First post, by senrew
- Rank
- Oldbie
So, the S7 bug has hit me. My win98 rig is nice but it's overkill for the games I actually need it for. Going through all the games I own, I've come to realize that the majority of the games I have are from the 92-96 range. A good chunk of the games are ones I originally owned and played on my two pentium machines, a p75 packard bell and a later p200mmx compaq. These games ran perfectly without issues on these contemporary machines but have some random issues on my 98 rig.
So, I started looking through my parts bin when I remembered about the p233 laptop I own. The specs are about what I wanted and plus it has an OPL3 for it's soundcard....I have no idea if that's a full fledged system or just the opl3 chip or whatnot..
Here is the spec sheet for it.
http://robertalpizar.com/dump/480cdt.pdf
Basically, P233mmx
64mb ram (in mine)
Chips & Technologies F65555 w/2mb
Yamaha OPL3-SA3
The screen is shitty, active looks like passive after so many years.
I need to pull it out of the box I have it in, play with the BIOS to see what kind of options I have for cache disabling and whatnot. The only thing that kills it for me is that I have no way to connect a joystick except for a usb one within windows, so that kills my options for DOS flight sims here.
So, my goals are to have a dual boot system, DOS 6.22 and Win95, pretty standard. I'd prefer a desktop that I can muck about with parts in, but if this machine will suffice for now, it'll satiate the bug I have.
As for a desktop, should I got that route, I'll need suggestions for just a couple of the parts. The oldest video card I have is a Stealth 3d 2000 pro which I know is perfectly fine for DOS but I'm not too sure about windows. I can move up to a TNT2/M64 but I think that may be too new for the vintage I'm going for. I'm thinking of finding a voodoo 1 or 2 to tack onto this just for variety.
I'm going to find a SB16 and/or an AWE 32/64 for the soundcard. Do I need to keep an older 16 card in there for games from the 92-96 years or am I ok with an AWE? Also, just for the hell of it, I'm going to look for a GUS and perhaps an scc-1 or sc-10/15 if I can find one cheap enough.
So, any opinions?