Choosing a Retro Gaming PC: Advice & What to Look For
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
sinni800
A 2022 perspective now is just throwing Windows out of the door entirely and using Linux with Wine and Dosbox. Dosbox for the DOS games (obviously) and Wine for the Windws95+ games.
Why wine? Modern Windows messes up a LOT of games. Wine gets them all to work. A lot of glide games work well with glide wrappers too, and I was able to play a lot of early 2000s games that stopped working right on modern Windows there just fine.
VMs like VMware never do them justice really, usually 3d acceleration is just crap in VMs.
Examples of games that I got to work just fine under Linux without even bothering to tinker are Unreal Tournament 99, Earth Series, Expendable and Incoming (two of my nostalgia childhood arcade games, Forsaken, MDK, Uprising 2. For UT99, adding a modern DX10 or OpenGL graphics backend can even use the S3 MeTaL textures and it doesn't have the weird speed issues it has under Windows.
What I can recommend is using Lutris and Gamescope on these. Gamescope is a tool made by Valve that runs as a wrapper around games. It makes the games behave on a Linux desktop by wrapping them into a borderless fullscreen window. This made it possible that I never got stuck ALT+TAB scenarios, stuck resolutions and all of this dandy stuff. It also properly scales the game to your full screen resolution, integer too if you want.
Hardware wise I would recommend just having an AMD APU build, dont even need a dedicated GPU (especially not for like early 2000s games. Avoid nvidia for this because gamescope is not nvidia compatible and the proprietary nvidia driver just has issues sometimes. The AMD driver is in the linux kernel though and has no to very little issues in this sorta thing.
Honestly, the upcoming Steam Deck could be a very competent retro gaming implement here. It can run modern stuff, but it can also run a crapton of games that hail from older times, and stuff from GOG, using Lutris as the manager to make it easy to manage, managingly.
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A 2022 perspective now is just throwing Windows out of the door entirely and using Linux with Wine and Dosbox. Dosbox for the DOS games (obviously) and Wine for the Windws95+ games.
Why wine? Modern Windows messes up a LOT of games. Wine gets them all to work. A lot of glide games work well with glide wrappers too, and I was able to play a lot of early 2000s games that stopped working right on modern Windows there just fine.
VMs like VMware never do them justice really, usually 3d acceleration is just crap in VMs.
Examples of games that I got to work just fine under Linux without even bothering to tinker are Unreal Tournament 99, Earth Series, Expendable and Incoming (two of my nostalgia childhood arcade games, Forsaken, MDK, Uprising 2. For UT99, adding a modern DX10 or OpenGL graphics backend can even use the S3 MeTaL textures and it doesn't have the weird speed issues it has under Windows.
What I can recommend is using Lutris and Gamescope on these. Gamescope is a tool made by Valve that runs as a wrapper around games. It makes the games behave on a Linux desktop by wrapping them into a borderless fullscreen window. This made it possible that I never got stuck ALT+TAB scenarios, stuck resolutions and all of this dandy stuff. It also properly scales the game to your full screen resolution, integer too if you want.
Hardware wise I would recommend just having an AMD APU build, dont even need a dedicated GPU (especially not for like early 2000s games. Avoid nvidia for this because gamescope is not nvidia compatible and the proprietary nvidia driver just has issues sometimes. The AMD driver is in the linux kernel though and has no to very little issues in this sorta thing.
Honestly, the upcoming Steam Deck could be a very competent retro gaming implement here. It can run modern stuff, but it can also run a crapton of games that hail from older times, and stuff from GOG, using Lutris as the manager to make it easy to manage, managingly.
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Chemical_E
DOSbox has gotten better in recent years thanks to community-made forks that make it more accessible to newcomers while adding new features and improving compatibility and optimization. -
With that said though, I'm grateful to have gotten my grandmother's old PC in my possession which had a 633mhz PIII-based Celeron CPU circa 2000, 3. 5- floppy drive, an Nvidia GeForce 2, 256MB of RAM, and a CD drive. Over the years I've upgraded it with components we had lying-around or I've found at Goodwill. Upgraded the RAM to 512MB (completely overkill but it's nice to have for Win9x, added a SoundBlaster Live card for better DOS sound compatibility, replaced the CD drive with a Sony DVD drive, replaced CPU thermal paste, replaced the old 10GB HDD with a new old stock 120GB IDE HDD (also overkill but extremely useful, added an old Linskys USB Wifi adapter (a nice novelty for browsing theoldnet and using FTP I don't use it for much more than that though, a Daewoo CRT monitor from 1998, a cheap toenail clipper IBM ball mouse I found at Goodwill, and my grandpa's old Zenith alps switch mechanical keyboard which I absolutely love. It's my preferred way to play classic PC games predating 2001 now. I might consider upgrading the CPU and GPU eventually though so I can maybe get it to push more games from 2003-2006 or so.
I would say Glide wrappers are now an essential part of retro PC gaming now since Voodoo cards have become prohibitively expensive at this point. They're a nice thing to have but not really viable for folks who don't have that kind of money. It's also important to consider slowdown programs like CPU killer in order to run older DOS games that weren't programmed with CPU speeds in mind, as they'll run way too fast to be playable on a 486 or Pentium without that workaround unless you're lucky enough to still have a turbo button.
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DOSbox has gotten better in recent years thanks to community-made forks that make it more accessible to newcomers while adding new features and improving compatibility and optimization. -
With that said though, I'm grateful to have gotten my grandmother's old PC in my possession which had a 633mhz PIII-based Celeron CPU circa 2000, 3. 5- floppy drive, an Nvidia GeForce 2, 256MB of RAM, and a CD drive. Over the years I've upgraded it with components we had lying-around or I've found at Goodwill. Upgraded the RAM to 512MB (completely overkill but it's nice to have for Win9x, added a SoundBlaster Live card for better DOS sound compatibility, replaced the CD drive with a Sony DVD drive, replaced CPU thermal paste, replaced the old 10GB HDD with a new old stock 120GB IDE HDD (also overkill but extremely useful, added an old Linskys USB Wifi adapter (a nice novelty for browsing theoldnet and using FTP I don't use it for much more than that though, a Daewoo CRT monitor from 1998, a cheap toenail clipper IBM ball mouse I found at Goodwill, and my grandpa's old Zenith alps switch mechanical keyboard which I absolutely love. It's my preferred way to play classic PC games predating 2001 now. I might consider upgrading the CPU and GPU eventually though so I can maybe get it to push more games from 2003-2006 or so.
I would say Glide wrappers are now an essential part of retro PC gaming now since Voodoo cards have become prohibitively expensive at this point. They're a nice thing to have but not really viable for folks who don't have that kind of money. It's also important to consider slowdown programs like CPU killer in order to run older DOS games that weren't programmed with CPU speeds in mind, as they'll run way too fast to be playable on a 486 or Pentium without that workaround unless you're lucky enough to still have a turbo button.
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He
I recently, finally got around to setting up DOSBox, which has been great for playing older DOS games without some of the hardware limitations and headaches we used to have. As a kid I would have loved to be able to press -Ctrl-F12- for more processing power, or just edit a config file to turn our 386 into a Pentium. And setting up TIE Fighter and Mechwarrior 2 to work with a Logitech gamepad with the DOSBox keymapper has actually made playing them more enjoyable than when I was using an MS Sidewinder joystick!
Getting DOSBox up and running made me start to think seriously about maybe setting up a real hardware -DOS box-, but the more I looked into it (including watching this, the more I realized I would end up needing multiple machines for different eras, and I live in an apartment in NYC, so I don't have the room to start amassing hardware. So I'm sticking to DOSBox for now, and it's working out just fine.
However, as I've been getting deeper into the retro gaming world, I've started hankering for some of the early-to-mid Windows games like SimCopter, which simply won't run in DOS, and later 3D accelerated games that my Macbook probably won't handle very well in a VM. I _was_ able to install and run Red Alert 2 and Unreal Tournament on my Windows 10 gaming PC with compatiblity mode tweaks, but for some of the other interim games that Ross described that might not fare so well, I'm in the middle of dusting off, dusting out, and refurbing my 2009ish gaming PC with a plan to load it up with WindowsXP and hopefully use it to cover some more bases
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I recently, finally got around to setting up DOSBox, which has been great for playing older DOS games without some of the hardware limitations and headaches we used to have. As a kid I would have loved to be able to press -Ctrl-F12- for more processing power, or just edit a config file to turn our 386 into a Pentium. And setting up TIE Fighter and Mechwarrior 2 to work with a Logitech gamepad with the DOSBox keymapper has actually made playing them more enjoyable than when I was using an MS Sidewinder joystick!
Getting DOSBox up and running made me start to think seriously about maybe setting up a real hardware -DOS box-, but the more I looked into it (including watching this, the more I realized I would end up needing multiple machines for different eras, and I live in an apartment in NYC, so I don't have the room to start amassing hardware. So I'm sticking to DOSBox for now, and it's working out just fine.
However, as I've been getting deeper into the retro gaming world, I've started hankering for some of the early-to-mid Windows games like SimCopter, which simply won't run in DOS, and later 3D accelerated games that my Macbook probably won't handle very well in a VM. I _was_ able to install and run Red Alert 2 and Unreal Tournament on my Windows 10 gaming PC with compatiblity mode tweaks, but for some of the other interim games that Ross described that might not fare so well, I'm in the middle of dusting off, dusting out, and refurbing my 2009ish gaming PC with a plan to load it up with WindowsXP and hopefully use it to cover some more bases
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CHRISMENENDEZ
Dude, my very first computer was an HP Vectra 500 but mine had an AMD K5 (I think 116 MHz but don't quote me on that, 16 MB of RAM, 1. 5 GB HDD, a 3. 5 inch floppy drive and a 4x CD-ROM. It also had a 33. 6 kbps data/fax/voice modem and software that answered your phone and sent and received faxes because it was actually an office computer, not a home computer, and it's something I never saw before and haven't seen since then, way ahead of its time (1996. It came with Windows 95 OSR2 and Lotus Smartsuite, which back then was much better than MS Office. It ran my games great, until I had to upgrade the RAM to 48 MB to play Age of Empires II. It had a great feature I also haven't seen in any other PC, where you could adjust the video memory that was shared from the main RAM, from 1 MB to 2 MB, and Windows actually reported the main RAM minus the shared video RAM, so the computer -really- had 15 MB at first and then 46 MB of RAM because after I upgraded it of course I upped the video memory.
I really miss that PC, I only kept the CDs and manuals for Windows 95 and Lotus Smartsuite. Now it's probably in a landfill somewhere, which is really sad. -
And Compaqs suck, really. At least in Mexico they were a heap of crap that broke down way too easily, and I wasn't surprised when the HP-Compaq merger turned into a fiasco that even then HP's CEO had to forcefully resign.
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Dude, my very first computer was an HP Vectra 500 but mine had an AMD K5 (I think 116 MHz but don't quote me on that, 16 MB of RAM, 1. 5 GB HDD, a 3. 5 inch floppy drive and a 4x CD-ROM. It also had a 33. 6 kbps data/fax/voice modem and software that answered your phone and sent and received faxes because it was actually an office computer, not a home computer, and it's something I never saw before and haven't seen since then, way ahead of its time (1996. It came with Windows 95 OSR2 and Lotus Smartsuite, which back then was much better than MS Office. It ran my games great, until I had to upgrade the RAM to 48 MB to play Age of Empires II. It had a great feature I also haven't seen in any other PC, where you could adjust the video memory that was shared from the main RAM, from 1 MB to 2 MB, and Windows actually reported the main RAM minus the shared video RAM, so the computer -really- had 15 MB at first and then 46 MB of RAM because after I upgraded it of course I upped the video memory.
I really miss that PC, I only kept the CDs and manuals for Windows 95 and Lotus Smartsuite. Now it's probably in a landfill somewhere, which is really sad. -
And Compaqs suck, really. At least in Mexico they were a heap of crap that broke down way too easily, and I wasn't surprised when the HP-Compaq merger turned into a fiasco that even then HP's CEO had to forcefully resign.
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Nunya
My go to PC setup for classic gaming is an AT socket 7 motherboard paired with a Pentium 233MMX. If the computer will be DOS only then 64MB of RAM is all that will be needed. Often though I install a CF card reader for in place of a hard drive giving me the option of switching CF cards. I often set up one CF card with DOS6. 22/Win3. 11, another card with Win95OSR2, a third card with Win98SE, and some times a card with Win2KPro. If I set up a system to use Windows CF cards along with a DOS only CF card I try to find motherboard that support at least 128MB for Win95/98 and 256MB for Win2KPro. For sound I always prefer the Creative Labs Vibra16C ISA cards as they work fantastically with DOS all the way up to Windows 2K. For video I try to stick with a PCI card with a minimum of 4MB, however VooDoo is the best if you can even find one these days. I sell many of my P233MMX setups on eBay and so far every one of them has created a happy vintage gamer. I love to build these classic gaming machines more than actual playing the games themselves. Oh, one other note, if possible always try to source new old stock (NOS) parts if you can. It will cost a bit more but will ensure you are not inheriting someone else's problem hardware.
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My go to PC setup for classic gaming is an AT socket 7 motherboard paired with a Pentium 233MMX. If the computer will be DOS only then 64MB of RAM is all that will be needed. Often though I install a CF card reader for in place of a hard drive giving me the option of switching CF cards. I often set up one CF card with DOS6. 22/Win3. 11, another card with Win95OSR2, a third card with Win98SE, and some times a card with Win2KPro. If I set up a system to use Windows CF cards along with a DOS only CF card I try to find motherboard that support at least 128MB for Win95/98 and 256MB for Win2KPro. For sound I always prefer the Creative Labs Vibra16C ISA cards as they work fantastically with DOS all the way up to Windows 2K. For video I try to stick with a PCI card with a minimum of 4MB, however VooDoo is the best if you can even find one these days. I sell many of my P233MMX setups on eBay and so far every one of them has created a happy vintage gamer. I love to build these classic gaming machines more than actual playing the games themselves. Oh, one other note, if possible always try to source new old stock (NOS) parts if you can. It will cost a bit more but will ensure you are not inheriting someone else's problem hardware.
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Martin
28: 30 One thing nobody mentioned was using Glide & DirectX 1-9 wrappers like DgVoodoo, NGlide, Wine D3D or DDrawCompact on modern versions of Windows.
DgVoodoo in particular is a life saver. Wine D3D is Wine's DirectX implementation as used on Wine Linux but encapsulated inside a handful of DLL files that you place inside the games directory. You can also get a Direct Sound 3D wrapper for games that refuse to work without Direct Sound 3D. A special mention goes to DXVK as although it only implements DirectX 9 and later, it was useful for eliminating game breaking graphical glitches in Driver: GRID on Windows 10.
Using these wrappers along with source ports and SCUMM VM, I managed to get over 90% of older Windows games working in Windows 10 and I've tried over 300 games.
Of course if the game has a 16 bit installer, then you have to use installshield wrappers or Otvdm to actually install the game on 64 bit editions of Windows 10. But that's another slightly different topic / layer of insanity -.
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28: 30 One thing nobody mentioned was using Glide & DirectX 1-9 wrappers like DgVoodoo, NGlide, Wine D3D or DDrawCompact on modern versions of Windows.
DgVoodoo in particular is a life saver. Wine D3D is Wine's DirectX implementation as used on Wine Linux but encapsulated inside a handful of DLL files that you place inside the games directory. You can also get a Direct Sound 3D wrapper for games that refuse to work without Direct Sound 3D. A special mention goes to DXVK as although it only implements DirectX 9 and later, it was useful for eliminating game breaking graphical glitches in Driver: GRID on Windows 10.
Using these wrappers along with source ports and SCUMM VM, I managed to get over 90% of older Windows games working in Windows 10 and I've tried over 300 games.
Of course if the game has a 16 bit installer, then you have to use installshield wrappers or Otvdm to actually install the game on 64 bit editions of Windows 10. But that's another slightly different topic / layer of insanity -.
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Wadmodder
Didn't Valve attempted to fix & remedy the infamous issue that Wine had regarding the compatibility of games that relied on DirectX versions newer than 9 back in 2018 with their Proton API bundle to help the developers of the Wine API? (26: 14)
As far as I know, I don't even think that VMWare, Oracle Virtualbox, Parellels or any other Virtual Machine software will probably never add support for Valve's Proton APIs & the new Wine DirectX emulation APIs, because they might think that they would violate Microsoft's guidelines on virtualization of their DirectX APIs, because Microsoft only allows virtualization of DirectX up to version 9 (with a few exceptions of DirectX 10 & later with VMWare & Parellels, when regards with emulation of Windows on both VMWare & Parellels. (28: 19)
So technically speaking, as of today, DirectX 10 & later emulation for the other Virtual Machine software for PCem & Oracle Virtualbox still remains in development hell. (27: 30)
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Didn't Valve attempted to fix & remedy the infamous issue that Wine had regarding the compatibility of games that relied on DirectX versions newer than 9 back in 2018 with their Proton API bundle to help the developers of the Wine API? (26: 14)
As far as I know, I don't even think that VMWare, Oracle Virtualbox, Parellels or any other Virtual Machine software will probably never add support for Valve's Proton APIs & the new Wine DirectX emulation APIs, because they might think that they would violate Microsoft's guidelines on virtualization of their DirectX APIs, because Microsoft only allows virtualization of DirectX up to version 9 (with a few exceptions of DirectX 10 & later with VMWare & Parellels, when regards with emulation of Windows on both VMWare & Parellels. (28: 19)
So technically speaking, as of today, DirectX 10 & later emulation for the other Virtual Machine software for PCem & Oracle Virtualbox still remains in development hell. (27: 30)
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TheSulross
Okay, as to the future for preserving the ability to run the old retro software, one category that was completely left out is the FPGA manner of hardware recreation of the classic retro hardware platforms, like MiSTer. And that things like Sound Blaster cards have been recreated in modern implementations. Me thinks that as vintage hardware begins to fail then it will be possible to put new boards inside of them that are based on an FPGA implementation faithfully recreating all of its functionality. And fortunately there are companies that continue to manufacture quality keyboards that could be coupled to these. This will be the next frontier of the retro computing hobby and computing historical preservation - modern manufactured replacement motherboards that can be dropped into the enclosures of the vintage computers so as to give them a new lease on life and enable passing them down to the next generations.
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Okay, as to the future for preserving the ability to run the old retro software, one category that was completely left out is the FPGA manner of hardware recreation of the classic retro hardware platforms, like MiSTer. And that things like Sound Blaster cards have been recreated in modern implementations. Me thinks that as vintage hardware begins to fail then it will be possible to put new boards inside of them that are based on an FPGA implementation faithfully recreating all of its functionality. And fortunately there are companies that continue to manufacture quality keyboards that could be coupled to these. This will be the next frontier of the retro computing hobby and computing historical preservation - modern manufactured replacement motherboards that can be dropped into the enclosures of the vintage computers so as to give them a new lease on life and enable passing them down to the next generations.
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Bradley
Personally for me I'm like you I prefer the original hardware and I have tons of it and many different systems for different occasions and things that I want to do with them parts are getting harder to find though and or more expensive and certain types of systems are becoming not really obtainable anymore by the normal average person who wants to play a dos based system but the common stuff is plentiful but for how long it's unknown and you're right there is always struggles when building your dos PC hardware doesn't last forever it's always a Gamble whether or not it's going to work if there's issues with it or whether or not the other components you got will even work with it but half the fun is making the computer the other half is using it and modifying it upgrading it and changing it to your liking that's my take at least
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Personally for me I'm like you I prefer the original hardware and I have tons of it and many different systems for different occasions and things that I want to do with them parts are getting harder to find though and or more expensive and certain types of systems are becoming not really obtainable anymore by the normal average person who wants to play a dos based system but the common stuff is plentiful but for how long it's unknown and you're right there is always struggles when building your dos PC hardware doesn't last forever it's always a Gamble whether or not it's going to work if there's issues with it or whether or not the other components you got will even work with it but half the fun is making the computer the other half is using it and modifying it upgrading it and changing it to your liking that's my take at least
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The
You really only need 3 computers to cover the entire DOS-era gaming period. An AMD 386DX-40 (with turbo to be able to downshift) to cover the 80s. An AMD DX4-120 with a good VLB video card (with turbo for downshifting) to cover the early 90s, and an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with a ViRGE/GX and Voodoo 3DFX makes a great PC that will cover the entire later 90s. All parts are dirt cheap on Ebay, and can be easily obtained compared to the now over-priced and increasingly rare Intel Pentium 3 setups. AMD is the answer to retro builds, and these 3 PCs will cover that 20 year era. However, Phil from Phil's Computer Lab nailed this to perfection with a 4-in-1 PC that is based on an AMD K6-III+ (P3) that can downshift to a 386 by being able to toggle cache options in the BIOS. Utterly frickin' brilliant.
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You really only need 3 computers to cover the entire DOS-era gaming period. An AMD 386DX-40 (with turbo to be able to downshift) to cover the 80s. An AMD DX4-120 with a good VLB video card (with turbo for downshifting) to cover the early 90s, and an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with a ViRGE/GX and Voodoo 3DFX makes a great PC that will cover the entire later 90s. All parts are dirt cheap on Ebay, and can be easily obtained compared to the now over-priced and increasingly rare Intel Pentium 3 setups. AMD is the answer to retro builds, and these 3 PCs will cover that 20 year era. However, Phil from Phil's Computer Lab nailed this to perfection with a 4-in-1 PC that is based on an AMD K6-III+ (P3) that can downshift to a 386 by being able to toggle cache options in the BIOS. Utterly frickin' brilliant.
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