Skyscraper wrote:

I agree, the forum structure is fine. […]
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I agree, the forum structure is fine.

Lately I am having fun tinkering with XP era hardware I could not afford back when the stuff was new, now it can be found in dumpsters.
This stuff is not really retro yet but it will be, sooner than we know everything will be gadgets and "load more".

While Windows Vista v1.0, v1.1 and v1.2 can run most games with some tweaking and updating surprisingly many XP era games fail to run when installed from old discs.
I think Windows XP will have a bright future as retro gaming OS but it will take some more time until XP truly feels retro.

I agree with this. And chuckled at "Vista 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2" 🤣

I think you, and Phil, are right that XP will become "the next frontier" for retro gaming as Windows continues to evolve towards mobile/cloud/whatever devices. It makes a lot of sense for DirectX 8/9 titles, and there were quite a few of those that put up absolutely huge sales numbers compared to even the best DOS games of all time. So there's bound to be plenty of folks that will want to re-play them at some point in the future. It'll be interesting to see if the prices go really high though. My understanding is that Pentium 4-era stuff was more mass-produced than anything that came before it, but of course it may also be more recycled than anything that came before it. 😕

Scali wrote:

I disagree there. Because the CPU is so fast, there's quite a bit of software that fails. Not all ISA devices will work for that […]
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jwt27 wrote:

but still with perfect DOS compatibility, PnP ISA slots with DMA

I disagree there.
Because the CPU is so fast, there's quite a bit of software that fails.
Not all ISA devices will work for that reason either, even in Windows.
I had trouble with a real Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 card in my Pentium II 350. An ESS clone works better, probably because it responds much quicker to DSP commands than the real SBs do. Most software just uses simple delay loops where they send a command to the DSP and then loop N times, reading the DSP status to see if an SB is there.
On a fast CPU, you have looped N times before the SB has responded, so it is not detected properly.

Likewise, there's a lot of software that crashes because things go too fast, and get divison-by-zero or other crazy things.
I think you shouldn't go higher than a 486 or early Pentium for the best DOS compatibility. Faster Pentiums would already start to have trouble with some software... but a PII... well, as I say, you can't even use real SB cards anymore, only clones. There's probably tons of other hardware that fails for similar reasons.

With DOS compatibility I was aiming more at, well, being compatible with DOS itself.
Speed-sensitive software (and hardware?) is a different matter entirely, but then that's what the 66x2.0 CPU speed setting is for! (or ACPI throttle, or disabling caches...) 😉
At the other end, some of the later DOS games more or less require a Pentium 3 (or faster) with AGP card to push any decent framerates.

i wouldn't consider Pentium 4 and up "retro" or collectable in any way. These platforms don't have much going for them, a modern Core i7 machine with 32-bit Windows XP installed can do just about anything a Pentium 4 can, only faster.

I agree. They are common as dirt and never were very good.

I consider Pentium 3 and older to be "retro". My primary focus is on 486 machines but I like everything from Pentium 3 or earlier.
Socket 775 isn't retro. It has SATA, PCI-E, SS3/SSE4, 8GB+ RAM, quad core and just about everything that an I3/I5 has. Just a little slower.

If it still runs all modern software satisfactorily, it is a big stretch to call it "retro"

obobskivich wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

While Windows Vista v1.0, v1.1 and v1.2 can run most games with some tweaking and updating surprisingly many XP era games fail to run when installed from old discs.
I think Windows XP will have a bright future as retro gaming OS but it will take some more time until XP truly feels retro.

I agree with this. And chuckled at "Vista 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2" 🤣

I didn't, that annoyed the bejeezus outta me. 😜

Stiletto wrote:

obobskivich wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

While Windows Vista v1.0, v1.1 and v1.2 can run most games with some tweaking and updating surprisingly many XP era games fail to run when installed from old discs.
I think Windows XP will have a bright future as retro gaming OS but it will take some more time until XP truly feels retro.

I agree with this. And chuckled at "Vista 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2" 🤣

I didn't, that annoyed the bejeezus outta me. 😜

Me too, since I have two machines running Vista 1.3! (Win8.1)

Stiletto wrote:

obobskivich wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

While Windows Vista v1.0, v1.1 and v1.2 can run most games with some tweaking and updating surprisingly many XP era games fail to run when installed from old discs.
I think Windows XP will have a bright future as retro gaming OS but it will take some more time until XP truly feels retro.

I agree with this. And chuckled at "Vista 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2" 🤣

I didn't, that annoyed the bejeezus outta me. 😜

Scali wrote:

Me too, since I have two machines running Vista 1.3! (Win8.1)

Well I can call them by their correct names! Windows NT 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2 to not upset your touchy feelings 😈

jwt27 wrote:

With DOS compatibility I was aiming more at, well, being compatible with DOS itself.

Isn't that the whole point of x86 though? Backward compatibility.
Heck, I have a Core i7 860, with an USB floppy drive, which I use to transfer data to my old DOS machines.
The other day I accidentally left an MS-DOS 3.30 floppy in there, an image which I had written to boot up another PC... and it booted to that 😀
I wouldn't be surprised if even the latest Core i7s would still be able to boot such an ancient DOS 😀

Put Prince of Persia on a boot floppy and it will work on an i7 🤣 PC speaker sound too.

tincup wrote:

Going back to the OP's original point [or question] - is it time to add new sub-forums for 'emerging retro' platforms - I'd say it's really not necessary. VOGONS goes with the flow for the most part and I find that threads on all manner of non-current machines sort themselves out smoothly in practice. There is always friendly jostling along the perimeter - just what constitutes 'retro' is an enduring and evolving theme on VOGONS. So my answer would be the forum structure is fine 😀

I agree, theres imo no need for such a split

smeezekitty wrote:

i wouldn't consider Pentium 4 and up "retro" or collectable in any way. These platforms don't have much going for them, a modern Core i7 machine with 32-bit Windows XP installed can do just about anything a Pentium 4 can, only faster.

I agree. They are common as dirt and never were very good.

But alas, that is one of their strong points! Just imagine, you can be homeless and without a computer, but if you dig for long enough, a Pentium 4 will be unearthed and peeking back at you! Friends forever! Yes Pentium 4's are super common, but with a decent video card and some ram, that basically "free" cpu will allow you to do almost any task! And it might not be the most powerful these days, but it means that no matter where you are - the top of a mountain or 2 miles deep in a cave - you can always have a computer.

That is what this forum is about, knowing deep down in your heart, when you are strong or weak, young or old, you will always have a computer at your side. 😉

fyy wrote:

But alas, that is one of their strong points! Just imagine, you can be homeless and without a computer, but if you dig for long enough, a Pentium 4 will be unearthed and peeking back at you! Friends forever! Yes Pentium 4's are super common, but with a decent video card and some ram, that basically "free" cpu will allow you to do almost any task! And it might not be the most powerful these days, but it means that no matter where you are - the top of a mountain or 2 miles deep in a cave - you can always have a computer.

That is what this forum is about, knowing deep down in your heart, when you are strong or weak, young or old, you will always have a computer at your side. 😉

Haha. What a great post. 😀 🤣

The thing with XP being retro.
You can install it on modern PC's still just fine.
If your not interested at all in dos games, XP-SP3 does OK with the majority of 9x games, and with a fast enough cpu you can run dosbox for the dos games.
And you can still get FM synth GM out of a few PCI SC's like the YMF7x4 under it, combine that with dosbox's MPU pass-through for GM and you can still have Hardware based FM music in some dos games under it. Strange as that sounds.

AlphaWing wrote:

The thing with XP being retro....You can install it on modern PC's still just fine...

Maybe I'm wrong but aren't we approaching the point where XP drivers will not automatically ship with your typical modern hardware and games? Having XP boxes for Dx7/8 and early Dx9 games, running on period-correct but driver-limited motherboards and video cards will represent a fresh "retro dividing line" in the not too distant future.

Personally I'm there already. The number of [early] XP games happier on a 32-bit OS, single core cpu, pre DX9/10 GPU [or some combination thereof] justifies a standalone rig. Less faffing about with modded game files and drivers and customized workarounds to coax these fellas into playing nice with W7 etc...

In fact that's sort of my working definition of 'retro' to begin with; when you reach the point where it's more convenient and less hassle to build from the old parts box to get a game to run properly. To me that's "retro" thinking - maybe not vintage, but certainly a backwards-looking distinction worth making in my book. Maybe "legacy" rig is better? Come to think of it I already label my retro rigs with an "L" prefix; L0, L1, L2... etc. The "L" stands for "legacy". That way I don't need to torture myself with the brain-warping internal debate as to what constitutes "retro" 😀

I don't have W8 but word on the street is it's not very friendly with pre W7 games. So the need for something to fill the gap between W9x and W8 seems pretty evident, or will soon.

As far as I know some of the newest chipsets and GPUs from Intel and nVidia are not shipping XP drivers, but AMD hasn't quite gotten there yet (apparently even the 290X will work in XP). But as you pointed out, just because you can get XP to run on brand-new hardware doesn't mean that older games will necessarily play nice with the system - some have issues with multi-core CPUs, some break (or partially break) with modern graphics drivers/chipsets, and so forth. I've not seen this on games that came out after Windows Vista, but some DX8 games from the early 2000s certainly fit into that category, and it's much easier to just have an older machine that runs XP available. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years the "very long backwards compatibility" that we're enjoying with Windows 7 these days erodes, and computers from 2006-2010 start to be more pertinent as well.

I don't think XP is really retro yet even though it is old.
It only lost official support very recently and most software still supports it.

Windows 2000 feels much more retro and has less modern hardware and software support.
Windows 2000 seems to have better support for old stuff but lacks the "Compatibility mode" of XP
out of the box

As far as I know some of the newest chipsets and GPUs from Intel and nVidia are not shipping XP drivers, but AMD hasn't quite gotten there yet (apparently even the 290X will work in XP). But as you pointed out, just because you can get XP to run on brand-new hardware doesn't mean that older games will necessarily play nice with the system - some have issues with multi-core CPUs, some break (or partially break) with modern graphics drivers/chipsets, and so forth. I've not seen this on games that came out after Windows Vista, but some DX8 games from the early 2000s certainly fit into that category, and it's much easier to just have an older machine that runs XP available. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years the "very long backwards compatibility" that we're enjoying with Windows 7 these days erodes, and computers from 2006-2010 start to be more pertinent as well.

I believe NVidia still supports XP fully

Using a modern DX11 GPU on a DX9 OS seems like a waste though

Some people may say Athlon 64's with XP are retro while some others may claim calling a 486 retro is pushing it.
I think it's not as much a solid wall with everything to the left of it retro and everything to the right not-retro, to me it's more a gentle slope (a gray area).
Last weekend I installed an old game on my main rig and it would install...kinda, but wouldn't run at all (not even in XP compatibility mode).

So I dug out one of my old A64 machines with XP and used that, the game worked fine.

This is always an interesting conversation 😀

smeezekitty wrote:

I believe NVidia still supports XP fully

I went to nVidia's site, told it GTX 980 + Windows XP and it said no drivers available. GTX 970 returns the same. You can check for yourself if you like:
http://www.geforce.com/drivers

Using a modern DX11 GPU on a DX9 OS seems like a waste though

Buying a card like a Radeon R9 or similar just for an XP-only computer doesn't make a lot of sense to me either, but if the machine could dual-boot with XP and a newer version of Windows that will support DirectX 11, that could be very useful for compatibility reasons. I think that "era" is coming to an end though, just as it did for Windows 98 some years ago.

obobskivich wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

I believe NVidia still supports XP fully

I went to nVidia's site, told it GTX 980 + Windows XP and it said no drivers available. GTX 970 returns the same. You can check for yourself if you like:
http://www.geforce.com/drivers

Yup. They still update drivers on older cards (I got a new XP driver for my GTX460 just a few days ago), but newer cards don't get XP support to begin with.
Note also that Microsoft no longer supports XP at all, so drivers cannot get WHQL certification anymore. This is a good excuse for most vendors to stop releasing new XP drivers.

And so begins the retro era of Windows XP 🤣

I've had heaps of fun playing with that XP machine and Pandora Tomorrow. The parts are hardly retro but it still feels "retro" going back to a game 10 years old.

The only problem I see with collecting XP era computers is the quality of the materials they used. My 80's and 90's computers are still going strong with no issues or part failures (other than the occasional bad PSU or CD-ROM / Floppy drive) but the XP era computers have a glaring flaw. All (Or most) of those 2000's machines used cheap caps and bad design choices on the motherboards which means that if you put an XP machine into storage there is no garuntee that when you come back the whole board wont be fucked.

My first computer I ever purchased was an IBM Thinkcenter 8183 that had windows XP home edition on it. It was a refurbished business computer from MiComp and I paid 99.00$ for it back in 2008. However 6 years down the line I dug it out of storage and noticed the caps on the motherboard are bulging.
I'm going to take pictures of it and document it's last days before I recycle it (hell I'll probably put XP on it again for one last time). Why am I going to recycle it instead of try and replace the caps? Well a number of reasons but mainly because like many have already pointed out, all the software that would run or did run on XP and these old Pentium 4 machines runs flawlessly on modern computers.

So while it would be nice to think that people are going to try and save these P4 machines I really don't think many will start collecting them due to the fact that they were basically designed to fail after a number of years. Designed Obsolescence... isn't it a wonderful thing?