old windows machines

moonlighting

I am doing a garage clean out and am trying to figure out what old computers are worth holding onto for retro PC gaming. The era of machines is from win 3.1 to win-xp. rather than use emulation what OS machines would be worth holding on to, for example will win-xp play the game that were made for win 95/98 etc.
Another thing i be wondering is it possible to set up ssd drives on the old machines. I don't mind keeping the specs original but the hard-drives from that era seem so slow and lets not forget those clicking noises.

CathalDublin

Not sure if they make IDE SSD drives but you could get an IDE to Compact flash adapter and use compact flash cards.
The max speed on IDE is 133mb/s

The Last Bandit

To be honest old PCs are a total pain in the... Big, noisy, IRQ hell

I use virtual machines if I need to fire up a old version of windows but that's extremely rare. I'd say at this stage GOG has most of the popular PC games prepackaged and ready to go on newer PCs which cuts out a lot of hassle. At old monitor is handy is your using a laptop as the screen resolutions are a lot higher these days.

In short, I keep the old PCs if I'd an interest in the hardware or collecting vintage stuff but no way I keep them just for a few DOS games.

Win-XP has a legacy mode that supposed to help with old DOS games but not sure how good it is.

As for SSD, Win-XP will install on them but it doesn't have TRIM support in the OS so you'll need to manually run third party apps periodically to keep the drive health.

Retr0gamer

The only real way to play a lot of DOS games is through a Windows 98 machine which supports does games. Windows XP is a disaster when it comes to compatibility.

Dosbox is all well and good but a lot of those ports on even GOG only output in soundblaster which was an awful soundcard. I've found it next to impossible to get Gravis or Roland MT emulation support although it can be done.

o1s1n

I'd love to build a Windows 98 era gaming PC, but I'd say drivers are a nightmare, close to an impossibility in some cases.

CiDeRmAn

Old Windows Machine?

moonlighting

Well cleanup is finished i kept any system that powered up and worked. As someone mentioned getting drivers and installing windows is a nightmare so instead just kept the machines that didn't have components missing.
kept good few win 98/xp machines, sadly all the win3.1 machines i had,
had bits missing but will try to bring back to life.
Thanks for the info on ssd drives i am going to check the web and see what components i need to purchase.

Stuxnet

Bang on some light weight Linux over windows, bring those old machines back to life.

Puppy Arcade Linux

amen

make sure you back up the drivers in case of hd failure

Star Lord

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Dosbox is all well and good but a lot of those ports on even GOG only output in soundblaster which was an awful soundcard. I've found it next to impossible to get Gravis or Roland MT emulation support although it can be done.

For me, they sound wrong no matter which sound card is selected, I played most of them via PC speaker on my old PPC640 or our subsequent Wang (hehehe) 386 (Which had a whole 2MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk!). Both of those only had "PC Speaker", and it wasn't till we got a Pentium II with Win 98 that we finally got something with a sound card!

eddhorse

This might help :

Play 2304 Dos games legally in your browser. No floppies needed.

[url]Https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection:softwarelibrary_msdos_games&sort=-publicdate[/url]

Also my first pc was a 286 dos pc i think. Win 3.1 came after.

greasepalm

if you were dumping pcs with xp and they had serial ports rs232 they are handy for old time flashing boxes with null modem cables and are sought after.

moonlighting

i actually kept some old laptops with serial and parallel connections. very useful for programming old hardware.
http://www.sivava.com/a56-package-6-willem-eprom-programmer-pcb50b-mcs-51-plcc32-pcb-ssop8-soic-8-adapter-extractor.html

eddhorse

Heres something new, usb to serial connectors, use them all the time

moonlighting

trust me i have used the them (in factories) but they can be troublesome at times.

greasepalm

true all info is not transferred when using usb,better with null modem cable.

CathalDublin

Loved my old IBM Aptiva 486 33Mhz
Those were the days

moonlighting

has a nice flat looking moniter for that era.

moonlighting

Spent the day trying to run games on various version of windows 95/98/me. I actually got most of the games i wanted to play working but am having serious problems with audio. Messing around with various sound cards and still not having much luck. My guess is that some games were only developed for a small selection of sound cards?