kazblox wrote:People here yearn over Slot 1 CPUs and machines? How boring; nothing but computers which have the promise to run modern software but instead play chicken when it comes to anything greater than their era. I get that the cartridge look may be nice, but that's just aesthetic that gives off little tactical advantage.
To me it's socket 7 that is that way, they "just" play DOS games faster than 486s, but lag for Windows 9x games that Slot 1 CPUs manage to run pretty well in comparison.
But I perfectly understand that people can prefer socket 5/7 over Slot 1, or 486 over socket 5/7 ...
Munx wrote:I doubt many people here use retro hardware for practical purposes. Dosbox is practical. Retro hardware rarely is. Slot CPUs are a distinct product of their short life-time and thats what makes them attractive.
DOSBox is practical for early and especially mid DOS games, but not for late ones and not for Windows 9x. Basically, nothing's more practical than a well built Windows 9x machine to play windows 9x games right now. Virtualization ain't that good, emulation is still not good enough, and keeping patching games so they run in newer oses is time consuming as well, and patches don't always exist ... And modern windows doesn't always like old games very much (I remember some game making administrator mode to not work anymore after reboot). And also DOSBox don't emulate everything yet and some stuff still do not work under it even though the DOS PC emulation is much more advanced than the win9x PC emulation right now.
I'm nearly 20 years old, I've never seen a slot 1 until I was ~15 years old so right now I can't be nostalgic of that era (or anything before that either and yet I have 8088, 286, 386 and so on ...) but I still prefer them over DOSBox for games