G'day all.

I've been a long time lurker of the VOGONS forum as I've always found it a great community and resource for old school PC gaming. I finally decided to build a cheap nostalgia machine, something that would allow me to play all my old DOS and Win9x favourites without jumping through various hoops like wrappers and emulators. I've had quite a few PCs over the years, starting with a 486-SX33 back in the early 90s, a Pentium 233 MMX (with a few different 3dfx cards) in the late 90s and an Athlon Thunderbird 1.2 GHz in the early 2000s. But my fourth PC was a Pentium 4 which served me well for many years. I figured this would be the best "bang for buck" build that could cheaply cover the 1993-2003 era of PC gaming I was looking for. My brother-in-law recently gave me an old Gateway tower with an Intel 845G chipset mainboard, so I decided to base the build off that. I scavenged a case, power supply and CD-ROM drive from yet another tower he gave me and, after some research, purchased the rest of the parts I wanted. The completed build:

Intel D845GRG Mainboard
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz
512 MB DDR-266 RAM
GeForce 3 Ti200
Sound Blaster Audigy
Seagate 40 GB 7200 rpm IDE HDD
Microsoft PS/2 Intellimouse Optical 1.1A & Keyboard
Microsoft Sidewinder Controller

I spent about $75.00 USD all up (this cost me about $2,500.00 AUD back in 2001) and the build went pretty smoothly. The Gateway mainboard was a little limited, as expected, but the bios had options to disable unwanted ports and onboard devices which was all I really needed. I install most of the components without a fuss. The only real drama I had came from the Audigy sound card. Despite being labelled a SB0090 model, I figured it is OEM of some kind since none of the Audigy driver CDs listed on VOGONS worked correctly. The drivers would cause a BSOD after installation and none of the applications would load. I was able to manually install the Win98SE driver update from the Creative website via the device manager, and it would work fine, but none of the other features of the card would be installed such as EAX support, custom soundfonts etc.

I sorted it out after finding a thread here on VOGONS where a member had suggested using an Audigy 2 driver CD instead. I couldn't use the installer as I didn't have an Audigy 2 card, but by simply navigating through the folders on the CD, and installing the VxD drivers and individual applications one by one, it all installed perfectly. I loaded up Heretic 2 and it worked out of the box, smooth as butter and with full EAX support. To set up DOS audio support I copied over the DOSDRV folder from one of the Audigy 1 driver CDs and installed that separately. That enabled SB16 emulation in the device manager. I then entered the resources it allocated (IRQ 7, DMA 3) into my autoexec.bat "SET BLASTER" line and that enabled SB emulation in true DOS. I can now run Doom through both true DOS and a Win98 MS-DOS prompt with Sound Blaster 16 SFX and General Midi. You beauty!

I still have a lot of testing to do. I have just under a hundred games on CDs I’ve bought between 1993-2003 to try out, not to mention dozens of demos of games I missed back when I was a poor high school / university student. This should be fun. Cheers to all the members here for all the helpful posts, with a special shout out to Phil('s Computer Lab). Your Youtube channel and website were a big help selecting parts and setting this all up. If anyone has any suggestions or critiques for the build I'd love to hear them. I still have to mess around with soundfonts since I only had a Sound Blaster 16 during my original DOS MIDI days. A CRT monitor would be nice too if I could find one locally.

I’d also really like a 3dfx Voodoo 2 just to complete the build but the high prices make it a little hard to justify, especially for the few games that actually require Glide over OpenGL or Direct3D. My original Voodoo 1 and Banshee are located on the other side of the planet right now (I moved to the USA about nine years ago) so next time I’m in Australia for a vacation I plan to scavenge them if they still work. I’ve read that the Voodoo 1’s have issues with higher clocked CPUs and FSBs so that’s probably out, but my Banshee PCI card could be a cool addition. Maybe with a little finagling I could set up the Banshee for DOS only while leaving the Geforce for Windows, using my monitor’s VGA & DVI inputs to easily switch between the two. It be a fun experiment at the very least.