Karpo, if i were you i'd take the p100, with 32mb RAM, and i also would STRONGLY get a sound blaster awe 64, as it's midi support is great for those games.

Ok, Thanks Dos_boy. Now, can someone answer to my other questions?

If you really want to run those old games, get a real Pentium machine, a P166 would be fine for most Lucas adventure games. Anything over 200mhz would probably need to be patched in order to run fine (if written with turbo pascal) and some games should be slowed down. A good plain Dos 6.2 with windows 3.1 would be nice, using QEMM or Memmaker to free conventional memory. A 4x CD-ROM is enough, together with a SB16 sound card, or awe64 (if you wanna spend). A video card with 4mb video ram is more than enough.

windows 3.1? why would you ever wanna put that on a dos box.. I think something like p100 is a very good one for all old games. just might need slowdown for some of the old games. and you ofcourse should manually set it up so you have most conventional memory free. if you wanna spend on awe64? I think you can get even AWE64gold for very very cheap. if you wanna spend a then find a GUS or a MT-32 etc.

I still haven't gotten the machine, but I'm thinking about it again. I have a question about sound cards: wich one should I get, an Awe 64 or Gravis Ultrasound Extreme ? I could get both quite cheap but don't know wich is beter.

Still haven't made your mind up?? Oh my... 😜

Yep 😅

Just buy any sound card with wavetable synthesis. It will be way more compatible with general midi than awe or gus.

I had an Ensoniq Soundscape Wavetable for the longest time. It emulated General Midi, Adlib, Soundblaster.. Roland I think too (not sure anymore.) Most games ran well (It was a Penitum 2) I used Moslo I think now and then (for the older games from like early apogee) but wasn't necessary for everything. The only problem I had with Ensoniq is that it HAD to have EMS On or you wouldn't get sound. Which is why I enjoy using DOSBox so much. Ultima 7 and some other games like Zone66 and stuff wasn't very happy with it.

wasn't that a PCI card?

There might be a chance to get a Roland SCC-1, I believe that would be pretty good?

If you would ever like something like that pc you mentioned I can help you out, as I have kind of a fleet of those being a pc store owner and longtime gamer.
I love Dosbox and have the opposite problem space wise. I even have a 286-12 that runs wavetable hardware sound under win3.1 in standard mode using a sb16/ensoniq combo that's running on a whopping 42MB that's right MB hard disk. Not just the pc stuff either. At the height of what my friends call my "cheesy old crap" obsession my vintage hardware and software took up about 400 cubic feet... that's right cubic. Anyways, I have a lot of the oldster stuff and have a p200mmx so tricked out that is just "wrong" on many levels. I just sold my collection of 3DFX cards to my junior tech at the shop though. So you missed out on 14 voodoo cards spanning from the 4MB voodoo 1 to the V5-5500PCI including wonderous failures like the banshee and rush. 😀 All my atari stuff is gone but I have a truly disgusting amount of commodore and amiga stuff and many tricked older pc's to eliminate. Maybe I can sell you one cheap since nobody on Ebay is literate enough to understand what I have. 😀 --- It's all about the Gameplay, BTW Did I mention that Qbix and team rock for making MOM work good on DosBox

I'd say a P166-200 would be best. It should run newer DOS and early WIN95 games w/o problems, while still not fast enough to cause problems for older titles (unless you play something really old...in that case you can also use dosbox 😜). P2s and Celerons are already based on the P-Pro risc architecture and can cause more problems. Couple that with 32MB ram, a fast PCI graphics card (STB Lightspeed 128 is my preference...ET6000 processor, 2.25(!!) MB ram, VESA 2.0 support in bios) and a hardware wavetable soundcard (Awe32....IIRC Awe64 is the same as Awe32 but with additional software wavetable which is yuck), set your timemachine 10 years back and you're a god 😁

Don't worry too much about "too fast." I play on a PIII 933 and when there are speed problems, disabling the cache in the BIOS usually does the trick. If I need more after that, moslo picks up the slack.

For me the Perfect pc for the old games i play would be

Intel DX4-75 Mhz, as the Processor (for the real old games : moslo @ 50 % )
10 GB as HDD for lot of games and some mp3-s
SB16 pro as a Soundcard
Riva 128 with 4 MB as Graphics and maybe a voodo 1
double Speed CD-ROM
disk drive 3.5" and 5 1/4"
and a simple 15" Monitor.
A simple Flight Joystick & a Gravis Gamepad with 4 buttons (was the best for me)

On this i would have dual-boot with MSDOS 6.22 & win98 SE
MS dos, configured to use cdrom mscdex only when i need it (via Batch
file) without smartdrive and other things. Dos configured to be in high &
umb - to get up to 606 kb free ram - beeing enough for all the games 😎
This would be my Perfect PC for all the Old games i Play

......or maybe dualboot with msdos 6.22 & win 95

I'm sorry, MP3s? WTF? This is a system for old games, not a generic do-everything system, you know.

Snover

I'm sorry, MP3s? WTF? This is a system for old games, not a generic do-everything system, you know.

Then i could leave the Windows OS away too. But there are Some games witch i love to play and these games run better with Windows (SQ6, KQ7 Tie fighter 95 or GTA1)
And i like to hear some music from the 80's or 90's when i play games from the 80's or 90's 😎 .

I now do hear the mp3-music during almost every game that i play - so i would install about 600 MB of old music that i heard when i was young - you know: Iron Maiden , Metallica, Genesis, Jean Michelle Jarre, AHA and so on 😁 . And , btw: if i install a 10 GB HDD, i can never fill this diskspace with games, all my old games have place on 16 cds - and in this there are about 10 "Voice"-versions (Sam&MAX, DOTT, INDY 4 - and this games have only a installation of 4 or 5 MB)

btw: my Soundcard is connected to my stereo, so i cannot hear pc & a Music-cd at the same time (only if the Music cd is in my CD-Rom 😎 )

Hello there Vogons People,

I just tought I might tune in to share my toughts the "ideal" oldgames PC. For a start I use and love the DOS.Box emu for a quick fix of good old gaming.

But sometime I felt like this was not sufficient - so I started to sink lots of time (like painting the desktopcase black, installing stuff etc.) and some money into a real DOS machine.

So I'll just share the monentary 'specs - if you diagree or just want to share your opionion just do so.. 😀

P1 133Mhz downclocked to 100Mhz for compatibility reasons
32Mb of RAM (DOS can't adress more RAM - afaik)
Some S3 Trio V64+ PCI VGA card - 2MB VRAM
+Some Noname VooDoo 1 card with 4MB
Soundblaster 16 ISA ASP w/o Plug&Play (with volume Dial on back 😁)
+Yamaha DB50XG daughter board
Roland LAPC-I
40GB Hdd that I painfully chopped up into 2GB chunks.
Mitsumi 8x CD-ROM Drive

Running Dos 6.22 / Win95 dualboot

On the problem with some games requiring D: to be your cdrom drive - I think you could just 'subst' the drive letters - can you?

Edit : Forgot the VooDoo card oops

VomitOnLino wrote:

32Mb of RAM (DOS can't adress more RAM - afaik)

Nope. I think you can address 64MB of EMS using a third-party utility like QEMM and even more than that using XMS or protected mode (XMS, top-down allocation strategy).