There was another thread about this a little while ago. I think everyone will tell you that you can't find a machine to be good at both 98SE and XP. Fundamentally, most of the last 98SE-friendly hardware came out in ~2004, which is only 2-3 years into the XP era which went on until 2012-2014. There was a LOT of improvement to both processors and graphics cards in those 8-10 years.

Your Sandy Bridge i5 can make a stellar XP machine; throw in a high end GPU (which will cost you a third the price of a high-end 98SE-friendly GPU that's several orders of magnitude lower performing) and you're done on the XP side. You can even dual-boot something else more modern - 7, 10, unsupportedly 11, etc.

Then, try and find yourself something different for 98 SE. It'll be harder because good 98SE-capable parts have gotten more rare and expensive, especially on eBay, but for 98SE you really want a PIII, Athlon XP, or potentially P4 with AGP.

Thanks for the fast reply!

What's XP like for backwards compatibility with older games? I'm mostly interested in games from the late 90s to early 00s. XP would have early 00s fairly well covered but I suspect some older games might be reluctant to run on XP.

At least I'll be able to put together a good XP system with what I have. Any specific recommendations for graphics cards or would anything circa 2005 be ok under XP?

skintt wrote on 2023-09-16, 14:42:

What's XP like for backwards compatibility with older games? I'm mostly interested in games from the late 90s to early 00s. XP would have early 00s fairly well covered but I suspect some older games might be reluctant to run on XP.

At least I'll be able to put together a good XP system with what I have. Any specific recommendations for graphics cards or would anything circa 2005 be ok under XP?

Why wouldn't you go with something much, much newer for a graphics card? e.g. AMD 7970 or the comparable Nvidia cards from ~2012ish that still had XP support? For some older games those cards may be a little too new, but if you're going to build a 98SE system that's not going to be a concern - just run those on 98SE. And those cards are plentiful because they're recent enough plenty of people are upgrading from them nowish, whereas 2004-era GPUs have become rare vintage items at this point - most of them went to the e-waste pile a decade ago unfortunately. And they are still supported in 10/11 if you wanted to dual-boot a modern OS. Or... if you wanted to go older, the 8800GT and 5770s were legends in their own way and are still newer than the 2005-era cards, not sure what supply/pricing is like now on those.

In terms of what XP is like for backwards compatibility... well... there's a reason that 98SE is probably the most highly-prized OS in the retro PC community. Anything ~2001+ will be fine on XP, anything well-written 1998+ should be fine, but there were still people writing DOS games in 1997 (and 98SE is the last OS with full DOS DOSness) and there were still game developers stubbornly saying "we don't support NT" well into 2000/early 2001 even though everybody knew that XP was the future back then.

I suppose my thinking with the 2005 era graphics card was to guarantee XP compatibilty but I hadn't appreciated just how long lived XP really was.

I think I have a GTX 650 knocking about somewhere in the loft so maybe it's time for an expidition to try and dig it out 😁

Thanks for your advice, it's much appreciated!

skintt wrote on 2023-09-16, 14:42:

What's XP like for backwards compatibility with older games?

I have a 32-bit XP setup and I've tested dozens of games ranging from late 90s to late 2000s.

Only two games didn't work: SimTower (a 16-bit Windows game) and the GoG version of Rainbow Six. In the latter case, this sounds like a problem specific to the GoG distribution of that game.

I'm mostly interested in games from the late 90s to early 00s. XP would have early 00s fairly well covered but I suspect some older games might be reluctant to run on XP.

Depending on how early the early 2000s you are referring to, you might be fine with just Windows 98SE.

My Windows 98SE setup is using an Athlon XP 2000+ and GeForce4 4200 Ti, hardware that came out in 2002. It will comfortably run games in the 2000-2002 era.

skintt wrote on 2023-09-16, 15:06:

I suppose my thinking with the 2005 era graphics card was to guarantee XP compatibilty but I hadn't appreciated just how long lived XP really was.

I think I have a GTX 650 knocking about somewhere in the loft so maybe it's time for an expidition to try and dig it out 😁

Thanks for your advice, it's much appreciated!

Oh yes. End of support for Windows XP was in April 2014, but... it's important to situate that in its full historical context. XP's successor, Vista, was late, so XP had a very unusual run of over 5 years as the newest version of Windows. Which means that people, software/driver developers, etc had gotten comfortable with it in a way that no one had with any prior version of Windows. And while XP's hardware requirements were steepish for 2001, by 2006, you could get a perfectly competent XP machine for like $400.

Vista comes along, and... well, even though it was no worse than any other new version of Windows had been at launch (but XP, which was quite mediocre pre-SP1, had grown up to be the most robust/stable/compatible/etc version of Windows ever by that point), it gets very poorly received. So... other than a few enthusiasts and home users buying store Vista systems, the world sticks to XP. Vista gives way to 7, which had fewer bugs but more importantly 2.5 years of better hardware and Vista/7-friendly drivers, and people start finally starting to inch away from XP. And I do say inching... I am sure many companies were issuing XP machines in 2010. You start to see growing adoption of 7 starting in 2011 or so, and even then, some business users stuck to 32-bit 7 not 64-bit...

Ivy Bridge (2012, so around two years before the drop-dead end of support date) is the last Intel platform generally thought to have full XP support, so... that tells you something. No one would have launched any new product in 2011, hardware or software, without XP support. Maybe products launched in 2013-4 started not to offer XP support, and even then, it depends on what that product might be.

And this, BTW, is how platforms stagnate. In 1996-7, lots of (most?) hardware/software on the market required the 1-2 year old Windows 95. But meanwhile, in 2011, everything needed to support a decade-old OS. By the time developers started to drop XP, 7 was already 4-5 years old and half-replaced by the disastrous 8.

And yes, I would encourage you to dig out the GTX 650. Speaking from experience, what you may view as a 'meh' Windows 10 machine sitting in your closet may actually turn out to be a very reasonable vintage XP system for $0 or close enough, but you just had never looked at it that way before. (Sadly, I don't think most people have anything 98SE-capable sitting in their closets that the same logic would apply to. Those machines would have been deemed meh XP systems in 2007-8, and I don't know if many people keep unused computers in their closets for 15 years.)

My first "proper" PC was a Pentium 60 which I swapped for my Amiga 1200 which was fully kitted out (accelerator, SCSI CD-ROM, goodness knows how many games). Since then I don't think I've ever bought a complete system and always upgraded (yay for modular hardware!)

The past 10 or so years though I've not really been too bothered about the latest hardware and now find myself more nostalgic for the older systems. In my mind, XP was always part of the 'new' generation of OSes and I'd forgotten just how backwards compatible it was with older games and software (despite being NT based and not Win32).

I'll probably stick with XP for now and see what dusty old hardware I can dig out!

Is it worth using 64bit XP to be able to address more than 4GB or is it more trouble that it's worth?

skintt wrote on 2023-09-16, 18:47:

Is it worth using 64bit XP to be able to address more than 4GB or is it more trouble that it's worth?

64-bit XP is a bad idea, probably. Driver support for it is shaky, software compatibility is going to be iffy (particularly with games), etc. Not to mention you lose support for 16-bit software/most 16-bit installers/etc. The transition from 32-bit to 64-bit really started happening in the mid-lateish Vista era and continued with 7...

3.xGB of RAM is more than enough for XP gaming, and unlike Win98 SE, XP will quite happily ignore any RAM above that.

Probably a high-end single core Pentium 4 / Athlon XP, for any and all Win98SE gaming and early WinXP gaming. And patch that 98SE to handle 2GB of RAM.