First post, by red_avatar
- Rank
- Oldbie
Over the past year I've been working on trying to get one PC set up that can play almost every DOS game under the sun with proper sound and music, MT-32 or Sound Canvas music too if available.
After many hours cursing and trial & error, I found the system which seems ideal to me - and because they're quite cheaply available on eBay (I bought it off ebay for $70) I thought I'd share it here in case others can learn from it:
The main system is a HP Vectra VE 5/75 Series 2:
Now, and this is very important, DO NOT GET THE SERIES 1 VERSION! for reasons I'll get into later. They look very similar and in fact I own a Series 1 - it's why I bought a series 2.
Here's the specs:
- Pentium 75/100/133 depending on the model (HP Vectra VE 5/133 = Pentium 133)
- PhoenixBIOS
- 64 bit integrated Cirrus Logic 5436 1MB (very fast in benchmarks) - you can upgrade to 2MB but good luck finding the chips
- 8-128MB 32 bit EDO RAM (mine had 32, I removed 16 since it's overkill to improve compatibility) - 6 sockets in total
- allows for either 2x 3.5" drives and 1x 5.25" at the front, or 1x 3.5" and 2x 5.25" so very flexible - I use the second 3.5" for a Gotek drive
- 1 parallel port, 2 serial ports, standard mouse & keyboard connectors (the "modern" type)
- 3x 16 bit ISA slots, 2x 32 bit PCI slots
- two PATA ports so 2 hard drives and 2 optical drives possible - the BIOS detects my 16GB Compact Flash cards fine
The sound card may vary - there was an Aztech in mine which I removed.
Now, these are solid specs for a machine of that age (1995). Now, the Series 1 which I had before, had some major weaknesses: HP BIOS (very limited), only one PATA port, no PCI slots, only one 3.5" and one 5.25" bay at the front and ... only would detect drives up to 2GB.
Here's what I added to the PC:
- I removed the original fan from the power supply with a very quiet one - the pins the PSU uses are compatible with modern fans
- I added a 3COM Etherlink III card for network transfer
- I added a Sound Blaster CT2230 - best sound blaster if you ask me
- 2x CF-to-IDE with a 2GB and a 4GB card installed (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32973215339.html <-- this model, you'll need a splitter for 2 extra floppy drive power connectors if you do it like me
- a better CD/DVD drive but that's open for personal preference
- a GoTek to properly install DOS on the CF cards (I tried doing it from a 6.22 boot disk I had but it wouldn't allow me to boot off the CF oddly enough)
I mounted the two CF-to-IDE brackets at the back for easy access to the CF cards but frankly, with 6GB of cards you won't need to do a lot of swapping unless you really want every DOS game under the sun worth playing preinstalled.
The first CF = 2GB and is a single C partition. The second CF is 2 partitions of each 2GB (D & E).
These are on the same IDE cable (the model above has a jumped for master & slave)
Now, you may wonder "but don't certain games demand D to be the CD drive" and yeah, some do. I timed it and it takes 20 seconds to reboot PC, go into BIOS, set second drive to "none"and boot DOS back up. This pushes the CD drive to drive D. Setting the second drive "online" again takes the same amount of time. I use C mainly for CD games and games that need the C drive.
The Sound Blaster 2230 is hooked up to both a Sound Canvas and a MT-32 using Serdashop's excellent DB15MIDI device (https://www.serdashop.com/DB15MIDI) allowing your gameport to "export" two MIDI signals at the same time. CT2230 is by far my favorite pick of sound card because:
- low noise
- OPL3 CT1747
- WT header (I won't need it but for a future Dreamblaster perhaps it's nice to have)
- no Vibra issues
- no serious MPU problems - slow down in a few games but that's easy to fix and all Sound Blaster cards have this problem
I first had the Yamaha Audician 32 Plus installed - REALLY not a good choice for compatibility. Over 30 tested games would not detect it including some well known ones like Cannon Fodder.
Now, here's the results of testing so far:
- 1 game won't work - black screen with coloured lines - and that's Crystal Caves. I can't for the life of me fix it - I found others who had the problem but no fix
- 2 games have small issues - Pinball Dreams 2 has corrupted flipper graphics- it's still playable though. Innocent Until Caught refuses to run with sound but I found dozens upon dozens of topics on this forum so this game is just a bitch to get working with sound it seems
- 168 (!!) games working perfectly
Combined with SoftMPU and SETMUL, I can play every game I throw at it at the correct speed with sound. Once I figured it all out this PC really surprised me. I'll continue to test games (and CD games) but so far, having just one game not working out of 170 is amazing.
For those who are interested in a rig that is very solid and highly compatible ... well here it is. And HP PCs are built like tanks + are incredibly easy to work with.
Retro game fanatic.
IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870
