ragefury32 wrote on 2020-02-27, 05:00:
Eh, you did say “reliable”, right, and probably mostly period-correct?
Probably something like an Abit BX6 R2, any coppermine P3/Celeron, 2-4 sticks of PC100 from the same stock, an nVidia TNT2 AGP, a decent mSATA-to-IDE adapter, a small mSATA SSD (no one should deal with a 20 year old hard drive), a solid brand name power supply (something people skimp on but shouldn’t) and something that plays well with OPL3.
Hah, I guess I should have defined "reliable" here - if it "reliably" crashes during certain things but is otherwise stable, it's reliable! If it randomly crashes, it's not reliable 😀. For me "period-correct" is "anything my mom didn't donate the second I left for college", I've been eyeing this GeForce FX5900XT as one example 😁
I agree on the hard drive though, the one I'm running is a WD 120GB I got in 2004. No issues yet, except the dog is terrified of its noise...
the_ultra_code wrote on 2020-02-27, 20:45:For storage, any modern SATA drive will work just fine (if you intend to use an SSD, though, I'd suggest you format the drive to FAT32 using gdisk under Linux, as Windows will only allow you to format 32GB FAT32 partitions; I believe that formatting an SSD in such a matter will prevent DOS's fdisk from doing a full-format, and give you any benefits that a modern disk partition manager will provide in terms knowing what type of disk it's formatting). As for how to use a SATA drive under 98SE if you aren't using a Pentium 4 machine with SATA ports, a brand-name IDE-to-SATA adapter from, say, StarTech or a PCI SATA card will do the trick. In the case of the later, though, it might be hard to find such a card, and finding the drivers for it might be harder. I can recommend the Adaptec ASH-1205 PCI SATA card. They're cheap on ebay, and you can easily find the driver for it (https://adaptec.com/en-us/speed/sata/ash1205_ … _v10041_exe.php). I've been using one in my Pentium 4 system to hook up the SSD being used for 98SE, and I've had no issues.
On a different note, I'd also recommend updating IE to IE6, and Windows Media Player to WMP9, in that order. It'll update some under-the-hood things, and if you ever want to access an FTP server or have a relatively built-in modern media player in the OS, for example, they come in handy. There's this guy who has offline installers for IE6 on his own servers I presume, and I've used his installer for 98SE without issue (https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29992). As for WMP9, I forget where I found my installer, but if you look around you should be able to find a copy, or you can ask me to share it with you.
As a bonus, I also update the ASPI driver for 98SE, but I can't say it does much. It doesn't hurt to do so, though, and if you wanna deal with anything SCSI, it'll probs help. (https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/speed/sof … i_471a2_exe.php)
I was actually planning on getting a 32GB CF card but the SLC Industrial-grade ones are $10/GB! It looks like I'd be better served by getting a SATA<->IDE adapter and using that with some of my old SSDs, and not worrying too much about the swapping once the file is disabled.
I'll update those programs hopefully I can find them around somewhere! I was looking at which DirectX to go with as well, along with the user-supported Service Pack. There's a ton out there to sift through!
* edit to add thanks for the advice on formatting tools! My old CD wallet has a WD Data Lifeguard disk, which let me create the 120GB FAT32 partition without issues!
kolderman wrote on 2020-02-27, 18:20:You are much better off with a K6-2+ or 3+ (or a via C3). You are not playing lots of DOS games with a CPU that can't easily be slowed down to 386 speeds.
Ahh my "alternative" was a K6XV3+ MVP3 with my old k6-2 500 (not plus, but I don't mind messing with jumpers), but it just didn't seem to want to cooperate with my other hardware. Once I had hardware in it that it liked it ran fine, but this Celeron seems a lot more idiot-proof (a trait which I probably severely need). I also like that the Celeron is a fully 6th gen x86 chip, so it can run 32 bit Linux without needing a 386/486/586 kernel that nobody builds anymore. Just nice to have the option, and worth a bit more to me than early DOS games.
I was looking a bit at Katmai and Coppermine P3's, but I just set the FSB on my Celeron to 100 MHZ and now it's running at 500 without issues, so I'm going to try not to mess with it, because if I get a new chip I'll want new RAM, in which case I may want a more fitting GPU, in which case I should have an AWE64... 😁 Plus with this board rev it looks like it's a roll of the dice for whether or not it can do the 1.8v that Coppermine needs, and all of the documentation for what voltage chips to look for seems to be lost to time.
Thanks for all the help everyone, this has been awesome!