Yeah I agree, with games past 2000 I just run them on Windows 7.

Oh no, I wanna run it on older hardware for the sake of it - it is a GOG release so its probably already patched to run well on Windows 7/8/10. And since I already have both the Duron and K6-2 on hand... why not? Given the VERY low system requirements the Duron will probably not even sneeze playing this thing at higher resolutions anyway.

ynari wrote:

alexanrs wrote:

Went through my GOG catalog and decided to play The Longest Journey. Since it is a 1999 game I thought about running it in my Duron 950.... but reading through the manual it seems the recommended system requirements call for a Pentium II 266MHz and a 4MB DirectX video card... now I wonder if I shouldn't just run it on my K6-2 500 and call it a day.

I have to say, as soon as games support DirectX, I mostly don't see the point of going retro. Run it on the latest, fastest system, as it will normally still work and probably support higher resolutions to boot.

Admittedly, it might be wise to run it under a copy of XP, for the EAX games where Alchemy doesn't work. Then there's a few games that are sub-par on later drivers (looking at you, Infinity Engine games that need a patch to work on modern graphics cards), but when the game is indistinguishable from the original, I'm less fussed about maintaining a retro PC (I don't think I can tell when Commander Keen is emulated now, for instance).

I "go retro" mainly because I have a short list of a lot of games I want to play still, but even several DirectX games won't run on modern hardware or modern OS's. One example is a few more modern titles, morrowind and oblivion have terrible times trying to run on windows 8 or 10, and usually can be coaxed to run in windows 7 but not at 1080p, usually some lesser resolution. This isn't reserved to that, there's a lot of awesome older titles that won't run natively on newer hardware, even on DirectX. They also won't work in emulators, or anything, and absolutely have to be run on original hardware or nothing else.

Also there's a lot of MS-DOS games I like to play that.. can be emulated, but at their default resolutions. If we want to run them in SVGA modes, there's no emulator that exists that can handle it. Those too have to run on original hardware.

I played several games of Windows 3.11 solitaire on my 486 with a serial mouse and CRT for the full effect, whistling tunelessly all the while. I was 16 all over again.

Had a stick of SDRAM die on me in Windows. I was doing a file transfer from CD to the HDD when the screen just froze. Cursor stuck. There was an earlier problem reading from the CD. When I rebooted, Scandisk started but got stuck somewhere around 65%. Then the computer would not boot at all, no video, nothing. I swapped out the video card, SDRAM, and then the CPU (Slot 1 BX, so it was easy). No dice. I thought the motherboard may have crapped out, but it is one of the best and stable boards I own (Intel SE440BX-2). Then, I decided to try a third stick of SDRAM. Turned out to be the culprit. Best case scenario!

Gosh, I haven't been here for a while, what with falling off the bike and fixing PCs.
A customer just came in with this nice machine asking if I could get his data off the hard drive. When we looked, we found that there wasn't one installed, so he said, oh heck just keep it then! 🤣 😊
The mobo is a Lucky Star 6ABX2V ver 1.2 with a Pentium II 350.
It's in a bit of a sorry state and not booting correctly so we shall have to see.
Very nice full tower case though, which are increasingly difficult to find.

Yesterday I did a count of all my computer cases (because of another thread on Vogons) and it turned out the amount of AT towers was roughly correct to what I had estimated, but I had way more ATX cases than I thought I would have 🤣

25 AT towers (a few have issues though, like one missing it's panel) and 54 ATX towers (couple aren't that usable though), I can go on for all of eternity! 😁
I only have a couple desktop models which I probably kept because they were unusual in some way or because I just hadn't gotten around to tossing it yet.

That's a ton of cases 😀

philscomputerlab wrote:

That's a ton of cases 😀

Ehh...I actually did a quick check in Windows Calculator and am happy to announce that this is thankfully not the case 😁 (I used an estimate of about 8kg/case).

But yes, they must have somehow slipped passed my defenses 🤣
I did get a couple new cheaper black cases last year or so because it was getting more difficult to find cases which have the PSU mounted at the top instead of on the bottom together with some other features I preferred and I figured I'd better get a couple before they would disappear completely. Also bought 1 or 2 old systems every so many months for cheap, but kept all the cases and if you do that for a couple years, things will start to add up.

I have a high end Voodoo 5 system upgrade in the works. (Athlon XP Barton, better memory, Sound etc.)
But I should also continue on my Dual 440GX system or the Slot A 🤣

What idiots in Intel designed coolers for socket-370. To remove it needs a screwdriver! One of roads on MB is now broken. Good news: for this killing I've gotten +1 EXP in old hardware skill.

Tertz wrote:

What idiots in Intel designed coolers for socket-370. To remove it needs a screwdriver! One of roads on MB is now broken. Good news: for this killing I've gotten +1 EXP in old hardware skill.

Some of these HSF's were just terrible. The heatsink was alright, but it was the mounting clip that only attached to a single tab on the socket (this was pretty common in those days though), but what I found absolutely worse was the design of the mounting clip which could be pressed to attach to the tab of the CPU socket, but it had no thingy where one could latch in a flatbed screwdriver, making it very easy for the screwdriver to slip away when attempting to press the mounting clip downwards when attempting to uninstall the CPU cooler and damaging your motherboards PCB.

I keep those Intel heatsinks, as they are not bad for the size (they are better than many Socket 7 heatsinks without actually overhanging the CPU socket) but those terrible mounting clips I replace with the more useful mounting clips I take from older crappy heatsinks.

Tetrium wrote:

worse was the design of the mounting clip

They just needed to make a finger abut like here:

Tertz wrote:

They just needed to make a finger abut like here: http://105.imagebam.com/download/moWSz0k5fvmnxOiRav5Qlg/45231/452309860/i.jpg […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote:

worse was the design of the mounting clip

They just needed to make a finger abut like here:

I actually prefer the one where you can just lodge in a flatbed screwdriver to this design, as this design I found was quite fragile and the handle sometimes gets in the way of motherboard components (had a copper cooler for s370, but a couple boards I either couldn't mount it or the handle would hover above one of the memory slots, thereby blocking it. And when using a screwdriver, you'll only need to concentrate for a few seconds.

Played some MIDs on my AST Advantage through the SC-7: sounds great: even with cheap headphones. 🤣

Beethoven's 5th symphony, Airwolf, Last of the Mohicans, Axel F and on and on. 😀

Played The Longest Journey on my Duron. Shoehorned in some AA through nVidia's options and I'm having a blast! Also installed RivaTuner to tweak some options (for stability - the SiS 730S chipset is a bit finicky with newer cards).

Well.... Did a lot of stuff today (through the night)

Upgraded my Unisys from a EGA Gfx controller, to a ET-3000 VGA-EGA Controller.
If I recieve that ISA-IDE controller, then it will get an 500mb harddrive, else I will go for SCSI.
Wich might be a bit easier on this machine. I don't know. Will see what will happen.

Did my Amd 5x86-133 build.
Wich is an FIC 486 VIP OI Board, 8mb FPM, Number9-S3-Pci, AWE32-CT3900 and a 3.? gb HDD.
DVD-Drive as I had no IDE-CDrom. Decided not to go for SCSI anyway.
It should have had an CL-5420 VL-Bus. Sadly it has some artifacting and most of the times it will not give any picture.
Something is just not right with this GFX card 🙁

Rebuild my P166, 64mb EDO, CL-5446-PCI, 9gb IBM-SCSI, AWE64-Gold, and an Adaptech-PCI SCSI controller.

May have killed a motherboard after finally getting an OS installed on it and getting everything setup just right and how I wanted to keep it 🙁 luckily I have a spare to swap it out for, but still annoying.

Splinter wrote:

Very nice full tower case though

nice whirrsumi drive 😀

ODwilly wrote:

May have killed a motherboard after finally getting an OS installed on it and getting everything setup just right and how I wanted to keep it 🙁 luckily I have a spare to swap it out for, but still annoying.

That sucks. I almost killed my vp6 today. I burnt off a contact for a 220omh resistor. But I was able to fix it.