The first three are DirectX 8 games and the rest are older, so a top-of-the-high-end Win98SE would work. 2K and XP could be options, unless there's a particular incompatibility with one of those titles.

I know Red Faction, Mafia, Max Payne, Half.Life, Diablo 2
will run fine on a modern pc (you need pure faction for red faction) i would guess the other games would run fine too.
carmaggedon is on steam so that should be fine

windows 7 patch for mcrae rally
http://kfyatek-dev.jogger.pl/2011/09/25/colin … indows-7-patch/

I don't feel like giving up my retrojunk yet, allthough it's something I've been thinking about recently due to dosbox, gog and, to some extent, steam (but i dislike their offline mode).
So... what kind of top of the high end w98 where you thinking about?

Thanks for the mcrae patch!

I'm Dug!

One of the top cards you can get 98SE drivers for, GeForce 5900 to 6800 Ultra or Radeon 9700 to 9800 XT, with like an Athlon XP based system, and an Audigy (2) for proprietary EAX support.

x800xt has win98 drivers too. so does de x1800/1900 series. Red Faction runs best on 98. It likes to crash quite a bit on xp w/o the pure faction addon.

If I were building a box to purely play those games I would do the following. Grab any P4 or Athlon system capable of running Windows 98 and clean it up, I'm particular to the Dell systems like the Inspiron 4600. You can find those for nothing at local computer shops and thrift stores. Toss in an Audigy 2 sound card and an GeForce FX 5900 (Quadro FX 3000) and call it done.

kanecvr wrote:

x800xt has win98 drivers too. so does de x1800/1900 series.

Those are fine cards. From my experience at the time, Radeon up to the X1950 Pro actually had better early D3D compatibility than the GeForce 3, 4, FX, because of texel alignment issues and such. I guess I didn't come across the stuff requiring palettized textures or fog tables, which are meant to be the GeForce's advantage in regards to early compatibility (along with DOS stuff).

BTW, if you very specifically wanted to target DirectX 8 and didn't care about 9 at all (reasonable enough for 98SE 😀), GF4 Ti 4600-4800 might be preferable just because of its special advanced shadowing in Splinter Cell that you won't get with later cards.

Just to note I could not find Windows 2000 or 98se drivers for the x1950 pro anywhere when I was going to use one in a retro box a while back. EDIT: Just did a quick search and found them, odd.

I'd use XP, but Squareguy has a solid plan. You don't really want to play the games on contemporaneous hardware unless you also want to relive insufficient performance.

Half Life might make a 98SE + Vortex 2 setup worthwhile. That can be a flaky, frustrating setup though.

So, i ended up building this one very quickly with parts I had lying: around, following some of your ideas.
Right now playing descent 3, go figure.
Anyway here are the specs:

- motherboard Asus P4S800 with some SiS chipset, don't know, don't care.
- Prescott 3.0GHz 1MB cache, 90W TPD: ther is a 120'mm noiseblocker with slicks from previous projects, the crapy PSU also has 120mm fan. Stock cooler has been washed and fresh termal applied.
- 1GB + 512MB + 256MB DDR 400 totaling the sum of 1.8GB RAM
- Aopen FX5200 128MB with TV tuner (some VHS tapes need to be rescued, including some a couple nintendo and sega ones)
- x2 seagate pata 160GB hdd
- a floppy
- a dvd+rw from NEC I believe
- and, it's not on the picture, one audiopci based creative sound card, because I could not be bothered to find the onboard sound drivers, and these install fine in XP: tcharam! Thank you all for your suggestions.

TELEPACMAN wrote:

What kind of system should I build to play these games: Red Faction, Mafia, Max Payne, Half.Life, Carmaggedon 2, Colin Mcrae and Diablo II ?

Look at highest recommended hardware for games you are interested in. Among named it's Mafia and it wants ~P4 2 GHz. So you could to find useful that thread with Win9x-only set. To use XP is less universal as you may get problems with some Win9x games wich you may want to play.