Building a 4 in 1 Retro Gaming PC 

I like re-watching this video once in a while, because it is one of the very best about classic PCs on the entire RU-vid! :)

2024 and I am bulding my 4 in 1 PC thnaks to Phil ♥ ty again!

Thank you Phil! I believe I have just found a motherboard capable of doing what you did in this video. This looks like a wonderful project to do at home. I made P3-800 98se build and once that is complete I may work on this. Thank you for making this awesome video.

I remember playing some of these old games as a child, I might go to GOG to buy some of these classics. This video also reminded me of how much tinkering you had to do back then to get PC software or games to run, I always hated that as a kid :)

Wow brings back so many memories.. so much of the tweaks on Windows 98 and what not I have long forgotten.

i had this exact same mobo/CPU back in the rockin' 90's

My old hardware has probably degraded after 20 years in storage. But your vids make me want to check it out. Nice work.

Lol, I'm having flashbacks of DOS 3.5" boot disk. If I have some space I'll definitely build it. Got into PC gaming around '89 so that brings back some great memories. Thanks!

Got so excited, stopped the video at 9:57 in order to go out and buy the case and PSU combo for my ultra quad-SLI system. Thanks for the advice! It's gonna look wonderful in my historic, mostly wooden constructed, gas supplied house! :D

Im trying to do something very similar but with a Voodoo 5 5500. Your videos are extremely helpful for us Retro PC people.

if you're going to go to this much trouble you really HAVE to do it proper with a CRT ;-)

That no-name power supply (a "free" throw in named after the case it came with) scares me. Lightly loading it doesn't mean it won't blow up and kill your hardware. More subtly, a junk PSU can also allow excessive ripple into the supply rails that puts more stress on everything.

That's probably the coolest PC build i've ever seen. I've really liked the ALI chipset that you're using here when those boards came out. The boards usually ran all kinds of hardware and there was plenty of low mem left after shifting everything possible into high mem, so you could keep lots of DOS soundcard drivers loaded. But i've made the experience that they were prone to die quite exactly 5 years in of daily use -.- Not sure what's up with that. Perhaps with lower FSB could help them last. Of course if i were to build something like this, and i probably will, i would make everything differently, like enclosure/PSU choice, cooling, soundcard choices, etc...

i love retro pcs, used to have a sony vaio that my dad had at the time. played world of warcraft n a bunch of kiddie adventure games as a kid.

Oh man, this is a dream project for me! Thanks so much for the video, I always squeal with delight when I see a new one.

I started watching this and was amazed at how many of these games I had played and forgotten about.

fun tip: you could have all your drivers on a cd/dvd ready for this.

I'm very proud of that PC.

Excellent video! I recently purchased a K6-2 400 CPU to give my old P1-200 a bit more performance in Windows games - still waiting on the delivery of the cooler though as the only option I have now is a fanless heatsink I salvaged from a Mac G3 which happens to be the same size. It works as a temporary measure but I don't want to run the machine fanless for too long. My Socket 7 motherboard is an AT-style one though although it accepts ATX power supplies. I never had a proper PS/2 mouse header for the machine so I ended up making one myself. I never realised that SQ5 needed slowing though - I should check if it does the same on my machine. I use a real SB16 though so I don't know if that makes a difference. I remember owning one of those Yamaha cards way back in the day but it didn't really impress me - I seem to remember it not being able to play multiple sounds back at the same time under Windows and configuring DOS games to work was a pain. The main reason I have that P1-200 in any case is to allow me to listen to music from the SB16 and Yamaha MIDI daughterboard. I wonder if there is a list of DOS games that do not run properly when run on faster machines? Wing Commander seems like a prime candidate but were all Origin games that problematic?

Great ideas. I'm thinking of doing a similar thing with a vintage IBM Aptiva. This is a great motivator. Thank you !

This is really clever. Thanks for the video! So essentially this PC can play anything from 1985 (or so) - 1999 really well? That's sweet.

First time watcher of this video! Just in the initial minute i can see this is going to be great! Go Phil Go!

My schoolmate had similar build at 2000 year :) He told me about those tricks with K6-3+ CPU (transform it into 386 and 486). BTW I had a celeron 600 on i815 chipset. It was double speed compare to my old celeron 333 on 440LX chipset. I was proud of my new PC and did not understand reason to go with 386. I didn't know xD

Hi Phil! Awesome video - I love how you explain everything so clearly and it reminds me of all the fun you can have with retro hardware! I have a very similar motherboard to yours - a Gigabyte GA-5SMM (SiS 530 based) that handles any FSB from 66-133MHz (including the /4 PCI divider) as well as voltages from 1.3-3.5V. I lucked out getting a K6-III+ 500/ANZ (binned at 1.8V at 500MHz) - It ran flawlessly at 4.5 x 133 MHz with 2 volts and was INSANELY quick. I even managed to cool it passively with just a heatsink at 133 x 3 400MHz and 1.3 volts! I was also lucky enough to have both a GeForce 2 MX/400 PCI and a GeForce 6200 in PCI that worked perfectly with that board - awesome for retro gaming - and even ran XP at a stretch too! Keep up the great videos and thanks again!

This video was very informative and entertaining. I could not stop laughing at the power supply bit. But this is interesting I might actually do this. I do have the amd K6 computer in the attic. Time to un-dust it and turn it into something awesome!

Hahah "If you made it to the end I applaud you" No man I applaud your videos

Very informative. Have an AMD K6 build myself and it works very well, although the OS I'm using is Windows 95 and my main goal for that machine is not only DOS games from the 386 era and up, but also Windows games that were developed before 98 was released. The only issue I've had with this build so far is that a couple of DOS games don't play very well. Here's a list of them: CD-Man [L1 and L2 disabled with 2x multiplier]: Twitchy intro screen, but otherwise stable gameplay. Dark Ages [L1 and L2 disabled with 2x multiplier]: Divide by zero error on Episode 1 unless I use the SLOWDOWN.COM utility. Episodes 2 and 3 also produce this error no matter what. Have yet to patch it with the RTE200 fix. Was wondering if there is any utility or something that could slow the CPU even further so that I can reduce the twitchiness and perhaps get rid of the Divide by zero error.

This video was really helpful, thank you Phil!

Very fun video to watch. I'm surprised that Wing Commander 3 was able to run that smoothly with the processor clocked that high.

Such a big difference in 486 vs Pentium perfomance

Hi Phil I see that you used Win 98SE, Back in the old days when I used it in a new install I found that some games didn't work. The work around was to install Win 98 then upgrade to 98SE. the reason some programs didn't work was because MS changed the file extensions from COM to EXE. So if you did the upgrade it left the old files so the older software would work.

Amazing pc and video! I have a very similar machine: Asus P5A AMD K6-2 300 MHz 128Mb ram Geforce 2 MX 3dfx Voodoo2 12Mb Sound Blaster AWE32 I love Voodoo3 3000, but I think the combination of a Nvidia video card and a Voodoo 2 is better for compatibility than Voodoo3, that is unable to run some DOS Glide2 based games.

Oh my... The memories... :) Kind regards, Meta Custom Computers

I have decided to post it here as well. SpeedSys is an excellent DOS-based tool for any 386 or higher that performs a system benchmark (CPU, memory, extended features such as MMX, etc.). FEATURES. ~~~~~~~~~~ Test allows you to detect following parameters: - Type of the processor. - Clock rate of processor. - Clock rate of processor via Time Stamp Counter. - Some information of processor stepping. - Size and speed index of memory. - Type, manufacturer, part number,some features of DIMM/RIMM memory modules. - Display adapter, size of video memory, video memory speeds index. - Sizes and speed of data caches. - Mainboard model. - BIOS vendor and BIOS date. - RTC-BIOS Year2000 bug. - Processor benchmarks. - Build a graph and define seek and access time of hard disk. - Build a graph and define an average transfer speed of hard disk. - Relative speed of hard disk. - Testing of extended memory on errors and malfunction. - Build a graph and define functioning of system a caching and memories. - Test a quality of surface CD disk. - Build a graph and define an average read speed of CD disk. - Build a graph and define average time access of CD drive. - Relative speed CD drive. - PCI/AGP device information. - ISA PnP device detection. - Save image of screen with testing parameters in PCX file 640*480*16. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ a) Processor 386+. b) VGA-compatible videocard. c) 4 MB free XMS memory. d) DOS 5.00+. Home page : web.archive.org/web/20020816182800/dxover.stealth.ru/sst.htm Latest version : 4.7 (Jan-25-01)

Hell ya :D Just blew my mind, scaling a processor down and up on the fly! whoa... making it jump from 133Mhz to 400Mhz ;) I love your videos, I love your research, but The PCs are not period enough for me, IDE HDD, IDE CDROMs, PS/2 Inputs, & Real Floppies. Just like uxwbill says "Real Computers come with a Floppy Disk Drive." X-D

Phils you mentioned on the video that it needs to be K6-2 PLUS or K6-3 PLUS. Non plus versions do not work to adjust the multiplier in DOS? the k6-3 plus are really hard to find in america, even K6-2 plus are hard to find

I would LOVE to build one of these so I could stream some of these classics.

9:45 you got me bro A+ 100%

I wish Intel or AMD or whoever would just release an FPGA that emulated an APU maybe with NVIDIA's help to get some voodoo love and just let you set the specs of the chips in the FPGA so you could on the fly boot different systems in a small little box and maybe boot systems off SD cards or whatever with external storage by USB to Floppies, optical disc and input devices. Never going to happen but it is a nice dream.

lol that power supply effects. i want to use a modern PSU but most only have 1 molex and floppy connector, and i want to avoid SATA to molex.

Haven't watched the full thing yet, but the intro was amazing. Nice to know that there could be a chance that Phil is becoming an evil genius with that kind of introduction. :P

I like your channel and your job. It is very tidy, all prepared. Every time nice job! How long do you deal with computers?

Very cool. Think I'll stay on the road of least resistance and stick with my 1300x retro gaming build. Win7 64 host os Win98,xp VMs Dosbox for Dos and windows 3x

Goes to show how much of a power hog Deus Ex was, I remember my mate being so frustrated that he had to run it at 800x600 and not the default res. Great game though, probably my favourite ever made.

+PhilsComputerLab This was great! Did you ever get to mounting the fan to that card more permanently?

I decided, rather than continuing my 486 project for the moment to try building a system like this. I've just acquired an MSI MS5169 motherboard. I needed 3 ISA slots for all the sound cards getting shoved into this thing. It came with a K6-2 450. I'm wondering will I still be able to do the multiplier and cache settings in software with this board? If not, I did have an interesting idea. Instead of opening the case every time I'd have to switch jumpers, why not rig up some SPST switches and wire them to the jumper headers.

I was planning on doing a build like this sometime in the next year or two, but I discovered the Celeron 766 which also has a 66MHz FSB, but is quite a bit faster at full speed. Would there be any disadvantage with using that Coppermine-128 CPU with a Socket 370 motherboard, vs this K6/SS7 build?

This is such a great build -- were there any 386 or 486 games you tested that did not run well? Or does this -- functionally -- replace the need for a 386/486?

Very nice and elegant way to build retro pc! I like placing new things into old hardware thanks to modern compatibility equipments, especially USB "floppy" and SATA bridge. Going to build similar one. Only see little problem with LCD 5:4 resolutin and 4:3 DOS games (or 320x200) Is the image stretched or original, as my 16:10 LCD give me only 720x400@70Hz for resolutions lower than 640x480 ?

early on we were told to get rid of that old stuff and upgrade upgrade always upgrade . faster is better . emulation is ok to a point . some emulators dont print if u have some legacy apps that you need to print . thanks . this 4 in will save space for those who dont have a lot of room.

thank you sooo much im going to do my best to follow this to a t. this is exactly what i am looking to build .

Why bother using a 2TB SATA hard drive and convert it to IDE when you could just use Compact Flash, which already uses the IDE standard?

Well, just as informative, here're the games that you have that I already tested over my Pentium mmx setup (soon, a k6-iii+ 400MHz) -Battle Chess (Windows version):OK -Test Drive 3: Runned almost right but still a little bit faster -Gods: I don't think this one even runned -Pinball Dream: Another one that I can't remember if it worked fine -Wolf 3D:worked fine with L1/L2 on -Comanche:L1 disabled, and moslo at 70, runs a bit faster than yours -Doom: Runs fine -Raptor:OK -Duke Nuke 3D:OK -Descent:OK -Tomb Raider I: software and glide are ok -Quake 1:OK -Need For Speed II:Works ok in glide -Quake 2:OK, some complex áreas runs at 30 - 28fps that that's the minimun with a voodoo 3 -Need For Speed 3:Runs half good, it lags on the dark with rain, but all the settings -Tomb Raider The Last Revelation: Worked fine I'm just afraid that with the K6 III the voodoo 3 will run more hot since the Pentium mmx was limiting his power;

thank you for showing the power supply!

Wouldn't it be easier using something like DOSBox on a newer machine? I do understand why doing this build would be a fun project - it just doesn't seem necessary.

How does Megarace and Star Wars: Pod racers runs on that machine?

I wonder what could be built with a Radeon 9600 xt. I have one of those lying around. xD I got it at goodwill for 5 bucks trying to find a GPU for my computer. at the time I wasn't as knowledgeable as I am now.

Phil, you mentioned at 11:21 that you will put the reviews of the super socket 7 motherboards in the description section, but they are not there :(

Hi, Thanks for your videos! I build a machine (almost) like that and I really pleased with the results. Well, nowadays I'm thinking in try 13h and X modes games in a 15khz monitor (scanlines) instead of a line-doubled VGA monitor. There is a few options like CRTemu driver, Some TSR and hardware to dowgrade resolution (extron emotia, etc). Did you already mess with it?

love your builds great work

Are the usb drivers the same ones from the msfn.org forums ? If so, I have used it as well and they do work. Very handy to transfer stuff especially if there are no usb drivers for your more modern motherboard for windows 98se. Anyone reading, make sure to have a proper faultless windows installation and already have the rest of the drivers installed from the motherboard cd beforehand. They didn't work from the first try for me, but after doing a format and reinstalling windows it works perfectly.

One thing I don't understand about all these old PC builds - the box it all goes in is pretty much identical to modern boxes. So what's wrong with Dosbox? Heck, you can even get a Windows 95 emulator in Javascript online. What's the point? Amiga/Atari/8-bit computers I understand keeping around, but old PCs? Not so much.

I like this idea a lot!

What a great build. Have you run into any compatibility problems with really early DOS games? And what about really late WIN98 games (does it run Half-Life)? Such a useful machine, as getting some 90s games to run on a 64bit machine can be a real pain.

You should use the sb awe32 much better sound!!

Not sure I'd want to play Unreal (or even Quake 2) like that though, it's just one of those old games which works so much better on a modern machine. (also dem framerates on Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex)

What is a good AGP graphics card that works with Win-98 ?

cool build

i have that voodoo 3000 ( and or 3500) but the pci ver, used to have that exact board/config(layout/chipset/slots/rambanks) (not gb tho, asus i think) and further back, a k6-2 450 ^_^

Hi Phil, In a LGR video, I see that you changed your time machine motherboard from this Gigabyte GA-5AX to the DFI K6XV3+/66. Is there any reason of you made the switch? Is the DFI mother more suitable to be used as a 4 in 1 time machine? Thanks!

+PhilsComputerLab I thought you were putting 4 motherboards in the tower. Why did you turn a 2TB HDD into 120GB HDD?

People are saying that you need few retro pc's to play dos and early winows games, that's simply not true and I wouldn't go into emulation

I'd like to know your perspective on computing and issues like hardware vs software, since you work with old computers a lot.

Awesome Vid man :) :) I want to build this lol :)

Phil i can't find any CPUs you recommend like the 400 k6-2+ or the k6-3+. Any other suggestions? I do see k6-2+ 500s for sale.

Where is all of the stuff that's supposedly in the description?

+PhilsComputerLab Sorry if this was explained in the video and I missed it, but why not use x1 multiplier for 386 mode? I would think 66MHz would be a lot closer to original 386 performance. Were you simply limited to a choice between max speed and one turbo speed?

what happened to the links in the description?

This is the Ultimate Windows 98 PC.

Another great video Phil cheers, about the super socket 7, do k6 chips work in p3 motherboards?, i have everything in your video apart from cpu, i remember running dos games back in the day on pentium systems and had to use a program called moslow , would this still work instead of turning off cache if i didnt have k6?, Thanks Brian.

Any reason you didn't go with a high-end PCI graphics card?

Isn't that a Voodoo 3 3000? The 3500 has a TV tuner and a darker heat sink from what I'm seeing.

I've listened to your review of the DreamBlaster S1 module and the thing that bugged me was "it's not at the level of a Sound Canvas". Now, the question arises. Should I stay with my current gen PC using Munt to emulate a MT-32 or should I get a Roland card from Ebay to get into a retro pc? Also, as stupid as it will sound... How do you plug a Roland SC into a PC as they only have midi input/output. Do I need a midi card?

xenon 2 didnt pc format give that away on there mag?????? ill have to dig the mag out

This is exactly what I tried to do a few years ago but with different parts, I have an Aopen Super Socket 7 mother (can't remeber the model) with a 4xx mhz K6-III, or it was a K6-II?....mmm I don't remember now, anyways, I don't have a Voodoo 3, but I do have a few PCi Voodoo 2's I can use, for primary gfx adapter I have a geforce 4ti 4600 and many ISA sound cards, never did anything with that crap, would it work? or it will be ltoo fast for the older games?

In the dos days of 3dfx there was emulators that would let you use your hard drive as vram so 32 vam could be 64. It did not work well seeing as how slow HD could be back then. Has anyone ever try doing this with a SSD i did try doing with with my ram back in the day and that did work somewhat.

A very interesting build. I'm curious as to why the Yamaha card as opposed to an AWE64? And have you ever tried to put a Gravis Ultrasound in one of your builds?

21:17 A E S T H E T I C

you born in 1986 since you started with games from back then? if so am born in 1986 too :D oh the good old nfs games :D

Hi Phil, I got the Audician 32 Plus and the DreamBlaster S1 - they are a great combination together. The DreamBlaster S1 sounds very clean and EQ has a nice balance to it - Thanks for your reviews on them both it helped me a lot (also got a Awe64 gold on order thanks to your review! ;o). I managed to pickup a Voodoo 5500 but I am struggling to get the Windows 98SE Glide drivers to work with the original Unreal. Do you know if I need to install separate Dos drivers as well or should I try and get hold of Unreal Gold instead as it may have better compatibility? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! :O)

What is the part list

i have a sempron 3000+ and 2 gb ram running on xp what would be a good graphics card that doesent cost alot but performs well for games like gmod. i currently have a radeon 7500

That PSU is really jank. Not so much 500W as 260w....12V rail is really most of it.

would the Cyrix 5x86 processor with motherboard (socket 3 i guess) be a common find to be priced well (not insanely high)

I love these old games but the games that are exclusively PC Speaker (pre-midi) are so painfull to listen to. Is there anyway to get the tones to be more pleasing to the ear?

Hey Phil, greetings down to sunny Australia from Germany. Nice work done but I have a question: I'm running an AMD K6-2 450 on a Biostar M5ALA at 2.5x50 MHz (the jumpers say so but actually it's clocked at 152,2 says setmul) and your 486 mode suggests 133MHz with internal cache disabled and MB cache enabled. But mine struggles quite heavy, allthough it's running 17-18MHz faster than yours. Is it just that the K6-III+ is so much faster than standard K6-2? Or does the BUS speed makes that much difference? Thanks in advance for your valuable help. Thomas

So, I'm looking for the K6-III+ 400 needed for this whole thing to work, but I'm kind of concerned with the voltages involved. The MSI MS5169 motherboard I have only goes down to 2.2 volts, but the processors I'm finding are only rated 1.6 volts. Even the highest voltage for a K6-III+ is only 2.0V, but I haven't found any 400 MHz models with that voltage for sale. Have you had issues using the lower voltage chip on your board, or does that board support the lower voltage?

I'm going to have mostly the same specs, but with a sound blaster 16 instead of a yamaha with the x1 version of the wav table. what type of ram does a super socket 7 take?

how's this video card you used for those pesky VESA win 95\98 games?

Thanks for this - great space saving idea. Any specific reason to not go with a faster 3dfx card? I'm thinking of going with an ASUS P5A-B for this...do you have any experience with it and/or thoughts? Also, I'm gonna track down an LAPC-I, what would you ideally pair it with? Thanks!