Most games should run just fine under WinXP or Win7 32bit. Heck even 64bit (although sometimes the 16bit installers can be a problem).
I always like to keep a Win98SE around that is powerful enough to run everything up until 2001, for that one pesky game that won't run under current systems.
Another major issue are widescreen monitors, some games are unplayable on them, at least for me!

sgt76 wrote:

Is there really a need to have a Win98 rig around for games from 95-00, which is the stuff I play? Some of my favs are DK2, Pod […]
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Is there really a need to have a Win98 rig around for games from 95-00, which is the stuff I play? Some of my favs are DK2, Pod Racer and Kingpin. I'm not talking about anything outside that time frame.

Would I be served better (or same at least) by a modern rig compared with say a P3 + GF3 + V2 SLI (which was my last Win98 setup but currently dismantled)?

Would everything run fine on Win7 64 bit or would the workarounds to run these games drive me mad? Would an XP 32bit system be better?

Reason I'm asking is cause I'm cleaning house as I need the space. From about a dozen or so rigs, I'm down to just 3 Win 7 rigs, a Pentium Pro, and assorted parts.

I'd like to minimize the number of systems I own to max just one dedicated retro gaming rig. And if I don't need one, all the better really.

Thanks.

I'm not -sure- if you really need a dedicated Win98 machine.
Almost all games run fine on XP I found out, I haven't touched any of my retrorigs for a couple months now (though I'm not in need of space so I didn't have to toss anything out).

Btw, what are you doing with the parts you part with? Hopefully not the bin, that would be a waste.

Yeah, I'd definitely be interested on the Pentium Pro ;P
If I were you though I'd build a powerful Pentium 3, perhaps Tualatin and a 6600GT for AA and AF. If you're lucky and can get an ISA Slot in there even better, you can have some Real DOS-Mode. Otherwise, just use DOSBox. My Tualatin 1.4-S performs equally to a Pentium 120-133 under DOSBox. I realised this due to the framerates I got under Quake, I think it was 21-22 fps?
Overall, I'd say that's pretty cool, you can run every DOS VGA game up until 1996-1997 and run the SVGA ones under DOS prompt.

The Tualatin 1.4-S runs Mechwarrior 2 at 1024x768 effortlessly.

Tetrium wrote:

I'm not -sure- if you really need a dedicated Win98 machine.
Almost all games run fine on XP I found out, I haven't touched any of my retrorigs for a couple months now (though I'm not in need of space so I didn't have to toss anything out).

Tetrium Bro! Nice of you to drop by. Yeah, I did some research and found that all the games that are precious to me, especially the above 3 (with DK2 being the most important! 😁) run with some tweaks on XP. Not sure about Win 7 64 bit though. I don't have any 32 bit Win 7 machine as there's really no point in that, is there?

So, I was thinking at the worst, if I need to build a Win XP rig, I get to enjoy all these old games with more powerful hardware allowing for insane AA + AF. Plus the stability of XP.

The workarounds to get these games working would be less than the patches, updates, headaches you need with a Win98 install.

So, the question is really now- does a Win Xp 32 bit machine guarantee a better retro gamig experience than a Win 7 64 bit machine? And if so, is there a particular hardware configuration I should be aiming for? i.e. video card, chipset, socket, single-core or multicore, etc?

Tetrium wrote:

Btw, what are you doing with the parts you part with? Hopefully not the bin, that would be a waste.

Oh, no... definitely not. Only the parts which were fried beyond all help I sent to the recyclers. Some older more interesting stuff I gave or sold to local enthusiasts and friends. Newer but obsolete things went to charity (they take P4s and above and donate them to children's homes and such). Finally, I sold a lot of the modern stuff that I didn't need.

F2bnp wrote:

Yeah, I'd definitely be interested on the Pentium Pro ;P If I were you though I'd build a powerful Pentium 3, perhaps Tualatin a […]
Show full quote

Yeah, I'd definitely be interested on the Pentium Pro ;P
If I were you though I'd build a powerful Pentium 3, perhaps Tualatin and a 6600GT for AA and AF. If you're lucky and can get an ISA Slot in there even better, you can have some Real DOS-Mode. Otherwise, just use DOSBox. My Tualatin 1.4-S performs equally to a Pentium 120-133 under DOSBox. I realised this due to the framerates I got under Quake, I think it was 21-22 fps?
Overall, I'd say that's pretty cool, you can run every DOS VGA game up until 1996-1997 and run the SVGA ones under DOS prompt.

The Tualatin 1.4-S runs Mechwarrior 2 at 1024x768 effortlessly.

OK, so one vote for a P3 + 6600GT box. Running Win98 I presume? What about a P4 box? And what about dual booting Win98 and XP?

Yeah you could go for a P4 as well, although these things are quite power consuming!
I used to run a P4 3.2 with Dual Boot and the only reason I ever booted Win98 was for Shogo I think, it just didn't run properly under WinXp at the time for some reason...
If you go with P4 and Dual Boot, it might be a good idea to get a 6800GT for even more perfomance 😜

So, the question is really now- does a Win Xp 32 bit machine guarantee a better retro gamig experience than a Win 7 64 bit machine?

If you want to fiddle less with trying to get games to work then yes. Check my compatibility list in my signature. If you don't have any games that have issues or require tweaking then 7 64bit will be better.

sgt76 wrote:

Tetrium Bro! Nice of you to drop by. Yeah, I did some research and found that all the games that are precious to me, especially […]
Show full quote

Tetrium wrote:

I'm not -sure- if you really need a dedicated Win98 machine.
Almost all games run fine on XP I found out, I haven't touched any of my retrorigs for a couple months now (though I'm not in need of space so I didn't have to toss anything out).

Tetrium Bro! Nice of you to drop by. Yeah, I did some research and found that all the games that are precious to me, especially the above 3 (with DK2 being the most important! 😁) run with some tweaks on XP. Not sure about Win 7 64 bit though. I don't have any 32 bit Win 7 machine as there's really no point in that, is there?

So, I was thinking at the worst, if I need to build a Win XP rig, I get to enjoy all these old games with more powerful hardware allowing for insane AA + AF. Plus the stability of XP.

The workarounds to get these games working would be less than the patches, updates, headaches you need with a Win98 install.

So, the question is really now- does a Win Xp 32 bit machine guarantee a better retro gamig experience than a Win 7 64 bit machine? And if so, is there a particular hardware configuration I should be aiming for? i.e. video card, chipset, socket, single-core or multicore, etc?

Tetrium wrote:

Btw, what are you doing with the parts you part with? Hopefully not the bin, that would be a waste.

Oh, no... definitely not. Only the parts which were fried beyond all help I sent to the recyclers. Some older more interesting stuff I gave or sold to local enthusiasts and friends. Newer but obsolete things went to charity (they take P4s and above and donate them to children's homes and such). Finally, I sold a lot of the modern stuff that I didn't need.

sgt76 wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

Yeah, I'd definitely be interested on the Pentium Pro ;P If I were you though I'd build a powerful Pentium 3, perhaps Tualatin a […]
Show full quote

Yeah, I'd definitely be interested on the Pentium Pro ;P
If I were you though I'd build a powerful Pentium 3, perhaps Tualatin and a 6600GT for AA and AF. If you're lucky and can get an ISA Slot in there even better, you can have some Real DOS-Mode. Otherwise, just use DOSBox. My Tualatin 1.4-S performs equally to a Pentium 120-133 under DOSBox. I realised this due to the framerates I got under Quake, I think it was 21-22 fps?
Overall, I'd say that's pretty cool, you can run every DOS VGA game up until 1996-1997 and run the SVGA ones under DOS prompt.

The Tualatin 1.4-S runs Mechwarrior 2 at 1024x768 effortlessly.

OK, so one vote for a P3 + 6600GT box. Running Win98 I presume? What about a P4 box? And what about dual booting Win98 and XP?

Thanks for the warm welcome, though I was never really gone, I still lurk here a lot 😉

How about you use a single A64 as a dedicated XP machine and skip w98 altogether?
If you really find that you need w98, then you could always create a dual boot (or install a second harddrive, though that would be much more tedious with all the switching cables and such).
Also a GF6800 would be a good card for an A64 I believe 😀

Even though Tualatins are good, they have their issues compared to A64 when you want to use XP on it. With an A64 theres no issue going with 2 gigs of memory (which w98 doesn't like much) and it's easier to find replacement SATA drives. You'd only need to watch out for some of the early VIA chipsets as their SATA controllers have issues running SATA2 drives.
And the Venice cores don't tend to run as hot as P4 does.

But I have to say, I still have a personal preference for A64 compared to P4, as you know 😉

In my experience the Win9x games that actually need old hardware need an old 3D card. Glide and D3D table fog type problems. GF6800 covers everything except Glide and maybe 8bit palette texture support. Glide emulators often work well enough.

Tualatin is a nice setup, but I think I prefer a KT333 setup now. You can often run a mobile Barton in these boards, meaning cool temps or crazy speed if you want that. They have 3.3v AGP support. KT133A is another possibility (you get ISA) but 686B is troublesome.

I'd say there is, for a number of reasons:

-Certain games like Terracide just will not run on 2000/XP onward, for whatever reason. Compatibility mode doesn't work, admin mode doesn't work...you have to boot Win98.

-Aureal didn't last long enough to develop good 2000/XP drivers, so if you want A3D, you have to run Win98.

-DOS games have a penchant for using features present on old ISA sound cards that aren't emulated in DOSBox. For instance, Eradicator's use of the EMU8000 on the AWE32/64 to play processed sound effect samples, sort of like a proto-EAX, or TFX's use of the ASP/CSP for QSound (probably the only game I know of that uses it).

-Some old peripherals just work best under Win98. The Spacetec SpaceOrb 360 comes to mind; sure, you can play a Descent source port on a modern machine using a 3Dconnexion peripheral, but you won't get the faster turn rates the SpaceOrb allows under the original releases.

As for what hardware to use...well, that depends on what modern motherboards have both ISA and AGP slots while allowing CPUs in the 1 GHz or faster range. Most of the ideal boards are uncommon ones pitched to industrial markets and whatnot that still use specialized ISA cards, though.

swaaye wrote:

KT133A is another possibility (you get ISA) but 686B is troublesome.

Aww cmon, thats just a myth. Really. Dont scare people away from a great chipset. Neither Abit KT7a, nor Asus A7V133(-c), nor MSI K7T Pro 2a (or turbo) have any faults. These boards I've tried and used (and I'm still using!) for years with all kinds of add-on cards.

elfuego wrote:

Aww cmon, thats just a myth. Really. Dont scare people away from a great chipset. Neither Abit KT7a, nor Asus A7V133(-c), nor MSI K7T Pro 2a (or turbo) have any faults. These boards I've tried and used (and I'm still using!) for years with all kinds of add-on cards.

It's probably fine for our retro gaming needs but it definitely has documented problems. There is something wrong with its PCI bus and some devices can cause it to act incorrectly (like PCI sound cards) and the most noticeable issue is file corruption because the IDE controller is on that loopy PCI bus. You might also have more sound card problems on this chipset than others. George Breese created his PCI Latency Patch for this chipset.

http://www.au-ja.de/review-kt133a-1-en.phtml
http://web.archive.org/web/20010602233904/htt … om/686bfaq.shtm

I rekon if you really want to minimise then a P4 does a pretty good job. Most hardware round that time still had Win98 drivers so you can always duel boot.

About 3 years ago I ran a Win98 P4 with 768MB Ram without issue, and the extra bit of ram helped when in WinXP, Was only playing the 1st Generation XP games so wasn’t asking much of the system when in XP, but I would think anything later would be happy in Win7?

I’m sure the AMD’s round the same time would be just as good, but haven’t experienced it myself so can’t really say

swaaye wrote:

It's probably fine for our retro gaming needs but it definitely has documented problems. There is something wrong with its PCI bus and some devices can cause it to act incorrectly (like PCI sound cards) and the most noticeable issue is file corruption because the IDE controller is on that loopy PCI bus. You might also have more sound card problems on this chipset than others. George Breese created his PCI Latency Patch for this chipset.

http://www.au-ja.de/review-kt133a-1-en.phtml
http://web.archive.org/web/20010602233904/htt … om/686bfaq.shtm

From the first link

first link wrote:

Thanks to John Gatt - who works for VIA Australia in Marketing - there are a lot of rumours in the www and print media. He said that there is no bug and we caused it by playing arround and overclocking our systems.

For the sake of argument, I've also used the "problematic" Live! and the first Audigy soundcard back in the day and I've never experienced the mysterious problem. I also used both the internal IDE controller and the HPT370 RAID controller on the mainboards that I own and neither produced any mysterious data corruption in 12 years. So, guys, please stop spreading 10-year-old rumors, pretty please 😊
...it may be that some mainboard manufacturers did mess up and did glitch the 686b as it is documented in the second link, but I can affirm that Abit, Asus and MSI (the versions that I tested and own) are this-particular-bug-free. As long as both the BIOS and Windows is up-to-date (ignore the 1-in-4 BS) nothing should go wrong.

Yeah right, I've never had any troubles with the Via chipsets I tell you... 😜
The greatest challenge with a KT-133 board is finding one that still has good capacitors. Or a KT-266 board for that matter...

Yowzers! That's like a lot of different opinions on how to go about this.

Pure Win98SE rig with a P3, P4 or Athlon Xp
Win98SE + Xp dual booter with a P4 or Athlon XP
or a pure Win XP rig with a P4, Athlon XP or Athlon 64.

Concurrently, I'm trying to look for a fast AGP card that supports Win98 and Xp, something like at least Radeon 9600 Pro, but preferably Radeon 9800 Pro- 6800 Ultra levels. Not that easy anymore from the looks of it.

This is making me lean more towards a pure Win XP rig, with a single-core CPU to cut off any need for setting cpu affinity and pci-e video card.

For the pci-e card, should I be bothered with getting something like a 6800GT and running very old drivers like the 8x series, or can I go with something more modern?

I've got a nice Radeon 1950 Pro NIB doing nothing for a long time.... would this do nicely coupled with let's say an Athlon 64 single core + 2gb ram and 4-disk raid 0?

Again, I stress that I play only stuff from 95 up. So, I'd use this system to play games from 95 to maybe 03-04. For newer games, I've got two i7s and a C2Q.

@elfuego
The PCI problem even has a workaround in Linux source. There are also some specifics in the comments.
http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/pci/quirks.c

BTW, another problem with KT133A / 686B is a buggy USB controller. Just do some searching on USB problems with it.

Anyway yeah it is a chipset that serves game machines pretty well but there are problems whether you've noticed them or not.

F2bnp wrote:

Yeah right, I've never had any troubles with the Via chipsets I tell you... 😜

😁
It is mostly their Super 7 hardware that causes me nightmares.

All right, which one of you won this? I didn't think people would pay THAT much for old boards like that which are still surprisingly recent for something with ISA slots.

I think I found an alternative that's much more reasonably-priced, but it has the inferior 845P chipset which doesn't officially support 200/800 MHz FSB. Not much of an issue for Win9x, but XP-era gaming performance will be limited if I can't get a P4 in the 3.0 GHz or faster range that defaults to 800 MHz FSB. Does anyone here have any luck overclocking 845P boards to 200/800 MHz FSB?

Also, if you need a good AGP graphics card, I've got a couple of Radeons lying around-an All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 128 MB and a Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB. The latter's complete in box.

swaaye wrote:

In my experience the Win9x games that actually need old hardware need an old 3D card. Glide and D3D table fog type problems. GF6800 covers everything except Glide and maybe 8bit palette texture support. Glide emulators often work well enough.

Tualatin is a nice setup, but I think I prefer a KT333 setup now. You can often run a mobile Barton in these boards, meaning cool temps or crazy speed if you want that. They have 3.3v AGP support. KT133A is another possibility (you get ISA) but 686B is troublesome.

Same here.

When building legacy systems, I tend to be pragmatic instead of sentimental. That's why I'm focusing on Win9x, 3dfx, Aureal 3D, and other picky things most game from that particular era run best with, instead of focusing on 486 systems and the likes.

DOSBOX is fine with me. I think DOSBOX is even better in certain cases; things like interpolated resolution, using modern joystick/HOTAS setup in DOS games, and using GM soundfonts. I'm not a purist, if a game sounds better with GM soundfont than the original MT-32, then I always pick the former. That often happens on games that support both GM and MT-32, like Star Rangers and Wing Commander I & II (Kilrathi Saga Edition).

The problem with DOSBOX is that it's often too slow for hi-res, 3D texture mapped games. And that's the reason I still need legacy systems; for late DOS games and Win9x games. And no, the casing doesn't have to be beige. As long as it has 3dfx, Aureal 3D, and ISA sound card, then a modern black casing is fine.