Where do the fans of oldies hardware congregate?

[imported_Kiwi]

During those years (end of the 90s), I was covered up in work, with little free time for myself, especially not to play many PC games. I want to recreate a couple of PCs of the sort that a well-fixed gamer might have owned, to play some of those old games, but as well as anyone back then could have done. Parts are cheap, unless a couple of bidders get into a little war and run costs up on one or another auction.

But documentation has already started to disappear, and it's been so long since I had to manually set up a "user" entered hard drive, I'd practically forgotten how. Today, I tried getting a Micronics MB to boot into Windows98, but it kept complaining about configurations, and resetting itself to its defaults. It's got an Intel 430TX chipset, and takes PC-66 or PC-100 SDRAMs, max 128 MBs per slot, but it claims all of those it looked at were only 32 MBs. I only put in one at a time.

Supposedly, the memory cache that the 430TX relies on only caches 64 MBs, and adding more than 128 actually will result in less efficiency.

Incidentally, I had an actual 30 GB Hdd, not a jumpered one of larger size. Most of the PCs back then had a 32 GB max limit. OK, that's the supposed "slower" one for Win95 era game titles (nope, no MS-DOS titles, I'm not that much of a masochist). Yesterday, I was dealing with an Abit BX-6, which has the Intel 440BX chipset. It's a P2 system, and I started with a 400 MHz processor, even though I thought it was slightly faster than I was targeting for.

No matter what RAM I put in it, when I was trying to get Win2000 set up, I got constant memory errors with a 100 MHz memory speed. I have a dual-boot with Windows98, and that OS was happy as could be with the 100 MHz and the 4x multiplier. So, earlier than I originally planned, I downclocked, with the memory speed reset to 66 MHz. W2K loved that, and worked beautifully thereafter.

But get this, after that change, Windows98 is a really sick puppy. It's slow, it has hiccoughs (comes almost to a stop occasionally).

Now, I realize that AnandTech is home to a lot of folks interested in the very latest, the very fastest, etc. I do have an AMD X2 6000 in one of my PCs here, and I had no trouble with that one. What I hope is that someone here knows some places where fans of the older hardware get together, and can suggest a site I can visit.

Thanks,

 

[mpilchfamily]

There us no need to go threw all this trouble just for some older games. Any current system can easily handle the job. You can dual boot any system now with win 2000. Heck XP does a good job handling any compatibility issues you may have with games designed to originally run on Win 95. If you need to run a DOS based game then download DOSBox. Its a very good DOS emulator that you run inside XP or Vista.

 

[bendixG15]

From what I've read, the real old games do not run well in the DOS box and you do need an "old" computer. Problem seems to be getting old drivers.

I don't know why you can't get WIN98 to run well on that mobo. The 430TX was a decent chipset. You do have to be careful with the PC 100 memory, as the later sets were not compatable with the earlier mobo, (high density, single sided vs double sided).

This place has a few "old time gamers" who know exactly what your problems are and can give good info (I'm not a gamer).

Suggest that you post specific problems which are more apt to get a response.

Good Luck...............:thumbsup:

 

[imported_Kiwi]

I do have a setup on which I've installed DOSbox, but the fact is, at the data point I have in mind, Win9X was already dominant. Also, the journey from scratch to working system is at least as important as whatever games I choose to test the system(s) with. I've bought some PC-66 RAM on eBay since the Micronics (and an Intel AN430TX as well) didn't run. It will take time getting here. The Intel board wouldn't run enough of its POST that it even beeped at me.

The Micronics BIOS setup seemed to run fine, with the exception of always identifying each of the (PC-100) DIMMs that I tried as 32 MBs, not 128 (I have one 32 MB and three 64 MB, also PC-100, that I hadn't tried in either one). When allowed to run the POST all the way, without interruption, then it had an objection to the configuration in setup and looked for a non-existent floppy drive. (It never accesses either IDE channel at that point.)

I have no mental database for the comparison between W2K (nor WinNT) and Win9X back then, when I was running that level of hardware as the currently standard gear. I didn't start using Windows2000 until slightly after WindowsXP's release, and was running an Athlon Thunderbird CPU with a Via chipset on a Gigabyte mainboard. The way I recall that situation, Win2K really needed RAM compared to Win98, before it would wake all the way up. The T-Bird was 1.2 GHz, and in those days I usually had 256 MBs of RAM installed in it.

If I recall correctly, the Abit BX-6 system had 384 MBs of RAM when I made the change from 400 MHz to 266 MHz, and 100 MHz memory speed down to 66 MHz. I was very surprised at the sudden decrease in performance when trying to run Win98se.