Mid-90s games often did not even had a full install option. After all, most Pentium I/MMX machines I come across have 1.6GB drives. 8.4 to 10GB is really more of a Pentium II territory.

As for late 90s to early 00s: I played Baldur's Gate II and Diablo 2 on a Pentium II machine with 30GB total in 2002 (I think). Those games needed more space than anything I played at the time and were more of an exception. You could, of course, choose "minimal" installations, but then you'd have to swap disks a lot and suffer longer loading time.

Any reason why you want to stick with such a small disk?

jheronimus wrote:

Mid-90s games often did not even had a full install option. After all, most Pentium I/MMX machines I come across have 1.6GB drives. 8.4 to 10GB is really more of a Pentium II territory.

As for late 90s to early 00s: I played Baldur's Gate II and Diablo 2 on a Pentium II machine with 30GB total in 2002 (I think). Those games needed more space than anything I played at the time and were more of an exception. You could, of course, choose "minimal" installations, but then you'd have to swap disks a lot and suffer longer loading time.

Any reason why you want to stick with such a small disk?

The board I have for my MMX build does not support >8.4GB HDDs and for some odd reason the only patched Award BIOS I can find for it (PCChips A101 v1.4 by the way) refuses to flash onto my BIOS chip (size mismatch error) so I am stuck with max 8.4GB.. I want to install and play 96-98 games on it, but I can do with not playing Baldur's Gate on a Pentium MMX I suppose (After all, I did play it on a PII-333 back in the day, IIRC..)

You might need a larger ROM.

At that time upgrade was only solution. (because of lack of information)

I suggest you to install ontrack disk manager for big HDD. (If I knew this at that time I won't struggle with Side jr)

Possibly; or it might be a newer ROM chip to replace a broken one and actually larger than expected, I do not really know..

Regardless, the idea of running multiple CD, post-glide games of 98 on a P166MMX/Voodoo2 seems like a futile exercise at best so I decided to limit my gaming on this PC to 1993-1997 with some 1998 games that I know would run OK on it like Starcraft, Commandos, Railroad Tycoon II, Fallout 2, Grim Fandango. Baldur's Gate, Half Life, Might and Magic VI, Thief, Rainbow Six, Shogo, Rogue Squadron etc. will be played on my Tualatin Celeron/Radeon 8500 build 😀

Installing a whole CD's worth wasn't really a common thing until 1997. Usually it's often a 10kb-40mb base data install for anything CD dependent.

Though there's a few DVD-sized games in 1998 that allow you to install all of it. 4GB drives were the norm by then, and in these two years (98-99) hard drive capacity rapidly increased to around 40gb at the end of 1999. Installing Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Baldur's Gate II all together wasn't an infeasible idea.

My pentium I currently sitting with a 8Gb drive and is doing fine with all the games I wish to play, its rare for a game to exceed even 100 Mb... (I am sitting at 50 games right now including some ISO files for running the games)
besides if you think 8 Gb is to few just get a second drive as you have a possibility to use 4 IDE devices and you only need 2 maybe 3 if you decide to go with dual cd-rom (which was uncommon so support was a **** when running games).

leileilol wrote:

Installing a whole CD's worth wasn't really a common thing until 1997. Usually it's often a 10kb-40mb base data install for anything CD dependent.

yes we did *cough* Twilight *cough*

I also had trouble with flashing BIOSes one or two times. In my cases it was related to the flashing program.
The newer releases of the flashing utility dropped support for either the chipset or the flash chip.
Same happened when I flashed Geforce cards..

Jo22 wrote:

I also had trouble with flashing BIOSes one or two times. In my cases it was related to the flashing program.
The newer releases of the flashing utility dropped support for either the chipset or the flash chip.
Same happened when I flashed Geforce cards..

That's.. interesting, to say the least. I will absolutely retry flashing the bios with an older version of AWDFLASH.EXE - just don't know which one to go for.. Considering the BIOS is from 1997 I suppose a version from 1998 would be a good idea to try?

I could name one game that was incredibly large for 1996. The Elder Scrolls Chapter II: Daggerfall!

Though it was the norm by 1998, it was certainly more rare in 1996. To top that off, one could say it is one of the few DOS games with an incredibly large option called 'Huge' (which would amount to 450MB, even larger than Windows 95's install!). When we had our Pentium from 1995, it had about 1.4-1.6GB at most as well.

As for CD games, most games with FMV were large around that time frame. What I didn't know that DVD copies (not ones with CD files all together, but actual DVDs) of Wing Commander IV even existed till just a few years back. Must've been incredibly rare when those versions came out (considering they were only found on very specific DVD drives with an MPEG-2 Hardware Decoder built in). We still have our CD original at least (though you can convert it into the DVD version).

Thanks for all the feedback. I'm going to dump cue/bin files into a USB flashdrive and mount them using Daemon Tools; hearing that full cd installs are a rare thing for pre-98 games is kind of refreshing 😀

appiah4 wrote:

Thanks for all the feedback. I'm going to dump cue/bin files into a USB flashdrive and mount them using Daemon Tools; hearing that full cd installs are a rare thing for pre-98 games is kind of refreshing 😀

Many pre-98 games also used CD for Redbook Audio; I don't think full CD install is possible for such games.