First post, by Great Hierophant
- Rank
- l33t
After having agonized over what my retro machine would be for years, I have finally put my money where my mouth is and will soon have the following machine:
Pentium II 450MHz
128MB PC100 SDRAM
ASUS P2B
24x CD-ROM
1.44MB Floppy
nVidia Geforce 256 32MB AGP
Aureal SQ2500 w/ Yamaha DB50XG
Diamond Monster 3D
PCI NIC card
6GB Quantum Fireball HDD
Sound Blaster 16 ASP SCSI-2 w/ Roland SCB-55
Roland LAPC-I
IBM Music Feature Card
I call this machine the Anti-DOSBox machine because it is designed to do things DOSBox cannot at the present time and in the likely future. It is a computer complimentary to the ultra-modern machine I use to run DOSBox.
First of all, this machine can play many Windows 9x games well. I included the Geforce for T&L support, but it is also the last nVidia card with solid 2D support. (My particular card also comes with a DVI-D connector for my flat panel.) It is a machine that can play DOS games that run in a 640x480 resolution smoothly. If necessary, I can get a faster processor as well.
The motherboard, the ASUS P2B, was a very popular board and can run just any Slot 1 processor, which includes Pentium IIs, Pentium IIIs and Celerons, at speeds from 233MHz to 1GHz. It also comes with three ISA slots, absolutely necessary for sound cards.
The Diamond Monster 3D uses the Voodoo 1 graphics chip, which can run many games, including some its successors cannot. The nVidia card will be handling the non-Glide graphics chores.
The sound cards really show the split nature of this machine. First, I have an Aureal SQ2500, the last sound card with A3D 2.0 support. A solid card for windows gaming. It has a waveblaster connector for the Yamaha daughterboard. It will be the main windows midi device.
Now here is where those three ISA slots come into play. The Sound Blaster 16 is the main DOS card with the best compatibility and true OLP3 sound. Its waveblaster connector will be occupied by the best, a true Roland Sound Canvas GS device. Perfect for later games that use midi. I will also be including a Roland LAPC-I for games that support the MT-32 or require a 100% compatible MPU-401 device. Finally, I will be putting my IBM Music Feature Card in the last ISA slots for the few games that support it. If I get an even slow retro-PC, those cards will probably go into it. DOSBox doesn't emulate the MT-32 perfectly or the Sound Canvas or IMFC at all.
For now, I will still use DOSBox for games that require a slower speed (and no patches available to make them cooperate.) I will also need DOSBox for Tandy/PCjr. games, games requiring the Sound Blaster Pro for stereo sound, or games supporting the Game Blaster, LPT DAC, Hercules or composite/tweaked CGA. It should be here within a week I hope.