The early dual core era was less stupid speed and more stupid crashes as many of the mid-XP era games weren't all too fond of another core and it's a habit of affinity disabling. The extra cores will mean nothing to Win9x (and probably would improve game compatibility in comparison for it).

Joakim wrote on 2024-02-11, 07:46:

What systems of this era do you own?

Just this one. It can run most Win9x games released before 2002 fully maxed out at 1600x1200 with AA and AF cranked up as desired. That was my main goal for building it. There are some compatibility issues like missing support for table fog and paletted textures, but otherwise, it's been an amazing ride. Heck, it can even run late DOS games ok-ish due to the Audigy's SB16 emulation.

Early WinXP stuff runs well enough on that system too. Thing is, most XP era games run even better on something like an i5 Ivy Bridge with a GTX 980.

Yeah I know windows 98 wont use the second core. Still one of those core are probably even quicker than my pentium m computer(s), yeah I have a thing for socket 479 and especially the ct-479 adapter I bought a few years ago.

Would be interesting to see how they compare!

How was AMD 64 bit processors doing during this time compared to intel?

Any specific motherboards to look for?

Dont know if my system in sig qualifies, but I have been running this hobby project of mine since covid days with a few machines of the generation that I tried. I ended up setting up quadripple booting into Windows 10, Windows 98SE (DOS only and proper), FreeDOS and Ubuntu (the latter as my rescue option).

While I tried some "later" Sierra games in Windows 98 the primary interest here are DOS games of 1993-1999 period, and I can run most of my childhood games at the moment, with only some posing issues (e.g. earlier games like Chaos Engine or more capricious ones like Arena or Daggerfall).

Talking about Windows 98 performance, it's absolutely lovely. My house Eternity Engine fork takes less than 30 seconds to compile from clean, and WAD-s like Ancient Aliens, Avactor, Eviternity (I) load without noticeable delays. I am actually not cross compiling and mostly writing code for that source port while in Windows 98, and only go back to Windows 10 when I want to "stress test" it with DOSBox stricter memory management, or need screen capture or DOSBox debugger.

I have almost completely switched to FreeDOS and VSBHDA these days however, for the SB16 emulated sound in games.

And I use the same PC for everything else (as in modern web or tax return filing), only in Windows 10.

Ah yes the good old dualcore retro pcs 😜

Dolenc wrote on 2024-02-11, 12:51:

Ah yes the good old dualcore retro pcs 😜

IMG_20240211_131236.jpg

Hmm.. what graphics card is that? a voodoo?

Jup, voodoo 5 5500

Joakim wrote on 2024-02-11, 07:46:

(No only Swedish snus.)

ANOTHER W FOR GVNG TQBACCQ