My first PC in collage was a Pentium 200Mhz (non MMX) Socket 7, baby AT form factor with 128 MB RAM running DOS 6.2/WFW3.11. It ran fine. I'm currently trying to restore it.
I've held out on the case for this system because the lack of I/O shield for it. However, there are Socket 7 motherboards that were supposedly ATX form factor. But even then, the IO shield would still be hard to find.

tjsnhgaming wrote on 2020-10-05, 02:13:

My current plan/hope is to get a CPU and Motherboard from that era, 32-64mb of ram, with a couple of PCI slots and PS/2 mouse port (I really dont want to have to deal with a DB9 serial mouse), run a graphics card (which I'll source individually and verify 3.11 drivers for) on PCI, with probably a soundblaster16 or something common like that for audio, and a PS/2 mouse.

Using more than 32MB RAM on a pure DOS system is not recommended. Certain games (e.g. Aladdin) will have problems with higher amounts and may crash or simply refuse to start. You can remedy this using ramdisk utilities and such, but there's really no point in having over 32MB for DOS gaming.

As for the CPU, I would personally go with a Pentium MMX 233 since you can slow it down to anything you need. At stock speed, it still has enough power to run late, hi-res DOS games like Quake and Tomb Raider at somewhat decent frame rates.

Regarding the graphics card, I would recommend an S3 Virge DX 4MB (or GX2 if you're using AGP) paired with a Voodoo1 card for Glide games. Those two will give you maximum compatibility with both early and late DOS games.

Anyone have any experience with Win3.11 on this era of system? General thoughts or landmines to avoid?

Win 3.11 will work just fine on that kind of hardware. There should be no issues unless you go for a later AGP card like a GeForce 2 which has no Win3.11 driver.

Some PCI sound cards also lack drivers for Win 3.11 but you should stick with an ISA sound card for the best DOS compatibility anyhow. Lastly, be aware that Sound Blaster 16 cards have a number of bugs which may or may not bother you depending on your preferences.

Dos/Win3x isn't very demanding, if it doesn't understand a bit of hardware say like USB, it just doesn't even know it even exist rather then casue any errors.
Same with CPU you could go much later if you really wanted, no benefit accept availability.

Your correct no chipset drivers to worry about which is why its so flexible. Typically only drivers you need is video, sound and maybe network if setting that up.

PCI is fine for video but as mentioned above even some AGP cards have drivers so is a another option if the motherboard has it. The Nvidia TNT one's are known to be buggy so recommend avoiding that route.

Sound your best off sticking to ISA for compatibility even if gaming isn't the main focus.

HDD your going to be limited to 2GB partitions if going with 6.22, you can however split say a 8GB HDD into 4 2GB partitions.

That's about the only issue I can think of, HDD support. Depending on what motherboard you get you'll be limited to a maximum size HDD, Are ways around this, just something to be aware of. People drop in an old SSD they have spare not knowing the motherboard doesn't support a dive that large natively.

AT motherboards in ATX cases is common due to necessity. I/O shiled and motherboard mounting height and position are the typical issues.

Overall though your plan is sound and will make a fine 3.11 PC

Thanks for the feedback, confirmed most of what I suspected.

I had an S3 Virge (of some variety) back in the day, and remember being very happy with it. Had read that the PCI Diamond Stealth 3d 2000 virge cards had good Dos/3.11 support, was planning to go with one of those (availability allowing).

For storage, I'm planning to use an IDE-CF adapter and just use a 2GB CF card, so no worries on partition limits etc.

I usually go with 4GB CF cards - having a second partition for installers and stuff makes it easy to run "format c:", whenever you feel like it. 😉

GigAHerZ wrote on 2020-10-05, 12:21:

I usually go with 4GB CF cards - having a second partition for installers and stuff makes it easy to run "format c:", whenever you feel like it. 😉

I considered that, and might get one.
The CF reader I'm going with is one of the back-slot-plate accessible ones, so I'll be able to easily swap the CF card. I might add a 2nd in the mid-term.

My thought is, if I ever decide "Screw it, I want a Windows 95/98 boot drive" I'll be able to just physically swap the C drive out without too much hassle - and having a 2nd one already in there to, for example, hold installed games or something might be convenient.

To get rid of HDD size BIOS limitations or DMA errors go SCSI route, but in case of true SCSI (not SATA host adapters with SCSI IDs) you get less performance in pure DOS when with ATA devices, but it saves you from many incompatibilities.

So, this is what I ended up going with:

AMD K6-II 300 CPU
Asus P5A-B Motherboard (the one, the only)
32MB ram
Diamond Stealth 3d 2000 Pro S3 Virge DX (4mb) PCI graphics card
Creative Labs SB16 "Vibra 16" CT4180 ISA sound card. (picked purely because it was SUPER cheap, and sound is probably the least important part of this build - at least for now)
Generic leftover 3.5 floppy and IDE cd-rom
Logitech SBF-90 PS/2 optical mouse , generic leftover PS/2 keyboard (with PS/2 to AT adapter)
Syba IDE/CF adapter with rear-case-slot bracket
Verbatim 2GB CF card

I suspect this might be a pretty typical build for someone looking to make a similar Dos6.22/Win3.11 retro comp, so I'll post my experience and such here (the easy, the hard, the totally broken) - maybe a build log thread with photos.

tjsnhgaming wrote on 2020-10-05, 23:22:

So, this is what I ended up going with: […]
Show full quote

So, this is what I ended up going with:

AMD K6-II 300 CPU
Asus P5A-B Motherboard (the one, the only)
32MB ram
Diamond Stealth 3d 2000 Pro S3 Virge DX (4mb) PCI graphics card
Creative Labs SB16 "Vibra 16" CT4180 ISA sound card. (picked purely because it was SUPER cheap, and sound is probably the least important part of this build - at least for now)
Generic leftover 3.5 floppy and IDE cd-rom
Logitech SBF-90 PS/2 optical mouse , generic leftover PS/2 keyboard (with PS/2 to AT adapter)
Syba IDE/CF adapter with rear-case-slot bracket
Verbatim 2GB CF card

I suspect this might be a pretty typical build for someone looking to make a similar Dos6.22/Win3.11 retro comp, so I'll post my experience and such here (the easy, the hard, the totally broken) - maybe a build log thread with photos.

Pretty typical I think. And very similar to what I have. Except I had a slightly older ASUS P/I-p55t2p4(rev2.1) , my sound card was ESS1688 based with a Sound Canvas SC-55 daughter board.
I did have a ASUS SCSI interface card on it but I no longer have use for it, so I took it out.

I used a 4 GB CF card. (two partitions). I had originally set it up as dual boot with dos6.22/Wfw3.11 and Win95 which is what I ran with in college but I ended up making separate CF cards for dos/win3.11 and win95 because of the complications with the VFAT that win95 uses. A few older dos/win3.11 utilities I used seem to choke on the VFAT.

_UV_ wrote on 2020-10-05, 16:01:

To get rid of HDD size BIOS limitations or DMA errors go SCSI route, but in case of true SCSI (not SATA host adapters with SCSI IDs) you get less performance in pure DOS when with ATA devices, but it saves you from many incompatibilities.

Quite a lot of controllers that are suitable for older operating systems have a 8GB max HDD size. Besides, the partitions themselves still cannot be larger than 2 GB on DOS 6.22.

yawetaG wrote on 2020-10-06, 06:18:

Quite a lot of controllers that are suitable for older operating systems have a 8GB max HDD size. Besides, the partitions themselves still cannot be larger than 2 GB on DOS 6.22.

We talking about Pentium class machine, so i assume baseline would be AHA2940 or Promise/Silicon Image SATA. And you can cheat a bit by using DOS 7.1 with FAT32 with very minor issues to WfW 3.11 in some cases Making Windows 3.11 work in DOS7.10 (patches inside)

I've run into a possible stumbling block.

The whole "removable" vs "fixed" mode for CF cards.

Anyone know off hand if this is an issue for booting/installing Dos/Win3x ? Will they even know the difference?

I just went with the first CF adapter I found on Amazon and selected a 32 GB CF card. I have not had any issues running dos/win3x, but its only using 2GB of the space.

utahraptor wrote on 2020-10-07, 17:36:

I just went with the first CF adapter I found on Amazon and selected a 32 GB CF card. I have not had any issues running dos/win3x, but its only using 2GB of the space.

In college I ran my Pentium on a dos/win3.1 with a 18gb Maxtor HD. I partitioned it up into several 2GB partitions. And that with the other two 2 GB drives already in the system where were both partitioned, one with two 1G partitions and the other with 1 GB and two 512 MB partitions. Add to that two floppy drives, Zip, and Jazz drives, and two CD drives. I had drive letters out the wazoo! 20 total drives. It was absurd!

tjsnhgaming wrote on 2020-10-07, 15:55:

I've run into a possible stumbling block.

The whole "removable" vs "fixed" mode for CF cards.

Anyone know off hand if this is an issue for booting/installing Dos/Win3x ? Will they even know the difference?

I don't think so. They are basically solid state IDE drives. It is more to do with the BIOS recognizing them as CF cards rather than as HDs. And the OS's usually don't care.
However, even though they are easily removable. They are not hot swappable when used this way. You will need to shut down the computer to change them out.

Another question - anyone have experience using the CDU MS-DOS 7.10 installation with WFW3.11 ?

Any known downsides to the CDU MS-DOS 7.10?

CDU MS-DOS 7.10 is basically Win9x with the windows bit stripped out.
I've never used it specifically but have format /s a HDD with a windows 98 boot disk which is the same thing.

Main thing is don't use Dos disk utilities as they won't understand Fat32.
Things like Scandisk, Defrag, Norton Utilities however these have Win9x command line replacements.

Some drivers also don't like the version number, Creative for example you'll need the drivers from 95dosapp.exe which don't include the Win3x drivers.
Probably a hack for this, I've just never tried.

Good info, thanks Chinny.
I'll probably mess around with both, but it sounds like 6.22 is going to be the long-term use choice.

I usually go with 6.22 and have emm386, himem and edit replaced in from windows 98. 😉