DOS Gaming PC with Athlon 64? 

I forgot how difficult it was building a custom PC back then, dealing with IRQ conflicts and boot parameters. DOOM would not load if your config.sys or autoexec.bat don't have the optimum settings. Nowadays people just concentrate on maximum RGB lighting effects. Loved that Wing Commander series.

I swear we are psychically connected, every time I imagine a build, you build it and release a video on it within the week. Very cool.

Fun fact about "Prince of Persia", the video and cpu was so low, author invented revolutionary hack to have smooth movements. pixels of charater not redraw at next frame, only changing (XOR-ing) some from the last frame... Later this technic was used in video compression (and still it's the base of all modern video compressions) but Prince was the earliest to do that

Damn I love how you show how to use cheap hardware and get it backwards compatible to run old games. You da man!

Well, that does it. I have 90% of a socket 939 Athlon 64 PC in spares, and I've been looking to get into building a reliable DOS PC. Thanks for the inspiration! :)

Love these DOS videos, thanks to you Phil I have built 15 retro gaming PCs using a mix of retro and modern parts. Your videos have been an inspiration throughout the past few years and it's always fun building retro machines. :)

Phil and MD DOS video, instant like. Have a great day Phil😁👍🏻

Awesome Phil. You da man. This is an awesome surprise of an bonus video. Much appreciated, I appreciate any and all content you make for us Phil. I am an Athlon/64 fan and I love seeing older hardware put to purpose. Thanks so much for the vid Phil, stay safe and I will catch you on the next one👍

Excellent video as always Phil! You don't always need to break the bank to enjoy some good old DOS gaming!

Awesomeness. I still have every computer I ever built. My first PC I bought used. A 486DX-25 that I later had upgraded the motherboard to a DX-33 cpu. I missed the 386 series. Still have both motherboards. I then went through many iterations. DX-100, DX2-66 and on. I had systems I multi-booted between Windows and Dos for gaming. I've been thinking of eBaying all that old stuff.

Dynamix....now that brought back memories that I had forgotten all about. Red Baron stands out particularly! Although Stellar 7 was one of the first I remember but that was back on the Apple II.

Thanks for the video! I have an old athlon 64 kicking around and now I know what needs to be done.

That racing game was called "Hard Drivin' in the Arcade here in the USA... So many memories.. and it supported multiple screens/cabinets.. I never got to play those setups, but I did see them.. :P

Great built for retro Dos game.. i prefer this machine to play all my win98 era games..pair with any ATi 9 series card.. Quake3 arena ,UT 99, Halflife , Rogue Squadron, NFS 2-3 , Blood 2, Tomb raider , Sins, Shogo MAD, ...

You're almost at 100K! Great for you it's been a long time since 2015 when i subscribed xD

Hey Phil, nice1 as always. Since I'm still parting together my 486-DX40 I went a not so modern way using an Epox EP-MVP3G5 with a K6-3 450. Though imho that itself is not that big of a deal I think the jewel in my setup is my used soundcard: The Labway D66. If I'm not mistaken it has the same soundchip as the soundcard you used but in contrary to yours it has a wavetable-header. My hope is to actually use it with my Dreamblaster X2 (it sounds just awesome).

Impressive! Thanks again for another great video!

These are my favorite videos of yours. Thanks :) For what it's worth, I often see the same scrolling problem with AGP Matrox cards. PCI S3/Cirrus cards seem to be the way to go.

My current DOS machine is an Athlon 64. Great machine, it only cost just under $1000. Of course I bought it well over a decade ago. Maybe it was two decades ago.

Another great video Phil, I had retro game nostalgia and begun with a Socket A (462) AMD trying to make DOS work, 6.22. I have yet that installation, but the only thing that I cannot make it work is audio. Omg, I became mad and I tried various audio card, but probably with my Asus motherboard Deluxe this card wasn't made to work pci sound card on Dos unfortuntaly. From that day I made a lot of tries and finally I had a Real Dos machine from 1996 with Banshee video card and a Pentium 200mmx. Games working finally and my audio card on that system was a Sound Blaster AWE64 Value, so can you understand how much I was happy. I figured out to run it on DOS (serious settings on autoexec and config) but now I have a Dos pc that make all games running, and in Glide acceleration too, thanks to 3dfx video card!

Phil, again I think I found some humor in a video of your's but I don't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. LOL! Anyway good to be back. Retro builds are so cool and it was to be my hobby for 2019 but went a little slow and I had hoped to ramp it up in 2020 but ... yeah. FInally just got to say thanks for a great video.

Oh wow, loved the intro :D

I've been playing around with PCem and I'm now pretty satisfied that the best way to capture the authentic look of DOS games is with emulation. Hardware-level emulation of a 486, S3 Virge/Voodoo and a Soundblaster16 is something that any modern computer can do perfectly. Games that came out after 2001 were optimized for Windows XP,, and backward compatibility for them works pretty reliably. But there is about a five year gap from 1996 to 2001 where games were built for Win95/98. These don't work well in modern Windows, but they require hardware that's quite hard to emulate if you want them to look good. I think that they are the primary reason why you'd want a retro-pc. Of course if you slap a decent graphics card in that AGP slot, this Sempron machine would play them perfectly! I guess that makes it a pretty versatile little thing.

Thanks Phil! Great video.

Been watching your channel for a long time man love your video keep it up 👍🏼👍🏼

Nice video!, now for the perfect DOS+Windows 98 overpowered setup, with the Solo-1 for DOS + Sound Blaster Live for Windows exclusively. It needs some serious fiddling with resources, but it works and it is amazing!

Very nice Phil you were good with your hand this time not waving much hey that is a good mother board i have one to but i put xp on mine its a original compac with same amd cpu thanks i enjoyed this post

i wish i played more dos games when i was younger, i dont really remember much about them. my parents started me out on a macintosh, didnt have my first pc til 1999...

Aww yeah, this is exactly my kind of content ♥

The funny thing is that I can usually fish old Athlon, Pentium 4, socket 775, and socket 370 systems out of the E-waste all summer. I don't know if I'll be able to do that this summer due to COVID-19 but if so I could probably get a side hustle going building and selling retro gaming PC's for Window 98 and DOS gaming.

Important note!!! Motherboard chipset a̶n̶d̶ ̶D̶D̶M̶A̶ support MATTERS when using PCI sound cards in DOS! VIA which is used here generally has good compatibility, while nForce from nVidia is useless. Also newer Intel chipsets (ICH6+ !?) dropped support during the Pentium 4 era I believe. Vogons have many threads about this and what works and not: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=24769 www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=70375 But didn't know it could work with VIA on such a recent platform, cool :-) Also didn't know about the IRQ trick on the PCI slot :-D

If you showed this PC to a guy in the 1980s, he'd call you a god.

Hello Phil! What a fantastic video showing some good stuff about VIA chipset. How about a windows98/DOS using socket 370 VIA chipset and an VIA C3 video? I have one build and I can go from 386SX33 thought Pentium 3@500 using SETMUL and a rear case switch to set the FSB to 66 or 133

On the DOS VGA question - my favorite "modern" DOS video card is another nVidia - a Riva 128, like the Asus 3DP/AGP V3000. The AGP one can give better high resolution performance (yes, even under DOS!), but unfortunately it won't fit this board as the old Riva has an AGP2x interface. Funny that the PCI version that was the "legacy" option when it came out will do just fine here.

Wolf3D (386DX-40 from AMD) is literally why I did NOT play FPS until I saw Quake 3. It gave me massive headaches Edit: Looking at that S3 Card - I was jonesing SO much for S3 Virge for so long (Tomb Raider days). All I had was a S3 Trio64 same as in this video wahahaha, no 3D = slideshow above 320x200

Woo Hoo! Bonus video! 😁

Is there a reason why you don't use throttle to slow down the pc for dos use? My main problem with my athlon64 system and dos is lack of conventional memory because I won't be able load many of the TSRs to upper memory area like optical drivers/mscdex. Mostly because such newer motherboard seems to reserve much of that area even when most things disabled in bios settings.

Phil - awesome video :) Pozdrowienia z Polski! :)

@PhilsComputerLab Wonderful build! Any other specific reasons apart from cost for going with an Athlon 64 for DOS/98 retro setup rather than a socket 370 mobo with VIA chipset.

i love DOS games. Very thanks from TURKEY. ♪

the oldest graphics card that I still have is a Trident Providia 9685, and my athlon 64 3200+ was running win7 just fine, and a Radeon HD 2600 pro

All I need now is a power supply for my Windows 98 gaming PC project. Not sure which one to get as it would need to fit inside the old Emachine case I'm using. The stock power supply it came with probably won't be enough for want I want to do.

You might agree, you might not agree, but hear me out, I personally think that if I was to use this modern of a system for dos gaming, I would just use my modern pc, since to me, owning a 486 or a Pentium for retro games gives the authentic feel, just like if you were in the 90s right now. Nevertheless, enjoyed the video. Rock on Phil!

Thats the cleanest Athlon 64 I've seen in a long time :D EDIT: BTW, there is something wrong with the scrolling in Gods.

CRT is the best for retro games

Test Klliser x79 M3 it cost 53usd, sata3 usb3.0 m.2 nvme in small matx standard 242*179mm. They can fit in Jonsbo C2 case so can by nice base for cheap small gaming pc.

Love seeing #IDE cables...

Why was everything recorded with a 16x9 aspect ratio? All these games were 4x3 and the stretch makes things look very weird.

GREAT video

I should play around with my old Phenom II X6 that I still have lying in my cellar incl. board and cooler but not much else. Windows 98 had problems because the RAM modules being 2GB but might work for pure DOS. Maybe Memory Hole at 15-16 MB will reduce the RAM to 15MB like it does with my Pentium 233 MMX having 256MB. Under DOS only a max 64MB is actually used but is too much for some games.

Cool video

Really like the Terratec Sound Card details and how to configure it to serve the place of a Sound Blaster Pro. Especially the IRQ tips. I'm getting very interested in 'Classic' era Sound cards. Many people don't seem to understand Sound Card evolution or history, or how the alternatives like Turtle Beach, Onkyo or M-Audio compare. I do have more interested in ancient NTSC/PAL Video and Sound capture.. but you have to understand how a Sound Card was conceived to work to get to Line Levels and Channels. MIDI, Roland and Game port evolution might be of some interest to other people. Are you strictly a Keyboard or Joystick or Flight Controller style DOS gamer?

You just got another subscriber

Do a video on a Number Nine pepper pro ISA graphics card if you can find one. Number Nine ISA graphics cards are difficult to find.

Interesting video, i have old motherboard with 128mb SDRAM and 1200mhz Celeron-256, with no agp slot, but i have some video cards like a ET6000, maybe i can build a retro DOS machine)

I was testing different cards under DOS for high resolution and high frame rate between a S3 virge stealth 2000, ATI Rage II and Nvidia TNT II m64 and found the TNT II m64 can run high frame rates at 800 x 600 ( Duke Nukem 3D/ Descent 1 and 2) - 1024 x 768 ( mech warrior 2 ) on a PII 233mhz slot one with fast vid.

I have the amd antholn 215 ,sam someone recomend me a decent gpu?

What i am wondering is, would it be possible to use a graphics card in the AGP slot with DVI output in the DOS environment? And what would be the result in regards of capturing the video output if it works? I think that would be really interesting for capturing old DOS games, because VGA/70Hz/LowRes is always a problem. Almost no capture device, even if it says "supports VGA", does not capture the classic gaming modes of VGA (320*200, 320*240) correctly. Maybe an idea for another short video?

Hmm.... now I really want to do this build in an In Win A500.

An Athlon 64 doesn't have to be to slow for XP gaming, I have an X2 4200+ running at 2.76GHz. It runs Farcry really good, and it even does a decent job running newer games like Fallout New Vegas! If I want to play anything newer than that those games usually runs fine on Win 10, so you can play those on your main PC. But after watching this I might have to try running DOS on it to, even if I alreade have two 486 and two pentium systems already. More DOS is good DOS :)

100k soon

Socket 754 is interesting and parts are still quite cheap. Maybe you could do a follow up on these with Socket 754 Turion 64 (ML or MT) cpus? Do they offer maybe any benefits for retro gaming like can those mobile processors be made even slower than their desktop counterparts? Many desktop 754 motherboards support Turion CPUs, only the heatsink might need adapting because Turions don't have the heat spreader and are thus a bit lower.

I can find all sorts of CF to IDE slot adapters, and SD to IDE that dangle loose from the end of the cable (I have a couple of those, work great but a nuisance to keep from contacting metal), but could not find a slot-mounted adapter like the one shown at 3:26.... source? Thanks!

Hi Phil, Is there any chance you might to an Atom 330 build? Perhaps with an Ion graphics? There are a number of cheap Ion systems out there for very little and I am not sure if Win 98 or earlier would be any good?

Awesome video !! Already tried that years ago thanks to A64LOWP by Falcosoft working under DOS (maybe you know this software, nonetheless I suggest you try it. It works also with AMD Geode and Athlon XP Mobile but not with the KT133/KT133A chipsets) but it's nice to share it and popularize, vulgarize for the ones who didn't know it could be possible to use differently the Athlon64

I rmember having same soundcard and motherboard but with a celeron D 315 256k cache very slow processor with 80gb ide hdd witha combo cdrw dvdrw drive as well as 256mb sd ddr ram with the integrated graphics

Great video as always Phil. The bit about graphics card got me thinking. What is the latest graphics card that support dos graphics modes like vga or ega do you reckon? Can a period accurate GeForce (4? Fx?) for Athlon 64 play dos games I wonder.

Would you know if this can run Magic Carpet playably in 640x480, or would it be too slow/fast?

hmm i always wonder why some vga chips on video cards can't do smooth scrolling in dos games that use adaptive tile refresh, it seems alot of via and ati graphics cards have these issues along with other video cards.

Interesting to see just how much faster the S939s are in pushing frames in DOS. What's hilarious though is that not even these overpowered CPUs can deliver 60 frames at the max resolution in software Quake! Doom also scores way lower on newer GPUs. Here were some results I recorded on my A64 4000+ 2.4ghz in DOS on an FX5900 Ultra: Quake: 300x200 - 223.1 FPS 640x480 - 85.1 FPS 800x600 - 57.9 FPS 1024x768 - 40.5 FPS 1280x1024 - 41.9 FPS not sure why but this is consistently higher than the lower resolution PCPBench: 320x200 - 269.5 FPS 640x480 - 95.6 FPS ( terrible flickering occurs) ChrisBench: 320x200 - 267.6 FPS 640x480 - 294.8 FPS ... weird but I consistently got higher FPS on the higher resolution with both GPUs. Doom - 72.86 FPS TopBench - 291 Build Engine was very choppy and slow on both the FX5900 and ti4200. I had to drop to a Geforce 3 to get it to run smooth. With WC (MTRRLFBE or FASTVID) enabled on the Geforce 3. Blood: 320x200= 274FPS 640x480= ~60FPS 800x600 = 4FPS ... LIES, feels exactly the same as 640x480. 1024x768 = 24FPS ... more lies.. see above. 1280x1024 = 15FPS ... also lies but certain areas where it dips to 7FPS it feels like it is ~15. 1600x1200 = Locked 50 FPS, totally smooth Duke3D @ 1600 x 1200 = 59/60FPS locked... perfectly smooth. The 4000+ can downclock to 723mhz (180FSB x 4) which is perfect because Outcast in Windows 98 gets cranky above 800mhz and some other games don't like 1ghz+ either, believe it or not.

Have you found a good solution for KVM?, I have around 4 machines I would like to use on and off and but the hassle connecting and disconnecting or the space to have them all at once makes it unpractical.

what is that racing game shown at the 15-minute mark?

hi! would you recommend an ATI Rage XL 8mb over the S3 Virge?

Awesome video! You talked about the likelihood of this hardware lasting longer. I have multiple boards from the mid 2000s (mostly MSI, socket 939 and 754) that already have capacitors that need to be replaced while basically all my Hardware from the 90s is still fine. In general, how do you deal with 386/486 boards and capacitors? Do you make regular visual checks or do you replace them as a precaution at some point? I am always a little bit afraid that I will miss when they show visual signs of age and that they blow and take the mainboard with them.

I haven't a clue what most of this stuff is about but instantly went back to my Amiga days when I saw Gods!! 😊😊😊

Hope you can show us some multiplayer dos, win98 setup soon. Like doom in multiplayer:)

How do you run Lotus 3 ?

one benefit i found with starter also is theres better glide emulation options available on 7 starter than in xp

Would this work for windows 95 era games too? Ones that were made for probably pentium 2?

I prefer 440BX and some Pentium3/Celeron, preferably Tualatin, for DOS gaming and real ISA sound cards

On aliexpress theres mx-4 thermal paste I want to buy it from there because thermal paste is expensive were I live but I am afraid that the thermal paste will turn out to be a chineese rip off thermal paste so do is it legit?

Sir, PLEASE MAKE A VIDEO ON xeon E5-2650L v3

Nice one Phil, or you could just use your "killer" 98se machine to run "Dos Box", like I do, lol.

You had ps/2 keyb and mouse or did you have custom usb drivers for dos? I’ve had lots of problems with these.

Hey Phil, I’ve been trying to decide on what CPU/Platform to build a MS-DOS PC on. My 2 main candidates came down to socket 478 pentium 4s and socket 754 or 939 Athlon 64s but I haven’t had much experience with Athlon 64 (yet). From your experience which CPU would be a better choice? Oh and may I suggest you make a video on MS-DOS on a Pentium 4 because I think many people including me would be interested in that video/topic. Have a nice day and hope you see my comment.

Phil i found an older operating system that seems to run all the game windows xp can run , i installed windows 7 starter on a system and so far i'm able to get those few game i could not run on 64 bit operating systems with xp era games to run on starter 32bit windows 7. if you want some content to test id love to see your results with windows 7 starter vs the older operating systems

How about Dune II?

I was never able to run one pci card in DOS before, I will try again some day... Someone even gave me an old isa creative sound card (is not even a soundblaster, I don't remember the model) but I couldn't make it run either, I have few motherboards with isa slots and none are good. Although I used msdos as a child, I am more of the era of windows 95 and 98 my knowledge of msdos is very limited. However I think the msdos game era from 1992/93 to 1996/97 was a golden era and I regret not having conserved my hardware from that time.

2 days ago I started playing Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis again- I told myself I would never play this game again. 26 years ago in 1994 I got a 486 computer and bought this game. I was in my 2nd year of university and played this game for 2 weeks solid. I was obsessed. It costs me a lot- low grades on essays and affected my overall degree class. But, playing it again, at almost 50 years of age, I can't help by being obsessed by it again. I managed to get it running on a SS7 board with an AMD K6-2 233Mhz. It's so difficult to get the sound working right in this game. Thanks Phil, for inspiring me to return to one of the best games ever made.

Thank you for the video Phil! It's always nice to see these alternative builds for retro gaming. I have a couple of questions if anyone can help. - This video is based around an Athlon 64-era system, but is a similar thing achievable with an Athlon XP? I have an Athlon XP 2600+ (Thoroughbred-B). - As far as I know, DOS compatibility (specifically sound cards) is bad with nForce 2 motherboards - is this still the case? The motherboard I have is a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro 2 (rev 2.0) which uses the nForce 2 Ultra 400 chipset. If I were to consider using my Athlon XP for a DOS retro gaming build, should I just look towards buying a different motherboard with a VIA chipset? Or would it be worth looking to angle towards a Windows 98 build instead? - The video card I have available on hand is a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee (specifically a Skywell Magic TwinPower PCI) - what's DOS support like for this chipset? It's basically a Voodoo2 with a single TMU instead of dual TMUs, and built-in 2D acceleration where the Voodoo2 required a separate 2D card.

ohhhh those memories............ currently getting all parts together for oldschool gaming - would i be able to play latest win 9x games smoothly with Celeron D, asrock 775i65g + 2x512mb ddr ram+geforce 7600GT 256mb ddr3?

Why testing very old games is not from the era of the processor ?!

Does the gameport work in this setup?

does msi boards have hidden features ?

BONUS!

I don’t mean to be snarky but how is this better than simply running DOS Box 0.74 on basically any PC these days? I still play Master of Orion 2 this way sometimes. On a 9900K god pc.

lols im still running on AMD k6 2 3D Main board on ASUS P5 4GB Ram with 3dfx Voodoo 3000. but on windows XP lols

G'day Phil single or dual core? I recently put DOS on my old K6-2 system and it works great. As to Athlon 64 would you recommend a single core over a dual?

Increase the system RAM latency could drop your speed even further for older games.

Hi Phil. I can't remember if simple usb joysticks work with DOS games. I assume I need some driver???