All you are doing is mapping a network drive to a drive letter. When you say NAS it makes it sound like you are talking about something special but it just mapping a shared folder as a drive in windows explorer. 🤣

well, idk, as I said I don't own a NAS, but I mean those NAS servers you can buy, load up with hard drives, and let them run 24/7 in a corner somewhere, I've never worked with one of those so idk how they work, but I thought you access them with FTP, like FilleZIlla or something, so I didnt know you can set them up to show up as a local drive and even install your games on them. This is cool, but idk if it will work well with retro PCs, win9x in particular, so I wanted to hear of those of you who have tried that

Before you even get to the drive/partition size limits, you have more basic things to consider:

The network connection between the NAS and the PCs better be fast to match that of a local hard drive, otherwise everything will be terribly slow.

Plus installing games that are accessed through multiple locations may create inconsistencies between parts that are stored locally on each PC and parts which are stored remotely.

NAS is great for sharing documents and media, less so for games.

Yes, I have gigabit networking on basically all my PCs and my router, and afaik gigabit should allow sustained speeds up to 125 mb/s, which I think should be plenty for any game to work fine, most older hard drives cant go that fast even.

What can be inconsistent between each PC tho, other than the cfg with the graphics settings and the savegames?

some programs might not mind, but others will want to read from a physical CD, unless you have no cd patches, you can try just normal file sharing between XP and 9x mapping drives and see if your games work like that.

It should work. You will probably just need to make partitions / volumes on the NAS for the Win9x stuff.

However, the access times are going to not be good for games that are accessing the drive a lot, what with the overhead of the network.
And if you are trying to access the NAS with multiple computers at the same time it will get even worse.

I did have a few different consumer oriented NAS units a few years ago and they had really horrible performance. The worst being one that would transfer at a max of about 500KB/s

If you want something that will actually be able to saturate a 1Gb connection, you will probably want to build your own. Even a dedicated Windows box with regular old file shares can do this.

If you want to not have so much of a bottleneck with having multiple computers accessing the "NAS" at the same time, you could always use multiple drives and a NIC with multiple ports or multiple NICs.

For newer systems, why stop at 1Gb when you can get dual port 10Gb fiber cards for pretty cheap off of eBay and the drivers still work in Windows 10? With the dual port cards you theoretically don't even need a fiber switch.. you can daisy-chain the whole setup... heh.
I bought a number of these NetApp Chelsio 111-0603-A0 10Gb Dual-Port SFP PCIe Network Interface Cards a while ago and they work great... seeing transfers over the network being able to saturate the speed of my SATA SSDs and still have a bunch of bandwidth left over is giggle worthy. And that is only with a single fiber hooked between computers.

What are the specs of your Win9x machine?

Many games won't even install on a NAS, since they don't recognize the drive letter as a local drive or won't see it at all. Keep in mind that a network-mapped drive letter will not give you a FAT volume, but an NFS one. All in all, I don't see the point in doing this, as a NAS is not meant for this and unless you only have portable versions of your games, you fill the NAS with stuff that doesn't work independently.

One solution for this is using iSCSI, which will attach the NAS as a local drive. However, I don't think there is any iSCSI Initiator software for Win9x. You could just use an external USB hard disk instead of a NAS, though.

Warlord wrote:

some programs might not mind, but others will want to read from a physical CD, unless you have no cd patches, you can try just normal file sharing between XP and 9x mapping drives and see if your games work like that.

yes, I tend to use no-cd patches or disc images with daemon tools 3.47 to try to not wear out my discs and optical drives too much, so I only play win9x redbook audio games off the real CDs since theres no other option when using .vxd sound drivers

What are the specs of your Win9x machine?

It changes a lot since I keep collecting all kinds of retro components and building stuff with them to test how well they work, tho my final goal is to have one dream pc build for just about each year, using only the best components available in that year. Right now the current build I'm testing is nothing special, core 2 duo on a P45 775 mobo with nvidia 7900gs and an audigy, dualbooting win98se and XP. But I do have some cool win9x-compatible stuff like a X850XT PE AGP or a Ti4600 or a voodoo3 and such.

Many games won't even install on a NAS, since they don't recognize the drive letter as a local drive or won't see it at all. Keep in mind that a network-mapped drive letter will not give you a FAT volume, but an NFS one. All in all, I don't see the point in doing this, as a NAS is not meant for this and unless you only have portable versions of your games, you fill the NAS with stuff that doesn't work independently.

One solution for this is using iSCSI, which will attach the NAS as a local drive. However, I don't think there is any iSCSI Initiator software for Win9x. You could just use an external USB hard disk instead of a NAS, though.

Damn, thats what I was afraid of, guess this idea wont work then

You wont get high throughputs from network in Win98. Youre looking at somewhere around 100Mbps (12,5MB/s) with gigabit Intel Pro/1000 PCI adapter if you optimize it correctly. And this communication will eat significant CPU resources.

I also use it just for mounting images to daemon tools and then installing games to local SSD

The NAS with ARM cpus typically have very poor CIFS performance causing very high cpu utilization on the NAS. Anything past SMB1 eats up alot of CPU so you'll need a fast ARM processor or x86 processor. NFS is usually a better choice but is not enabled by default so you'll have to do some extra configuration on the NAS and the client OS. The HD performance is typically very poor as well unless you have a high end NAS.

I would recommend a QNAP NAS with an x86 processor or building a FreeNAS server if you want to attempt this.

For making a drive accessible as a local drive you'll need to use iSCSI or NFS and you'd have to find the client software for 9x for that to work.

The 9x network stack is horrible compared to NT4+ and I doubt any iSCSI or NFS software you find for it would perform well either.

Finally games don't need alot of HD speed but latency and if multiple machines are using the network and the NAS then you'll have issues and you'll need to be up to the task of identifying where those issues are from client NIC to swich/router to NAS HD/RAM/CPU issues.

Stick to iSCSI or NFS with Linux and NT based OS if you want to game or NFS with DOS for simple games.

Typically in the business world you don't do this unless you're dealing with VMs and 10gbs or multiple 1GB NICs on operating systems and hardware that support it.

As for drive limitations the client OS would only see the amount of storage you assign.

Here are a few interesting pages:

Access Windows 10 shares with DOS:
https://www.cnczone.com/forums/milltronics/36 … -cam-posts.html

DOS VM that can access the host shares:
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Sharing_files_with_DOS

Freedos and SAMBA shares:
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configuring_ … s_a_Samba_Share

Freedos and Windows share:
https://www.lazybrowndog.net/freedos/virtualbox/?page_id=771

Boot DOS using gPXE/iSCSI: - page says it runs DOOM fine.
So basically you can set up a system to PXE boot to DOS.... 🤣 at the crazy person that decided this was a good idea.
https://gpxe.etherboot.narkive.com/eE0jCaD2/b … ve-is-read-only

I am also finding references that
Microsoft iSCSI Initiator 5.2.3790.279
supports Windows 9x.

All you really need to connect to the network with DOS is an NDIS driver for your card that supports DOS.

Here is a site that has a DOS boot disk with support for 98 different network cards:
https://www.netbootdisk.com/cards.htm

You can even go 10Gb fiber with DOS:
https://www.amazon.com/Bewinner-Ethernet-Conv … y/dp/B07W98VFVD

Guessing that there are a lot more 10Gb cards that have NDIS drivers.

Wheeeee!!!! 🤣

Intel DOS Ethernet drivers:
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/290 … -?product=46827
or go here and change the OS to DOS:
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/46827

So if I understand the "problem" you want to avoid having to install your games on multiple PC's?

Another, simpler option is to use a 2nd HDD in each PC and clone this onto all of you systems.
You will still have problems with games that read settings from eh registry as only the initial PC will have this.

Another option keeping the NAS idea is to use it to store say a Norton Ghost image of each your systems pre configured with all games installed.

Just throwing out few other ideas but would also recommend what Worlard said, Share out a folder on another PC and try out the concept for yourself. It may end up working for you

Nobody mentioned yet that for many (if not most) windows games you can't just point a shortcut to the installation folder and play.
Installation does additional things like registry keys, try to copy an installation folder from a computer to another and see for yourself. Some games will work, many won't.

konc wrote:

Nobody mentioned yet that for many (if not most) windows games you can't just point a shortcut to the installation folder and play.
Installation does additional things like registry keys, try to copy an installation folder from a computer to another and see for yourself. Some games will work, many won't.

We have 😀

chinny22 wrote:

You will still have problems with games that read settings from eh registry as only the initial PC will have this.

dr_st wrote:

Plus installing games that are accessed through multiple locations may create inconsistencies between parts that are stored locally on each PC and parts which are stored remotely.

Although many games work fine, many are simple export the games registry key from 1 pc to another, and yes, some simply refuse to work unless you install. No-CD patches help alot as well
I'd say maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of my games need a fresh install on the target PC. Classic case of YMMV

chinny22 wrote:

We have 😀

oops, you're right 🤣

konc wrote:

Nobody mentioned yet that for many (if not most) windows games you can't just point a shortcut to the installation folder and play.
Installation does additional things like registry keys, try to copy an installation folder from a computer to another and see for yourself. Some games will work, many won't.

Actually I already have a solution for that, since Ive been doing dualboots for a while, so heres how you do it:
Let's say C: is winXP, D: is win7, E: is data strorage
You first boot winXP, install the game on E:/game
Then reboot to win7, rename the dir of the game to something like E:/gamebak
start the game installation and install it again to E:/game
Finally delete E:/game and rename E:/gamebak back into E:/game

that way in the end the game files are in E:/game, and both OSes have all the registry and stuff present and pointing to the right place.

Now, to the other question, I don't just want if possible not to store games separately on each PC if I could just keep it all in one place, I also would like to have more storage space available for the older system that have limitations. If a win98 PC could only fit 3 or maybe 4 HDDs in the case, and each could have only 120gb, thats a lot of space and can fit a lot of games, until it doesnt. When the number of games grows too high, and especially when fanmade mods and maps and stuff get involved and grow sizes further, then obviously the idea of maybe having a NAS with several 14 TB or whatever hard drives raided toghether with redundancy and everything sounds cool... not to mention all other media like movies and music and stuff is there too, and can be accessed from the retro PCs as well, while originally they would only have the games installed as there'd be no space left for anything else

God Of Gaming wrote:

Actually I already have a solution for that, since Ive been doing dualboots for a while, so heres how you do it:
...

Yep but what you're trying to achieve by theoretically installing everything to a centralized place is to not having to reinstall on every pc you want to play the game 🤣

It would really take a lot to fill 2x 120GB drives if you keep most your data on the nas and just use the local HDD for game installs. Game installs were only a couple of GB at most. The biggest Win98 game I have is Diablo 2 No-CD'd and that's still under 5GB.

You would keep music, movies, patches and iso's on the nas and mount them when you want to install or play games that need the CD. accessing the iso across the network would still be better then physical CD-ROM speed so shouldn't effect the game. Music and movies would depends on the CPU more then the network speed.

Of course if your wanting to try this just for the hell of it then do it! I'm running a stripe raid on my WinXP box just because I can with old hard drives, so when 1 disk fails (and it will) I'll have to reinstall everything, but hey it is cool 😉

I already keep everything on my main PC and external hard drives and only installing games and nothing else to my retro PCs to make the most out of those tiny retro hard drives, but still, even though the games are small, when there's like 100 000 of them, even stuffing a case with 6 hard drives and some raid controllers seems quiestonably enough