First post, by jm1607
I’ve been a long-time lurker but this is my first ever post. Hi guys!
I want to build a vintage PC to run DOS games and early Windows games and I’ve been doing research for weeks now and keep going back and forth between build ideas… One issue I’m having in most of my searching for “DOS gaming” or “Retro gaming” the emphasis is always on some of the later DOS games. I “mainly” want to play really old games like Bard’s Tale and text adventures like Zork. I found a chart on CPU sensitive games, most of which I don’t care about or haven’t heard of. The 1 or 2 I do like I can live without, np. No one ever talks about the really old ones like these though?? Will they handle well on something newer like a Pentium 1? I don’t remember having any issues running them on my 486 back in the day.. But I was also like 9 years old 🤣
With that being said, I would also like to play games as late as Quake 1, Duke Nukem 3D, and Warcraft II. Possibly even Fallout 1/2, but not required. I’m sure anything that can run those could also run Doom, Wolfenstein & ROTT. So, I guess I want to be good up till about 1996 with little to no lag.
So... I’m torn and I really only want to build one machine (if possible).
I guess the whole build just starts with the processor choice. I have it down to either a 486DX66 or a Pentium 1 (100-233 MMX).
From what I understand, if I go with the Pentium there’s not really any reason not to go all-in with the 233 then I can disable the cache and slow it down in bios or using software for older games. This leads me to my next question which is if I went with a 100, 133, or even 166 would it be more well rounded for what I want to do? I’d kind of like to set it and leave it and not have to reconfigure my cache/speed depending on which game era I’d like to play if that makes sense.
*I also LOVE the idea of the turbo button but from what I understand that would only be possible if I went the 486 route and I’m not sure a 486 would handle the later DOS games I mentioned above. Would it??
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Sorry, this post got long fast 🤣