Retro PC kit

[Blazkowicz]

warcraft 2 runs on a 486 actually, and I remember c&c on a P75.
sure you can go higher (such as P3 500, 256MB, voodoo3, win9x) but that becomes a modern PC, and most windows games can be run on your main desktop.

 

[MulciberXP]

...

 

[sham63]

You're really talking about a subjective target. Retro is going to be whatever specs evokes nostalgia. For me, it was the pentium mmx era between 95 and 98 when 3d on the pc was born and just started taking off. The games we played at our "retro lan party" were all from the same era; Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Age of Empires, Doom 2, X-Wing v TIE Fighter, Duke Nukem 3d, Carmageddon, Quake, Chaos Overlords, Grand Theft Auto, Heroes of Might and Magic 2; Worms, Jagged Aliance, etc...and all those run on your main desktop. We used Win95 and coax cable w/ BNC NICs for our network. That's retro enough for me!

That is true. My idea of retro would be a pc a little older than that. It would be a 286 witha meg of ram for F-15 II, JNUG and JNSE, Wolf3d, or an early 386 based pc with 4 megs of ram and a tseng labs et-4000 video card. Perfect for Wing Commander, F-15 III, Doom, Links, and others from back then.

Of course, for others it would the early Commodore and Atari computers. I used to love Star Raiders on the Atari 400, but I think I have more enjoyable memories from my early IBM compatible pc days. I remember going through Computer Shopper and ordering the parts for my first pc, a 286-12 with 1 meg of ram. The thing was as large than a phone book back then. Then trying to get enough free ram to run the latest game. Half the fun was messing with the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get the some games to run. I miss dos.

Jim

 

[chavvdarrr]

You're really talking about a subjective target. Retro is going to be whatever specs evokes nostalgia. For me, it was the pentium mmx era between 95 and 98 when 3d on the pc was born and just started taking off. The games we played at our "retro lan party" were all from the same era; Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Age of Empires, Doom 2, X-Wing v TIE Fighter, Duke Nukem 3d, Carmageddon, Quake, Chaos Overlords, Grand Theft Auto, Heroes of Might and Magic 2; Worms, Jagged Aliance, etc...and all those run on your main desktop. We used Win95 and coax cable w/ BNC NICs for our network. That's retro enough for me!

I went through HMM3 on AMD 486DX4-120 with 32MB ram , also JA/Warcraft/Civ2 ... 486 is enough for hardcore "classics" gaming

 

[ShaidarHaran]

I went through HMM3 on AMD 486DX4-120 with 32MB ram , also JA/Warcraft/Civ2 ... 486 is enough for hardcore "classics" gaming

Hmm, I dunno about that... I noticed a huge jump in performance going from a 486dx2 50mhz to an am5x86 100 o/c'd to 133mhz

 

[INKster]

My only regret was not to have that S3 Trio 64V+ PCI upgraded from 1MB to 2MB by using the built-in RAM socket.
Too bad i couldn't find -or didn't bother to find- any compatible chips for it until i got around to upgrade that system one last time to a 3dfx Banshee PCI 16MB.
On the other hand, back then, when we could overclock our Pentium by messing with motherboard dip-switches, it was just so much simpler -even if it sometimes meant some burnt SIMM modules, unable to cope with higher FSB speeds-.

 

[ShaidarHaran]

I could probably find a chip for ya if you still had that card

 

[Fox5]

Wow, I don't see the reason behind building old PCs.

DOSBox handles just about any old DOS game. It may even have glide support. Usually less troublesome than actually using DOS was back in the day too, no EMS problems.
Virtualization should pick up the rest.

And as for old windows games, I find a Linux install + Wine handles them better than Windows. That, or for the non-3d accelerated ones, virtualized copies of old windows versions work fine.

 

[soylent]

I think turbo was 8088s and maybe 80286s.

On the lunch break in grade school(6-9) I distinctly remember toying with basic on old computers and playing table tennis in the basement. They had a pair of red 7-segment alphanumerics next to the turbo button to advertize the fact that they ran at 20 MHz. That makes them 286s or 386s, probably the former.

 

[swaaye]

486s had turbo buttons sometimes too. Maybe even some Pentium boards. Depending on the hardware, it disables L1 cache or switches bus clock up or down. I had a 486 that had a hardware-based key combo for the turbo switch.

Ooop, here we are: ctrl-alt-(+/-) while in DOS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button

 

[chavvdarrr]

I think anything younger than Apple ][ should not be considered retro.

 

[the maddman]

On the lunch break in grade school(6-9) I distinctly remember toying with basic on old computers and playing table tennis in the basement. They had a pair of red 7-segment alphanumerics next to the turbo button to advertize the fact that they ran at 20 MHz. That makes them 286s or 386s, probably the former.

Ha, if it's anything like the old cases I used to work with the "speed" display was set with jumpers inside the case. So they'd switch the numbers even if the "Turbo" switch wasn't connected to anything at all.

Anyways, that's not retro at all. Anyone up for a round of SpaceWar on my MicroVAX?