First post, by manic232
- Rank
- Newbie
Thought I'd share my retro PC with pics and thoughts with you.
Intel 440BX Motherboard
Pentium 3 600Mhz CPU
256mb PC100 SDRam
3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 GPU
Creative SB AWE64 Gold Sound Card
17” iiyama CRT Monitor
Cambridge Soundworks SBS52 Speakers
Front loading HD bay (to easily change hard drives DOS/Win98)
And the best bit last, a real Roland MT-32 😀
I have been using DOSBox for some time, but really wanted to get my hands dirty with DOS and Windows 98 SE, so set about building the above PC. My main goal was to try and get DOS 6.22 up and running to play 90's point and click adventure games like the Lucas Arts gems, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle etc. I also wanted to use a real MT-32 if possible.
I know that the PC is well over specced for just pure DOS, but I also wanted to use Windows 98 for Glide games, I figured it may be easier to slow down DOS with MoSlo that to try to speed it up.
The build went fine, no real problems at all, powered on first time and I was very happy. The real problems came when I started playing games! Some games work fine, most of the Lucas Arts games install and run without issues, but one problem persisted, getting the MT-32 running. I had never used one back in the day as they were very expensive back in the days of yore, so i was a little green under the gills with regard to knowing how to get it working. I thought you just plugged it into your sound card and that was it. After doing some research on this and other web sites i realised that you need an MPU MIDI interface card, great i thought no problem, i'll just to on eBay and pick on up…. yes I know the knowledgeable among you are laughing at me now! The prices for these cards on eBay are quite silly, frankly the eBay listings belong in an episode of Ripley's Believe it or Not! Then there is the problem with the Rev 0 MT-32 (which I have) some games cause the unit to display a buffer overflow error when using the MT-32 the sounds are all messed up or won't play at all. To cut a long story short, i have given up the idea of trying to get the MT-32 working on this rig, this leads me to my next point…
… I have come to learn that DOS gaming is a pain in the butt!! there i said it, i don't care who knows 🤣. Like i said most games run OK (apart from MT-32) but there are some that just point blank will not work at all, The Humans for example keeps coming up with low memory errors, Lemmings 2 sometimes works but again sometimes randomly comes up with error message about upper memory or lower memory, can't remember now and I was having issues with CD Rom and Mouse drivers not working, I managed to edit my autoexec.bat and config.sys files to load mouse and CD drivers, but sometimes without warning and totally at random DOS rather rudely deletes the lines from the autoexec.bat and config.sys, why this happened is totally beyond me. Then there is the most important factor, how the games look and run. the games that did work, worked well, but looked rather pixelated to me, frankly to me games look better with DOSBox and a filter like SxSAI or similar.
So to bring this to a conclusion, I have now decided to use a cheep (ish) Dell desktop to run DosBOX and a few other emulators (I call it my Emulation Station 😀), i still use the 17” iiyama CRT Monitor and speakers etc, but I get trouble free gaming with this PC, games run great, look better and the MT-32 works just fine without me having to re mortgage my house for a MIDI controller card and if using an SVN build of DOSBox you can even eliminate the buffer overflow error by making a change in the .conf file... superb!
The specs of the Dell are:
Core DUO 2.13Mhz
4GB Ram
80GB Hard Drive
AMD 4000 Series GPU
I sprayed the 2 sides of the Dell white to (kind of) match the rest of the components (my OCD would not allow a PC that does not match the monitor, speakers etc 😀)
This whole SAGA has made me realise how lucky us retro gaming geeks are having an awesome emulator like DOSBox, the creators of this software are pure legends and deserve a knighthood.