Building old computer for 1990s games

[Tweak155]

Sometimes it is better to run old games on newer rigs due to enhancement patches. Eg, "vanilla" Diablo 2 ran at 640x480-800x600. On Windows 7 with the D2MultiRes patch, it looks great in 1080p, and you can now see more than 8ft in front of you.

That looks interesting.

Only old 90's game I find myself wanting to play on occasion is Full Throttle. I never could get it to work after WinXP.

 

[BSim500]

Only old 90's game I find myself wanting to play on occasion is Full Throttle. I never could get it to work after WinXP.

Try ScummVM. It's listed on their compatibility page along with most other LucasArts games.

 

[penske2298977]

I keep a Win98 box -- all on vintage hardware.

CPU is an AMD 64 2200+ something or other. Mobo was based on a Via K8t800 chipset.

Using the fastest (and last) AGP card supported under Win 98 ---> the ATI x850 xt.

using SB Live sound card with a gameport.

Using a GDM FW 900 --- all 100 lbs of it...hehe.

Some of the older games are just too hard to get working properly under emulation -- and I still like using the old MS forcefeed back II wheel through via the gameport (not the muted usb version).

 

[StinkyPinky]

Dos Box works well for a lot of the older games. I was playing Centurion Defender of Rome on it just last week.

 

[schmuckley]

I mean with vintage hardware.

I have some old dos based games with 16 bit installers that will not even install under windows 7 64bit.

Run it in a virtual machine.

 

[tidy]

.

 

[Revolution 11]

there should be a way to do this through VMware and not bother wasting money and energy with ancient hardware

You will be surprised to find out just how bad virtual machines are with certain games that don't run or run poorly with Vista/Win 7 but also are too advanced to run on DOSBox (much more reliable for games than VMs).

VirtualBox's choice of default drivers and hardware emulation renders the more graphically intensive games from the late 1990's pretty useless or prone to poor gameplay experience. I am not sure about VMWare and how its drivers work with games.

I feel the OP's pain and have considered a ancient rig from Ebay as a easier way to play games released between 1996 and 2000. The OS should be Win98 as others have done already because many games during the Win95 era can be run on DOSBox and post-Win98 software has good support with XP and post-XP Windows.

 

[CP5670]

The problem with VMWare and VirtualBox is that they're not really designed for games, and 3D support in them was an afterthought until fairly recently. It's worth trying them out though, and I have a couple of games that don't work in 8.1 but work in an XP VMWare machine, but others need an actual, native XP.

I also came across this site recently. It seems to be actively updated and has a lot of good information. Although I tried their ddraw.dll for Rollcage Stage 2 (a game I normally need XP for) and it doesn't work for me.

I like the idea of building up 'period' systems for older games, although my focus is usually on post-2000 hardware and Windows XP. I was trying in vain to get EAX working properly with XP last month, but again I came to the same old realization that EAX is broken, bug-ridden garbage and always has been even when it was 'properly' supported under XP.

Yeah, EAX was always messed up. Playing an EAX game often caused EAX to break itself and the global environmental effects until the next reboot, a problem that persisted over several generations of Creative cards over many years. It was good when it worked but I don't miss it at all (Alchemy restores it in some games, but it's spotty). A3D was a lot more impressive back then, and worked consistently.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Hmmmm... depends on how vintage you need to go, but I have a complete P4C on an Abit IS7 with a Radeon 9600 Pro system I could sell you.

 

[lavaheadache]

Running old games on new rigs is no fun....

 

[Revolution 11]

Especially if emulation with solid programs like ScummVM or DOSBox is not possible.

 

[PingSpike]

It seems like with DosBox and virtual machines you can run anything up to the original 3D accelerator era. And modern titles are by their nature a bit better looked after. But if you're talking about some of the first 3D games...then things are ugly. Virtual machines from vmware and virtualbox only sort of have virtualized 3D hardware. Not only is it crazy slow, it just isn't there and it probably designed for more modern uses anyway.

Modern hardware or its drivers seem to have stripped out a lot of the things they relied on. So if you don't have an older video card a lot of these games run with problems. So you either have to find a 3rd party patch for the game, or install an older card and dual boot to it at least. Since that card won't have any modern drivers for your OS anyway you'll have to dual boot to an old OS.

Two cool things that are out there now are DosBox having support for a emulated 3dfx voodoo card. I haven't tried it myself, but you can actually install 95 inside dosbox and use it. It seemed problematic and slow from what I was reading though, but exciting.

And then there is vt-d direct hardware passthrough to virtual machines. Unfortunately, this seems to solve nothing from my research. Getting it up and running seems to require video card drivers that are aware of it, and cards that have modern drivers aware of it are modern. ATI cards only have drivers that work with it starting with the HD2000 series. My experience was that the x1000 series were the last cards from ATI that ran old ass DX5,6 16 bit color games with little complaining. HD2000 and later hosed things up. Its even worse on the nvidia side, they only support passthrough on quadro cards. And probably only modern quadro, because modern Nvidia hardware also hoses up old games like that...starting with the 8000 series and maybe earlier with my experience.

I was going to test if I could passthrough a real live voodoo card to an XP VM though for laughs. I do have one in a box in my basement. Since its a weird secondary adapter pci beast I wonder if it might be able to work where other cards fail.

In the end its probably easiest to just dual boot or use build a old PC like in title.

 

[CP5670]

I think VT-d improves performance in theory, but won't actually help at all with VM or driver related issues. 3D games often don't work at all in the VM.

Windows 8 also introduced a new problem that was not there in 7, which causes numerous DX5-7 games to be locked at 15fps or 30fps. There are several custom ddraw.dlls that people have made for specific games, but some games don't work with any of them. I use native XP for these games, but have gotten a few of them working properly in a VMWare XP VM.

Having 95 inside Dosbox sounds interesting. I've done that with 3.1 and it works nicely. Windows Glide games are usually easy to run though using any of several Glide wrappers (sometimes even better than on native 3dfx cards), as Glide was mostly just a stripped down version of OpenGL. The problems are usually with the DX5-7 stuff.

 

[v8envy]

Meanwhile, in Linux land... WINE runs many, many ancient Windows games perfectly. This is where having a 5-10 year lag in development compared to "real" windows pays off.

You can even have a Wine configuration with DirectX 5 while another has 9c, side by side. And different games running the different configs.

Fair warning, though. If you go down the dual boot Linux + Wine path expect a learning curve and intense googling for several weeks. Still, should be less painful than hunting down ancient hardware to get a retro box working.

 

[CP5670]

One of the custom Directdraws out there is actually the one from Wine. Look up Wine on Windows. However, I haven't had it work in any game where something else didn't already work. Another one called aqrit's ddwrapper has the best success rate in my experience.