I thought it about time I share some photos of my DOS machines now that I've been here a couple of months. 😉

The Original Recipe:

Packard Bell Multimedia C110
Pentium 120, 48MB edo
onboard Cirrus Logic graphics
Packard Bell ISA modem/soundcard (Aztech/Crystal-based with genuine Yamaha OPL3)

I'd been looking for my first DOS PC for many months when a co-worker brought this in to me along with the original CRT. It was a Windows 95 PC, but it had ISA slots, which was more than I'd been able to find up til then! I took it gratefully and got to work. I had no interest in Windows 95 (already have a high-end Win98SE rig) so I put DOS 6.22 on and sought help here for DOS sound card drivers. gdjacobs came to the rescue by extracting them from his Win 3.1 Aztech drivers (which I did not have an install of). Thanks, friend!

I eventually removed 16MB of edo because two of the RAM slots were blocking the lowest ISA slot, which left me with an even 32MB. I then added a Voodoo3 2000 PCI and replaced the Aztech with a CT2800 and Dreamblaster S1, as the Aztech did not have a wavetable header. I also over-clocked the CPU to 133Mhz. It ran most games decently. New DOS games (mostly in SVGA) were still a bit sluggish, but the system was too fast for Wing Commander. I learned about Setmul to disable L1 cache, which got the system down into the low 386 speeds. This allowed me to play and beat WC1. However, WC2 was too slow with Setmul, and too fast without it, even with the built-in ALT/+ speed toggles that WC2 has. Interestingly, the motherboard on this Packard Bell was incompatible with US Navy Fighters. The PharLap DOS extender it uses conflicted with the BIOS ROM shadowing and there was no way to disable it in the barren PB BIOS settings.

Meanwhile, my friend from work came through with a couple of more HP Win95 systems. One of them turned out to be a gem. I pulled the board out and set it up in one of my beige boxes...

The Hot Rod:

The motherboard is an HPified Slot 1 Asus P2L98-XV Rev 1.02. It's not very flexible in terms of what CPUs it will take, but it has a Celeron 333Mhz in there that was perfect for my needs. It also has AGP and ISA slots. The onboard ATI Mach64 graphics were decent, but I chose to put a GeForce 2MX AGP in as it had the best combination of performance and compatibility.

I transferred the Creative Labs CT2800/Dreamblaster S1. At 333Mhz, all of the games that were sluggish on the PB now ran perfectly smooth. These games include System Shock (640x480), Descent2 (640x480), Duke Nukem 3D (800x600), CyberMage, and Wing Commander 3 (SVGA). Oh, and US Navy Fighters worked fine. 800x600 is smooth with sky and ground detail off, and 640x480 (with cockpit) is smooth with sky and ground detail on. Nice. Descent2 is still a bit sluggish (15-18 FPS) in 800x600 but I could live with 640x480 cockpit mode.

So now that I had Hot Rod, I underclocked the CPU on The Original Recipe to 75Mhz and replaced the Voodoo3 with the onboard Cirrus Logic to slow things down a bit. Now WC2 runs acceptably with a little help from ALT/+. With the Aztech card I still get great OPL3 FM synthesis and SB Pro 2.0 compatibility. Here are the two brothers together:

note: I had to break my beige theme with Hot Rod because I could not find a DVD reader except in black. 🙁

And some Wing Commander 2 gaming with retro Gateway 2000 (ACS41) desktop speakers, retro Grado SR60 headphones and CH Products Mach I joystick: