Building the Ultimate Win 95 machine.

I've just spent a few hours installing Windows 98 in Parallels and then another few hours fiddling with DOSBox in XP in a vain attempt to get Toon Struck (one of my fave games of all time) to work.

Not happening.

SO I figured in this day and age it must be possible to put together a pretty good portable DOS/Win 95 PC for those retro moments.

So far my components list is:

Pentium 2 MMX
128MB Ram
Smallest drive possible (maybe an old notebook drive) around the 4/8 GB size.
SoundBlaster AWE/16/32 (which is best?)
CD-Rom drive.

I was hoping that you guys could help me choose a graphics card (voodoo or ATI?).

Also what would be the smallest I could get this machine? I'd be happy to use an external power supply but the cards are going to take up some serious space. Anyone got any links to someone who has done this before?

 

Voodoo all the way. It was the macdaddy of GPUs back in the day.

 

Virtual PC? http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

Always worked great for me in the past.

 

VPC is the one thing I haven't tried but it would be nice just to have something working out of the box so to speak.

Working on a Macbook, having to bootcamp to get windows and then struggle with dosbox without the Function keys is just a pain in the ass.

 

In my personal experience the Soundblaster 16 makes a great sound card for old games and abandonware. You'll probably do fine with any old Creative ISA or PCI card.

BTW I totally agree with Unorthodox, Microsoft Virtual PC works great when it comes to Windows 95 and 98 emulation. You should give it a try if you're interested

 

From your post, I get the impression that you're restarting in Windows and running DOSBox. If this is true, why not just use DOSBox in OSX?

What issues are you having with DOSBox? I've used it for a few years now and there are very few games that have unsatisfactory performance. Building an old PC just seems a little excessive, but I can't blame you for wanting to try.

If you do wind up building one, get a Voodoo 2 card. I have a Diamond Monster 3d II lying around my parents house. The last time I used it it was still working fine (maybe about a year and a half ago). If you really want to go nuts buy two of them and set up SLI.

I could be wrong, but as far as I know Virtual PC doesn't support 3D acceleration, so any type of 3dfx/Glide game you wanted to play would be out.

 

Good point, never tried to use a game that needs 3dfx/Glide via VirtualPC, but as far as I know it doesn't handle any kind of 3d acceleration.
The only virtualization program I know that is working in 3d support right now is Sun's Virtualbox, but its graphic compatibility with Windows 9x sucks so much that it can't even be considered as an option. Maybe you'll be able to handle these games via virtualization in some time, but for now you'll have to go with the real stuff.

 

Some CVS versions of DOSBox have rudimentary Glide support. I've never gotten it to work, but admittedly I haven't tried very hard, either.

 

Voodoo 3 2000 16MB was a great card for its day. I remember running GTA3 on it at mid high settings back in the day and being amazed it could pull it off

 

get a bloody AWE 64! it's a wonder nowadays! if you get the 64 with the large ram you can even take the pleasure to put on the soundbanks you wish for.

GREAT for those games using MIDI synthesys and MIDI music

 

Why did not take a normal machine (AMD64 or Core2\i7) and simply install multi OS with a boot manager like grub ? The only one issue is the sound card and maybe the VESA driver.

For sound card you can use an old SB64 or 128, these SBPCI board have SB16 compatibility under DOS OS.

if a game asks for a VESA driver, use UNIVBE it works with most of video card. However, since PCI VGA card, VESA is now include in BIOS.

If you realy want a native DOS machine, you can look at SOHO motherboard who provide an ISA bus with P4 (s478) arch and DDR.

 

I love this project! Is that a Slot 2 Pentium II? If so, you can might as well go for a PIII.

 

for god's sake not a SB128! it was waaaaaaaay worse than a AWE64 and on par with the old SB16!

 

The nice thing about such projects is that people will happy give you all that crap for free if you need anything let me know lol.

 

Yay! Love this stuff. I'd do the same if I had room.

 

Why go for a Pentium 2 when a P1 will do the job just fine?

 

Yes, you'r right. But today SBPCi is the only sound card who works on PCI bus under DOS...

The best sound card for game (and music) for me, is SB16 AWE32. This sound car never leave me since its purchase :



But... it's ISA...

 

This project is, at the moment, all about Toon Struck.

I love the game so much but it fails to run correctly in any emulation scenario, methods to make it work are documented often on the net.

When I was a kid my first PC was a Pentium 133mhz 16MB of ram compaq presario. I don't know what sound and graphics capabilities it had but I know for sure that installing direct x resulted in losing all video. The best I got to play was Dark Forces and Yoda Stories, this was in 96.

My Friend however had a Mesh PC running at 200MHz on a Pentium 2, 32MB Ram, ATi Rage graphics adapter and a sound blaster 32. His machine ran it all, Red Alert, X-Wing, Toonstruck, Alien Vs Predator, Dark Omen etc.

Granted these are not all DOS games BUT many of them won't run on modern hardware and software. So what I'm essentially trying to do is build a machine which bridges that gap in the timeline where games went from DOS and VESA to Direct X and 3D accelerators.

A Pentium 3 is overkill but will probably cost just the same as a P2. A Pentium 1 will take less space but might not be enough for some of the higher end games.

As for the graphics, well I want something that supports all of the old video modes (SVGA etc) but if that's not going to happen I was thinking about a Voodoo 2 Black Magic 12MB mainly because I always wanted one.

I'm still undecided about the sound card but I'll take the smallest backwards compatible Soundblaster there is.

My main concern is how small I can make the machine, something portable would be ideal but those ISA card are going to be a bitch, as will the Pentium 2 be if I go that route.

 

yup, but the best one was AWE64 not 32 and it was ISA too i was really pissed off when ISA disappeared making my wonderful card useles...

whaterver