First post, by DeadnightWarrior
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi all,
I'd like to put together a little project, starting from a very old system I have.
At the moment, the specs are:
- AMD Duron 750Mhz
- Gigabyte GA-7ZMM
- 256 Mb ram PC133
- 40 Gb hard drive
- S3 Savage 4 - integrated
- Creative CT5880 (a.k.a. PCI128) - integrated
- A DVD reader and a CDRW burner
First thing I wanted to do is swap the hard disk with an SSD: I already purchased a cheap as hell (15€ !) 60Gb sata SSD, along with a SATA to IDE converter, basically to get rid of the awful noise the HDD is making.
I could partition it in order to have a Win9x / WinXP dual boot, but then I started thinking "why don't I just add something like a compact flash or an SD card with another converter and throw DOS and Windows 3.11 on it?!".
So, down the line I guess I'll be adding these and maybe upgrade the CPU to a much more powerful Athlon 1.o / 1.2 Ghz (the Via KM133 is limited to 200Mhz FSB Athlons, so I don't have that many choices), the RAM to 512Mb and maybe add a graphics card.
Questions:
- I guess the correct order would be to have a single 2Gb partition on the memory card, install DOS first, then Win3.11, then create two partitions on the SSD and install Win9x on the smallest one and finally WinXP on the largest one. I should end up with the XP boot loader showing all four OSes. Is this right?
- Concerning video cards: could something in the league of a Geforce 4 / Radeon 9500 / Voodoo 3 be enough to handle some early 2000s games under XP? Or should I consider a Geforce 6? But then again, wouldn't the Athlon Thunderbird severely bottleneck a GF6 (let alone the Duron!)?
- What do you think of the integrated S3 Savage 4 and the Soundblaster PCI128 integrated chips? Could they give me problems under DOS? I honestly never had any issues with Windows 95 or 98 on this very platform.
- I need to use all 4 IDE channels so I guess it's either a pure Compact Flash to IDE or an SD to CF to IDE adapter... is it doable?
My goal is basically to have a little retro PC capable of playing a dozen years worth of games, say from the early 1990s until the early 2000s.
Thank you so much for bearing with me!
Cheers,
Mike