I have a baby AT with 3 PCI and 2 isa slots, so the form factor won't really limit you too much on hardware. The Pentium 200 should be more than enough to hit your game target. I can't speak to Linux distros though. I fiddled with mandrake around 2003 iirc, but didn't do much with it.

I have a 200MMX with 256 MB of RAM (all cacheable, my board has a VIA chipset and tag ram) and it runs Windows 98 like a dream...
Just make sure none of the games you want to play are speed sensitive. If some are, you might need to mess with disabling caches.

Yeah. I have to agree. I think 200MMX may be the sweet spot. Getting a newer chipset (430TX, SIS, or VIA) will help with performance in Win98. USB support can be spotty in older chipsets.

Though, including games from the late 80's may force you to disable cache (as mentioned) or use something like Moslo to get the speed in check for games that don't limit themselves.

If you can get lucky go with an ATX socket 5/7 setup as they are easier to work with. If you are dead set on a classic AT setup good luck with finding a good case as they are getting harder to find these days. Beyond that you found the sweet spot for early to mid win 9x gaming.

I think with 200MMX you'll need some hardware accelerated 3D of some sort if you want good fps on quake, voodoo would be ideal, but you can go with a geforce if you need good dos compatibility also, MX series are easy to find and cheap.

I think a Voodoo-1 is a no-brainer for mid-90's 3D and Glide.

TELEPACMAN wrote:

I think with 200MMX you'll need some hardware accelerated 3D of some sort if you want good fps on quake

If you are going for regular 320x200, then a Pentium 75-90 and a decent PCI videocard should be enough.
For higher resolutions, the requirements for CPU and videocard bandwidth go up very quickly (the CPU has to calculate every single pixel and send it to videomemory over the bus. 640x480 is almost 5 times as many pixels as 320x200, so it is almost 5 times as slow), so yes, you probably will need a 500+ MHz machine with AGP to get 640x480 or 800x600 in decent shape. In which case a 3d accelerator is a much better approach.

So it really depends on what flavour of Quake we're talking about here. I guess 'pre-acceleration' would mean software rendered Quake. So then the question is: at what resolution?

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. While I generally think that Mode 13h (320x200) is "enough for everybody" (tm) you convinced me that having an additional accelerator would be beneficial. Right now my hardware of choice is as follows:

• P200MMX or P233MMX (I really want a pre-P2 era CPU)
• S3 Virge DX 4MB
• Voodoo 2 12MB (or two in SLI)
• Sound Blaster 16 CT2950 - what do you think of this model, especially MIDI playback? Does it have the hanging note bug?
• Realtek RTL8139C or RTL8139D

I don't care for "newskool" stuff like USB support. 😀

Do you recommend any ATX socket 7 mobo that accepts a Pentium MMX and has at least 3 or 4 PCI slots (preferably 4)? I really don't want to go through the PITA of having to deal with AT cases. 🙁

Funny you should talk about old linux distros. I just got an old Compaq laptop and it came with Red Hat 5.2. The interesting thing about that is that I got to see what an old Linux distro was like in terms of system resources usage. It barely used any RAM. This machine has 16MB and it still had about 13MB free after it finished booting (not counting caches/buffers of course). Unfortunately it didn't had any desktop environment, only basic Xfree86 and that only used a few KB of extra RAM.

As for Quake, a Pentium 133MHz will get you smooth framerate at 320x240, provided you have a good video card, so a 200MMX will probably allow higher resolutions.

I recommend an OEM. A lot cheaper, well documented and should cover your needs pretty well.

Scali wrote:

If you are going for regular 320x200, then a Pentium 75-90 and a decent PCI videocard should be enough.
For higher resolutions, the requirements for CPU and videocard bandwidth go up very quickly (the CPU has to calculate every single pixel and send it to videomemory over the bus. 640x480 is almost 5 times as many pixels as 320x200, so it is almost 5 times as slow), so yes, you probably will need a 500+ MHz machine with AGP to get 640x480 or 800x600 in decent shape. In which case a 3d accelerator is a much better approach.

640x480 has exactly 4.8 times as many pixels as 320x200 and it is an enormous additional strain on the video subsystem. I believe that people olaying it on their Pentiums and Pentium IIs either put up with frames in the 15fps range (tolerable in single player) or cut the resolution (a must for multiplayer) or bought a Voodoo and used GLQuake. I am not sure, even today, if there is a 3D accelerated option for pure DOS other than the Rendition vQuake.

USB support just reaches the level of usefulness in an i440BX motherboard. It is still USB 1.1, so you are limited to 12Mbit speeds. Its good for joysticks, but gameport joysticks of the period work in pure DOS.

MasterM wrote:

Do you recommend any ATX socket 7 mobo that accepts a Pentium MMX and has at least 3 or 4 PCI slots (preferably 4)? I really don't want to go through the PITA of having to deal with AT cases. 🙁

Most definitely. I have an Asus TX97-XE on my Socket 7 build, and so far it's been great overall - 4 PCI/ISA slots, PS2 Keyboard/mouse, can use any ATX case. I even had a Voodoo 2 12mb card working for quite some time.

Thanks JayCeeBee! Just bought TX97-XE with Pentium MMX 233Mhz off ebay for ~$50.

Currently have:

• The CPU and mainboard mentioned above
• 2x Voodoo 2 12MB for SLI setup
• SB16 CT2950
• Realtek RTL8139D

Total cost so far: about $160.

Will soon get S3 Virge DX 4MB for free from a friend!
Still need to get 64MB DIMM SDRAM, a nice HDD, FDD and an optical drive. And of course an ATX power supply and a nice looking case. 😀

P.S. Just noticed that my monitor for retro stuff (15'' Belinea 101570 LCD) supposedly does not support resolutions below 640x480. 😒 Any way to remedy this without buying another one? I suppose gfx cards of that era won't upscale when in 320x200...

MasterM wrote:

[*] It should handle 1999 Linux running KDE 1 or Windows 98.

You've plenty of power for early Linux. Checking my notes, your box ought to boot Knoppix 3.3 okay, which is 2004.

MasterM wrote:

P.S. Just noticed that my monitor for retro stuff (15'' Belinea 101570 LCD) supposedly does not support resolutions below 640x480. 😒 Any way to remedy this without buying another one? I suppose gfx cards of that era won't upscale when in 320x200...

LCDs tend to treat any standard graphics mode below 640x480 and the regular text modes as 720x400 and scale them. It usually looks ugly but it should work.

I recently changed from LCD to a 17" CRT to a 21" CRT. It's night and day. CRT takes up more room, but WOW, it's worth it!

My setup is pretty much the same. Though I replaced the MMX with non-MMX because older games may have a problem. Really though I'm going to have two systems. One to hopefully be the most compatible with DOS and another to be the most compatible with Win 98. I think you give up too much when trying to make a system for both. So you gotta go with two machines in the end (if you want later era windows games)

Great Hierophant wrote:

LCDs tend to treat any standard graphics mode below 640x480 and the regular text modes as 720x400 and scale them. It usually looks ugly but it should work.

Fingers crossed then!

Thraka wrote:

I recently changed from LCD to a 17" CRT to a 21" CRT. It's night and day. CRT takes up more room, but WOW, it's worth it!

I would love to have a CRT, but I barely have enough room for the computer itself. A good CRT monitor is #1 on my to-buy list once I eventually move to a larger apartment.

Thraka wrote:

Though I replaced the MMX with non-MMX because older games may have a problem.

What kind of problems did you encounter? The number of really old games I wish to run (late 80s) is miniscule compared to my huge nostalgia for post 1990 era so I just hope for the best. 😀

This should be a really nice machine, Asus TX boards are rock solid.
Definitely pick up a CRT, it's a big part of the vintage experience. Even a 14" would do.

SLI is a bit pointless on a 233MMX, but whatever, it's still cool 😀
CT2950 can have either Yamaha OPL3-L or CQM, the former is more faithful to early 90s games with FM music.
HDD-wise I'm a fan of 2.5" notebook HDDs with a converter, they run very cool and quiet. On the other hand HDD noise is also part of the fun.
Try to get a low-speed optical drive or one that can be slowed down with a software util, as otherwise you may get the hairdryer effect.
No mention of the 2D card but I'd recommend an S3 Trio/Virge for compatibility. I also had good experiences with ATI Mach64.

Interesting that you specify high framerates for Quake. I think in general our tolerance of low framerate was much better in the 90s. Framerates 60+ have become the norm for modern PC gaming. To achieve solid 60fps in 640x480 software quake you'd need a much faster machine. Even 60fps in 320x240 takes more grunt than a 233MMX.

Hell I played Quake on a DX4100 and I liked it 😀 GLQuake was awesome but the software version has more atmosphere IMO.

It's mentioned in another thread but the shareware game Solar Winds from Epic Megagames (92 and 93) kept locking up on the MMX chip. I figured if one early 90's game and almost certainly some 80's games would have a problem with MMX, it wasn't worth the effort. So I just got the fastest P1 I could find. I don't have a problem with it at all.