First post, by Tek
- Rank
- Newbie
Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfSukXqGZ1c
In an effort to keep the build video short, I've not gone into too many specifics so I've written this to go alongside. For starters, very little of this would have been possible were it not for the VOGONS members. A lot of my enquiries were nipped by searching and lurking and my more specific questions were answered brilliantly.
Most of the parts were sourced from eBay due to the age and availability but some of the best scores came from private sales from a few guys here and personal friends.
This PC build is centred around a 450mhz PII MMX Slot 1 CPU and half a gig of RAM, which is insane for 1998. Games from 2000 were only asking for 128mb so it's a huge amount. In fact Windows 98 can only recognise 1gb in total which is a limit I mean to meet in the near future.
The Soyo motherboard was shortlisted along with three others, one being a Chainfire board that I just could not track down. The choice was made due to PII support, a wide range of RAM compatibility and the large number of PCI slots, as well as an AGP slot for the GPU. Also, I had to have a beige case but wanted a new one, hence the excellent if overspecced CH case.
The graphics are provided by an old '98 Riva card that I pulled out of an old build but that's propped up by two 12mb Voodoo 2s running in SLI. These things are absolute BEAST MODE. I'll make a benchmark video soon but suffice to say I'm running Half Life in full HD at 60fps+ and it's the same for Q3A. These are truly the heart of it and one factor I was never going to concede or negotiate with.
Media drives are pennies, I just grabbed what I had lying around. I'm considering adding a Zip drive but I'm not sure I have any IRQ left - that's something I forgot to mention - IRQs! God that would have been a nightmare has I not been prepared. The HDD is a 60gb(?) Seagate Barracuda and it has tons of space - the OS is a few hundred mb so there's space left for probably a thousand games.
The SoundBlaster Live! sound card rules. One thing that I noticed after installing and playing for a while is that the SB16 emulation under windows is great - if your DOS game will run in the DOS virtual environment then everything will work perfectly, unfortunately if your games have to run in pure DOS then the card doesn't perform as well (LucasArts adventure games I'm looking at you!) so I had to install a second sound card for DOS - I went for an old SB AWE64 Gold which is the best ISA sound card of its type (IMO). That was a specific request that was answered here and I was even pointed towards the best card I could get so again, thank you VOGONS! Luckily my Soyo mobo had an ISA slot so that was a fairly painless - if ultimately heartbreaking - process. I really wanted to get the PCI card working in 100% of cases but in actuality it was easier to rock two cards.
I chose Windows 98 Second Edition for my OS. SE was chosen for the full-featured compatibility with the hardware but crucially because it was the last true DOS-based OS, meaning reverse compatibility for DOS games would be as good as I could get on a Windows machine. The theory paid off, everything worked exactly as expected! Hardware compatibility was a runaway success, no driver issues and no conflicts (which is actually BETTER than my memories of the 90s) and software compatibility has been almost perfect too, although I still can't get Evolva running (remember that game?)
All in all it was a blast building this PC. I've wanted a retro rig for a while as a lot of my old PC games don't work on new iterations of Windows so it was worth building a rig to play them on. Many thanks to you guys here for pointers and for being an ace community I'm proud to be a member of.
We'll karaoke all night long, macarena 'til the break of dawn.
