Running 90's era games today- what are my options?

[BoneSnapDeez]

Check to see if anyone you know wants to dump their old computer.

My father-in-law gave me his 2003-era Dell (very similar to what Hazerd has) - it has a floppy drive which is fantastic. I use it as a DOSBox machine quite a bit.

I also snagged a Win 98 laptop on craigslist under free stuff.

Either way, make sure you get DOSBox on every machine (unless it has real DOS of course)!

[Hatta]

There should be no ambiguity about what port the monitor plugs in to. There's only one female D type connector with 3 rows of 5 pins. If you use the VGA connector with your modern PC, it should work with your vintage PC. If you use DVI or HDMI normally, you might have to hit a button to select VGA input.

If the monitor is on the right input, you absolutely should get a signal from your vintage PC. I'd understand if Windows didn't display, but the boot console messages should be visable on any display. That would suggest to me that something is wrong with your hardware. What else does the Dell do when you turn it on? Do you get console beeps? Does the HDD light activate?

BTW, it looks like this motherboard has the 440BX chipset, which is generally considered the best of that era. Stable, fast, and compatible. It's worth putting some effort into seeing if you can fix it up. Is there an AGP port inside? A 440BX with a PIII and Geforce4 or similar and Windows 98SE is a fantastic gaming machine.

Lastly, if you do get another machine, make sure it has an ISA slot for a sound card. DOS doesn't play well with PCI sound cards.

[Hyp81]

I do get a console beep and the light comes on green as if it is running. I will check the new monitor to see if there is a way to change it to VGA. I have also arranged to borrow an old CRT monitor from my school to see if it runs with that option.

[Hyp81]

Okay, after some great advice, I was able to open the PC up and check the "tightness" of the cards inside the computer. It now comes up on the monitor, and there's no more beeping, however....

When it tries to boot up it says "no boot device available." I tried to go into the F2 set up screen and change the boot order to "hard drive only" since it was set to diskette. This did not fix the issue.

Some quick internet research revealed that the hard drive may be the issue. Is this accurate? If so, how do I go about finding a replacement drive? At this point I am simply fascinated by this problem.

[Hazerd]

Okay, after some great advice, I was able to open the PC up and check the "tightness" of the cards inside the computer. It now comes up on the monitor, and there's no more beeping, however....

When it tries to boot up it says "no boot device available." I tried to go into the F2 set up screen and change the boot order to "hard drive only" since it was set to diskette. This did not fix the issue.

Some quick internet research revealed that the hard drive may be the issue. Is this accurate? If so, how do I go about finding a replacement drive? At this point I am simply fascinated by this problem.

Just find a IDE drive, 80gb or less should be cheap

WD HDWD1600AABB 160GB 7200 RPM RPM 2MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 / ATA-6 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136910

It's refurbished, but for $17.99 you cant really lose.

[Hyp81]

Alright, sounds good. I imagine I will now need a new copy of Windows 98 as well. And recommendations on the version? I know there were several.

[Hazerd]

Alright, sounds good. I imagine I will now need a new copy of Windows 98 as well. And recommendations on the version? I know there were several.

Windows 98 SE

[Pulsar_t]

For Glide games use a Glide wrapper such as http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide

I see that virtualisation hasn't been mentioned here. Don't write it off; VMware Workstation works for me. I use it to play Gabriel Knight 2 and Discworld Noir. I imagine you can play lots of pre-XP games just fine using a product like that.



Here's Virtua Cop running glitch-free on Workstation 9. There's also Virtualbox which is freely distributed under GPL2. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

[Pulsar_t]

Mechwarrior 3 looks like this Unfortunately with 3D acceleration things get a bit tricky. The framerate is quite fast though. (just tried it on Seven x64 and it's almost as rubbishy-looking.. maybe a z-buffer issue)

[Hatta]

Congratulations, reseating the cards seems to have fixed your main issue. I wouldn't run out and buy a new hard drive just yet. Grab a floppy image from bootdisk.com, and make a bootable DOS floppy. See if you can boot that and get to an A:> prompt. Then run fdisk, delete all partitions, and create a new one. Run 'format c: /s' to format the C drive and make it bootable. Then reboot, making sure your bios is set up to boot from the hard disk.

If that works OK, then yes 98SE is the operating system you want on this computer. If not, you can replace the hard disk with an old IDE drive. But my preference is a CF/IDE device. Old hard disks often get destroyed rather than resold, and the ones that are resold are probably covered with bad sectors by now. A 32gig CF card is plenty to hold the OS and a bunch of games, and you can easily pull the CF card and put it in your main PC for file transfer/backup. The last option is a modern SATA drive with a SATA-IDE converter. I haven't tried these, but they ought to work.