What retro things have you done today?

I've been looking to put together a Core 2 system for a while now to get that full mid to late 00s experience. I did some digging around in my loft and surprisingly I managed to find nearly everything for a fairly period correct LGA775 system.



Specs are:

Engineering Sample Xeon X3330 (which is a quad core 2.66GHz and looks to basically be a Q9400)
4GB DDR2-800
GeForce 8800 GTX
1TB HD
Random case I found in the loft

Obviously the 1TB HD isn't period correct but I'm fine with that because HDs from that era were crap and are quite frankly a liability these days. Was tempted to put an SSD in it but I'm running Vista 32-bit on it and Vista doesn't support trim so decided to stick with an HD.

I found a selection of CPUs like an E6400, Q8200 and a Q8400 but the X3330 is the best of the lot and I've had good fun playing around with overclocking again. I forgot how good it was back in those days - I took that CPU straight from 2.66GHz to 3.2GHz without needing to touch anything else and it's fine, even with that heatsink.

I've also got a selection of graphics cards from around that era including an X800 XL, GeForce 7800 GTX and a GeForce 7900 GS. Obviously the 8800 GTX is the best of that lot but it could make it mildly more interesting to put one of the lesser cards in :)

Next up is trying to see if I can get that USB3 PCI-E card working in Vista or not and then digging out some games from that era. Quite happy that I knocked all that together and didn't need to spend a penny. Although I'm happy to spend a few quid on parts to improve it if need be, but I think it's decent enough as it is. Although that 8800 GTX sure runs hot, even just sat in Windows.
 
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Retro6 said:
Update... I can't believe it... I managed to get the sound card working with the 486.
Click to expand...
Good to hear the missing sound issue is finally fixed, so now it’s time for some serious DOS gaming! :D
I found 4 more worthy dos games that should work fine on your 486 with 4MB.

The Zool character basically became the 90s Amiga mascot (1992), but in regards to Zool 2, the DOS version (1994) is superior, so it might be interesting to try if you never played the series.
Lollipop is another fun and bit more modern platformer (1995) that should be interesting. Both Desert & Jungle Strike I loved playing on my Amiga so if you like some helicopter action, try them :)

3lrpc.jpg
 
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I've been having fun with a modified version of DOS 7.1 which starts with the MS DOS logo which I think is pretty cool and it has the mouse driver all ready to go.

I thought it was time to dig out this little 486 DX to see what this can do. Probably the smallest 486 Computer I've seen, it was an ex POS system. It has 32mb of RAM fully working 4GB HDD and 90MHz 486 processor. I will install an ISA sound card to it to see if UNISOUND works with it and a CF Card adapter to swap out cards while trying out different versions of DOS. I want to try out Free DOS to begin with so I'll install that to one CF Card and then I'll have DOS 7.1 on another...

Before I can fit this adapter I must first look for a long IDE cable as well as a long enough power connector. I could probably make the power connector if push comes to shove and then the IDE cable isn't so simple because I can not plug a standard IDE cable into the board as it has a different connector but I have a work around for that.

Can never have too many 486 machines... It could also do with a good wipe down.

zFAeci5.jpeg
goE1MCs.jpeg
 
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Thats that machine done. I managed get the IDE cable fit to where its long enough to go from the board to the CF Adapter, it was longer than I thought it was so no need to hunt down a longer cable and the power I had found a spare male Molex to floppy connector which was long enough to reach the CF Adapter.

Unlike my other 486 machine, it doesn't boot all CF cards, in fact its very fussy on what CF cards it can take but the ones that do work, work well. Unfortunately I could not get FreeDOS "Floppy version" running because the floppy images don't appear to be bootable so I just went with DOS 7.1

I have 3 CF cards that work on this machine. Interestingly enough... I think I can get other CF cards working with this machine because if they are able to be made bootable by simply typing fidsk /mbr then non bootable CF cards become bootable like I found out last night from experimenting with my other 486 machine. However this machine is running DOS 7.1 so it doesn't have the option of running that command because DOS has to be installed first to the CF card and if the CF card can not be seen as a C: drive in DOS upon installation then it means the CF card is not set as active or bootable and dos 7.1 doesn't have that option but DOS 6 has. I find it fascinating how a non bootable CF card can be made bootable for DOS.

Wing Commander works on this machine, its a bit fast but playable and runs fine with 32MB RAM although it still complains about there not being enough extended memory... The sound card worked well under Unisound, it sounds better than my Sound Blaster card in the other 486 machine.

I was hoping to get FreeDOS going... I wonder if there is a way to get FreeDOS on a CF Card by dragging and dropping files onto a CF Card?
 
cee-S-dee said:
I put this together a while ago. Originally I picked up the parts for this of the MM for my Lad to play some Roblox. He had an upgrade and I thought the parts would be awesome for a XP/W7 build so this is what i built

Intel i7 4770K (currently stock :p)
16GB of Kingston Genesis Ram
Asus Gryphon Z87 MATX motherboard
EVGA Geforce GTX 780Ti (3gb) (Got this for £30 off ebay)
Creative X-Fi Fatality (awesome for Windows XP)
Fractal Define Focus G Mini
Corsair 550W PSU
2 SSD's (Samsung 128gb Drives - each one having an OS installed) and a 2TB WD Black

Was quite fun building this and it plays games awesome. The X-Fi card sounds wicked.

y3RcTsZh.jpg

IkxzD48h.jpg


Installed Dino Crisis 2 today and had a blast

xpj4dSjh.jpg
Click to expand...

Sir that is a brand new computer. :p
 
cee-S-dee said:
I put this together a while ago. Originally I picked up the parts for this of the MM for my Lad to play some Roblox. He had an upgrade and I thought the parts would be awesome for a XP/W7 build so this is what i built

Intel i7 4770K (currently stock :p)
16GB of Kingston Genesis Ram
Asus Gryphon Z87 MATX motherboard
EVGA Geforce GTX 780Ti (3gb) (Got this for £30 off ebay)
Creative X-Fi Fatality (awesome for Windows XP)
Fractal Define Focus G Mini
Corsair 550W PSU
2 SSD's (Samsung 128gb Drives - each one having an OS installed) and a 2TB WD Black

Was quite fun building this and it plays games awesome. The X-Fi card sounds wicked.

y3RcTsZh.jpg

IkxzD48h.jpg


Installed Dino Crisis 2 today and had a blast

xpj4dSjh.jpg
Click to expand...

My current gaming PC, 4790K, 16GB ram Z97-P mobo and a 3070 gpu. This is not retro gaming , this is current gaming, maybe not AAAA gaming.
 
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Retro6 said:
Thats that machine done. I managed get the IDE cable fit to where its long enough to go from the board to the CF Adapter, it was longer than I thought it was so no need to hunt down a longer cable and the power I had found a spare male Molex to floppy connector which was long enough to reach the CF Adapter.

Unlike my other 486 machine, it doesn't boot all CF cards, in fact its very fussy on what CF cards it can take but the ones that do work, work well. Unfortunately I could not get FreeDOS "Floppy version" running because the floppy images don't appear to be bootable so I just went with DOS 7.1

I have 3 CF cards that work on this machine. Interestingly enough... I think I can get other CF cards working with this machine because if they are able to be made bootable by simply typing fidsk /mbr then non bootable CF cards become bootable like I found out last night from experimenting with my other 486 machine. However this machine is running DOS 7.1 so it doesn't have the option of running that command because DOS has to be installed first to the CF card and if the CF card can not be seen as a C: drive in DOS upon installation then it means the CF card is not set as active or bootable and dos 7.1 doesn't have that option but DOS 6 has. I find it fascinating how a non bootable CF card can be made bootable for DOS.

Wing Commander works on this machine, its a bit fast but playable and runs fine with 32MB RAM although it still complains about there not being enough extended memory... The sound card worked well under Unisound, it sounds better than my Sound Blaster card in the other 486 machine.

I was hoping to get FreeDOS going... I wonder if there is a way to get FreeDOS on a CF Card by dragging and dropping files onto a CF Card?
Click to expand...
I do have an installation of freeDOS on an SSD inside a netbook... my plan is to take out the SSD and hook it up to my main PC and clone the DOS files to a CF Card. In theory I should then be able to boot FreeDOS from that CF Card in my 486...
 
rare said:
Depends, if it’s built specifically for Windows XP how is it not retro gaming…

I have a similar system I built specifically for XP with a 980Ti and a 4790k and its XP performance is insanely good (as expected haha).
Click to expand...

The latest and greatest CPUs can do retro gaming, yes you have to gimp them a lot. A 4790K is still a CPU that is more than capable of just retro gaming.
 
drakulton said:
The latest and greatest CPUs can do retro gaming, yes you have to gimp them a lot. A 4790K is still a CPU that is more than capable of just retro gaming.
Click to expand...
It's difficult to install XP on modern systems as there aren't drivers available for the hardware. That system I posted is running Windows XP SP3 with all native XP drivers. Z87 (or maybe Z97?) is the last chipset, officially supported by XP. Yeah it's still more than capable of running stuff today, but it steams through all the XP stuff with great ease, which I wanted.
 
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Still trying to decide what GPU to pair with my Xeon X3330 setup (Core 2 Quad Q9400). The 8800 GTX is definitely running way too hot and either the card is playing up or it's temperature related, but I had some stuttering and black screen flickering in games. Got the 7900 GS in there at the moment and that works fine but I'm not sure what else to try.

Any thoughts on the best GPU I can throw in for that era? Other spare cards I've got are a GTX 560 and a GTX 670, but they're arguably too new and probably too good for a Core 2 era PC anyway. I did see that a GTS 250 is pretty much on par or better than the 8800 GTX while being smaller, quieter and using a lot less power so that's an option if I can find one for pennies too.
 
Trying to figure out why the f its so impossible to create a DOS boot floppy that isn't 7.1.

God its a real head F

WHY AREN'T DOS FLOPPIES BOOTABLE?

If anything happens to my original dos floppy disks I am well and truly screwed. DOS 7.1 doesn't have any of the features or tools I need like FDISK and FORMAT etc etc DOS 7.1 is just a modified barebones os to run old games taken from the WIN98 CD. FreeDOS doesn't work, floppies are not bootable. It doesn't look like anybody knows what the trick is or will tell me. I remember years ago people had copies of DOS 6.22 including myself and they booted and WORKED fine. This is going to torture me... I don't know what I am going to do when my "one only set" of original disks get errors on them that is DOS retro computing over.
 
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Someone drove 3 hours round trip on Saturday to buy my old Pentium II machine for £100 and quelle surprise barely 3 days later they’re asking for a refund because they ran into a problem they couldn’t problem solve.

They even took it to a local computer shop and PAID them to diagnose it. I didn’t even know such shops still existed?!? No surprises they told them it needed replacing. They didn’t even manage to reinstall Windows 98 on it as part of their efforts.

I could probably fix the issue (an error message on startup saying Windows cannot access the registry or some such, so unlikely to be hardware related) they’ve had if they were local, but I’d rather chuck them a part refund than bother any further with it. I certainly don’t want a machine back that’s been tampered with by god knows who.

Hopefully they make some use of it rather than just scrapping it.
 
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So I've found the problem... DISK 1 has 41 files but when copied over only 38 files get copied, 3 of the files have the same name... you can not replace or skip these 3 files otherwise the system disk will not boot. I don't know how to get around this unless I can change what ever files have the same name and pray that the system disk will boot.
 
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MichaelAwkward said:
Someone drove 3 hours round trip on Saturday to buy my old Pentium II machine for £100 and quelle surprise barely 3 days later they’re asking for a refund because they ran into a problem they couldn’t problem solve.

They even took it to a local computer shop and PAID them to diagnose it. I didn’t even know such shops still existed?!? No surprises they told them it needed replacing. They didn’t even manage to reinstall Windows 98 on it as part of their efforts.

I could probably fix the issue (an error message on startup saying Windows cannot access the registry or some such, so unlikely to be hardware related) they’ve had if they were local, but I’d rather chuck them a part refund than bother any further with it. I certainly don’t want a machine back that’s been tampered with by god knows who.

Hopefully they make some use of it rather than just scrapping it.
Click to expand...
At least nobody will have to rely on finding a working copy of DOS to get it going... Windows 98 SE CD is all you need or 95 whichever suits the machine best.
 
Chris said:
Can you not image the Disks using WinImage and then burn them to fresh disks?
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I'm not sure how to use it, it looks a bit complicated. I have downloaded and installed it but I can't open anything so I don't know.

I will come back to WinImage and try to figure it out, but for now I'm going to see if there is a more simple way.
 
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