I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum’s basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it’s never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.
Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn’t want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.
Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn’t have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).
So what were your favorite games from the 90’s and early 2000s?
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Unreal Tournament 99 and Everquest. But those don’t even come close to needing a fraction of the hardware you procured :D
UT GOTY was one of my main reasons for this project. I played the hell out of that game!
Oh, a person of taste! :) May I recommend BunnyTrack maps? I played those a lot in the 2015 timeframe and enjoyed myself immensely.
That sounds like a fun project, although I’d recommend XP over Me. XP has a DOS emulator, and it’s a lot easier to configure drivers for.
My favorite games from that era are Star Wars: X-Wing and Wing Commander: Privateer. Both games stood out as exceptional back then. Warcraft was also an excellent game. Command and Conquer is worth checking out too.
Edit: I’m pretty sure I played the first two games on Windows 3.2, so I’m not sure how they’ll play on Me or XP.
Did you play Squadrons? The mission briefings were still not up to X-Wing/Tie Fighter standards but the flight was 10/10.
I seem to remember having issues with XP and Dos games but if ME is too problematic I will try 98 and XP. Though if I’m going with XP I’ll be using a half built P4 PC that I have hanging around.
I never did play Squadrons. I joined the Army right after the X-Wing era and had a several year gap where I didn’t touch a computer at all.
Now that I think about it, if these are straight-up DOS games then you don’t need Windows at all. You can just load MS-DOS and then run the game straight from the command line. I think you’re right that XP broke a bunch of old DOS games. It’s been so long that I completely forgot we were mad at Microsoft for the removal of DOS back then and the move to an emulator only experience.
Deus Ex Duke Nukem 3d Quake
I would also recommend Windows 98se, since it was the last (popular) operating system that directly supports DOS.
I just got Falcon 3 Gold running in DOSBox the other day
Cool idea!
I was going to mention a few games to check out but they were all already mentioned, so I will suggest the one that wasn’t brought up, Star Crusader. Space combat game with a great story, fun game play, high replay value, and great voice acting for a game from 1994. And the ending blew my mind, still remember the moment and my shock to this day. I have my original CD and the jacket in a memorabilia box haha, one of only a handful of things I kept from those days.
512MB RAM? Go wild cowboy. As for games:
- Arcanum
- Planescape Torment
if no one mentioned them.
Yeah seriously that’s an ungodly amount of RAM for a PC of this vintage. My old WinMe machine had 128MB.
(And an 800Mhz PIII. I later added a GeForce 4 MX 4000 so I could actually play games at more than 15-20 FPS. It was my first graphics card purchase ever. Also upgraded to XP cause Me would BSoD so often that I never got a chance to do a proper shutdown at the end of the day. When the machine crashed, I was done for the day.)
I remember going from 128 -> 192 MB in order to upgrade from ME to XP so I could learn programming with Visual C# 1.0. It was completely doable, assuming you manually disabled almost all the background services.
Keep in mind you’re not going to be able to run all games between those years on a single build. Quite a few older games need older hardware, especially slower CPUs. Then, the DOS support on ME has a ton of issues that broke many games (one of the reasons people hated it), and XP is needed for a lot of the later Windows games in that range.
That said, it should work very nicely as a 9X build, which also happens to be the era with the least emulation support. If an older DOS game doesn’t work, you can always use something like eXoDOS on a modern computer.
One additional cool thing you could consider down the road is something to really take your midi experience to the next level like an SC-55 MK II.
It’s been literally 20 years, but I seem to remember having more issues with XP than ME as far as Dos compatibility. I have already run into some audio troubles so a dedicated card might be the next step.
Yeah, I used to run win 2000 on my desktop and had some games that I couldn’t play from the win95 era. So I resized my mom’s old windows XP machine and pulled a 2 gig partition out then installed win98 on that. I used the windows disk manager to mark the partition I wanted to boot from as active, so it was completely transparent to my mom when she would need to use the computer, including booting.
If I were going to do a system like this again today, id probably do something similar. An MBR formatted hard drive can have 4 primary partitions. FAT16 had a max partition size of 2gb, but fat32 was introduced in win98 so you could go with whatever partition size you wanted there.
So you could have a 95, 98, ME, and XP installation all on one drive and just switch between them using the drive manager to change the active bootable partition then rebooting.
Yeah, XP would definitely have more issues. 98SE probably would have the best all around compatibility. But there are some Win95 games that only run on Windows 95. The computer you’ve got is really nice for the 1994 - 2001 era, though. What you could do is get a pullout tray, and have different drives with different loads, and switch them out as needed. Ultimately, if the games you want to play work, that’s what matters.
I remember buying C&C Red Alert many years ago, and being completely unable to play it due to CPU speed. Moving the mouse to the edge of the screen would instantly zip to the edges of the game world.
Up voted for recommending real Roland hardware. I have an MT-32, CM-32L, and SC-55mkII to cover all my compatibility bases.
I would also suggest the modern emulated alternatives if you struggle to get hold of the original hardware
MT32-pi: https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi (covers the MT-32 & CM-32, can also do some general midi with sound fonts, so in theory you could emulate a soundcanvas too)
Then there’s the sound cards too
PicoGUS: https://github.com/polpo/picogus/ (emulates a Gravis Ultrasound, SB2, AdLib, Tandy & also the MPU401 if you do end up with real midi hardware)
Also gonna just drop the goldlib too: https://pcmidi.eu/goldlib.html but that one might be a bit separate from what OP is currently doing
So many favorites.
- Diablo 1 and 2
- Star craft brood war
- Red alert
- Doom, hexen, heretic, quake
- Doom 3 I think was out around then
- Dawn of war
- Guild wars
- Heroes of might and magic 3
- Counter strike 1.6, half life, half life 2
And so many more I’m sure I’m forgetting.
Huh, I wonder if there is a way to play HL2 on this setup without Steam.
🏴☠️ probably
Hexen to CS 1.6. We must be very similar in age. That’s basically my teens.
Red Alert was my favourite. Dial-up multiplayer with my school friend. Rarely finished a game because someone’s house got a phone call or someone picked up the phone. We both got in trouble when the first phone bills came in. Would spend about $2.50 in local calls each time tuntil the computers linked up. A $60 phone bill was savage back then for families living in government housing and struggling to pay off a base model computer.
“Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory.”
Stop. PLEASE! 15 year old me in the year 2000 can only get SO erect!
Nice!
Time for some Tribes or Heroes of Might and Magic.
Oh the nostalgia from seeing those icons. You should join the Microsoft Network! Crack open ICQ! Get on AOL and see if “you’ve got mail.” Heck, I may still have one of those CDs with 2500 hours on it!
I am a little tempted to see how ME handles the modern web but it seems like a good way to b0rk my setup.
Oh don’t worry, ME will bork itself just fine, haha.
ME is how I learned the work ‘kernel’ and that it can have <unknown error>
Oh man that takes me back.
Oh the memories…
LucasArts Adventures
US Navy Fighters
Unreal
StarCraft
Need For Speed 1 & 2
Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2; Need for Speed 2 and 3; SimCity 3k.
Also, check your monitor properties. Afaik most CRT monitors (not TVs; those run at 60hz/50hz depending on region) are meant to run at 75~85hz. If it’s running at 60hz when it’s meant to run at a higher refresh rate, then that might be why it’s nauseating (my crt has a very noticeable flicker at 60hz, but that goes away at 75hz).
Carmageddon and GTA were quite some bangers, and I think they still are. Or Age of Empires 1&2.
Honorable mentions:
- Dark Project
- Soul Reaver
- Blood Omen
- King’s Quest
- Ballistics
- Dethkarz
- Ken’s Labyrinth
- The Settlers
Carmageddon! I still have the original CD from the late 90s.
