1990 - 2005 Gaming Build

I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum’s basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it’s never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.

Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn’t want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.

Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn’t have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).

So what were your favorite games from the 90’s and early 2000s?

dutchkimble,

Get a modem and dial up too!

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

There is one installed but I don’t have a phoneline to my house >_<

Etterra,

Oh man that takes me back.

MeanEYE,
@MeanEYE@lemmy.world avatar

Original, and in my opinion best, Fallouts 1 and 2. M.A.X. which doesn’t get as mentioned as it should. Good old Blizzard games back before they turned evil. Sanitarium, awesome game from a studio who released it and promptly died after.

PraiseTheSoup,
  • Jazz Jackrabbit
  • Descent
  • Need for Speed 2
  • Witchaven 2: Blood Vengeance
  • Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness

These are the games I remember best on our win95 IBM PC. My personal favorite of this era is Hexen: Beyond Heretic but that has been mentioned a few times already.

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

Jazz Jackrabbit

Epic game music, up there with Sonic for getting stuck in your head.

PraiseTheSoup,

Epic game music

Not sure if the wordplay was intentional, but I chuckled a bit. Agreed though, the music was awesome.

cupcakezealot, (edited )
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

alone in the dark, any of the sierra games (but especially kq 5,6, and 7), lands of lore 1+2, master of orion 1+2, sam n max, sim town, myst, ultima underworld, sim ant…

humorlessrepost,

Warcraft II

cupcakezealot,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

oh and wing commander ii!

raspberriesareyummy,

Unreal Tournament 99 and Everquest. But those don’t even come close to needing a fraction of the hardware you procured :D

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

UT GOTY was one of my main reasons for this project. I played the hell out of that game!

raspberriesareyummy,

Oh, a person of taste! :) May I recommend BunnyTrack maps? I played those a lot in the 2015 timeframe and enjoyed myself immensely.

Iloveyurianime,

i remember my dad used to have a samsung syncmaster CRT would probably preferred it over my more modern but crappier TN display

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

As long as it wasn’t stuck at 60Hz, CRTs had the better picture up until at least 2010. I get why they went out of favour but if someone made an 80lb, 16:9 4K CRT I would buy it.

LowtierComputer,

I have one that I estimate is near 2k. It’s a 45 inch I think. You need 3 or 4 people to carry it.

Iloveyurianime,

i would still prefered that samsung crt over the TN 1366x768 display panel im using on my desktop cause the colors are just so dogcrap

Anticorp, (edited )

That sounds like a fun project, although I’d recommend XP over Me. XP has a DOS emulator, and it’s a lot easier to configure drivers for.

My favorite games from that era are Star Wars: X-Wing and Wing Commander: Privateer. Both games stood out as exceptional back then. Warcraft was also an excellent game. Command and Conquer is worth checking out too.

Edit: I’m pretty sure I played the first two games on Windows 3.2, so I’m not sure how they’ll play on Me or XP.

Edit 2: Silent Hunter is another memorable game

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

Did you play Squadrons? The mission briefings were still not up to X-Wing/Tie Fighter standards but the flight was 10/10.

I seem to remember having issues with XP and Dos games but if ME is too problematic I will try 98 and XP. Though if I’m going with XP I’ll be using a half built P4 PC that I have hanging around.

Anticorp,

I never did play Squadrons. I joined the Army right after the X-Wing era and had a several year gap where I didn’t touch a computer at all.

Now that I think about it, if these are straight-up DOS games then you don’t need Windows at all. You can just load MS-DOS and then run the game straight from the command line. I think you’re right that XP broke a bunch of old DOS games. It’s been so long that I completely forgot we were mad at Microsoft for the removal of DOS back then and the move to an emulator only experience.

hydrospanner,

I was so, so hyped for Squadrons, even had a HOTAS setup on my list…then the game came out.

Everything I heard, even from people who loved it, totally turned my view of it sour, and I was so glad I didn’t sink any money into it.

Maybe someday we’ll get a SW fighter sim that delivers.

parricc,

Keep in mind you’re not going to be able to run all games between those years on a single build. Quite a few older games need older hardware, especially slower CPUs. Then, the DOS support on ME has a ton of issues that broke many games (one of the reasons people hated it), and XP is needed for a lot of the later Windows games in that range.

That said, it should work very nicely as a 9X build, which also happens to be the era with the least emulation support. If an older DOS game doesn’t work, you can always use something like eXoDOS on a modern computer.

One additional cool thing you could consider down the road is something to really take your midi experience to the next level like an SC-55 MK II.

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

It’s been literally 20 years, but I seem to remember having more issues with XP than ME as far as Dos compatibility. I have already run into some audio troubles so a dedicated card might be the next step.

parricc,

Yeah, XP would definitely have more issues. 98SE probably would have the best all around compatibility. But there are some Win95 games that only run on Windows 95. The computer you’ve got is really nice for the 1994 - 2001 era, though. What you could do is get a pullout tray, and have different drives with different loads, and switch them out as needed. Ultimately, if the games you want to play work, that’s what matters.

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

I’m using an IDE-SATA adapter so swappable drive bay would be a nice solution. I’m not even sure if 95 would handle 512MB of ram, my original W95machine only had 32MB XD

bitwaba,

Yeah, I used to run win 2000 on my desktop and had some games that I couldn’t play from the win95 era. So I resized my mom’s old windows XP machine and pulled a 2 gig partition out then installed win98 on that. I used the windows disk manager to mark the partition I wanted to boot from as active, so it was completely transparent to my mom when she would need to use the computer, including booting.

If I were going to do a system like this again today, id probably do something similar. An MBR formatted hard drive can have 4 primary partitions. FAT16 had a max partition size of 2gb, but fat32 was introduced in win98 so you could go with whatever partition size you wanted there.

So you could have a 95, 98, ME, and XP installation all on one drive and just switch between them using the drive manager to change the active bootable partition then rebooting.

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

After messing around for a couple of days now I might try a dual boot between 98 and ME. I haven’t had any stability issues but this particular hardware doesn’t play well with Dos and audio under ME 🙃. Thanks for the info!

Blackmist,

I remember buying C&C Red Alert many years ago, and being completely unable to play it due to CPU speed. Moving the mouse to the edge of the screen would instantly zip to the edges of the game world.

xyzzy,

Up voted for recommending real Roland hardware. I have an MT-32, CM-32L, and SC-55mkII to cover all my compatibility bases.

9point6,

I would also suggest the modern emulated alternatives if you struggle to get hold of the original hardware

MT32-pi: github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi (covers the MT-32 & CM-32, can also do some general midi with sound fonts, so in theory you could emulate a soundcanvas too)

Then there’s the sound cards too

PicoGUS: github.com/polpo/picogus/ (emulates a Gravis Ultrasound, SB2, AdLib, Tandy & also the MPU401 if you do end up with real midi hardware)

Also gonna just drop the goldlib too: pcmidi.eu/goldlib.html but that one might be a bit separate from what OP is currently doing

iAvicenna,
@iAvicenna@lemmy.world avatar

512MB RAM? Go wild cowboy. As for games:

  • Arcanum
  • Planescape Torment

if no one mentioned them.

Psythik,

Yeah seriously that’s an ungodly amount of RAM for a PC of this vintage. My old WinMe machine had 128MB.

(And an 800Mhz PIII. I later added a GeForce 4 MX 4000 so I could actually play games at more than 15-20 FPS. It was my first graphics card purchase ever. Also upgraded to XP cause Me would BSoD so often that I never got a chance to do a proper shutdown at the end of the day. When the machine crashed, I was done for the day.)

blusterydayve26,

I remember going from 128 -> 192 MB in order to upgrade from ME to XP so I could learn programming with Visual C# 1.0. It was completely doable, assuming you manually disabled almost all the background services.

rehydrate5503,

Cool idea!

I was going to mention a few games to check out but they were all already mentioned, so I will suggest the one that wasn’t brought up, Star Crusader. Space combat game with a great story, fun game play, high replay value, and great voice acting for a game from 1994. And the ending blew my mind, still remember the moment and my shock to this day. I have my original CD and the jacket in a memorabilia box haha, one of only a handful of things I kept from those days.

www.old-games.com/download/2881/star-crusader

psilotop,

1600 x 1200 at 60hz is actually quite respectable today. You can still buy laptops with 1366 x 768 resolution in 2024!! 🤢🤮🤢🤮

I remember having a 1440 x 900 monitor and wondering how far we would go in 10 years…10 years later 1366 x 768 was more common and I wanted to die.

Amazing project btw, you might inspire me to do something similar.

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

I have a few of those “HD” laptop’s rolling around, they are pretty horrendous (and easy to get for free). When LCDs first came out I was kinda disappointed that I was going from ~2k CRTs back to 1024x768. Even now the default is only 1920x1080 which is only 10% larger than the CRT for this PC.

psilotop,

My company just bought 30 new 1080p monitors for my office which can’t display our main software completely. Imagine spending thousands of dollars for tech from 20 years ago that still cuts off information for average use. I could rant for hours about resolutions…

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

Oh man, we have 30+ PCs in the building that are used to control big automated machines, they used to run on XP at 1024x768. When they started to fall apart I offered up the solution of using modern machines running Debian and putting the SCADA software in a virtual machine, this was rejected. They instead went with Lenovo micro-PCs and Windows 10. They then paid a programmer to manually rearrange and scale up every machine page page to fit on a 1920x1080 screen. FML.

psilotop,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6a4f6a2d-b3cb-4957-9a33-8096a6891b59.gif

Anticorp,

4x is pretty common for desktop gaming these days. Laptops are hardly an indication of our gaming progress.

mechoman444,

It was around 2000 when I helped my parents build a computer from a shop in town. It was an AMD k6 with 512mb of ram and a voodoo3. I used that computer for years and years.

mechoman444,

Man. That sounds like a fun build.

I consider this kinda like the wild West era of computer building. There wasn’t a lot of standardization like there is now and you really have to know how to handle the software because the support wasn’t really there.

nik282000,
@nik282000@lemmy.ca avatar

Finding 2 sticks of ram that both worked AND worked together was a slog of boot/swap/rebooting. It really is just plug and play these days.

Anticorp,

That’s why I still have RAM pairs from every computer I’ve ever built in a box in the garage. I’ll probably never use them again, but I spent so much money on them, and it took so much research to get the right ones, that I can’t bring myself to throw them away.

NutWrench,
@NutWrench@lemmy.world avatar

Deus Ex Duke Nukem 3d Quake

I would also recommend Windows 98se, since it was the last (popular) operating system that directly supports DOS.

Anticorp,

Oh yeah! How could I forget Duke Nukem? Wolfenstein 3D was pretty rad too.

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