I mainly put together systems based upon hardware that I once used heavily. So, I put together an Am5x86 system and have it around for kicks.

Honestly I don't even game much on these retro machines. I just like putting things together and getting them up and running and tweaked. I've got modern stuff all figured out and so go back in time to further satisfy my addiction.

Some people smoke, some drink, I put computers together. I don't know what happened with me 😀

Nostalgia of the parts/build is the only thing I can think of as well.

I have to agree...a P1 system is more useful than a 486 system.
I prefer to use a 386 for the really ancient golden oldies games and a K6 machine for the later more demanding DOS games.
A 486 is often too fast for the older games and too slow for the later DOS games

But I like to tweak old socket 3 systems like swaaye 😀
like building a nice Eisa/VLB system with fast SCSI drives....parts that cost insanely high sums back in the early 90's 😎

> Why build a 486 system?

Because you can.

Seems to me that retro builders if they were purists would have two systems, a lowly 386 (the Beater Daily Driver) and then a modded Pentium (the weekend joy ride) and just completely skip over the 486 days.

That's reasonable, and I'm taking a similar sort of approach myself, although not with just two systems. For most games from, say, the 1992-1998 range, give or take, I'm assembling a nice 430HX Socket 7 system. (I had a P133, but it died, so I'm building a new and better P1.)

For earlier games, I may eventually put together a 386 or high-spec 286, but for now, my Amiga covers that era to a reasonable degree. It's not quite the same as a PC, but I'm happy enough with it... like anything else it has its own strong and weak points.

I also have an 8086 machine for really old software, and 2000-up titles are covered by my main machine, or one of my PIIIs, or whatever is handiest.

On the other hand, I still kinda want a 486 anyway, just to screw around with. I guess it's partially nostalgia-- that's what I had when I first really started getting into computers. It was the first time I assembled a machine from parts, and I played Doom and Raptor and some of those other 'classic' titles on a 486, I first got onto the internet with a 486, first experience with Windows 95, all sorts of stuff like that. Plus, for some reason I just find it interesting to play with orphaned technologies like VLB and EISA.

Interesting thread. I want to check something out - Wing Commander on a 486. Now I understand from Mr. Wing Commander himself (aka Amigaz) that the best hardware for WC is a 386DX-40. I have no reason to doubt this at all. I ran WC for the first time yesterday, and I don't know much about the game. There's a "flight simulator" to practice on, and so that's what I did. Curiously, I seemed to always get killed quickly on the first attempt, then subsequent attempts proved to be a lot easier. I tried this game on a 486 DX2-66. It ran much too fast. But then I put the BIOS in to "fail safe" mode, which disables various caches, etc. Honestly, the game then ran slightly too slowly. When I say the game, I mean the opening credits, and then the "flight sim" section. I haven't done anything else in the game. I was surprised by my brief testing. BTW, I have no sound card in my 486 board ATM, and also I am using a PCI graphics card.

retro games 100 wrote:

Interesting thread. I want to check something out - Wing Commander on a 486. Now I understand from Mr. Wing Commander himself (aka Amigaz) that the best hardware for WC is a 386DX-40. I have no reason to doubt this at all. I ran WC for the first time yesterday, and I don't know much about the game. There's a "flight simulator" to practice on, and so that's what I did. Curiously, I seemed to always get killed quickly on the first attempt, then subsequent attempts proved to be a lot easier. I tried this game on a 486 DX2-66. It ran much too fast. But then I put the BIOS in to "fail safe" mode, which disables various caches, etc. Honestly, the game then ran slightly too slowly. When I say the game, I mean the opening credits, and then the "flight sim" section. I haven't done anything else in the game. I was surprised by my brief testing. BTW, I have no sound card in my 486 board ATM, and also I am using a PCI graphics card.

A 386DX 40 without cache 😁

A 386DX25/33 with at least 64k cache is ideal

Luckily i was too young to have fond memories of the 386 (and later 486) PC my father had for work at home in the early 90's.

All i remember is just some Frogger, Pac-Man, then the mysterious Who Framed Roger Rabbit (was it a visual bug that prevent me from playing through?), me and my neighbor friend playin'... but i wasn't interested in the hardware itself.

Btw gerwin have just linked me to an answer in another thread:

Why build a 486 system?

To run Win XP at 8MHz. 😜

Pentiums do have problems with some older games 486s do not have. Blackthorne is one of them.

Plus, you get a turbo button on the 486 for those problem games/apps! 486s do what Pentiumdon't,

VLB ISA is also more prevalent on 486s than Pentiums too.

Part of the reason is nostalgia for me. My 486 is a part-for-part recreation of my 1990's 486, in a new case and a newer monitor. (both of those died)

Not to mention that one of my favorite games of all time, Ultima VII, runs perfect in my experience on my 486DX @ 33mhz. Any lower speed computer, such as the 386DX40, is a bit sluggish, but acceptable, and any faster, such as 486DX2 @50 or 66mhz, will run it a bit too fast.

There are quite a few games around the 1992-1993 era that will run perfect with the 486DX33 computer, so if anything, I would vouch for that particular 486 setup, instead of the faster ones, which I agree that Pentiums can replace easily.

swaaye wrote:

Honestly I don't even game much on these retro machines. I just like putting things together and getting them up and running and tweaked. I've got modern stuff all figured out and so go back in time to further satisfy my addiction.

Some people smoke, some drink, I put computers together. I don't know what happened with me 😀

+1

If you happen to have the parts laying around, why not put them to use?

Maybe a little bit off topic, but - what's the use of pci slots and the respective graphic cards even in fast 486 systems?

I tried a voodoo graphics with a Virge DX card on a socket 3 board with an AMD 486DX4-120, but of course this system couldn't really make use of the glide acceleration, and also the 4mb virge doesn't behave any better in dos than a 1mb Trio32.
I've also heard that some boards have difficulties with the pci implementation, so is a VLB board the better choice?

Yes, VLB is more appropriate. PCI wasn't really needed on 486's yet, but they had to introduce it sometime. When it worked, PCI was of course faster, but it's better to be more compatible if you're building it for retro purposes than to be cutting edge.

Silent Loon wrote:

I tried a voodoo graphics with a Virge DX card on a socket 3 board with an AMD 486DX4-120, but of course this system couldn't really make use of the glide acceleration, and also the 4mb virge doesn't behave any better in dos than a 1mb Trio32.

A Voodoo2 got my 486 running Battlezone (the Activision 1998 one) nicely around 27fps with hardly any frame chokes, at maximum detail. It's amazing how some later games work on 486s with just a Voodoo2. You couldn't play this game in software mode at all on the 486.

The original Jedi Knight runs fairly well too with a Voodoo in a high end 486.

I'm sure there are plenty of those early 3D games with simple geometry that would run very acceptably on a 486 + Voodoo.

I played Jedi Knight on a 486DX4-120 with a 2D VLB video card. It was playable at minimum resolution, but boy was I glad to step up to a Pentium II 450MHz with an AGP nVidia TNT1 a while later.

I remember having to decide between VLB and PCI when building that 486, because there was no clear winner at the time (a few months later and it would have been obvious though, as Pentiums were quickly becoming popular but were still out of my budget range). I actually didn't get the VLB video card for it until they were quite hard to find (got it used from someone on a forum). It still wasn't fast enough to run early DirectX games like Dink Smallwood very playably.

Other than for the nostalgia's sake it's hard to give a proper answer to the question of this thread. I admit, seeing the word 486DX2-66 at the P.O.S.T. screen is something memorable.

I've dropped the notion for building a 486 (or older) tailored to run a particular game, since doing so will render other games unplayable.

This has been further substantiated by the availability of DOSBOX. This baby can handle any of the oldies at a particular speed. (I still can't thank enough the Dosbox creators.) For example, fine tuning in dosbox to play Wing Commander I or II. And furthermore, you can still divert the midi message to an MT-32 in XP or even Vista-64-bit, thus, maintaining the sights and sounds of the classics.

Now, I just maintain a Pentium 133, and another Pentium III 450 (underclocked to 300MHz). Mainly for playing the later Dos CD-based, more resource-intensive games.

(Also awaiting for a socket 7, AT-based motherboard to arrive to fix in a case which has the numeric LED display on. Wanted to display the 133 or 166 magic numbers on the LED. 😀)

I can't even find 486 parts any more, Pentiums are rare too 🙁
I have 100Mhz Pentium I for retro gaming, altough I run most of the games emulated with my Core 2 machine.