Looking to get into OLD PC gaming (DOS)

I advice AGAINST a pII.
Get your self a p1 200/233mmx machine with a "new" mobo that has all 3 slots: PCI, ISA and AGP.
You NEED an ISA sound card for pure DOS mode. On the AGP put some gpu like a nvidia riva/tnt/tnt2 or a 3fdx card. You can also add a voodoo2 (or two).
There are command line utilities to switch on/off the cpu's L1 cache thus making a p200mmx behaving like a ~386DX speedwise, some older games need it.

Lack of -5v on the PSU is not that big of a deal, basically you need it for the Roland LAPC-I or the SoundBlaster PRO2 (IIRC) soundcards. On a p1 machine you most likely want a SB16 card...

Have a look at these vids: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzxnB2CD6aw , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZAeKc2TYNQ and the rest "time machine" related ones on the channel

 

Be ready to deal with different Memory Bootup configurations. Some of the DOS games require HIMEM, otheres need EMS and some don't like any memory preconfigure. All this can be done in the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files with the DOS CHOICE command. Then there are the IRQ issues getting a particular soundcard and VESA drivers for video cards to work with every single game.

A better route would be to just get DOS Box and a newer PC, but you do lose the hardware hacking satisfaction.

As far as older games and if you like flying, try DOS Inferno, Pyrotennica and Jet Fighter III.

 

thanks for all the tips guys, So I take it a P2 is a bad choice?
Just to refine I'm looking at playing most of the the popular titles as like I said Doom, Blood, Dukenukem3d (Not too fussed if I can't) maybe some RPG's.

I have been thinking a lot about it and I love to hack up motherboards so maybe a scenario like this may work:


Externalize all means of changing the clock speed(ie; all the dip switches/jumpers and depending on the board socket the crystal oscillator will be mounted on the outside of the case) so I can change the clock speed on the fly/easily.

replace the heatsink with a modern one with heat pipes and try to passive cool the cpu or liquid cool just for the fun of it

Use a Soundblaster ISA card (from what you guys tell me)

use some sort of voodo 3d GPU

Have both an floppy drive and floppy emulator


OR seeing as it's better to have 2 PC's (or more) for old gaming maybe I'll cram a pentium200 mobo and a PII/P3 in the same case ?? I live in an apartment and might be moving in the next six months..


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BTW the MMX200 I was looking at, the seller blocked me even though I re-offered a decent price of like $50, some people must here about how people sell crap for $10000000000000000000000 on ebay and think anyone will buy it at their price :/

Anyway I'm going to hit up some more old pc shops this weekend so maybe I'll get lucky

Unless someone here has a good board for sale?

 

I dont think so. Keropi recommended a MMX because it has ways to slow it down in the bios with disabling cache. It's a trick I have often heard about but never tried myself.
I do not know if some P2 have this option or not.

The reason I recommended a P2 is because they are cheap and plentiful, easier to find than MMX.

 

well, if the DOS games the OP is interested in playing are the "late" 3D ones then a P2 is not a bad idea. You won't be able to slow it easily but if you are not interested on older 286/386 titles then you won't have to. For Blood, Quake, TombRaider etc a P2 is great. For older titles not so, be prepared to face speed issues, sound issues and that damned Error:200 older programs give when the cpu is more than ~200mhz ...
It all depends on what the OP wants to run basically...

 

Imho for everything up to and including a 486, I'd probably rather use DOSbox these days.

 

hmm, I see what I can get and work from there.

no dosbox.

 

Heh, I might see how dosbox works on my 166 for those really really old games that run too fast and the few that run in purple on an LCD. Technically it's still running on the older hardware.

EDIT: A swing and a miss...lol...choppy as hell. Oh well.

 

There are some really neat tricks you can do with real hardware and Dos games.

Games like Comanche: maximum overkill and Descent will actually speed up or slow down depending on how much crap is going on.
They have bad CPU scaling and they are always either too fast or too slow.

I found that by using a fast Pentium 2, on which those games would normally be unplayably fast, but sticking an ultra slow ISA video card in it, you can actually cap the frame rate.
This is a very neat trick, I have many old video cards and tried them all until I found one that gave me pretty much perfect constant speed and frame rate. Maybe this can be tweaked to get a video card to run slower so that more video cards can do it.

That's part of why I like real hardware instead of DosBox

 

I play some old DOS games (Blood, System Shock, Carmageddon, etc) and for me DOSBox on my current machines is great. If you've not used it then it might be just what you're looking for, as it's very configurable (use a front-end like D-Fend, or D.O.G., so you don't have to setup the options yourself), runs on modern machines no problem, and is very convenient to use. Plus it won't necessitate your getting a new (well, old!) PC if you already have a good, fairly fast one.

But if you do want to use an older PC to run the games on real hardware, then a great place to learn about and discuss old PCs and their games is VOGONS (Very Old Games on New Systems), who, despite their name, also use (and love) old systems. They discuss things from the original self-booting floppy PC games that ran on an 8086, right up to running games on the most modern PCs, as modern PCs (and Windows, and their drivers) can present almost a brick wall to running some old games.

http://www.vogons.org/index.php

 

The biggest site in Poland of a Old Games already over 1000, with frequent updates. L

The biggest site in Poland of a Old Games already over 1000, with frequent updates. Looking for an old game and you can not find it on my website you will find for sure, all the links are working, all the games are completely free. In this section you will find a link to the software program needed to launch games. I invite you also to my forum about old games. Hi all on my website: http://staregryzawszedarmowe.strefa.pl/index2.html

 

Don't enter this website. Google Chrome, Comodo, and Mozilla Firefox blocked this site for being unsafe.
This account is probably a bot, too.

 

To give you some ideas I can describe my setup for DOS games.

It is a 486 Cyrix CPU running at 80MHz, 16MB, 420HDD, ISA 3Com NIC, integrated VGA and genuine ISA SB soundcard.
I run MS-DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 on it. The reason I am running 3.1 on it is that I can run an FTP-client in Win3.11 and download games from my server. This setup wont run later games such as Quake well, but Doom and Tie Fighter runs at realistic speeds of how they ran back in the day on similar hardware and that was the point of the hardware for myself since I really liked stuff that used to run on my 486 back in 1995.

 

^ you can ditch 3.11 for ftp transfers and just use mTCP from DOS, in all my tests it was faster than win3x : https://code.google.com/p/mtcp/

 

+1 for mTCP, it even works on PC and XT class machines!