MartliThanks guys I am quite proud of this set up.
re: things I need to add: honestly, it would only be niche stuff at this point that probably supports like 3 games, so I don’t think so. The two builds I am looking into I suppose? But they are really just for the fun of playing with hardware.
I’d say the big missing piece for my MIDI setup is a Roland CM32L – ie with the wider set of sounds than the MT-32 for games like monkey island 2. I’m going to Japan in January so will be hunting for one there. I can also use an old laptop with MUNT to cover that off.
The other thing would be a CRT that can do 1600×1200 resolution, but they’re BIG and I probably don’t have the space, so very much a nice to have and I can’t see me bothering to get one.
re: LAN – I briefly tried DOOM95, the problem is the two stations are very close together so it would be a very cramped LAN session! But would be possible on win 98 where I can pit the P4 vs. the P3.
MartliI don’t reckon we need to have an episode up on the day, especially if it’s going to be a hassle to pull together, but close enough would totally work. A conversation would be more interesting than a series of long voicemails I reckon, but happy to send in a voicemail if that’s where you end out going as I’ve got a lot to say on the topic 🙂
MartliI managed to do it (in wimp mode) by just boosting it down the dirt path and ignoring the cops chasing me. Took a lot of goes because I kept totalling the car every time I hit a bump, but got there in the end…
MartliI think the advantage of CF cards over SD cards is that they’re pin-for-pin the same as IDE drives so the conversion is relatively straightforward, it’s just that CF cards are more expensive than SD cards.
I feel like the general consensus (for both CF and SD cards) is that they’re fine for DOS and Win 9x, but for XP you’ll get performance issues and are better off going for an SSD.
I’ve personally had great success using a CF to IDE adapter for both DOS and Win95, and a Sata2IDE adapter for an SSD in windows 98 (plus Sata SSD connected to SATA port but running in legacy mode on a newer mobo).
MartliSpecial XP episode would be cool. It really was quite an epic edition of windows with a very long lifespan (partly due to Vista being so shite).
When I think of Windows XP, the definitive game that comes to mind is Doom 3. I’ll just leave that there.
MartliIf I get a bit of downtime off work over the next week or so I’ll try my Logitech momo wheel, which I’m expecting is slightly too new to work.
MartliI personally found PCem and 86Box quite limited performance-wise. It tends to struggle beyond a pentium/pentium ii. I understand you need to have a CPU with quite beefy single-core/thread performance.
Windows XP will run on intel systems up to ivy bridge, and Nvidia GPUs up to a 980ti (needs some tweaks to the drivers if beyond 960) – so if you’ve got an old PC lying around from that era it could be a viable option and should cover games from 2000 onwards pretty comfortably. That narrows your incompatibility window to ~96-99. Most early windows games were really DOS games and so DOS box serves well into 97 or so.
I find the early win 95 era the trickiest, where some games won’t even run natively in win 98 (I haven’t been able to get interstate ’76 to run on windows 98, for example).
One cool method I’ve seen is to use a PCIe-PCI converter (or a motherboard with native PCI slots) and pass-through a period-correct graphics card and sound card to a virtual machine. See here for an example using Unraid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgIF8uG-2G0 . A bit of a middleground between using old hardware and new. Probably not practical for most of us (and to be honest unless you can get a Voodoo3 PCI the graphics options mostly suck), but still a cool concept.
The folks over at VOGONS (very old games on new systems) are also a great source of help on this topic :-).
MartliI had a good go today and these tips were very helpful! Still can’t win the stupid race (mission 5) but I’ll get there…
MartliSeconded, it’s a cool game, even though I’m terrible at it.
MartliGreat shout.
I’d request we do AoE 1 as well. I remember playing that more than 2. Vivid memories of my dad frantically typing in the cheat codes as he’d yet to discover how to copy and paste…
MartliHOLLYWOOD HOGAN’S GOT FOUR BIG WHEELS BUT HE AIN’T USIN’ ANY OF ‘EM!
I have a lot of hours playing MTM2! The WCW trucks were the icing on the cake for me.
MartliLove this game. An absolute classic, played it for hours back in the day and one of the first games my kids could engage with given it’s mostly non-verbal.
