I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum’s basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it’s never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.
Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn’t want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.
Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn’t have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).
So what were your favorite games from the 90’s and early 2000s?
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That sounds like a fun project, although I’d recommend XP over Me. XP has a DOS emulator, and it’s a lot easier to configure drivers for.
My favorite games from that era are Star Wars: X-Wing and Wing Commander: Privateer. Both games stood out as exceptional back then. Warcraft was also an excellent game. Command and Conquer is worth checking out too.
Edit: I’m pretty sure I played the first two games on Windows 3.2, so I’m not sure how they’ll play on Me or XP.
Edit 2: Silent Hunter is another memorable game
Did you play Squadrons? The mission briefings were still not up to X-Wing/Tie Fighter standards but the flight was 10/10.
I seem to remember having issues with XP and Dos games but if ME is too problematic I will try 98 and XP. Though if I’m going with XP I’ll be using a half built P4 PC that I have hanging around.
I was so, so hyped for Squadrons, even had a HOTAS setup on my list…then the game came out.
Everything I heard, even from people who loved it, totally turned my view of it sour, and I was so glad I didn’t sink any money into it.
Maybe someday we’ll get a SW fighter sim that delivers.
I never did play Squadrons. I joined the Army right after the X-Wing era and had a several year gap where I didn’t touch a computer at all.
Now that I think about it, if these are straight-up DOS games then you don’t need Windows at all. You can just load MS-DOS and then run the game straight from the command line. I think you’re right that XP broke a bunch of old DOS games. It’s been so long that I completely forgot we were mad at Microsoft for the removal of DOS back then and the move to an emulator only experience.
“Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory.”
Stop. PLEASE! 15 year old me in the year 2000 can only get SO erect!
Oh man that takes me back.
How much did it cost to download all that RAM?
I got it on Kazaa ;)
It’s still bonkers to me that Kazaa’s network still technically lives on in Skype, though all the Supernodes are in Azure these days rather than the original P2P setup.
Oh the memories…
LucasArts Adventures
US Navy Fighters
Unreal
StarCraft
Need For Speed 1 & 2
1600 x 1200 at 60hz is actually quite respectable today. You can still buy laptops with 1366 x 768 resolution in 2024!! 🤢🤮🤢🤮
I remember having a 1440 x 900 monitor and wondering how far we would go in 10 years…10 years later 1366 x 768 was more common and I wanted to die.
Amazing project btw, you might inspire me to do something similar.
4x is pretty common for desktop gaming these days. Laptops are hardly an indication of our gaming progress.
I have a few of those “HD” laptop’s rolling around, they are pretty horrendous (and easy to get for free). When LCDs first came out I was kinda disappointed that I was going from ~2k CRTs back to 1024x768. Even now the default is only 1920x1080 which is only 10% larger than the CRT for this PC.
My company just bought 30 new 1080p monitors for my office which can’t display our main software completely. Imagine spending thousands of dollars for tech from 20 years ago that still cuts off information for average use. I could rant for hours about resolutions…
Oh man, we have 30+ PCs in the building that are used to control big automated machines, they used to run on XP at 1024x768. When they started to fall apart I offered up the solution of using modern machines running Debian and putting the SCADA software in a virtual machine, this was rejected. They instead went with Lenovo micro-PCs and Windows 10. They then paid a programmer to manually rearrange and scale up every machine page page to fit on a 1920x1080 screen. FML.
It was around 2000 when I helped my parents build a computer from a shop in town. It was an AMD k6 with 512mb of ram and a voodoo3. I used that computer for years and years.
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Looks good. I also went from win95 to winme. I got myself a p3 running win95 and got a crt too. It’s definitely better on real hardware. Got yourself a ball mouse rather than laser?
Doom, doom2, red alert, Tyrian, warcraft, warcraft2, death rally, settlers 2, caesar 2, age of empires, Indiana Jones and his desktop adventures.
Yesssss death ralley was so good
I have an MS Trackball Optical (that I have been using since 2002). Just can’t go back to a regular push-mouse.
Tyrian is such an awesome game, I must have replayed it a dozen times!
Unreal Tournament 99 and Everquest. But those don’t even come close to needing a fraction of the hardware you procured :D
UT GOTY was one of my main reasons for this project. I played the hell out of that game!
Oh, a person of taste! :) May I recommend BunnyTrack maps? I played those a lot in the 2015 timeframe and enjoyed myself immensely.
Oh the nostalgia from seeing those icons. You should join the Microsoft Network! Crack open ICQ! Get on AOL and see if “you’ve got mail.” Heck, I may still have one of those CDs with 2500 hours on it!
I am a little tempted to see how ME handles the modern web but it seems like a good way to b0rk my setup.
Oh don’t worry, ME will bork itself just fine, haha.
ME is how I learned the work ‘kernel’ and that it can have <unknown error>
See if you can play some Phantasy Star Blue Burst on that. Also gotta try the original Marathon, you can look up and down!
Man. That sounds like a fun build.
I consider this kinda like the wild West era of computer building. There wasn’t a lot of standardization like there is now and you really have to know how to handle the software because the support wasn’t really there.
Finding 2 sticks of ram that both worked AND worked together was a slog of boot/swap/rebooting. It really is just plug and play these days.
That’s why I still have RAM pairs from every computer I’ve ever built in a box in the garage. I’ll probably never use them again, but I spent so much money on them, and it took so much research to get the right ones, that I can’t bring myself to throw them away.
Don’t connect that machine to the internet. (Not that you had plans to.)
Cool idea!
I was going to mention a few games to check out but they were all already mentioned, so I will suggest the one that wasn’t brought up, Star Crusader. Space combat game with a great story, fun game play, high replay value, and great voice acting for a game from 1994. And the ending blew my mind, still remember the moment and my shock to this day. I have my original CD and the jacket in a memorabilia box haha, one of only a handful of things I kept from those days.
