First post, by RobbieBenzi
Hello there, I have been recently tasked by my sweet half with the task to clean our garage from my "trashware corner", a little collection of various hardware from the late 90s/early 2000.
After a long and logorating battle we have come to the agreement that I can keep one fully assembled system for PC retrogaming, but coming from the viewpoint of a "trashware as to make old hardware usable again with linux" enthusiast I am in no way an expert in retrogaming hardware, so I need your help in this difficult choice.
I know from reading this forum that the best hardware platform would need one or more ISA ports for the sound card a Tualatin and possibly a PCI vodoo graphic card, but I have neither of those. And I have seen various videos from PhilComputerLab with really "modern" (up to socket LGA 775) hardware, so I am somehow lost.
I would like to be able to run windows 98SE maybe on top of DOS; eventually even Windows XP games but the latter is surely not needed in any way. Knowing that my experience with older DOS games will probably be hampered anyway by the above mentioned lack of an ISA slot and sub par architecture and videocard I am open to emulating those that are lost battle, but I'd like the keep the true experience with good performance with the best possible number of games from the early DOS to the late 98SE/ME(/maybe early XP) era.
Good news is I have at least a Sounblaster live audio card. More details about GPU, more sound card and eventually more peripherals will come in future post, but at the moment I would like to choose at least a core, meaning a Motherboard and a CPU.
This is the hardware currently in my possession (and I don't think I can justify to my special someone buying more hardware while I am supposed to get rid of it =P)
Socket 370
Motherboard
PCChips M758LMRT+ V5.x
CPUs
Pentium 3 1000 SL4C8
Pentium 3 SL45V
Pentium 3 SL4C8
Celeron SL4P8
Socket 462
Motherboard
A7N266 - VM (rev 1.05)
CPUs
AMD Athlon AXDA1800DUT3C
AMD Athlon AXDA1800DMT3C
Socket 939
Motherboard
Foxconn C51GM03A1-2.0-8EKRS
CPUs
AMD Sempron SDA3400DIO2BW
Socket 478
Motherboards
MSI 945GCM MS-7536
ASROCK P4V88
CPUs
Pentium 4 1.7Ghz SL5TK
Pentium 4 1.5Ghz SL5DF
Pentium4 1.8Ghz SL63X
Pentium4 2.6Ghz SL6PP
Pentium 4 2.6Ghz SL6WS
Pentium 4 2.8Ghz SL7DB
Pentium 4 3.0Ghz SL7PM
a Pentium 4 about 1.6Ghz (it's lapped/sanded to copper, so I can't exactly remember the model number ^^' I was working at a low power idle machine and was young and curious,maybe too much of both)
Socket LGA 775
Motherboards
Asus P5S-MX SE
Asus P5V800-MX
Asrock 775v88
CPUs
Pentium 4 SL7PU
Pentium 4 630 SL7Z9
Pentium 4 640 SL7Z8
Pentium D 820 SL8CP
Celeron 1.6Ghz SL9XP
Celeron G1610T SR10M
This in pretty much it. I know that later architectures like those based on LGA 775 will make some purists spit out their dinner but, as I said, this is what I can work with, and I'd like to get the most out of the hardware I'm gonna keep. I don't value XP compatbility that much because it always seemed to me to work pretty well while virtualized. If that's not the case I am also open to an hybrid solution keeping 2 machines, one running DOS/98SE, the other one rocking XP even if that means finding a way of letting one slide under my evil other's nose unnoticed.
Thank you in advance for getting this far in the post to those who will, and even more thanks to those who will give me their opinion and help me decide
Cheers