You don't get to press the turbo button. You don't get to run out of memory in tes arena because you wondered to far into the wilderness. You don't get to play math blaster in school on a crt monitor after practicing typing. You just don't get it.
The Turbo button died with the 486, but there may have been some Pentium 1 machines with one on the case. But I don;t think they worked. This machine is a Pentium 4. Maybe even a FX 5500 or GeForce 6500 would be a good fit? Both would be around period correct hardware.Might be able to find fanless cards in this range too.
thanks for the suggestions i think i used to have an fx5500 actually. it was a piece of shit but it played doom 3 and half life 2 decently enough didnt need to upgrade it until I wanted to play oblivion. Its too bad that pc is gone though died of capacitor plague.
I'd personally advise against dumpster diving for these retro PC's. I bought one of these from Goodwill before and the motherboard died within a year. If you really want an XP machine like that, buy Chinese parts on Amazon and build it yourself; it'll cost more, but you'll also not need to replace the whole thing every year.
I've personally had enough games malfunction in VM's to where I can't take VM's seriously anymore unless it's something like DOSBox (which I think isn't even a VM in the first place anyway).
that pc probably died of capacitor plague. I dont want an xp machine I have a top of the line one from 2008 so this is going to be a win98 machine. I would have liked a p3/amd athlon machine but this will sufficd. Lots of electronics from the early 2000s suffer from capacitor plague like the original xbox its just something you have to deal with. Our family PC when I was a kid died of it too before I knew what it was.
Anon with the father who bought tons of PCs at auctions here. The very worst of the worst in this regard, in my experience, was the Dell Optiplex GX270. It had even better specs than your Compaq, but LITERALLY half of them would die due to bad capacitors. And I do mean literally. We had like 200 at one point, and we got to testing them all one by one, and like 95 of them had leaking capacitors. The GX260 before it and the GX280 after it were nowhere near as prone to dying.
picked up a driver earlier and got windows on it. just about to update the drivers so i dont have to do 640x480 in 16 colors lol.
mines got plague lol i opened it right up and a bunch of the big caps are no good. i fully expected that when i got it but im going to grab some more caps tomorrow. its only the 6.3v 2200 uF ones that seem to fail and fortunately they are the easiest to replace.
>no one can walk on walls like I can because I am the sideways man >the sideways man, the sideways man >no one can sideways walk as fast as I can because I am the sideways man >the sideways man
It's an old computer, but I can't say I would have necessarily picked it for any specific retro purposes. It's new enough that DOS would be inconvenient to configure on it. If your goal is Windows games, you can pretty much play that on your modern PC without needing an old one.
>bro do you even play pc games. windows 7 has trouble with so many old games and windows 10 is even worse.
Windows compatibility mode, literally allows you to run 16 bit windows applications on modern windows. If you have trouble playing old games in windows 7 or 10, you will struggle to get them working on metal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_on_Windows
I think you're seriously overestimating Compatibility Mode. Just two of the games that don't work:
- Desperados: if you play it on anything above XP, you'll most likely run into a CTD as soon as you finish the second map, and none of the workarounds truly work;
- Slave Zero: the game uses a wrapper (nGlide), so if you're not playing on Win98, you'll get ultra slowdown during the sewer stage. And I'm not joking, it's like 2 FPS at times.
About 16-bit windows applications, are you sure they actually work? Because the last Windows that had support for 16-bit applications was XP. I know because I usually play older japanese PC games, and they're usually 16-bit. I'm pretty sure both Vista and 7 throw a warning about it not working anymore.
You are correct.
Windows 10 decided to treat it as a feature you had to install later.
With 64 bit Windows, you have to install some extra 3rd party stuff to get 16 bit support back.
Alien Carnage is weird on screens that are not 4:3.
ive never had problems with embeded sound cards in dos before they all emulate soundblaster just fine. besides ill just throw something in the pci slot if i have to.
and here are the specs. I am pretty impressed myself. I plan on installing windows 98 se once I have a hard drive. What kind of video card should I stick in here? What can I do about a hard drive too? I plan on just sticking a new old stock IDE drive in myself but is there a better solution? This thing is going to he the best win98 machine still offering full dos support.
Best video card you can do will be a 4x AGP low-profile. Most likely 32MB to 128MB VRAM, 32MB being more likely, 128MB being a unicorn. Try to aim for a later GeForce card with hardware texture and lighting features. Avoid the GeForce 4MX.
My dad used to buy computers from school auctions to resell. We had literally hundreds of these exact pieces of shit at one point. I recall the power supplies would fail quite often, so we have dozens of them just taking up space, waiting to be cannibalized for parts. Also IIRC sometimes it would be a pain in the ass to lift the hinge that holds the HDD and CD-ROM drive because there would be a plastic bit that would get stuck unless you lifted that bit manually. Shit sucked to work with. As for GPU, your options are going to be limited due to the small form factor. I think some of them came with some shitty low-end ATI.
lots of old geforce cards will fit, pretty sure a tnt 2 wont have problems fitting either. im just not sure what i want to pair with that beefy processor though
>tnt 2 wont have problems fitting either. im just not sure what i want to pair with that beefy processor though
May as well just find a fanless GeForce 4MX. The GeForce 4MX is basically just a re-branded GeForce2 with an updated memory controller. A TNT2 seems pretty old for a Pentium IV era PC. Or Geforce 6600? That might be a bit much?
yah i only was thinking tnt2 as an option cause i am familiar with those cards i know its more a p3 era card. I was also thinking of a geforce 4mx but i wasnt sure how that series was because i remember its the budget shit models but I dont plan on playing doom 3 or half life 2 so maybe thats my best choice.
>yah i only was thinking tnt2 as an option cause i am familiar with those cards i know its more a p3 era card. I was also thinking of a geforce 4mx but i wasnt sure how that series was because i remember its the budget shit models but I dont plan on playing doom 3 or half life 2 so maybe thats my best choice.
I have had Geforce 4MX cards, and they are really not great for gaming from that era, and they are basically the 'cheap shit' GPU's. They only support up to DX7, they basically are better Geforce 2's. The Geforce 4 ti's were the real Geforce 4's. But even the ti cards max out at DX8. For DX9 you would need a GeForce FX or higher.
At that point, it'd be better to go ATI, would it not? I recall the FX series more or less shitting the bed during that generation.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
op here I do not know anything about ATI cards from that era. how easy are the drivers to track down? i know finding old nvidia drivers is easy enough.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
I don't know, to be honest. I just remember that specific generation was ATI kicking Nvidia's ass up and down the range, with only the highest end (the FX 5950) holding its own. It was much more even the generation after that.
like I said I dont plan on playing doom 3 or anything. Just half life, quake 3, and stuff from that era. I might even just roll with onboard graphics and do everything in software cause that processor is a beast and 512mb is more than enough ram for everything i want to play on it. I actually still have my core 2 duo with a geforce 9800 from 2008 for playing xp shit natively.
Way better specs than I thought it would have.
same here man I was expecting a piece of shit p4 when i finally got to boot it up. Even a base p4 would be more than powerful enough for the best windows 95/98 games and I got this frickin beast. I am really impressed to say the least.
Congratulation OP! You're now the proud owner of someone else's garbage. Liked and upvoted!
He paid for that shit? I used to get it for free from clients who realized what a horrific mistake they'd made buying HP and switched to a competent vendor as soon as the garbage was amortized. I fixed whatever I could and donated it to schools in 3rd world shitholes.
lots of old geforce cards will fit, pretty sure a tnt 2 wont have problems fitting either. im just not sure what i want to pair with that beefy processor though
Nothing will fit except a low profile card. A standard card is taller than the whole machine. You've obviously never worked on a PC before. Lucky these things don't require a screwdriver to open, otherwise you'd have put an eye out playing with daddys tools by now.
what should i do about the hard drive boys? should i just buy an IDE drive? or should i be rolling some sort of compact flash solution? is there an adapter so i could use a SATA ssd?
okay sweet, question though how am i supposed to get the driver onto the computer to actually detect a sata drive if i plan on using that as my hard drive.
Traditionally, you place the driver on a floppy diskette, and leave the disk in the floppy drive during install. Windows 98 might be less smooth about it than NT/2k/XP, because it will boot in a DOS mode.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
okay sweet, question though how am i supposed to get the driver onto the computer to actually detect a sata drive if i plan on using that as my hard drive.
AND, the controller may have the option of impersonating an IDE controller.
There are adapters to let you connect SATA drives to IDE controllers, but I would be surprised if you didn't take a drastic loss in speed when using them. I wouldn't want to put Windows on a system that used one.
I use one of these happily on my dedicated DOS system, so that I can use a SATA SSD.
https://www.amazon.com//dp/B002OEBO6E/
I have never benchmarked it, but I only use it for DOS, and everything on DOS is more than enough.
You can find IDE SSD for laptops, and they should work well. I kinda see it as not worth the money.
https://www.amazon.com//dp/B008RVN97A/
https://www.amazon.com//dp/B08MDV66F2/
oh shit nevermind the second link is the solution lol. yah im thinking thats kind of not worth it. someone local is selling a 60gb ide hard disk i sent him a message hope he replies tomorrow.
It's good and it's bad.
The speed difference between the SSD and a spinning platter is VERY noticeable, even on IDE.
The drive size in the current year... yeah, not good, but Windows 98 would still find it roomy.
i actually went with this 64 mb geforce mx440 cause its got svideo out too. I also got the windows 98 drivers for the card already. nvidia still has all the drivers for their legacy cards on their site.
I hope you got it for free, I consider Pentium 4 machines to be worthless. For 90s PC Pentium 2 or 3 is better because you can find motherboards with ISA slots for them, which means a big selection of cheap and good sound cards. For 2000s gaming, Core 2 Duo-based systems are much faster and cost almost the same.
no hard drive of course, onboard graphics but an open AGP slot, also 2 pci slots you cant really see in the photo.
>no hard drive
Slap an SSD in that bitch
I still don't understand the point of retro pc's when you can just run a VM.
You don't get to press the turbo button. You don't get to run out of memory in tes arena because you wondered to far into the wilderness. You don't get to play math blaster in school on a crt monitor after practicing typing. You just don't get it.
>You don't get to press the turbo button.
The Turbo button died with the 486, but there may have been some Pentium 1 machines with one on the case. But I don;t think they worked. This machine is a Pentium 4. Maybe even a FX 5500 or GeForce 6500 would be a good fit? Both would be around period correct hardware.Might be able to find fanless cards in this range too.
thanks for the suggestions i think i used to have an fx5500 actually. it was a piece of shit but it played doom 3 and half life 2 decently enough didnt need to upgrade it until I wanted to play oblivion. Its too bad that pc is gone though died of capacitor plague.
You could post this in any thread and just say "I still don't understand the point of retro consoles when you can just run an emulator".
I'd personally advise against dumpster diving for these retro PC's. I bought one of these from Goodwill before and the motherboard died within a year. If you really want an XP machine like that, buy Chinese parts on Amazon and build it yourself; it'll cost more, but you'll also not need to replace the whole thing every year.
I've personally had enough games malfunction in VM's to where I can't take VM's seriously anymore unless it's something like DOSBox (which I think isn't even a VM in the first place anyway).
that pc probably died of capacitor plague. I dont want an xp machine I have a top of the line one from 2008 so this is going to be a win98 machine. I would have liked a p3/amd athlon machine but this will sufficd. Lots of electronics from the early 2000s suffer from capacitor plague like the original xbox its just something you have to deal with. Our family PC when I was a kid died of it too before I knew what it was.
Anon with the father who bought tons of PCs at auctions here. The very worst of the worst in this regard, in my experience, was the Dell Optiplex GX270. It had even better specs than your Compaq, but LITERALLY half of them would die due to bad capacitors. And I do mean literally. We had like 200 at one point, and we got to testing them all one by one, and like 95 of them had leaking capacitors. The GX260 before it and the GX280 after it were nowhere near as prone to dying.
God, I fucking hated that "job".
picked up a driver earlier and got windows on it. just about to update the drivers so i dont have to do 640x480 in 16 colors lol.
mines got plague lol i opened it right up and a bunch of the big caps are no good. i fully expected that when i got it but im going to grab some more caps tomorrow. its only the 6.3v 2200 uF ones that seem to fail and fortunately they are the easiest to replace.
>no one can walk on walls like I can because I am the sideways man
>the sideways man, the sideways man
>no one can sideways walk as fast as I can because I am the sideways man
>the sideways man
spider pig
spider pig
Have you tried VMs meant specifically for this sort of thing like 86box/pcem?
What are you gonna do with it homeslice
Oh hey, I had one of those.
It's an old computer, but I can't say I would have necessarily picked it for any specific retro purposes. It's new enough that DOS would be inconvenient to configure on it. If your goal is Windows games, you can pretty much play that on your modern PC without needing an old one.
if i install windows 98 on it the only problem i should run into in regards to dos software should be for really ancient shit tied to clock speed.
bro do you even play pc games. windows 7 has trouble with so many old games and windows 10 is even worse.
>bro do you even play pc games. windows 7 has trouble with so many old games and windows 10 is even worse.
Windows compatibility mode, literally allows you to run 16 bit windows applications on modern windows. If you have trouble playing old games in windows 7 or 10, you will struggle to get them working on metal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_on_Windows
compatibility mode doesnt work for everything retard seriously you must not play games. try and play disciples and see for yourself.
Works fine
If the child doesn't know how and doesn't want to try, just leave him to his struggle.
disciples literally does not work on windows 10 and clicking your stupid little box does fuck all. I think you two gays may be on the wrong board.
I think you're seriously overestimating Compatibility Mode. Just two of the games that don't work:
- Desperados: if you play it on anything above XP, you'll most likely run into a CTD as soon as you finish the second map, and none of the workarounds truly work;
- Slave Zero: the game uses a wrapper (nGlide), so if you're not playing on Win98, you'll get ultra slowdown during the sewer stage. And I'm not joking, it's like 2 FPS at times.
About 16-bit windows applications, are you sure they actually work? Because the last Windows that had support for 16-bit applications was XP. I know because I usually play older japanese PC games, and they're usually 16-bit. I'm pretty sure both Vista and 7 throw a warning about it not working anymore.
I've not tried it, but supposedly 16-bit applications can still work on 32-bit versions of Vista, 7, 8/8.1 and 10.
You are correct.
Windows 10 decided to treat it as a feature you had to install later.
With 64 bit Windows, you have to install some extra 3rd party stuff to get 16 bit support back.
Alien Carnage is weird on screens that are not 4:3.
You are going to run into sound problems on DOS games. Don't give up after 2 seconds, and you can play old games on 7, 8, 10 or 11.
ive never had problems with embeded sound cards in dos before they all emulate soundblaster just fine. besides ill just throw something in the pci slot if i have to.
and here are the specs. I am pretty impressed myself. I plan on installing windows 98 se once I have a hard drive. What kind of video card should I stick in here? What can I do about a hard drive too? I plan on just sticking a new old stock IDE drive in myself but is there a better solution? This thing is going to he the best win98 machine still offering full dos support.
get an ide to sata adapter from startech, it's not worth fucking with old ide drives.
Way better specs than I thought it would have.
Best video card you can do will be a 4x AGP low-profile. Most likely 32MB to 128MB VRAM, 32MB being more likely, 128MB being a unicorn. Try to aim for a later GeForce card with hardware texture and lighting features. Avoid the GeForce 4MX.
>pentium 4 in SFF case
looks neat tho
4 in SFF case
>housefire
pfft, amateurs...
I owned one of these.
Show us the exhaust fan(s).
My dad used to buy computers from school auctions to resell. We had literally hundreds of these exact pieces of shit at one point. I recall the power supplies would fail quite often, so we have dozens of them just taking up space, waiting to be cannibalized for parts. Also IIRC sometimes it would be a pain in the ass to lift the hinge that holds the HDD and CD-ROM drive because there would be a plastic bit that would get stuck unless you lifted that bit manually. Shit sucked to work with. As for GPU, your options are going to be limited due to the small form factor. I think some of them came with some shitty low-end ATI.
lots of old geforce cards will fit, pretty sure a tnt 2 wont have problems fitting either. im just not sure what i want to pair with that beefy processor though
>tnt 2 wont have problems fitting either. im just not sure what i want to pair with that beefy processor though
May as well just find a fanless GeForce 4MX. The GeForce 4MX is basically just a re-branded GeForce2 with an updated memory controller. A TNT2 seems pretty old for a Pentium IV era PC. Or Geforce 6600? That might be a bit much?
yah i only was thinking tnt2 as an option cause i am familiar with those cards i know its more a p3 era card. I was also thinking of a geforce 4mx but i wasnt sure how that series was because i remember its the budget shit models but I dont plan on playing doom 3 or half life 2 so maybe thats my best choice.
>yah i only was thinking tnt2 as an option cause i am familiar with those cards i know its more a p3 era card. I was also thinking of a geforce 4mx but i wasnt sure how that series was because i remember its the budget shit models but I dont plan on playing doom 3 or half life 2 so maybe thats my best choice.
I have had Geforce 4MX cards, and they are really not great for gaming from that era, and they are basically the 'cheap shit' GPU's. They only support up to DX7, they basically are better Geforce 2's. The Geforce 4 ti's were the real Geforce 4's. But even the ti cards max out at DX8. For DX9 you would need a GeForce FX or higher.
At that point, it'd be better to go ATI, would it not? I recall the FX series more or less shitting the bed during that generation.
op here I do not know anything about ATI cards from that era. how easy are the drivers to track down? i know finding old nvidia drivers is easy enough.
I don't know, to be honest. I just remember that specific generation was ATI kicking Nvidia's ass up and down the range, with only the highest end (the FX 5950) holding its own. It was much more even the generation after that.
like I said I dont plan on playing doom 3 or anything. Just half life, quake 3, and stuff from that era. I might even just roll with onboard graphics and do everything in software cause that processor is a beast and 512mb is more than enough ram for everything i want to play on it. I actually still have my core 2 duo with a geforce 9800 from 2008 for playing xp shit natively.
same here man I was expecting a piece of shit p4 when i finally got to boot it up. Even a base p4 would be more than powerful enough for the best windows 95/98 games and I got this frickin beast. I am really impressed to say the least.
4MX cards are basiclly stripped down Geforce 2 cards. They're not bad at all as long as you know what to expect from them.
Congratulation OP! You're now the proud owner of someone else's garbage. Liked and upvoted!
He paid for that shit? I used to get it for free from clients who realized what a horrific mistake they'd made buying HP and switched to a competent vendor as soon as the garbage was amortized. I fixed whatever I could and donated it to schools in 3rd world shitholes.
Nothing will fit except a low profile card. A standard card is taller than the whole machine. You've obviously never worked on a PC before. Lucky these things don't require a screwdriver to open, otherwise you'd have put an eye out playing with daddys tools by now.
what should i do about the hard drive boys? should i just buy an IDE drive? or should i be rolling some sort of compact flash solution? is there an adapter so i could use a SATA ssd?
https://www.amazon.com//dp/B07NQL1YW6
> Support Windows 98SE / Me / 2000 / XP / NT 4.0 / XP 64-bit / Vista, Linux & Netware OS.
oooh this looks interesting but how do i get power to a sata drive without the wide connector
https://www.amazon.com//dp/B07PXR1XR1/
okay sweet, question though how am i supposed to get the driver onto the computer to actually detect a sata drive if i plan on using that as my hard drive.
Traditionally, you place the driver on a floppy diskette, and leave the disk in the floppy drive during install. Windows 98 might be less smooth about it than NT/2k/XP, because it will boot in a DOS mode.
AND, the controller may have the option of impersonating an IDE controller.
this is a xp machine
correct it did have xp on it at one point. now it will be my windows 98 machine with the best single core cpu you can throw at it pretty much
There are adapters to let you connect SATA drives to IDE controllers, but I would be surprised if you didn't take a drastic loss in speed when using them. I wouldn't want to put Windows on a system that used one.
I use one of these happily on my dedicated DOS system, so that I can use a SATA SSD.
https://www.amazon.com//dp/B002OEBO6E/
I have never benchmarked it, but I only use it for DOS, and everything on DOS is more than enough.
You can find IDE SSD for laptops, and they should work well. I kinda see it as not worth the money.
https://www.amazon.com//dp/B008RVN97A/
https://www.amazon.com//dp/B08MDV66F2/
do those SSDs not require power? how do they work?
The adapter in the other link is how it gets power. The laptop dives have more pins, because some of them are for power.
oh shit nevermind the second link is the solution lol. yah im thinking thats kind of not worth it. someone local is selling a 60gb ide hard disk i sent him a message hope he replies tomorrow.
It's good and it's bad.
The speed difference between the SSD and a spinning platter is VERY noticeable, even on IDE.
The drive size in the current year... yeah, not good, but Windows 98 would still find it roomy.
I hope you're gonna run Stay Tooned on that
i actually went with this 64 mb geforce mx440 cause its got svideo out too. I also got the windows 98 drivers for the card already. nvidia still has all the drivers for their legacy cards on their site.
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/374593873678
Consider optimized Omega drivers
https://web.archive.org/web/20030812161126/http://www.ftpfiler.wp.dk/nvidia_w9x_omega_14403.exe
Are you going to put it down?
I hope you got it for free, I consider Pentium 4 machines to be worthless. For 90s PC Pentium 2 or 3 is better because you can find motherboards with ISA slots for them, which means a big selection of cheap and good sound cards. For 2000s gaming, Core 2 Duo-based systems are much faster and cost almost the same.
https://a.co/d/3XA2r8g
this is the adapter I prefer to put new drives on old computers
I hope you lifted with your knees.