; Most of the people there were smaller folks who just wanted to get one box and keep incrementally upgrading it (as most any desktop user would on another platform) and were complaining about how Apple was stonewalling their attempts to do so.
This reminds me, I would love to do some research and journalism on the ones that tech leaves behind; Anybody who has committed to a platform or product only for the maker to move on in the interest of new consumption/different direction/cost cutting/etc. As somebody who has been one of those people, an investigation of what others in different worlds feel about it would be really interesting to me personally. If I get time maybe!
I mean, technology does inevitably leave some behind. Some interfaces are clearly a product of their eras and are too limited for the newer stuff coming out. We saw this on PC, with the coming and going of all the various buses (ISA, VLB, PCI, AGP, just counting the ones that actually had some mass adoption), OSes, and other such standards. The difference, of course, is that at no point were any of them just dropped as soon as the new hotness arrived. Plenty of effort was taken to keep some kind of compatibility and support for the older interfaces for as long as it made sense to do so. ISA stuck around until the Pentium III days, PCI well into the Core 2 days if not later. DOS applications had support well after 6.22 came out in some form, and even now it's possible to run many of them if you use a 32-bit OS. Support and compatibility only dropped off once the interested user base became so small it no longer made sense to keep at it, and any outcry would be very minimal at best. Not so with the Apple ecosystem. If Apple says we're switching to this new thing, you as an Apple user are expected to follow or eat shit. There's SOME effort to keep some compatibility (see Rosetta Stone, as well as the odd adapter here and there), but it's typically short lived and gone within a scant few years.
Apple really understands that they’re a status symbol and has mastered inducing fomo. My boomer dad buys new Apple shit for himself every year like clockwork even though it’s no better. For gaming, I have accepted that Macs are basically no good (mobile games don’t count) and that PCs have more gaming longevity. Most of the games I played on my Mac were shitty PC ports anyway, and the era of Mac exclusive games is mostly things that can’t even be successfully emulated anymore because they’re so touchy.
Yeah, admittedly I actually bought a Mid-2012 Macbook Pro years ago (at a very good price, mind you), specifically because it's the last model you can actually upgrade and more or less easily replace the parts on. It's getting a bit long in the tooth now, even with 16GB RAM and an SSD, and of course Apple cut it off from the latest OS updates, but it still runs GANOO+LOONIX, so it now serves a fine purpose as a living room shitposting machine.
Yeah, I do upgrade my Apple stuff every 2-4 years just because it’s a.) easy for me to write it off and b.) more difficult to sell Macs more than 4 years old on eBay, etc. It’s a buyer’s market when it comes to old Macs unless they’re considered collectible, ie not many. It does suck to also need a pc for gaming, but as I said, retro gaming on Macs now is a waste of time since they did the arm conversion. I will miss the Escape Velocity games, though…
When I move out, I might take my Nana's old Windows 95 (she never uses it since she has a recent laptop) and turn it into a DOS/early Windows gaming rig. The specs are painfully average for 1997 but it runs, it has a CD drive, and the HD is intact so I'll take it!
I don't see any benefit anymore with 86box/dosbox. You have crt filters that are almost good enough to replace crys, a year or two and it's over for pvm homosexuals. I own a Trinitron myself, but I do t see myself ever looking for a crt of filters start getting added to led tvs.
>of filters start getting added to led tvs.
Like out of the box from the manufacturer? Not going to happen.
I could see a gaming monitor company like asus doing it once and then cancelling for lack of sales. I would be happier to see them starting these CRT filters in classic game compilation packs. M2 did it for the MD games ported to 3DS; The filter even uses stereo 3D to make the screen look more curved.
Exactly this. No extra smart tv shit just filters and upscalers. Idk why someone hasnt done this already, maybe they have I'm I'm just ignorant. This would also greatly benefit the vhs enjoyer not just the retro videogame patricians.
They haven't really been widely available or known about, probably. Sure, scalers are known but for most of time they've been exclusively the domain of LOOKIN GOOD and so I imagine industry for these game compilation packs just hasn't caught up. I'll see if I can get one of those retro game prostitutes to pressure companies on social illness about it.
Emulation, fan patches, and source ports are plenty enough for me. I wouldn't mind some old machines if the price was right, but I don't see myself using them often after the honeymooning period is over. I don't have the space, money, or time to just keep buying old PCs to tinker with to prevent that.
This. There's enough enthusiasm to get old games running on modern hardware that it's difficult to justify owning an old PC just to run them.
Not really, unless you have an interest in the hardware itself and want to actually tinker with drivers and stuff. If you just want to actually play the games, there are far cheaper, easier and better options in 99.99% of cases. Prices on a lot of retro shit (graphics cards especially) are insane these days. Go back ten years and stuff like Voodoo 3s were still e-waste that nobody wanted.
I have an XP rig I made a few years ago that can run late gen 6/early gen 7 stuff like a champ, been installing some stuff I got off archive.org, myabandonware, and gog-games the last few days and I'm gonna go grab a monitor for it tomorrow to get a proper setup. Time for some comfy AoE II.
Got some old Lenovo with a 3GHZ hyperthreaded P4, disabled HT, threw in a PCI OPL3 based sound, a Geforce 4 TI 4200, and a CF to IDE adapter. Got WIN98Se on it, works great for WIN98 stuff, great for alot of DOS stuff. Could probably do it on my main machine but setting up perfect output on a CRT on a modern machine with resolution switching looks like a pain in the dick.
Absolutely not, no. You'd need multiple machines for multiple eras. I don't have a fricking server room in my house.
One thing I'll give retro machines: try running Descent III with multiple joysticks natively or virtualized. Have fun.
>why would you want to do this
6DOF games are fricking made for 2 sticks (HOSAS) or throttle and stick (HOTAS). You have not played them if you haven't tried this yet.
I always wanted to get a really good joystick setup for games like that.
Any old game which uses native direct-input joysticks is going to be a massive headache to run on a modern machine. The moment Microsoft added an API/virtualization layer between game code and controller, it permanently broke compatibility.
If your machine doesn't have a joystick gameport on its sound card, or at least a serial port, you're in for a bad time.
I've been picking up some computers lately. I'm not seeking them out, just finding cool machines thrifting or on auctions. If you want to collect, I'd try to only focus on compact machines and peripherals, and only stuff from the 90's onward. No monitors. Don't be a gaylord like LGR hoarding junk from the 80's and gluing wood pattern wallpaper to it.
Stuff I've picked up:
-IBM PS/2 E 486 (ad pictured - for Windows 3.1/95)
-Macintosh IICI
-WYSE Thinclient from the 2000's with a 9200SE I think (For windows 95/98)
-Dual P3 800 machine w/ a geforce 2 ultra in a funky late 90's full tower (got for free, for windows nt/2000 maybe)
The only other thing I'd want is maybe a high-end P4 for windows xp. I have the processor and a 9800 vid card, just need a working motherboard.
>compact machines
That youtuber is a homosexual. VWestlife tier homosexual.
Let me guess, LGR is also a homosexual because he's not a literal boomer?
He kinda is a homosexual, though. I still watch his videos, though, which makes me a double homosexual, I guess.
I just remembered I have a windows xp netbook in my closet. do these make good retro pcs or does the lack of a dedicated gpu kill it?
Netbook or notebook? My feeling is if the former, it may run older DOS stuff OK, but wouldn't count on anything 3D from the 3DFX era onwards. Some games may run OK in software mode, but you'll start to get some slowdown the further through the 90s you go.
Might be good for some DosBox or light emulation. I wouldn't expect much more than that.
Got a couple older machines hanging around
>DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 & Windows 95, Pentium 90mhz, 32MB, Sound Blaster 16, S3 Savage, 3DFX Voodoo, Sony CD drive, boots from a compact flash card
Useful for anything that's a pain in the ass to emulate on modern machines like certain DOS games or Windows 3.1/95 games such as FMV games.
Also use it for my Willem EEPROM burner since it requires a real LPT port
Connected to a CRT that does 640x480@120hz
>Windows XP & 7, Xeon W3690, Radeon HD7970Ghz, 48GB RAM (3,5 usable in XP), Plextor CD drive, DVD drive, boots from an SSD
About as high-end as makes sense to go with XP.
Mostly useful for StarForce-enabled games, ripping CDs with CloneCD or DIC, ripping audio CDs that my main computer disc drive refuses to read, playing games that just refuse to work on Windows 11, using USB and PCI peripherals that don't work on 11, sharing files via SMB1, and a whole bunch of other stuff that's either impossible or difficult to do on modern Windows.
Capable of 2560x1440@144hz and 1920x1440@165hz
Only problem is that since it's an LGA1366 system it uses like 200 watts just to idle on desktop
I did before almost all the old games I want to play are on GOG or got HD/Definitive Editions.
>Is it worth the effort?
Yes but this board is not for retro gaming its a troll bait board against people who like old games and systems. Its not a good place to talk about old games and systems or owning them you have to 'belong' only like Nintendo and a few games for it running in emulation. but even that's bullshit. Talk about games on Ganker this is a shit board
Based Taz mouse pad. I still have mine in clean condition.
I own several old pcs from the win98, xp, vista, 7 generation in addition to my main pc. I keep them around mainly for LAN parties. I can host 8 people playing Unreal Tournament and other classic LAN games, without anyone else having to bring a computer.
For single player gaming, I rarely use them. The great majority of older games I want to play run on win10 or have source ports. Occasionally I use emulation or virtualization for win98, xp, or dos. It's the same or better experience compared to actually using old hardware.
The main thing with virtualizing 98/xp is having a second graphics card with drivers available for that OS. You need a pretty old pcie card for 9x, but up to 2014 cards support xp. Optionally you could have a sound card for eax/a3d. pci card passthru can also be done, you may need an adapter. All other drivers are taken care of by virtualization. I can plug in a crt to my secondary graphics card.
I don't play DOS games that often, but I find 86box has very responsive keyboard and mouse controls. Input lag is not such a big deal.
>go fix a rich family friend's PC after a power outage all it was was she accidentally knocked the HDMI cable out
>notice old dirty ass beige tower in the corner
>peek inside, early 2000s AOpen board with some random ass Celeron in it
>ask if I can have it and she gladly lets me take it
>mentions there's more in the basement she can show me when she has time to
Slapped in a new drive and reinstalled Windows 98 and it's running great, gonna order a GPU and a Sound Blaster Live and it'll be a pretty killer DOS/90s era rig. As for the basement stuff I'd be happy finding a CRT monitor at the very least but if there's some 486-era stuff I might have to grab it.
Is there a way to emulate old jap computers other than MSX(2) and NEC's PC____ yet?
I mostly mean FM-Towns and Sharp x8600 by that
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/FM_Towns_emulators
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Sharp_X68000_emulators
Alright OP, there is something you need to understand about retro gaming. A lot of us grew up with these consoles and computers, so we just kept what we had from our childhood. It was not even "retro" gaming back then, just regular video games. Going through the effort of tracking down all of these parts and accessories in current year isn't necessary at all though when you can just emulate or run them through a VM.
A decent beige mechanical keyboard will give you the same feeling as the old ones if not better. Sure there are CRT purists and what not but if you already have a computer capable of playing these old games, I really recommend to just use that before buying a completely separate machine for no real reason, unless you can find one (+ any other peripherals) for dirt cheap.
I got a retro pc but it doesn't seem to have an audio card nor does it want to connect to my ethernet. Anyone have any idea where you would look for this kinda stuff? Total noob obviously.
It would help if you told us everything about the machine (motherboard, CPU, cards, ram, etc). Also you're probably not gonna be able to browse the internet with any old browser that's there. There's different browsers you can get depending on your OS to browse on older machines.
alright, i'll boot it up and have a look, wasn't sure if anyone here would want to help
It's a Win XP SP3, CPU is a Celeron 2GHz, 504 MB of RAM. Motherboard is P4SM1 (cant even really find this one online).
I guess internet isn't necessary, but I would need sound, and I dont know how to install that or where to get it. It also doesn't have a video card and the ones I've tried don't fit into the GPU slot at all. The slots look like picrel (which is what turned up when I searched that motherboard) , not sure what kinda GPU goes in here.
I realize it might not be possible to help me here but would be nice to at least spitball some ideas.
It would be useful if you could take a pic of your own motherboard.
Many old cards use PCI or AGP. Google what the cards look like.
I think it might have some of those weird proprietary AGP to PCI-E slots.
I own a few, I have a dos machine, Win9x machine, and a winxp machine. Love em all
Some friendly neighborhood PC repair guy gave me a free laptop. It's a Dell Latitude PP04X. Unfortunately it's missing a some bits, like a bunch of screws, the RAM, the battery and power adapter. I've installed an old 320 GB hard drive from one of my previous laptops, but might put a SATA SSD in it (have a 128 GB drive in another laptop I don't really use).
Otherwise it's a pretty decent machine, Yonah-based Core Duo (32-bit only, sadly) and an early Quadro (dunno the model). Max RAM is 4 GB, DDR2 667 MHz. Has both WiFi and Bluetooth cards. Need to get a 32-bit Windows 7 for it.
How well would this machine run late-00s games?
>Core Duo (32-bit only, sadly)
>How well would this machine run late-00s games?
Nope