Yeah knowing what is and isn't compatible with operating systems is genuinely guru level knowledge that is lost art among most people. Win 98 support is surprisingly robust for platforms that existed years after it lost relevancy. I have a lot of AM2 athlons lying around and a bunch of AM2 AM3 motherboards. In fact I'm thinking of turning one into a semperon server and the other into retro PC. 5:03
i'm glad some people are keeping this stuff alive. i spend my energy restoring old tvs and stereo equipment, so i don't really have the bandwidth for a retro pc equipment hobby as well. i just use dosbox lol 😅
I'm happy with my pile of assorted Slot 1 stuff (and a janky HP 486 pizza box), but more people having access to the hobby is always a good thing in my books. Keep it up Phil!
Thank you for all the resources in the description! I don't need to build another retro machine but now I am strongly considering it lol Great job on the video!
Being able to use a new modern cpu cooler is a must. Had so many retro PC moments ruined by small fans with ruined ball bearings making completely awfull noise.
I tried building with a Radeon 9200 pci and it worked fine under windows 98 but once I tried dos I got weird artifacting. It may have been my scaler solution but switching to a GeForce FX 5200 fixed all the issues I was having. (Probably picked up the fx because you recommend it) I did not know about the dvi locked at 60hz I will need to look into that. Always picking up awesome info from your videos.
Thanks Phil for the bonus video! Availability of working 754 boards is a challenge in the US often times, but 939 boards can be had reasonably. Socket 939 CPUs are more readily available on places like eBay, too.
Running a 939 board in single channel memory mode pretty much turns it into a 754. There are also several K8M800-based AM2 boards, with these you can go full double/triple boot with no drawbacks. I would also suggest using the IGP for DOS/Win9x as it is S3 Savage-based which means remarkable compatibility and outstanding picture quality.
I tried Via 939 platform years ago, and if i remember right there were issues with drivers under win98 or some other incompatibilities, it ended up being a no-go for me.
Back in 2010 I've build AMD machine with Phenom II X4 on ASRock MB with ATI Radeon HD 3870 AGP graphic card with 2x2GB DDR 2 Kingstone HyperX 1066 sticks of RAM. Crunching every game, even 'Far Cry' or 'Crysis' in Full HD (1080p). That was cool PC... ;-)
Cool setup and video ! As for a MS-Dos/windows 98 setup I built a Pentium4 machine with an Asrock 775i65G (rev3), 512mb of ram, a 40gb Maxtor, a Diamond vortex2 and 6800 gt. So far it runs really well (only tested duke nukem 3d and little big adventure 2 at the moment).
I really appreciate your knowledge and reccommendations Phil, i like how you think "out of the Box" and come up with great solutions, and uses for aging hardware.
Talk about coincidences, I just finished a 98/DOS build with a Biostar socket A and an Athalon 2400. It's a via266 chipset without sata but I'm drowning in ide drives anyway... I'm literally setting up autoconfig for DOS as I type! Great video as always. Just so you know, your downloads are a godsend for getting these old cheap boards going. Thanks for all you do!
I have a similar system with an Athlon XP CPU and a similar Radeon you had recommended in a video years back. It's a great dual-purpose rig, allowing nice, high res titles in Windows '98, but it also has decent enough DOS compatibility as well. As you mentioned near the end of this video, I agree that you definitely want as much CPU power as you can for later DOS games that support higher resolutions. I still love playing the original Quake in software mode, for instance. At 1024x768, my system still manages a flawless 60fps. Paired with a CRT, it's a great experience!
This makes me super happy, somebody just dropped a pc with very similar specs on my doorsteps a few weeks ago, so I got Win98 set up and running beautifully!
The retro hardware piece that I value most and still own is the Roland SCC-1 ISA card that I got back in the 90's. I could not live without it for retro PC gaming so I am stuck with old motherboards that still have ISA bus :)
Great video Phil. Nice to see some new videos. AND, in all of these years I do not believe I have ever seen your face! Now I know you have just as much hair as I do! Keep up the great work!
I just love the fact that you can Supply these Athlons 64 with the new PSUs, instead of going only for those PSUs that have 30A on 5V Line (IIRC, could be less, could be more) that are needed for Athlon XPs and such. Such as saviour in that regard!
Later Socket 462 motherboards started to include P4 power connectors for 12v CPU power. Because even back then, the engineers knew trying to pull 89W+ from the 5v rail was untenable. I had several Socket 462 boards with P4 power connectors, mostly from MSI. The KT4A-V was one, and the KT880 Delta was another. Both motherboards supported almost every Socket 462 CPU that existed at the time. I still have my KT880 Delta, it was a great board in age of the capacitor plague. I never had a single issue with it having failed capacitors.
I use a PIII-S SL6BY on an asus TUV4X board with a Ti4600 or Voodoo 5500 and a Soundblaster live. It uses a VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset, and has pretty good late dos game compatibility, windows 98, and also Win2k/XP.
You mentioned retro gaming on Windows XP, and I was like "Nah that is too new..." Then I looked at the years and I am a bit shocked to see that it is becoming relevant again in this context.
Great video Phil - I'm looking forward to the next one! Just so you know (maybe you're aware already, but in any case) it looks like your website might be experiencing some issues at the moment. When I tried to visit it today I found I only got a blank white browser page. Hopefully it's just me/my browser and not a broader problem with the website. Hopefully it'll be back up and running soon. It's a fantastic resource - thanks for maintaining it!
Love Athlon 64s. My DOS/Windows 98 system is built around an Abit UL8 (Socket 939), which has a ULi chipset. Works great and Nvidia even still host the drivers on their website. Complete overkill of course and Socket 754 stuff tends to be cheaper all-round, but I picked it up cheap on Ebay and had always wanted an Abit motherboard.
I ended up doing the exact same thing. By the time I wanted to build a retro PC the parts were too expensive so I picked mine up from the dump. It was someone's well taken care of old business PC. And personally I ran with the idea of having a windows 98/DOS super computer. Restricts the DOS end a bit, but there are plenty of games that run just fine even with the way too fast CPU. And I am amazed at how much better some of my old 3d favorites in windows run having all of that CPU power behind them, like the original Max Payne.
back 22 years ago , (2001) my dream machine:-. Pentium III_ 1.4ghz 128mb sdram ATI Radeon 9000 pro Aureal Vortex 2 sound Run SystemShock 2 to buttery smooth..
Thanks a million for the Super Easy pack, it really did help get DOS running for me. If I didn't already have a Slot A system (my grandpa's old PC actually) then this would certainly be the direction I'd go.
One thing to be vary of with that this platform is that it was still largely from the era of "capacitor plague". So, important to check for bulging electrolytic capacitors before buying (unless one has the tools and skills to replace them.)
I've been having fun playing around with a Via C7 based embedded system for windows 98/dos stuff it's been an interesting journey. Trying to find extremely small DDR2 dimms tho is a challenge.
I recently picked up a Mac mini G4 so I could play a lot of these without worrying about Voodos or sound blasters to be honest. It runs Mac OS 9 native and though some stuff doesn’t run native I can use virtual pc and vMac for the really old stuff like Dark Castle on the power Mac.
Thank you for the video. I currently revived my old QDI-Legend V mainboard (intel 44LX) with an old ISA Soundblaster 16. I was very happy that I kept these parts, as the prices for pentium II and pentium III mainboards already includes "collectors tax". I was running some older games also on an AthlonXP 2500+ with a terratec ESS-Solo-1 as it was cheap to get in the past. Currently K7 Mainboards are also very easy to get and maybe an alternative to the newer AMD Athlon64.
Heh, I had no idea that heatsink sizes have stayed the same all the way through Ryzen. And that's the one drawback to a Socket 775 build - Intel changed from 72mm to 75mm hole spacing starting with LGA 1156 sockets, so socket 775 heatsinks are limited to socket 775 heatsinks.
@@philscomputerlab Yeah they're still out there, just that most (if not new old stock OEM which are becoming increasingly hard to find) are at least 2x as expensive as a cooler for a more modern socket. Then there's also the issue of 2 mounting types - one is a screw-type that screws into a plate under the holes, and the other just snaps in - and the snap-in coolers are generally too short to fit most boards designed for the screw-in type. And you'd think that the 3mm spacing difference would be small enough that you could force fit say an 1155 cooler - NOPE.
I was given an old Packard Bell for a colleague at work. It needed some capacitors, and the original hard drive quickly died, but to my delight is was an AGP board. It was an early-ish Pentium 4 socket 478 and came with XP, but good for Windows 98. I haven't got the original drivers now, but with some digging, and your website, I managed to get drivers for everything except the onboard sound card. This is specific to the Packard Bell version of the Gigabyte board but it's not an issue as I wanted to use a Sound Blaster Live anyway. There's an FX 5500 in there, again, drivers thanks to you, and 98 is just fine. I've not tried DOS as yet, but what could possibly go wrong..... right? Thanks for your resources!
It's like you're describing my retro PC! A socket 754 Sempron, VIA chipset, an IDE optical drive and a SB Live (Platinum 5.1). Besides an odd problem with the music in Wolfenstein 3D, and Megarace running too fast, it handles everything I could possibly want to play, perfectly.
Athlon 64's are still my favorite retro PC platform, I love my Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 build and its the only retro PC I actively use and need. Couple of tips for compatibility, if you go with a VIA Motherboard those support the PCI cards very well, mine is paired with an ESS Solo-1 also featured on this channel and it has excellent dos compatibility. Pair that with a tool like CPUSPD to slow the CPU down when you need and you get a very wide range of DOS compatibility all the way back to the 80's. For Windows you can then put something like a Geforce 4200 in and have great Windows 98 compatibility as well, but in mine I went with the 6800GT + Voodoo 2 combination instead. That is still highly compatible in Windows 98 but I do need to lean on the Voodoo 2 a bit to get all the games to work. But it has the benefit that you unlock that 2005 Windows XP era where you can now play stuff like Half-Life 2 in all its glory and even Crysis 1 works on the machine.
Seeing that Gigabyte board reminds me sad memories: I got TWO of these bricked by a faulty RAM stick. 😭 Acquired a similar Asus K8V-MX later and still is my main Win98SE rig (with SB Live! and Radeon 9600 Pro). BTW Phil, what about Socket 370 builds? Many of them have at least one ISA slot, providing even better DOS sound card compatibility; Coppermine P3 should be fast enough for 640x480 VESA resolution and are much cheaper than Tualatin P3. The only problem might be availability; not sure if they can be acquired easily without breaking the bank nowadays, although I got mine (Gigabyte GA-6VXC7-4X-P + P3-600) for just US$30.
hey phil, thank you again, everybody loves your videos, me too! to cope with some difficulties in life right now, I did get a retro hardware haul, right now i am using an iBase mb800h mainboard with a pentium 4 2.4ghz, a geforce 4 (i like it, had no issues so far in dos gaming!?, so i do not understand why it is not recommended) and i use a really shabby isa sound card, avance logic als+, and i love the sound! its such a great dos experiance, with your dos mode super easy I did add norton commander to the autoexec and start in a graphic menu, really comfortable to use! I did never hear you mention Norton Commander, for me back in die day (i think i was about 10 years+ old) NC was the way to go! a shame i had no longer time for good old dos, windows 95 did conquer my computer very soon. so, i love p4 for dos, but only with the right mainboard, ISA slots are a must have for me. i have two other projects to complete, the ibase board is my second dos retro machine, my first and formost dos machine is an celeron a on an asus mel-m mainboard, socket 370. with a soundblaster awe 32. good times! its a really nice hobbie, and i feel like going back in my lifetime :D ty mate, keep up the good work!
It is a really fun hobby and good to hear it's helping you a little with whatever you're dealing with. I do know NC but never used it back in the day. Have you heard of VC? Vulkrov commander I think. Very similar in many ways. P4 is awesome 😎
@@philscomputerlab hey ty for your reply! no, i´ve never heard of it, I will check it out for sure! maybe you have another lead for me, as kid I did you a progam called "dos menu" - you could program your own directory trees and what not, to start programs and games from a grafical menu. i can not find any good results, maybe you know it?? anyway, thank you again and best regards from bavaria in germany!
I would say period correct, if you have the place for more retro pcs. A retro enthusiast would always build more Retro PCs. For Windows XP, I plan to build a Socket 939 AGP NForce3 system with an AMD Opteron 180 Dual-Core CPU. PCI Express is too new for me. 😀
I was a PC gamer since the early 90s. Back in those days PC gaming wasn't the seamless experience it is now, you had to mess around with config files to allocate more memory, know the IRQ, DMA settings of your soundcard and know the idiosyncrasies of DOS so you could create different boot settings dependent upon the game you wanted to play. I miss those days 😢
I've got a coble of Sound Blaster Live cards, and I've had a problem FM synth emulation on these cards ...it just sounds wrong! However with these cards what I like is the agility to load soundfonts up to 63 - 64Mb , makes a huge difference over the stick 4Mb soundfont. Loading a larger soundfont like weeds sounds awesome , and the card will use that soundfont when booted into pure DOS.😊
I bought that board when you showed it in the channel for the first time years ago, really nice platform indeed but, I would say, for Win98 and early XP only. For an overkill DOS i would say a P4 with one of those mainboards supporting sblink, which are really affordable, is much more recommended.
Hah, looked at the title and saw the thumbnail with this dude holding a 754 board and grinning. I run a 754 system for my Windows ME system but never thought about using it for DOS.
My go-to DOS machine is still a mid 90's toshiba laptop (the chunky gray ones) with a P1 or P2 cpu. those often come equipped with an OPL3 sound chip and a decent 2d windows accelerator chip. :) the -CDT models often have decent screens.
P1 and P2 are actually quite different for DOS gaming. P1 you can slow down and run older speed sensitive games nicely. P2 is better for demanding 3D games.
@@philscomputerlab True. I do use setmul to disable cache on my P2 computers to run speed sensitive games. My 4030CDT (PII-300) is setup as a DOS machine in that manner. the graphics chip on it even has Win 3.1 drivers. it can cover a surprising range of DOS games with just a quick utility. :)
I think we're gonna see a shortage of 754 and 755 sockets shortly soon on ebay, I figure LMAO. Good video Phil, I picked up a Gigabyte 8S661FXM-755 last year to verify some cards I was gonna throw over on ebay but found it's actually quite a solid performer in Windows98 and DOS tasks respectively too. Back then I'm pretty sure you'd want to gravitate towards Nvidia's Nforce chips, but these SiS ones aren't at all bad for the task at hand with 98SE. You could definitely make these components work flawlessly if you don't care about getting age-specific components. There's some fast single-core processors here for sure. All the same, it's probably best to be prepared and buy replacement caps because...yeah, these motherboards are all from /that/ period.
Always fun to watch, even if I won't go back to playing like I did in my early, very early, teens. DOS Box with MT32/SC is just perfect for me today. I credit my game playing on our old 80286 and later our 486 for being in IT, because getting the right amount of memory, getting sound, etc all working was a lot of art vs science (or so it felt as a kid) and I still enjoy it 30+ years later...
Due to traveling abroad I left my old machine (Compaq Deskpro Pentuim3 with its CRT) I only ever changed the harddisk.... was corrupted by Windows Millenium then I installed windows 2000 Never knew there would be a demand for these back in 2009 Well as you showed we can build an eco-friendly more efficient machine nowadays or just emulate with dosBox Staging like the previous one!
I started with this motherboard for my first win98 pc build with sempron 1.6 GHz. Now my win98 pc is on Asus CUV4X socket 370 with Pentium III 1 GHz. Actually Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M i have in Win2000 pc with Athlon64 2.2 GHz.
It's still in beta, not a lot of AC'97 or HDA chipsets have been tested yet and there is confirmed count that alot of other computers aren't working with Sbemu.
@Explorer yes, it is beta! I have had various successes and failures on the PCs I have tested so far. But when it works, it can often work very well 😀 It's worth a shot. It doesn't cost anything to try 😉
Another great video Phil. Maybe think about doing a video on laptops for DOS gaming. I've found ThinkPad R5x or T4x are great Windows 98 machines which support sound blaster emulation in a DOS window. Games like Doom work great. I must try some of the games you mentioned in this video.
I’ve personally switched to using old MacBook Pros for retro gaming. Probably won’t work for DOS era but for XP it works fine. You can get for example a 2009 MBP with Windows XP that will run most games fine. If you get the model with 9600GT M instead of 9400 M combined with the C2D CPU you have enough performance for most games. Unibody Macs are getting very cheap these days. You can get many under 100 bucks and because of the great build quality many remain in great condition. Unlike newer macs you can also put an SSD and upgrade the RAM and it is very easily done. With a cheap adapter you can get VGA out to connect to a CRT and unlike a big tower PC they can be easily stored away when you don’t need it. 2008-10 MBP officially support XP while with 2011-12 models you can run W7 which works with most XP games. Might be a way to get XP working as well but you don’t really need a quad core and GTX 650M for games old enough to not work with W7.
Heh, this is actually very similar to a retro PC build that I tried a few years ago. I combined my old Athlon 64 3200+ with a second-hand EPoX VIA-based motherboard, a SoundBlaster Live! 5.1, my old GeForce 6600 GT as well as a Voodoo 3 graphics card. I was having trouble getting Windows 98 to work well though; especially the USB mouse wouldn't work for some reason, which made installing drivers and software quite tricky. I should try with a PS/2 mouse but I don't have one at hand. DOS compatibility was also merely so-so; some games had graphical issues like Commander Keen in this video, and Ad-Lib didn't sound quite right to me. It felt to me like this hardware was just a bit too new to make for a successful retro PC. Watching this video makes me want to try again though, and perhaps I should give FreeDOS a shot instead of the dated original OS'es.
My friend has a Pentium 4 tower that has not been used for years. I may have to ask her to borrow it. I spent 2 years upgrading it in the 2010's with more memory, faster processor and graphics card until she gave up using it as her daily computer and bought a more modern i7 laptop.
A socket 939 opteron makes for a great XP system Though dual core may cause trouble for some older games and there are very few xp era games that can use multiple cores. My current dos system of choice is a Windows 98 laptop. There are many choices from low pentiums to quick p3s. Dos sound support on late 90s and early 2000s laptops is likely to be very poor but fine in Windows if you can find drivers on the modern internet. mid 90s systems might even have a real opl3 and are great for early 90s and late 80s games
My dos system has a Athlon thunderbird, a Radeon 7200 (though I have other cards that can work) and a SB Live! value. This pc works both in dos and win98 just fine for my needs
Cool video with some great recommendations, imo. I actually dumped Intel after the PIII and went with AMD for the Athlon Thunderbird, and Athlon64 eras, and I believe I even went up to the Phenom X4 as well, before returning to Intel with the i7 970. I actually ran the Gigabyte GA-K8V Ultra back in era, with an Athlon64 3800+, with I "think" it was a BFG GeForce 6800 GT at the time, a SoundBlaster Live, and I think it was 1GB RAM at that time as well, maybe 2GB. In any case, never used it for DOS games at that time, of course, but it was a great system for Windows XP, during my WoW years. 😄
The amount of options is always a great thing. I've had an Acer PIII 733 machine that has served me well over the years, and aside from giving it a new case circa 2004 and and SSD a few years ago I haven't really found a need to upgrade it. I am also using a Sound Blaster Live, though I think it's one of those Dell OEM ones that's even more picky. Thinking about replacing it with a Yamaha XG era card -- or if I can find one of those cheaper ones that use Yamaha's chips!
I know some DOS games support hardware 3d acceleration via 3dfx voodoo cards although with faster CPU speeds there can be detection issues and crashing, may be worth throwing on in.
Hey Phil, great video! I have a similar build of an AMD 64 3000+ on an SiS chipset., With 1024MB of ram, a Radeon 9550 (great tip about using the VGA port for high refresh btw). I'm using 2 soundcards, a Yamaha YMF, and a Soundblaster X-Fi. I'm dual booting Win98 SE and Win Vista. I've got the Yamaha card enabled in Win98, and the Soundblaster card enabled in Vista. I run DOS games in Win98 - I've found problems with DOS games running in pure DOS with the Yamaha card not supporting wavetable sound on the board.
@@philscomputerlab it is very good FM on that card! I have 2 of those cards thanks to a very early video of yours on the Audician 32 boards having that Yamaha chipset. The wavetable is AMAZING! One of the best sounding cards I have had with native GM synth! My only complaint with them was having FM only in pure DOS games , like most Apogee titles and Duke3d! Unless there is a driver you know about, I can not get Duke 3D to recognise that cards wavetable capabilities in DOS. Doom is fine however! I know this card has a true opl3 chipset on board, but when the wavetable on the card is so good, I want to use it! Personally when it comes to FM synth I can't shut up about how well ESS cards do it on a single chip
Interesting video, like! The frequency and FSB of the CPU can be lowered and also the cache can be disabled to get a performance similar to the ones from that period.
My retro setup: ‒ Siemens Mainboard D990 ‒ Intel Pentium 150MHz ‒ 48 MB RAM ‒ 40 GB HDD ‒ Windows 98 SE ‒ ESS Audiodrive es1868f ISA sound card ‒ Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC (PCI LAN card) ‒ 125W power supply ‒ A:\ floppy ‒ B:\ floppy ‒ DVD drive ‒ removable HDD rack (empty) My sweet retro period is the mid-late 90's. 🙂
To anyone that wants to get into retro PC gaming, but can't afford the expensive stuff I will say the following: Just start off with a budget setup like this and eventually this stuff kinda just falls into your lap. You don't have to spend ludicrous amounts of money to get more "authentic" hardware. It will come. Keep an eye out for deals on Facebook Marketplace, Offerup, Craigslist, etc. You'll run into stuff like this eventually that people had stowed in an attic and don't know what they have. Last year I picked up a Super Socket 7 motherboard for $10 from a former collector. He was just selling off all his old stuff cheap for "reasons" I guess. You just kinda run into weird circumstances like this. They'll sell whole machines that are ideal for DOS gaming for less than $50 in many cases. Don't expect to find an IBM 5150 or anything, but you will find opportunities. If you last long enough, you'll run into the opposite problem. You'll find you have too much hardware sitting around, and you won't know what to do with it all.
MSI's boards from the time seem to be good for DOS and Win98 PC (at least their KT600 or KT800 boards). Their implementation of SATA on at least the KT6V works well under 98 - no driver is needed for the controller to install to and boot from HDD on it unlike under XP. Even PS/2 hot plug works (at least with my AT keyboard using an adapter). Went for the extra cost of a proper Solo-1 (not the 1e) for my mum's retro PC while retaining the Live Value! for my own PC - her old Casio Keyboard would work with and sound better through the Solo then the Live (plus Magic Boy has working sound with the Solo).
The only 754 I have comes with integrated Nvidia MCP61 graphics with a Pcie slot, but has no improvement by adding one given the CPU speed limitations. The added benefit is being able to run Linux and streaming some lower resolution video. The downside is the Alsa drivers are not spdif functional with the chipset. So analog only. If I use Emachine Xp, it all works. Windows 7 64bit would also work. The dual thread Pentium 4 (775 Dell) I have, also does a nice job aside from the higher TDP, but that was stock with XP. If would be nice if 64 bit W7 had a 32 bit shell.
Love these vids. I want a period-correct machine, but this would be a much better starting point. - I just got a expansion-card to put in a Sony PVM - that gives it a VGA input. I think there is going to be quite a bit of trial and error to find a compatible graphics card.
