Assembling a Pentium 75 Computer to run Old Games

A

alxsml

Spaceman
Thread originally started from the WC3 Digital/music card startup problem... thought that this could be informative for anyone who is crazy enough to do what im trying to do ... plus might attract more help towards my cause .... and i know i need all the help i can get!!

Allright my friends! I have gone off the deep end and am actually considering assembling a Pentium 75 computer (the things people do for a game!). I sorta know my way around computers innards ... but something tells me i'm gonna be learning a lot more in the near future! For anyone who would like to help me set this up, any input would be greatly appreciated!

6816828603 is the ebay item number for the motherboard I got. Basically its a 75 Mhz motherboard with 64 MB ram... onboard video- S3 Trio 64 SVGA card and 1 MB of onboard SVGA video memory.... and plenty of open PCI and ISA slots. And i have an SB 16 sound card on the way.

Now if I am right ... i need a power supply ... a hard drive .... a CD-ROM drive ... an operating system and a case to hold it all together right? Am i missing anything? Would i need a floppy drive?

Anyway ... if you guys could tell me specific keywords to search for on ebay for each of those items (and anymore things i'd need), i couldn't tell you how happy I'd be!!
 
You might want to opt for a better PCI VGA-card, such as a tseng labs 6000 or NVidia RIVA 128, with 4 megabytes.

As for the floppy drive, you might want to use boot disks to play the individual games.wing commander 1 and 2 need EMS, while 3 and 4 use XMS or even their own memory manager.
 
Make sure you find the dos drivers for your video and sound, and have fun getting them working and put into your autoexec.bat and config.sys. I've been working on computers for a *long* time, and I can safely say that there is a reason why operating systems have gone the direction they have since the DOS days, what with plug-and-play and centralized driver repositories and GUIs.

As much fun as I would have had building an older machine (and fun I did have), the cost and the frustration will eat you up over time. Better to just use DOSbox.
 
A Pentium 75 is good for WC3 if you have 64 megs of ram, but a slightly faster computer wouldn't hurt. Definitely don't need more than one meg of video ram for WC3. There probably aren't any DOS video card drivers either, but sound and CD-ROM will need them.
 
I found a nice ATX motherboard with 2 ISA and like 3 PCI and 1 AGP 2.0 slot, and then came accross a pentium 166 chip, got 512,megs PC 100 mem(runs at 66mhz with a pent 166), got some old piece of crap PCI 1meg SVGA card and an ISA soundcard from creative(16bit) and it runs WC1-4 without issues, had to reduce the graphics on WC3 and 4 though to 8bit SVGA and it ran better.

I did that because DosBox dont work too well on my PCI Express computer..

The pent 75 should work, just reduce your graphics to 8bit SVGA instead of 16bit, u need an AT power supply(i think,unless its a newer board), any CD-rom should work, win98 or ME should work on it if your hardrive is at least 2gigs, u can try a program called FreeDos(beta 9 version of a DOS operating system) to run on it, its a free download:
http://www.freedos.org/

well the case depends on the type of motherboard and age of it, the old ones used the flat case normally, if its a newer one u can mount it in a tower, u can probably rig it up in a tower and lay it on its side too, but the CD-rom and harddrive cant be on their side they wont work right.or u can rig up an old cardboard box and set the motherboard in it with an anitstatic bag and ground it somehow and u got a rigged up one:-P, just becarefull not to spill anything on the box...~~~
 
Unregistered said:
I did that because DosBox dont work too well on my PCI Express computer..
Click to expand...

Having PCI-e slots shouldn't affect DOSBox at all. Any newer computer should run the program pretty well.
 
What game? Setting non-dynamic core and about 3500 cycles sets the emulation speed to approximately that of a mid range 486, no matter how fast your actual processor is. Most games beyond SM1 have speed limiters built in, so playing with cycles isn't necessary at all beyond meeting the minimum system requirements.
 
Nomad Terror said:
Make sure you find the dos drivers for your video and sound, and have fun getting them working and put into your autoexec.bat and config.sys. I've been working on computers for a *long* time, and I can safely say that there is a reason why operating systems have gone the direction they have since the DOS days, what with plug-and-play and centralized driver repositories and GUIs.

As much fun as I would have had building an older machine (and fun I did have), the cost and the frustration will eat you up over time. Better to just use DOSbox.
Click to expand...

That's why God made memory managers :) Assuming you can find a download for one (I *THINK* I used Hurricane something-or-another back in the day), it'll make your life a lot easier - if it can get ~620k conventional memory + sound card/CD/et. al. + EMS, it can get enough to run WC3 =)

(Spectrum Holobyte must have been on CRACK when they decreed that Falcon 3.0 + MiG-29/Tiger/Tornado needed 620-630kb CM + EMS for the fun stuff - it was already enough of a trip getting 600 for the base program!)
 
Helix Software had two products called Netroom3 and Hurricane. Netroom3 was the DOS product, and Hurricane was the product for Windows 3.1 and, later, for Windows 9x. Helix is the company that wrote the memmaker command for MS DOS Version 6 as well, and Netroom3 is an expanded version of that utility. Their products were first-rate in my experience.
 
finding what your looking for

A monorail machine would be perfect for what you are trying to do. It meets the specifications, is a complete system (including a flat panel monitor built in), comes with all of the drivers for DOS (and has Windows 95 preinstalled), and doesn't take up much in the way of desk space. I use one to play the DOS versions of all the Wing Commander games as well as some other old DOS titles from back in the day. Although, I must admit, not as often anymore since I have been experimenting with DOSbox.

Just search for Monorail on ebay or click this link.....

http://computers.search.ebay.com/mo...QQfmcZ1QQfromZR8QQfsooZ1QQfsopZ1QQsacatZ58058
 
if one is absolutely convinced they must have a standalone DOS machine, it might be cheaper to pick up a halfway decent machine at an auction, put Win98 on it and have DOSBOX launch in full-screen mode on startup. :>
 
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