Currently rolling with an Athlon XP setup myself. There are some games that will simply not work, that are timing sensitive. Highway Hunter and Traffic Department 2192 give all sorts of trouble because the CPU is too fast, even when turned all the way down to 5x100mhz. Turning off the cache doesn't …

i think he is saying you don't run a swap file at all, which is feasible if you have enough ram. he is still wrong though. NVMe would be possible if it passed along the appropriate BIOS bootcode. Never tried it, so don't know if it exists or not. (Essentially, does the adapter just create a bridge …

I seem to be getting a mixed response here. I'm going to look into all of the suggestions that have been posted so far. For the naysayers, whether or not it is a fool's errand is of no concern to me :lol: I just want to give it a shot. I won't be spending ridiculous amounts of money on it though. …

Storage: If you have a spare PCI-E x4 or even x1 slot, why not try an M.2 to PCI-E adapter? Potentially 10 times faster than a SATA SSD. Standard M.2 drives are still SATA drives, just in a different form factor, so they aren't any faster. NVMe drives are what you're thinking of, and in a modern " …

For PCI cound cards for DOS, you can do sound blaster emulation on Audigy and Sound Blaster Live cards, or you can use the Yamaha YM74X PCI cards with real OPL3. Compatability in both cases is rather limited. The most compatiable PCI cound card is the ESS SOLO-1 with excellent soundblaster …

I posted about a similar idea only with a P4, so line-by line; Core 2 will work, would likely be overkilkl for 99.9% of anything considered "retro", though so would the P4. 4GB of ram: You could get 16 on most boards and not even break $30... course anything 32-bit will only see 4 of em minus your …

Just in case there's kids watching, by solder they mean apply solder paste and flux, then apply heat. While this CAN be done with an iron you're making your life very difficult that way.

Beyond whatever Microsoft was doing, the manufacturers produced drivers for the cards, and they do work. Kind of silly to argue against something that's already been tried and tested. A LOT of people didn't upgrade to XP in any realistic timeframe. (I had an aunt go from 98 to Windows 8... surprised …

Demystify the Gotek for me. Does it support multiple image sizes at once or is it locked to a particular size (e.g., 1.44MB)? I've been doing my floppy installs in a VM and then copying the directory onto the CF card for the retro PC. I get that the Gotek can be more...convenient for floppies that …

Oh, also decided on just modding a crappy old ATX case as I am definitely NOT paying $70 shipping for an AT case. Got some blank faceplates to drill out and the ATX case being so crappy actually makes it look like a vintage AT. Might do my homework on a 3 digit Turbo display and will definitely need …

Fairly standard build for a 486, but its standard for a reason, It's a proven set of hardware to get the most out of gaming :) Not sure if your aware, but the virge lets you mess around with S3D, their brief attempt of getting into the 3D accelerator scene. https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t= …

Do the floppy controllers on 775 boards still support dual disk drives? You didn't mention an FDD but if I wanted something for DOS games, I would want to be able to use the disk if I had stumbled upon one. Also, PCI-e wasn't common until 98 was dead and buried. Even ME was a distant memory. I …

For a loose BGA chip (as in, if the finger test works and there's likely a cracked solder joint) you can use a hot air gun or (if you're EXTREMELY careful) reflow it in an oven. Obviously some experience is much preferred before you go risking your rare hardware. Such issues are seldom visible.

I get what both of you are saying, but in my defense this was only ever the hypothetical solution to a problem I'm not sure anyone's ever had. Just spitballing a madboy solution and hoping to elicit some discussion from others vis a vis what they'd do to solve the same problem. You know, for funsies …

Was tossing this idea around lately, probably not going to build it - at least this week - as I'm usually all about maximum compatibility for the era in question. But I was going over what hardware, OS, etc. I'd run to cover the largest chunk of retro IBM PC games in one system. Just going by memory …

This is incredible Taking the mediocre and making it awesome is right up my alley. Some people may think it's heresy to destroy old hardware, but your intentions are to make it better and more enduring - Creative's digital capability plus the discrete OPL3 makes this card tick almost every box on my …

I'll post pics once it has a proper home, right now it's just a mess.

Quite proud of the rig and the journey to it so the description is long. Tail Deer at the bottom. So I'm an IT worker and have been gaming since around 1985 (I was six at the time.) Time working as it does, my real renaissance for gaming was around 1995. Around that time the SNES was still fairly …