90's build advice

xSamuraix1x

xSamuraix1x

xSamuraix1x

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4 Mar 2018
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30
Hi,

I know I can have multiple OS's and software etc etc to run 90's games but I only want to build a system from roughly 95 - 98.

I've had a look about and I will use XP Pro (I'll never go online with it) and now all I need is the PSU, Ram, Motherboard, Graphics card, Sound card and case.

What in your best opinions are the best hardware from this era?

I want to play games such as Must 1, 2, 3, 4, Soon series, Tomb raider 1 to 4 and resident evil games etc etc

Would building a system around a pentium 4 extreme edition be good?

Any advice would be appreciated.
 
OK if you want a stupidly fast Win 98 rig that will max out any games of that era.... And also play early XP games as they were meant to be played..

This based on one of my retro gaming rigs that I built this year

For 98SE/XP games I would recommend a LGA 775 motherboard that has AGP slot. Find one that supports Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad. My rig has ECS P4M800Pro Motherboard
Asus P5PE-VM is another good example. There are more. Get the fastest LGA 775 CPU you can find that your motherboard supports.

GPU - Get a Geforce 4ti 4200/4400/4600 This has native DirectX 9.0 support and some games will only work properly on this card or earlier
Only fit 1Gb RAM or Windows 98SE won't work
Fit two hard drives, put Win98SE on one and Win XP on the other. Use the Boot sequence settings in the BIOS to select your OS
Windows 98SE doesn't like HDD bigger that 120Gb. Two 120Gb SSDs is a good choice (that is what I have in my rig)
Get a 4:3 Monitor (I use 19" LCD) or games won't display correct, they will stretch horizontally and look wierd
Get a soundcard that supports EAX for XP games
Get a Voodoo 2 PCI if you want to play early Glide games such as Tombraider 1 or Duke Nukem 3D


If you are more interested in a Win95/Win98 and DOS retro rig, this is my other retro gaming rig

Get a Super Socket 7 Motherboard, I have this one - Gigabyte GA5-AX
Get a fast K6 CPU, Ideally a K6-II+ 450 or a K6-III+ 450 or K6-III+ 550. These run cooler than the non + versions and are easily overclocked.
Fit 128Mb PC133 RAM. More will likely cause problems.
20Gb or 40Gb IDE is plenty big enough.
Get an IDE CD-ROM otherwise you will have problems installing Windows games, or running DOS games
Get a Voodoo 3 3500 AGP, or a Geforce 2 AGP + Voodoo 2 PCI. More recent AGP cards won't work well, if at all, on SS7 motherboards. If you want to look really cool get 2x Voodoo 2 12Mb and run them in SLI mode! remember the Voodoo 2 is an add on GPU, not a standalone Graphics card. This video and the five that follow will help a lot regards GPU choices - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gipW4lcUHg
Get an ISA Creative Soundblaster (I have AWE 32 ISA)
Get a 4:3 monitor

This won't be cheap to build, but these machines are going up in price year on year, the opposite to a new build!! It's a good investment.

This is authentic period hardware, will play Windows 95/98SE and DOS games perfectly. As it is Super Socket 7 you can disable cache and slow it down to low clock speeds to run DOS games that were meant for 486DX PCs and run too fast to be playable on modern machines

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/gigabyte-ga-5ax-rev-52.html This should help
Also he has extensive GPU test videos on the same platform.

Best online resource for Retro Gaming Hardware advice is Vogons forum.

I hope that helps
Rich
 
All this talk has got me looking round the 'bay... man, what a nostalgia trip. I never would have guessed stuff from the late 90's and in particular early 2000's would be going up in value. Graphics card's I had like a GF3 Ti500 or GF4 Ti4600 are so rare and expensive. A decent investment indeed.
 
..and to think i gave away my 1998 vintage, beige tower case, Pentium II 333Mhz, 128Mb Ram, Voodoo II SLI and 19in CRT Monitor setup in the space year 2000AD, thinking it was now underpowered junk only fit for the landfill. :)
 
mikeyw85 said:
All this talk has got me looking round the 'bay... man, what a nostalgia trip. I never would have guessed stuff from the late 90's and in particular early 2000's would be going up in value. Graphics card's I had like a GF3 Ti500 or GF4 Ti4600 are so rare and expensive. A decent investment indeed.
Click to expand...

Absolutely. Not only is it a good investment but also a huge amount of fun to play those old games on that old hardware. Trouble is once you get the bug for retro gaming hardware it becomes kinda addictive.... It's still possible to find old beige tower PCs at car boots etc if you keep your eyes open. I regularly find them here, sell the parts and use the money to by other retro gear for myself.

You can try to recreate the exact same rig you had back in the day - or build the high end SLI rig you always wanted but couldn't afford at the time (eg Radion X1950 SLI etc) There is lots of info and help out there. Like you found, it's a big scene.

In addition to the rigs I mentioned above, I also have a 386 overdrive rig in good working order. I got it out of a skip last year and it's mega rare and quite valuable too! You will find me on Vogons, same user name ;)
 
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Hi people...

Just got a old beige case for a ATX size board and a white case of same kinda size.
2 PSU's
Windows XP Pro
Windows 98 (and Windows 95 for £4)

Decided to go for a pentium 4 HT extreme edition for XP 64bit

Now for the graphics/sound cards ram and motherboards..

Could have had the dual boot but really want 2 separate machines.

The CD players, back then they were 16x? Prior to XP 4x?
 
CD players were often quoted as 52x but really they were 16x or there abouts

Which motherboard do you have? Bear in mind you can only use one with AGP slot for windows 98. It will not understand or support PCIe at all

If it's a SKT 478 Pentium 4 board with AGP it should work just great.

Do try to get a Geforce 4ti 4200,4400 or 4600 graphics card. I've had a Geforece 2 MX400 and then a Geforce 3 in my rig before finally managing to score the Geforce4 ti 4200 in auction from a seller in Germany for less than 10 euros in the summer. I got very lucky! The GF4ti was a really good buy and the rig runs so much better with that fitted.

Two separate machines is also good. That's like I have posted above- one built with the fastest hardware i could buy that still supports Windows 98 (An LGA775 board with Core 2 Duo) and the other all period correct hardware on a Super Socket 7 board. Both have their pros and cons. The LGA775 with AGP and Core 2 support you should be able to put together for less than £100 if you get lucky on a GPU and it will max out any games of the era. Take care not all LGA775 with AGP will support Core 2.

The SS7 rig I listed above is likely to cost you around £500 or more - depends how lucky you are and how much a rush you are in to buy.

Do join Vogons forum. I trust its OK to post that here as it is entirely dedicated to retro hardware, not a competitor to OcUK.

Have fun
Rich
 
Some ATX PSUs were designed for Pentium 4 and probably say so on the label.. They have higher current on 5V. The super socket 7 would be AT or ATX, but probably ATX. Socket 7 and Super Socket 7 were on the changeover between AT and ATX . Mostly PSUs of 250W or thereabouts were normal at the time, and perfectly sufficient. As I suggested, try Vogons forum, General Old hardware section. Lots of very clever and dedicated guys there.
 
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Dicky, just 1 thing I forgot to say, I want to be able to play all the Myst games after Riven (Myst 2) so that is XP era, so would a ASUS P4C800-E with a Extreme Edition and 3GB ram and the graphics card you mentioned be a good gaming setup? The EE is 64bit ok so my XP would need to have the 64bit disc so I can use 4gb ram, but more than likely I'll use 6.
 
P4C800-E is socket 478. Should be fine for a period correct XP rig. I'm not sure you want to install 64bit XP OS. That motherboard supports up to 4Gb only. A much more typical rig of that era would be 1Gb or 2Gb RAM

Regards the games list you mention I am honestly no expert in this area as I am mostly interested in DOS through to Windows 98, and early XP games. Plus to some extent I am equally interested in the hardware and building these machines.

Most XP games will play on newer operating systems. Its the Windows 98 and earlier, plus Glide games that really benefit from (and may only run poperly on) old hardware. You know where to go and look. Post your games list there ;)
 
Just digging and found my old ASUS P5Q-E deluxe board, thing is, it's PCI express and not full ATX ddr2 and has a core2duo extreme CPU in it and a old Nvidia gtx470. Says on Asus website can put XP on it, would this work good for old xp games? Oh, has 2gb of Corsair extreme ram in and a 500gb WD green HD.

I joined the other forum and will post there also.
 
Good question - complex answer...

Any motherboard and video card that has driver support for Windows 98SE would also support Windows 95. Also pretty much any game that runs on Windows 95 would also run on Windows 98 SE

You can also use Windows ME on a lot of, if not all, hardware from this era

The only problem I can see that you would have with games Pre Windows 95 is that they would be DOS games and may run to fast to be playable on a faster machine, if they run at all.

This is why I have two Windows 98 gaming rigs....

One built around a Core 2 Duo on an AGP motherboard which can max out the settings on any Windows 98 games (and on early Windows XP games too). Basically Core 2 + AGP + SATA (SSD) is the fastest platform available that has drivers for Windows 95/98 SE. This is why the fastest AGP graphics cards ever made (Geforce 7950, Radeon HD 4670) are so rare and expensive, while the PCIe versions of the same cards are cheap. But if you go for lower spec AGP graphics cards then this type of retro gaming rig can be quite cheap to build. Mine cost less than £100 and I have Geforce 4ti 4200. I have dual boot Windows 98SE/Windows XP using two 60Gb SSDs.

The other rig I built uses all 1990s Period correct hardware (super socket 7, K6 cpu) and I built it because it can play Windows 95/98 games very well but also supports true DOS 6.22 and can be easily slowed down by reducing the clock/multiplier and disabling Cache (in the BOIS or with a windows app) to the same sort of performance as a 486 for DOS games. It also has ISA slots which you are gonna need for a SoundBlaster card if you want to play DOS games with full compatibility. Only the Super Socket 7 motherboards have all these facilities, so they are the best option for a DOS/Windows 95/98 rig. This is why Super Socket 7 motherboards are so expensive.
 
Hi Dicky, XP machine almost built, got a ASUS P5Q PRO motherboard with a intel core 2 quad 3.33ghz cpu + stock cooler with 4GB corsair dominator ram with twin gtx 470 cards. 2x WD 500gb HD's (going to use raid) with a DVD-R drive and a creative sound blaster aqudigy 2 platinum ex sound card and windows xp pro 64 bit. So far only got a crt monitor, microsoft ps2 keyboard and mouse for the 95 build...
 
One last thing, the few things I need to download to play the games, net framework etc etc is there a good website to download them all on? I see some sites but they look a bit dodgy...
 
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