*moved to marvin*

Well, because you have Commander Keen here, it is easy. For graphics card follow this chart: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/, but basically Matrox are pure garbage, ATI is worthless too, best bet is S3, Nvidia, Trident or Cirrus Logic. For CPU - I think for these games Pentium 1 is kind of a maximum, but if you don't have it, Pentium II should do the job too. For soundcard - it is hard, I had never luck running soundcard on older PC, always had IRQ problems, so sound was working only half times. Basically you need to have it on IRQ channel 5 for Commander Keen to work. For OS - Win 95/98 doesn't matter, both should do.

Send me some specs what do you have and I can hopefully tell you something about that. But generally P4 was made for XP, so finding drivers is impossible.

I beg to disagree... a pentium iii on a mobo with an isa slot with an old nvidia agp graphics card and 512 mb of ram will do.

Glaraldur wrote:

Hello guys. I'm a retro game fan and I'd like your help in choosing the best hardware for my retro pc. I have a friend that gath […]
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Hello guys. I'm a retro game fan and I'd like your help in choosing the best hardware for my retro pc. I have a friend that gathered lots of components among the years and is willing to give me all of them. However, most of them are Pentium 3 / Pentium 4 hardware. So we are talking about DDR RAM, AGP video cards, CPUs between 1Ghz and 2Ghz.
Will 16-bit games work well on this configuration? Well as in if it'll work without compatibility issues. I'm going to use Windows 98 or 95 on it.
The games I'd like to play are DOOM, Hexen, Heretic, Warcraft, Commander Keen. But I'd like to have a large game scope, like above 90% compatibility with all old games.

Should I get the Pentium 4 Hardware or buy a Pentium 2, With a PCI graphics card for better compatibility?

Thank you so much for your input

Go for the Super Socket 7 platform.... Build a time machine.

dondiego wrote:

I beg to disagree... a pentium iii on a mobo with an isa slot with an old nvidia agp graphics card and 512 mb of ram will do.

I disagree with that, as he is asking for Keen to Doom and more...
No way you can get a game like Dynablaster to work correctly on a Slot1 system.

Go for the Super Socket 7 platform.... Build a time machine.

So you are saying, a Pentium 1/AMD-K6 would be better?

Also, no need to get tense. I'm trying to understand these things.

Commander Keen is really sonovataint. I had trouble running it on K6, but not because the CPU was bad, but because soundcard was not compatible with K6. But I am sure it could be done, I just don't have time for that. And yeah, Socket 7 or Super 7 would be better.

Free is better than spending money. Yes, theoretically a SS7 platform can run the gamut of old to new games by faffing around disabling caches, etc, but a pentium 2 or 3 will happily run many quite elderly games.

Personally I'd be inclined to go for a pentium 3, on the basis most P3 motherboards had more than one ISA slot and most P4 are limited to one. Noise may be a factor if the P3 systems are slot 1 rather than socket 370.

AGP is not necessarily less compatible than PCI. I swapped the graphics card in my main retro gaming system from a PCI S3 Savage4 (was a Virge GX but I managed to cook it in another system 🙁 ) to an Nvidia something (Mx440?) and found compatibility to be pretty good, Keen scrolling was lovely and smooth.

Yeah, I was gonna say my recommendation was a Pentium III, probably in the Coppermine socket type if he has it. A motherboard to support it. And for those times, I ALWAYS went Creative Labs on the sound card. Sound Blasters were my jam. In my retro rig, I purchased a used ISA AWE64 (not gold) for relatively cheap and it works perfectly. Then again, I don't play Commander Keen.

DOS mode works perfectly with sound, so do Windows games. I'd choose Windows 98 SE as the OS of choice, but I only have a copy of 98 FE, so I used that on my build. SE would have given me better driver support, newer DirectX, better USB support. All minor things, but whatever.

And for those legendary Glide games, I actually dropped some real money on Voodoo2 PCI cards. Got Quake and Unreal up and running very nicely. And it makes Final Fantasy VII PC just POP. Like, wow.

P3 might give you troubles with older DOS games that are speed sensitive. You can disable cache to circumvent that but depending on the speed of the P3, it might go too slow after disabling cache. For example, a Pentium II 300 becomes as fast as a 286 when caches are disabled, while a Pentium 233MMX becomes as fast as a 386DX-33. I think P3s are more like P2s when disabling cache. Check out how various CPUs perform with cache disabled from the link in my signature (Let's benchmark our systems with caches disabled).

Many newer DOS games will play just fine from Win98 running in a DOS prompt.

Perhaps start out by listing your components on hand? As in model numbers cpu speeds ect ect. Then we can narrow it down to the best usage of what you have and go from there.

Essentially the two best platforms for tackling the full range of speed sensitive DOS games are SS7 K6-2+ or K6-III+ and VIA C3 'Ezra-T'.

He's brining the components sometime this week and i'll take a look at them.
However, I've found my old computer. What do you think of these specs?
http://www.cnet.com/products/compaq-deskpro-2 … e-series/specs/

Glaraldur wrote:

He's brining the components sometime this week and i'll take a look at them.
However, I've found my old computer. What do you think of these specs?
http://www.cnet.com/products/compaq-deskpro-2 … e-series/specs/

Definitely a better platform for DOS gaming then a P3. Here's how you can expect it to perform with various caches disabled:

With L1 disabled it performs like a 486-33. With L1+L2 disabled it performs like a 386DX-33.
And at top speed it should play almost any late DOS game smoothly at up to 640x480.

Yup, that is pretty much the same specs I am using in my gaming rig and it is working excellently.

Glaraldur wrote:

Go for the Super Socket 7 platform.... Build a time machine.

So you are saying, a Pentium 1/AMD-K6 would be better?

Also, no need to get tense. I'm trying to understand these things.

Oh no... Was not being tense. 😀 I was only referring to a concept called a time machine. 😀
It is by far the best option, when no real 486 or 386 system is at hand.
It has one advantage over 486's, wich are the ability to run early Win98 games.
A small handfull of early to mid-90's games have problems on such platforms.
They are few, and unfortunately I can not really recall what those are.

Hope you find a solution to you'r needs. 😀

EDIT:
This is one such time machine, that I am talking about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcAqRbFFQPU

I'd take a totally different approach. Because you will have a lot of parts, I would just put something together and play around with it. This is all part of the journey.

Building the perfect retro computer is, IMO, an iterative process with lots of fun along the way. I wouldn't plan it out too much, you will quickly see what works and what doesn't.

Have fun 😀

I agree with Phil. Since the games you want to play are mid-90s old, while I too would personally go for Socket 7, you might want to play with the earliest hardware you have (slow P-IIIs maybe?). Even a P3 would make a nice DOS/Win9x build to get you going, and you can decide later if you want anything older/slower or something specific, like 3dfx hardware. You're just starting out so begin playing around and keep your money for when you decide upon something that you know/feel will suit you better! As for Pentium 4, well...! And if you have such a "faster" processor, I would hazard a guess that the odd old game which can't run well, would work mostly right under DOSBox 🤣 The sky's the limit 😎