First post, by red_avatar
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- Oldbie
I've been working on a proper Windows 98 PC for, oooh, 10 years or so now? Over these years I've been optimising my setup taking into account what items are most expensive, what has the longest lifespan, etc. and I felt it might help some for me to write down all the tips & tricks I've discovered over the years. I won't go into tiny details since there's tons of guides that delve into this, but my idea is to give a general view of a great setup that is both easy to work with & will last a long time.
THE MINDSET BEHIND THIS BUILD
The mindset behind this build is to have a system that is flexible, fast, degrades moving parts as little as possible and is just plain comfortable to use. Games can be stored as CD images on USB sticks, connected to a USB 2.0 PCI card leading to vastly faster speeds than any DVD drive back then could muster. It means no hiccups in games, no faffing around with CDs (and potentially having them scratched), having the CD images & patches (and even manuals) in one place.
HARDWARE
The Windows 9X era spans from 1995 until 2003 (and even later in a sense) with major chances in DirectX (from 1 all the way to 8.1). As such, game compatibility can be tricky. No system will work with all games so you'll need to make a choice. Personally, I went with TWO systems but you can stick with just one and it will cover 80-90% of all games.
CPU: a socket 370 Pentium III 1Ghz is recommended. Some will recommend a Pentium IV but you're bleeding heavily into Windows XP territory there. I also found the Pentium IV boards to be more flaky & the CPUs pump out a lot more heat so keeping your system quiet & cool is trickier. You CAN go with a Pentium IV (I'd avoid anything AMD since the overheating problem is even worse and the boards often had bad caps & buggy chipsets)
MOTHERBOARD: there's tons of good socket 370 motherboards out there. Look out for fan headers (minimum 1 CPU, 1 Chassis, 1 system) , PCI slots (at least 3) & AGP speed (4x minimum). Make sure you can find the manual online and make sure it supports higher end Pentium III CPUs (many don't). https://www.cpu-world.com is a lot of help here.
MEMORY: 512MB (133Mhz if you go with the CPU above) is plenty and so far, I've yet to encounter any game that fails to run with this amount. It also allows you to dual boot Windows XP using the system I'll explain below
HARD DRIVE: 120GB SSDs are ideal. They're quiet, use little power and Windows 98 supports 128GB per drive so this is perfect:
GRAPHICS: this is tricky but personally I'd go with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200. A Voodoo 3 3000 is a good choice for games up to 2000 but will struggle with 2001-2003 games. The GeForce 4 is also very compatible with D3D. You could always add a Voodoo2 card for 3DFX support in older titles.
SOUND: there's quite a lot of choice here. The SB Live! or Audigy series of cards all works really well. I personally use the SB Audigy. Most games of the time will properly use EAX with this card
PSU: many modern PSUs will still work fine - just make sure they have at least 2 cables with molexes (one for the hard drive, one for the CD drive). I personally use modular PSUs since it makes cable managing a lot tidier
EXTRAS:
- get a PCI USB 2.0 card - this is VERY recommended. Most of them require no drivers and add 4 USB 2.0 ports AND a 5th port inside the PC (which can be great if you want to pimp your retro case with RGB lights)
- get a 2.5" drive caddy for the back - for example the Icybox IB-2207STS. This allows you to easily remove & replace an SSD or a 2.5" drive. I'm using this to quickly swap between my 120GB Windows 98 and a 1TB Windows XP.
- get PATA to SATA converter so you can hook up a molex & ATA cable to the modern caddy mentioned above and potentially on your DVD drive depending on its age (you can get brand new SATA ones really cheap)
- a SATA to USB device letting you mount your SATA drive on your main PC for moving files across OR you can burn CDs
- it's a good idea to replace old fans with modern silent fans. If your graphics card has a dying or noisy fan, try to surface mount a new fan and hook it up to a system or chassis fan header - do NOT hook it up to your graphics cards since it could damage your card if the fan draws more power than the original fan. The CPU fan should always be replaced - depending on the heatsink, it's not difficult to find modern replacements. I also recommend at least one case fan if your case allows for it
- 128GB USB stick(s) (up to 4 depending on the size of your library)
SOFTWARE
- Windows 98 SE
- DirectX 8.1 (you have no choice here - too many later games demand this)
- USB mass storage drivers
- drivers for your sound card & graphics card. Do NOT pick the very last drivers for your graphics or sound card. Many later drivers break compatibility or may have seriously higher overheads. Pick period correct drivers. Personally I went with a 2003 driver even though there were drivers released until 2006.
- Alcohol 120% for Windows 98 (it's free on their website) + ClonyXXL (for detecting copy protections)
- Nero Drive Speed if you wish to reduce drive noise
INSTALLATION
- Install Windows 98 SE to the 120GB drive
- Remove the drive from the retro PC and attach it via USB on your main PC
- Put all drivers & software you wish onto the drive in a folder
- Put the drive back inside the retro PC
- Start with the chipset drivers, then the USB drivers, then the graphics card, then the sound card - always install the chipset drivers first (I've run into too many issues by not doing this)
- Now install other software such as Alcohol 120% (+ VLC, Winamp, etc. according to your wishes)
- make sure your virtual drive is the first CD letter after your physical partitions, your real CD drive can be the next letter
- enable DMA support for all drives in Device Manager
- also fix the drive letter in Device Manager so the drives always have the same drive letter (with USB removable drives you can get weird results otherwise)
- you can now rip games you own to 1:1 disc images, store them on the USB drive and use your internal drive just for installation files
SUMMARY
In the end, you can have hundreds of CD images (500GB worth) available inside Windows 98 without having to add or remove anything. Games load & install extremely fast due to USB 2.0 + SSD drives. You can remove the SSD drive to do an occasional trim (not supported by Windows 98) when needed if you wish to do so thanks to the caddy that is always accessible at the back of your PC. You can even dual boot multiple systems by swapping out SSD drives. The recommended hardware has a very high compatibility rate with games of the era as well and will comfortably play games up till 2003.
I honestly think I've hit the limit of what more I can do & improve. If you've followed the guide, you'll have a system with no parts that will age quickly or ones you can still find modern replacements for, your DVD drive won't be used often so thanks to modern quiet fans, your entire system should be very quiet.
if you have any suggestion, shoot!
Retro game fanatic.
IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870