I'm aware that for some people, Windows NT simply isn't their cup of tea, but for me it's a pretty interesting system. I actually have Windows NT Workstation 3.51 installed on my Pentium MMX rig (at the top of my signature) for playing around with.

The most interesting Windows NT 3.51 application (in my opinion) is Firefox 2.0.0.22pre which is a web browser from 2008, it may not do much by today's standards due to how the internet has changed, but it still has a bit of life left if you enjoy looking at basic HTML websites - including this forum. 😉

This web page has some pretty interesting info regarding application compatibility for Windows NT 3.51 (and also Windows 3.1x).

Windows NT doesn't have much to offer in terms of gaming since DirectX support wasn't maintained until Windows 2000, I suppose you can run some 2D games and maybe some Windows 3.1x era games on it.

There's a built-in audio CD player application so if you have a collection of Music CDs, you can listen to them on your Windows NT rig. I believe there's some old version of WinAmp that's compatible with Windows NT 3.51.

AFAIK you don't need any special drivers for your S3 Trio 64 video card. As for the Sound Blaster AWE64, the official Creative Windows NT drivers were intended for NT 4.0 so I have no idea if they'll work with NT 3.51, at the very least you can use it as a Sound Blaster 16 with the included drivers.

Hopefully you have fun with your Windows NT 3.51 rig.

Is 64mb. of ram enough or should I add more ?

What are some good and necessary apps to have for video and audio ?

I have tcp/ip networking working., Internet browsers IE and Netscape working.

Perhaps Photoshop 4.0?

Not sure about NT 3.51, but on my NT 4.0 system, I have the following installed:

Acrobat 5
Autoruns
Cambridge Dictionary
Cerberus FTP
Everest
EZ SCSI
Firefox 2
Modbin
Mp3 directcut
Process Explorer
Sound Forge
Webster's dictionary
Winamp
Winrar
ACDSee Classic
Apache
Boarland C++
Continuum
Convert
DosBox .72
Filezilla
Firefox 2
Flash Renamer
K-Melon 1.5.4
Opera
Partition Magic 6
Pirch32
Quicktime 2.12
Remote Desktop
Uptime
VNC 4.12
VoptNT 3.00
Win Image 6.1
Word Web 4.50
WinMd5Sum
Xchat 1.8.11
Xing
ZTree 2.10
IE 6 sp1
Adaptec ASPI 4.71
Directx3
Directx5-beta
DPMS screen saver
Office 97
NT4 SP6 updates
FAT32 for NT4
Flash Player 7r73
Hook99
Javx MS 1.1.4
PICVideo
Tweakui 1.33
UDF Reader 1.03
WMP 6.4

I just want to know which apps, software, and drivers I need to best play audio and video and games.
I have SP5 installed.

Games on Win NT 3.51? Ummm... Does GLQuake even work?

you can pretty much forget about games. NTVDM cannot properly run most dos games, IIRC compatibility is even worse than in NT 4 or higher since it is even more rudimentary. Windows games are somewhat better but many 3.1 games will simply crap out on it. DirectX games you can forget at all, 3.51 does not support directX of any kind. Which is not too much of an issue since getting drivers for 3d capable videocards is pretty much impossible. Good luck finding sound drivers outside of the default ones as well. You' will need it. There was just not much support at all from hardware vendors, at least for most consumer hardware.

NT 3.51 is not much fun to play around with. It is way too limited for desktop use thanks to most software not working properly on it and It is utterly unsuitable for any form of gaming and very limited for pretty much anything media related.

It is however pretty good for light office work and basic networking. Companies appreciated the, lets say, lack of distractions...

here is a good link for NT3.51 tweaks/hacks/info https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/winnt351.htm

I got it to boot from a FAT32 partition on a Pentium M with 768MB of RAM. I found an NT4 driver for the Soundmax AC97 and got it to work in 3.51 (only the PCM, no MIDI synth) but I had to start the service manually after booting or else it would cause a crash. The universal VESA video driver mentioned on that page works fine but on the slow side. The universal ATA disk driver trashed my partition when I tried it on a 440BX board (twice) so I was not inclined to try it again.

As for media, you can add L3CODECA.ACM (MP3 decoder), and XVID VFW codec (MPEG4 decoder) and play some WAV/AVI files. Maybe Vorbis would work too but I haven't tried it.

NT 3.51 is nice to play around with, but you'll probably get bored with it quite quickly due to lack of software & hardware support. I'd say 64MB RAM is more than enough to run that. You could probably get by with half of that RAM.

Also the specs you've chosen would generally be wasted on NT 3.51. A motherboard & CPU of that caliber is closer to the Windows 2000 era, so I'd probably dual boot with something more useful. If I was going to build a dedicated NT 3.51 system though, I'd probably be looking at 486 or early Pentium class hardware.

That'd be a fine NT4 system

Yes, I understand it is not period correct. But with this config it is really easy to setup and everything works except the USB.
With a NEWer bios, PCI slots, and built in ports. It's a breeze to setup with WinNT351. All vanilla default drivers.

I am having problems getting the correct serial cables and the bios limitations is always a challenge on my 486 and Socket 7 builds.

you're not having fun unless you're battling BIOS limitations

unreal

I am going to install DOS for dual boot.

oeuvre wrote:

you're not having fun unless you're battling BIOS limitations

With NT prior to 4 sp4, it's driver limitations. 8gb max recognized IDE HDD size.

I can confirm that Office 97, Photoshop 4.0, and IE 5 work on my NT 3.51 installation. I haven't tried any more software yet.