I think you could mix the pentium 1 with the pentium 2 in order to get a better 9x/DOS machine (since the time I started to use a pentium 2 3 years ago, I've almost never used my pentium anymore. Though my 486 are also faster)
This may depend of the games that you like though, but well that's my experience ^^

I agree with the above post, keep the PII and use PI parts.

I'd possibly also keep the FX 4100 as that should easily cover the mid XP era games you mentioned, with a bit of breathing room to spare. I'd certainly keep that over the Athlon XP system.

I'd generally also prefer a P4 setup over an Athlon XP too. Though you do have to factor in the greater heat & power consumption.

Do you have a modern system? If so, you can use it for your XP-era games, which I find translate better on a modern system than DOS games do. Personally, even though I love the 486 platform, the P166 can pretty much do everything it can with slowdown tricks, plus play newer DOS games better. You could probably get more money for the 486 anyway. That leaves you with the P166 for DOS games, AXP for Win9x games, and your modern system for XP games.

I would keep the 486 and the P166 and toss the rest.

ninkeo wrote:

I'm mainly interested in mid to late DOS (say 1992 onwards) and early 9x to mid XP era gaming.

Then why would you keep the slow 486 over the much more capable Pentium? The Athlon XP does make sense for 9x/early XP gaming, if you actually install XP on it for dual-boot.

I would keep this "MSI VIA-based Socket A mobo with Duron 750" for sure.
There is allot of games you can play on this setup.
https://youtu.be/K5vYD0JMD_A

Thanks for the ideas so far guys, I still need to fully test everything just to make sure I'm not replacing something that works with dead parts.

Deksor wrote:

I think you could mix the pentium 1 with the pentium 2 in order to get a better 9x/DOS machine (since the time I started to use a pentium 2 3 years ago, I've almost never used my pentium anymore. Though my 486 are also faster)
This may depend of the games that you like though, but well that's my experience ^^

The slot 1 board does have the usual 3 ISA slots along with the PCI and AGP setup, it might be a better option considering what games I play in DOS. The 486 I mainly use to run old speed sensitve games on, as the turbo button lets me run WC1 perfectly on it.

PTherapist wrote:

I agree with the above post, keep the PII and use PI parts.

I'd possibly also keep the FX 4100 as that should easily cover the mid XP era games you mentioned, with a bit of breathing room to spare. I'd certainly keep that over the Athlon XP system.

I'd generally also prefer a P4 setup over an Athlon XP too. Though you do have to factor in the greater heat & power consumption.

From a technical standpoint I would prefer the P4 over the AXP, though testing revealed more problems than just a dead ethernet chip. I might try a recap down the line, but for now I'm putting the 478 board aside. Its a pity considering this board has an i865 chipset and used to perform pretty damn good back in the day.

If I can get the 478 board working correctly, the AXP is probably going to my parents place for them to run their old 9x era games on.

clueless1 wrote:

Do you have a modern system? If so, you can use it for your XP-era games, which I find translate better on a modern system than DOS games do. Personally, even though I love the 486 platform, the P166 can pretty much do everything it can with slowdown tricks, plus play newer DOS games better. You could probably get more money for the 486 anyway. That leaves you with the P166 for DOS games, AXP for Win9x games, and your modern system for XP games.

Considering how hard complete 486s are to find here, I'm quite hessitant to get rid of it. If I upgraded the CPU to a DX2 66 and doubled the ram to 16mb, would it really be much better than the DX33 with 8MB? On the P166 and the P2 300, I could never get them running older speed sensitive games correctly, they either ran way too fast or too slow (WC1 being one of them) even with underclocking the multiplier and FSB coupled with setmul.

My modern system has real problems running XP era games that aren't DX9 based, I either get corrupted video or an instant crash. Probably because of the RTX graphics card or Windows 10 maybe?

dr_st wrote:

ninkeo wrote:

I'm mainly interested in mid to late DOS (say 1992 onwards) and early 9x to mid XP era gaming.

Then why would you keep the slow 486 over the much more capable Pentium?

The way I was doing it previously is I run the older games on the 486, and when it gets too slow to enjoy, I jumped up to the Athlon. If an upgrade to the 486 allows it to run more without causing issues on the older games, then the Pentium is probably going to disappear.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

I would keep this "MSI VIA-based Socket A mobo with Duron 750" for sure.
There is allot of games you can play on this setup.
https://youtu.be/K5vYD0JMD_A

The board I've got in particular is the KM2M, the combo board with SDRAM and DDR memory. I need to test it again but I've always had problems with the VIA 4 in 1 drivers crashing on Windows 98, hence why I went for the ECS K7S5A instead (not to metion my nostalgia for this board). It might be more stable if I put in an officially supported CPU though... (the Duron 750 isn't in MSI's QA tested list, while the spare D1200 and Athlon XP 2400+ is)

I got a super-cheap Optiplex 790 i3 ($40) and it works *brilliant* as an XP machine, and it's tiny. YES it lacks authenticity and you aren't playing with hardware anymore.

If space is more a consideration than money consider getting rid of cases and making a couple/few test-rig style setups, even stack them and maybe swap a power supply between them. You could get 3 systems in barely more space than 1 tower. I'm kind of half-considering a solution like this, or racking 4-5 "era" systems in a closet and running a KVM.

Personally I am overwhelmed with stuff right now, I kind of asked for help finding stuff I was missing and then a tidal wave hit. I'm still looking for missing stuff (plenty of things I still want) but I'm being cautious asking now. 😀

Moving now would be insane.

Merovign wrote:

I got a super-cheap Optiplex 790 i3 ($40) and it works *brilliant* as an XP machine, and it's tiny. YES it lacks authenticity an […]
Show full quote

I got a super-cheap Optiplex 790 i3 ($40) and it works *brilliant* as an XP machine, and it's tiny. YES it lacks authenticity and you aren't playing with hardware anymore.

If space is more a consideration than money consider getting rid of cases and making a couple/few test-rig style setups, even stack them and maybe swap a power supply between them. You could get 3 systems in barely more space than 1 tower. I'm kind of half-considering a solution like this, or racking 4-5 "era" systems in a closet and running a KVM.

Personally I am overwhelmed with stuff right now, I kind of asked for help finding stuff I was missing and then a tidal wave hit. I'm still looking for missing stuff (plenty of things I still want) but I'm being cautious asking now. 😀

Moving now would be insane.

A bit of a late reply (guess moving does that 🤣),but a worthy update. I considered long and hard on what I played the most, and I ended up going down the small form factor route, using a Core2Duo E7500 Acer Veriton and a spare GT 710. Don't worry, I'll be soon replacing this crap card with a low profile 750Ti, due to driver bugs. Reason being is that I've got a hold of an early 2000s Thinkpad (an R30 running Windows ME) that can run pretty much everything I wanted to play on the Athlon rig, with everything else including a few modern titles running on my SFF Acer rig. I have the 486 and the 440BX slot 1 system in storage fully assembled, with the rest safely disassembled and packed away.

So now my retro setup is this:
9x era games / games that have issues running on XP: ThinkPad R30
XP era and up (including DOS emulation): C2D Acer

I would sell redundant CASES and keep boards/cards in smaller boxes (e.g. motherboard boxes which can be kept even under the bed). I did it some time ago and it helped a LOT.

Old topic, but since it got resurrected I'll say my opinion.

-486 DX33 (8MB ram, SB16 and 512k VGA card - DOS) - Keeping
I agree, it's a nice system, a bit too old for my taste, but for early 90s it's very good

-Pentium 166 (32MB ram, AWE64 and 2MB PCI SVGA card - Win95 / DOS)
Hard to say, I'd keep it, it's very good for 95-96, Duke3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior, etc

- Athlon XP (512MB, SB Live, GeForce2 Pro 64MB - WinME) - Keeping
Indeed, nice system for early 2000, if you can replace the card with a GF3 it's even better

- FX 4100 (8GB ram, X-Fi Fatal1ty, EVGA GTX 960 - WinXP)
I wouldn't keep that, it's not retro at all (in my opionion), plus it's mid range, boring. Also it's not a WinXP system, rather a Windows 7/8/10 system.

And the following spare parts in storage:
- Slot 1 440BX board with PII 300 and spare mendocino Celeron (on slotket)
I would definitely keep that, but I am a little biased here, I'm a huge fan of slot 1 and BX 440.
PII 300 was legendary and very expensive.
If you add a Voodoo3 card there, or even better, a TNT2 Ultra and V2 SLI... that would be a kickass system, but maybe then the CPU should be a bit faster, maybe a PII 400 or even a PIII 500.

- MSI VIA-based Socket A mobo with Duron 750
It's a "meh" system, mid range, plus the system above (BX440) with a Coppermine above 600 MHz and 100 MHz FSB would make this Duron redundant for anything.
If you need to give up on something, there this one should be high on the list.

- ACER socket 478 board with dead Ethernet chip (3ghz P4 HT)
Again, a meh system, especially if that ACER motherboard is proprietary. I would not keep that.

- HP 775 board with Core2Duo E6300
Nope, just nope.
A decent board (P35 - Abit, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI) with a Q6600 would be another story, very good for late Windows XP era.

RaverX wrote:

Old topic, but since it got resurrected I'll say my opinion. […]
Show full quote

Old topic, but since it got resurrected I'll say my opinion.

-486 DX33 (8MB ram, SB16 and 512k VGA card - DOS) - Keeping
I agree, it's a nice system, a bit too old for my taste, but for early 90s it's very good

-Pentium 166 (32MB ram, AWE64 and 2MB PCI SVGA card - Win95 / DOS)
Hard to say, I'd keep it, it's very good for 95-96, Duke3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior, etc

- Athlon XP (512MB, SB Live, GeForce2 Pro 64MB - WinME) - Keeping
Indeed, nice system for early 2000, if you can replace the card with a GF3 it's even better

- FX 4100 (8GB ram, X-Fi Fatal1ty, EVGA GTX 960 - WinXP)
I wouldn't keep that, it's not retro at all (in my opionion), plus it's mid range, boring. Also it's not a WinXP system, rather a Windows 7/8/10 system.

And the following spare parts in storage:
- Slot 1 440BX board with PII 300 and spare mendocino Celeron (on slotket)
I would definitely keep that, but I am a little biased here, I'm a huge fan of slot 1 and BX 440.
PII 300 was legendary and very expensive.
If you add a Voodoo3 card there, or even better, a TNT2 Ultra and V2 SLI... that would be a kickass system, but maybe then the CPU should be a bit faster, maybe a PII 400 or even a PIII 500.

- MSI VIA-based Socket A mobo with Duron 750
It's a "meh" system, mid range, plus the system above (BX440) with a Coppermine above 600 MHz and 100 MHz FSB would make this Duron redundant for anything.
If you need to give up on something, there this one should be high on the list.

- ACER socket 478 board with dead Ethernet chip (3ghz P4 HT)
Again, a meh system, especially if that ACER motherboard is proprietary. I would not keep that.

- HP 775 board with Core2Duo E6300
Nope, just nope.
A decent board (P35 - Abit, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI) with a Q6600 would be another story, very good for late Windows XP era.

Funnily enough, it turns out I was able to trade the HP board for an entire rig, that being the Acer I use for gaming nowadays. Luckily the Acer's board has a G31 chipset, which means it supports a great range of CPUs, including P4s, Pentium Ds and Xeons. Though I doubt the VRMs would handle my spare Xeon (an X5450), just because you can doesn't mean you should 🤣

I ended up tossing the 478 board after getting the G31-based Acer, since it had started developing boot issues I couldn't really track down.

Apart from that, I agree with pretty much everything else you suggested apart from the FX system. Good P35 era boards aren't cheap and are well over $100 AUD, to me this didn't make sense especially since I already had the CPU and motherboard for the FX rig. A few friends also gave me a few parts in return for doing a few jobs for them, that's how I got the GTX 960 and the X-Fi card.

The slot 1 machine is actually going to go back into service soon, as a DOS gaming PC for a friend. Unfortunately I can't find a BIOS update suitable for the board that will let me use the Mendocino Celeron (shows up as "MMX CPU" 🤣 ), so I'll probably just overclock the Pentium 2 to 350mhz and be done with it. I'll probably chuck in a voodoo2 (that's what I've got), a Rage 128 AIW and an AWE64, if I can find another one. Otherwise he'll just have to suffer with the horrors of the SB PCI 128 😈

Wolfus wrote:

I would sell redundant CASES and keep boards/cards in smaller boxes (e.g. motherboard boxes which can be kept even under the bed). I did it some time ago and it helped a LOT.

This is a pretty good option. Along with a test bench, you can still fullfil your retro hardware needs without needing to take up as much space. I personally have a Streacom BC-1 for this, which while being a bit expensive for what it really is, goes along with it really well, because all the parts screw back into the base plate, meaning you can easily disassemble it and store it while barely taking up space. I still am planning on some builds, but if I were to make a system for every single platform I want to play with, I'd have more PCs than living space 🤣