building old school PCs to play classic games.

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This reminds me of my 386 SX with DOS 6.22 and WIN 3.1... good times.

This is my next project. I put it up almost a year ago but I only installed an os a couple of days ago. This is the ultimate pentium III box.

The CPU is 1266 PENTIUM III-S with Tualatin core, full 512k cache. This is the latest iteration of p3 and it didn't make it to consumers much as first p4 cpus were at wild at that time. This is a first intel CPU with heat spreader on the die.






Mobo is an ASUS TUSL2-C on i815EP. Latest intel chipset for p3 and the only one that worked with Tualatin core. It's major limitation is max 512 MB RAM. This mobo was considered best p3 mobo ever.


Vidya is a GF4 4800 by Creative Labs. Bought straight from Creative's Dublin office where my roommate was working at a service center ten years ago. Heatsink is a zalman modded in from a fried radeon 4xxx or something. The original tiny fan was doing 5000 rpm and killing me with noise.




There is a SB Live Value and an intel NIC






Boot time is quite long even if considering slower HDD (40 GB Barracuda4). I love the simple aesthetics of Desktop interface though. In fact I think one of the biggest problem for MS is their lack of aesthetic taste. Their default windows skin is getting more kitschy, bloated and plain ugly. This is their last good stuff, probably because with minimum thought from them.

As speed is concerned desktop operations are nanosecond snap, noticeably faster than my main desktop which is a quad core XP box. It slows down when it starts to trash HDD for swap which happens quick on a 512 RAM and few tabs opened in the browser.


Games you can see shortcuts to on desktop work flawlessly max res & detail, some even with FSAA and Antialiasing boosted.

Oh. Windows!

2000 . . . Oh God!

Flee! Flee this thread! The impending crash is neigh!

ONI! Yeehaw, that was a great game!

no atx12v connector back then?

Dude, things were not always as they are now. Well, at least some weren't

Magical times back then.

Is it possible to brofist a whole thread? Because I want to do that.

Apart from the Pentium 3 having fancy modern sleeved cables. Very un-

yellowcake

im new, just started building when sandy bridge came around

Goddamn newfags.

*Reverses polarity of hard-drive*

Oh God, why!

Those times were not glorious at all!

It was a time when the men were men.

I sold a gold Poljot watch that I inherited from my aunt in order to buy fucking 486DX4. I was pissed at it cause it was going late 5 mins/24 h. It just needed service as I learned later. I regret it now.

Was she hot?

we were all new to everything once, no need to be an asshole (and a parrot)

Your mom is a parrot.

Awesome thread. OP is a true gentleman.

EMS allocation error

Got an opportunity to test old Matrox PCI graphics cards: Millenium (1995) and Mystique (1996, also known as Mystake).

The Final Reality benchmark for Windows shows, the average 2D performance of both is something like 5% better than S3 Trio64V+ and the next iterations. It's insignificant, since the gfx performance of that time almost completely relies on CPU.

Both cards cause strange glitch in random DOS games: when horizontal scrolling occurs, the entire screen (background) is jittering. It's annoying like hell and makes the game almost unplayable. It was mentioned on related forums, like Vogons.
Checked few games: got this in Comander Ken, Aladdin and Jazz Jackrabbit, thing did not occured with 3D (DN3D, Q2), vertical scrolling (Tyrian), nor in Direct Draw isometric games (Firefight).
Upgrading card BIOS to the latest version available from Matrox website, unsurprisingly changed nothing.

In short, from the perspective of buliding garbage PCs for gaming, those cards seem to have no advantage over S3s. I read about the mythical outstanding image quality, but didn't see any difference. So, beware the Matrox. Unless someone wants really badly to play the OEM games (all three of them), written specially for the crappy Matrox 3D acceleration.

Strange. Mystique 220 worked like charm to me, I used it with conjunction with Voodoo2. Also Mystique was 4Mb (extendable to 8Mb) or 2 Mb (extendable to 4 Mb)? Can't remember now. S3 Trio 64V+ was 1 Mb extendable to 2 Mb. Interesting, how your Mystique compares to S3 Virge DX.

Heh, someday I should collect all my dozens of videocards in one place.
*looks on the ten 3Dfx videocards on the bookshelf and giggles*

I never had either cards in my hands but worked briefly on g450 and g550. Didn't try games though. The point of those cards was reliable multi - monitor support and it worked well. Back then it could be a pain in the ass to hook up a TV to your graphic card and have everything working nicely (differing resolutions, refresh rates etc). Matrox cards worked fine out of the box on the first try.

Interesting. Never experimented with TV outs.

So, about your computers:
1) Pretty mundane, but good working horse. AWE64 Gold is a nice touch.
Why using diagnose /s? ctcm is suffice. Are you using mixer /p for lulz or really tuned volume of your card?
shsucdx? Heh, I still using vide-cdd.sys
2) T2P4? Triton HX? So you don't have UDMA, but have USB. Pity about UDMA, sometimes it really matters. Try to find something on the VIA chipset or Triton FX.
Also Samsung spinpoint detected.
If you have any problem connecting USB to this m/b (or connecting PS/2 to some other m/b), PM me. I "upgraded" many of these AT motherboards back in the time.
3) Never saw slot version of Tualatin. So you basically installed FCPA2 CPU on the FCPGA m/b without wire cutter and solder iron.
Awesome.
Belomor Kanal detected,

Just use ctcm.exe :shrugs:

Err, no. Why? Because with 32 Mb RAM or on slow first Pentiums (like 133) it's really faster. Personally I used Win95 until 2006 or 2007. Dos 6.22 have its merits too. Its resident part smaller than DOS 7.x part. Just install it on the FAT16 partiton.

I assure you, even Celerons with Mendocino core (up to 533 MHz) don't have Error 200. I started to have it only on Coppermine, although previously used many "fast" CPUs from Cyrix M2 and shitton of Intel CPUs to AMD K6-2. Also Error 200, lol. Just edit two bytes and voila!

If I didn't get any crashes labeled as Division By Zero on CPUs I mentioned (and higher), I wouldn't give a flying fuck about the first Pentiums.

P133 is basically the fastest Socket 7 equivalent of i486. Everything what works on the good old DX, will run on P133 as well. Somebody is looking for a hardware version of DosBox- he should start from there.

Although I agree a PC with ~400 mhz CPU, proper OS (multi-boot), and additional soft to solve hardware issues, is a very versatile configuration. Suitable for games between 1996-200x.

So fucking easy, eh? I wonder how many executables have you patched manually.
Personally I'd rather run CPU-eater (all are shit, BTW), or switch to VM, than play trial-and-error with hexadecimals.

Aethra Chronicles and the Nahlakh just recently. And it's really easy. Usually you can just find
F7 D0 F7 D2 B9 37 00 F7 F1 string and change 37 to FF.