Well I guess this Geforce 2 GTS is starting to grow on me. It's not all that terrible looking after all if you do some tweaking with it. I've adjusted the color profile and bumped up the digital vibrance, both made a pretty big difference.
This used Sound Blaster card was a bit of a hassle to get working properly and I still have two devices in my hardware manager that are not set up correctly. I believe one of them is the legacy 16 bit sound blaster compatability. From what I have read there is supposed to be 2 drivers for the sound blaster live in 98, one for the windows driver and one for the dos driver. I am not sure yet if this is correct. It does seem, however that all my sound is working ok on windows programs, but not with older DOS programs. There is currently nothing in my DOS autoexec.bat and config.sys files that are located in the c:\ directory. I have tried running some DOS games in "real DOS mode" as well and still no sound. I am starting to think maybe this sound blaster live is a little 2 new to handle older DOS programs but I really haven't dug into the problem enough yet to give up on it. I may have faired better if I had purchased a sound blaster 128 PCI or even this Ensoniq card I was looking at. I do have another machine, a 266 Pentium 2 with a Sound Blaster AWE 64 ISA card in it. Even under 98 this seems to work better on DOS games.
Basically I have forgotten a lot about setting up 98. I used to be a pro at this stuff and now it's like speaking French (well maybe not that bad) but has it been so long. I have been struggling to jar my memory back into shape on things like config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Another thing I seem to be experiencing is that it's like picking through the runes of a lost city trying to get information on some of this stuff. It just seems like finding the info I need for 98 is harder then finding info on the newer operating systems. That is mainly the reason I decided to document my journey here. Don't get me wrong, I know there are a lot smarter guys than I am out there, but when it comes to PCs there isn't a whole lot I can't figure out on my own. The other alternative is to run DOSBox on this P3 but that is just sort of killing the point then. I think the best thing to do is probably have use my P2 266Mhz to run these types of older dos programs. I am even starting to think about just running plain old DOS 6.22 on it. I might give Windows 95 as it's really just sort of a DOS shell. I'll get back to this, sorry if I sounded a bit scatterbrained but I am brainstorming while I am writing this.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Retro PC gaming part2
One problem I encountered which I may or may not have already mentioned is that as Windows 98 is no longer officially supported by Microsoft I couldn't get the OS to automatically update. It appears there is a problem with the Win98 update site itself. You can still however find what looks like most of the old updates in the Windows update catalog. Here again though it is a bit of a pain to have to search through and download the ones you need. A better alternate I think (at least for me) was the unofficial service pack for windows 98 I found floating out on the internet. You can grab it at http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html. I don't know that much about it as far as security goes but being as this is not my main machine and will be primarily for gaming with limited access to my home network I figured it was cool to use. I am also running the free version of Zonealarm so it should tell me if anything funny is taking place, maybe. You can get that here http://www.download.com/ZoneAlarm-Firewall/3000-10435_4-22231.html?tag=mncol. There is a free pro version too and I don't know what the difference is off hand but you can check it out for yourself. One more of several annoying issues I had (and I don't think this just applies to Win98) was that internet explorer kind of stinks. It was constantly giving me errors so I decided to do away with it and use something else. You can get your hand on a version of Opera web browser that will work great with 98, and it's pretty darn fast too.
Ok so I installed a few old games like Unreal and European Air War and had some pretty pleasing results. One thing that I realized pretty quickly was that the integrated sound card on my motherboard was crap. I went on ebay and found an Sound Blaster Live! value for 7 dollars shipped and what a difference that made. I also ordered an Asus TNT2 32 meg video card for $10 and a Geforce 2 GTS 64 meg card just to experiment with. It only cost me 15 dollars shipped. I may have already mentioned that. Anyhow, the first video card I started with was the integrated onboard AGP rage 2 pro which quick frankly is only really good for very basic usage. The next one to go into the rig was the TNT 16 meg AGP card I had laying around. This was a big improvement over the Rage 2 integrated but it still wasn't all that great even for something as old as Unreal. Finding the right driver to work with it was a bit of a hassle too. The only Nvidia driver I could find that would work was something like version 25.xx. I would have thought that the Nvidia Detonator drivers would have been the best choice for this card but I happened to find the original disk for my Diamond TNT laying around and using that actually made a hugh difference in performance gain, go figure on that one. Still that card is not really that great so I tried out the TNT2 64meg next. That gave me a real nice boost in not only performance but picture quality as well and the option to use anisotropic filtering. It also seemed like some old games liked that card better as I didn't have as many problems with compatabilility and in game rendering options. I was actually really inpressed with Unreal when using direct 3d rendering. Compaired to OpenGL it was night and day. The direct 3d not only looked incredably better but it also ran a lot faster and didn't show hardly any artifacts of graphical glitches. I can't say the same for OpenGL which basically looked and ran like garbage in comparision to the D3D. So next I popped in the Geforce 2 GTS hoping to see big gains and while it did seem to make things run a good bit faster I was actually pretty supprised to find that my picture quality suffered a little bit. I don't know but everything seemed to look a little cheesier for some strange reason. Kicking the digital vibrance up a little helped and it ran pretty good set to 32bit color. I also had more options in the way of antialiasing an anisotropic filtering. I was now able to set the drivers up for x4 anisotropic filtering but this actually didn't look as good and made everything a bit blurry. It was either that or the higher antialiasing level this card could achieve. There is one other funny thing that I had not seen for years. It's hard to explain but at certain times there was now some kind of funny hex patterned overlay or filtering that you could see vagely over the images. It's almost like looking through a screened window. I am actually considering putting the TNT2 back in but I will give it some time and see if I can tweak the Geforce 2 to clean up the picture a bit more before giving up on it. All in all there is a trade off as far as I can tell between the two. The Geforce 2 has better performance, options, and to some degree compatability but that Asus TNT2 just seems to look nicer.
Ok so I installed a few old games like Unreal and European Air War and had some pretty pleasing results. One thing that I realized pretty quickly was that the integrated sound card on my motherboard was crap. I went on ebay and found an Sound Blaster Live! value for 7 dollars shipped and what a difference that made. I also ordered an Asus TNT2 32 meg video card for $10 and a Geforce 2 GTS 64 meg card just to experiment with. It only cost me 15 dollars shipped. I may have already mentioned that. Anyhow, the first video card I started with was the integrated onboard AGP rage 2 pro which quick frankly is only really good for very basic usage. The next one to go into the rig was the TNT 16 meg AGP card I had laying around. This was a big improvement over the Rage 2 integrated but it still wasn't all that great even for something as old as Unreal. Finding the right driver to work with it was a bit of a hassle too. The only Nvidia driver I could find that would work was something like version 25.xx. I would have thought that the Nvidia Detonator drivers would have been the best choice for this card but I happened to find the original disk for my Diamond TNT laying around and using that actually made a hugh difference in performance gain, go figure on that one. Still that card is not really that great so I tried out the TNT2 64meg next. That gave me a real nice boost in not only performance but picture quality as well and the option to use anisotropic filtering. It also seemed like some old games liked that card better as I didn't have as many problems with compatabilility and in game rendering options. I was actually really inpressed with Unreal when using direct 3d rendering. Compaired to OpenGL it was night and day. The direct 3d not only looked incredably better but it also ran a lot faster and didn't show hardly any artifacts of graphical glitches. I can't say the same for OpenGL which basically looked and ran like garbage in comparision to the D3D. So next I popped in the Geforce 2 GTS hoping to see big gains and while it did seem to make things run a good bit faster I was actually pretty supprised to find that my picture quality suffered a little bit. I don't know but everything seemed to look a little cheesier for some strange reason. Kicking the digital vibrance up a little helped and it ran pretty good set to 32bit color. I also had more options in the way of antialiasing an anisotropic filtering. I was now able to set the drivers up for x4 anisotropic filtering but this actually didn't look as good and made everything a bit blurry. It was either that or the higher antialiasing level this card could achieve. There is one other funny thing that I had not seen for years. It's hard to explain but at certain times there was now some kind of funny hex patterned overlay or filtering that you could see vagely over the images. It's almost like looking through a screened window. I am actually considering putting the TNT2 back in but I will give it some time and see if I can tweak the Geforce 2 to clean up the picture a bit more before giving up on it. All in all there is a trade off as far as I can tell between the two. The Geforce 2 has better performance, options, and to some degree compatability but that Asus TNT2 just seems to look nicer.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Retro PC gaming part1
For the life of me I cannot believe that there are no good sites dedicated to retro PC gaming. Oh sure yea there are quite a few sites about retro gaming as far as abandonware is concerned, but what about the hardware. OK, let me start over. So, I was looking around for some of the old games I used to play in the early 90's and I discovered this stuff called abandonware. Yea, I know this is nothing new to most people but we're talking about a while ago so bare with me. So, like many people I said "Kool!" and I started downloading stuff only to find out the most of it doesn't work on a Windows XP machine. So then I find this thing called DosBox that allows you to emulate Dos on a newer computer and thus allowing you to play alot of the older stuff. Once again I am like "Kool!" And you would think that that is were the sorry would end, but not for me it didn't. You see there were two problems I encountered while using DosBox. The first is that while everying seemed to work pretty good the games didn't look so hot on my 22 inch widescreen LCD display. The second problem was that I while I was DosBoxing on my computer running Linux I wasn't able to use the PC for anything else, not to mention I have all this old PC hardware I have been hanging onto for years and have never done anything with. Now, I guess you could say "Hey why not just set up a CRT monitor hooked up to your main computer and play you games over on it while you chat, blog, surf the web, work on your website, whatever. Well, yea I guess you could do that, but some thing just felt unnatural to me about the emulation. That and the fact that some thing still just don't work right with DosBox. And while DosBox has some similarities to actual DOS, it just isn't. Not to mention all this got me remebering back to the good old days of Windows 98. Well, good for the most part. I mean there is not denying 98 had plenty of issues, however towards the end of it's life with all the updates, it was a pretty nice and stable OS for general use and gaming purposes. So, I said to myself "Hey self, what the heck?" and I threw together some of my old stuff.
The first thing I did was put grab this old 266Mhz Dell Gx1 I had been given by someone who bought a new PC and knew I was into computers all hot and heavy. So they decided to throw me a bone. Mind you this machine has been unused and in my possession for probably 8 years or more. Well, I installed windows 98, which happened to be the original OS that was on it, I think, oh who knows it coulda been 95. Well, that machine turned out to be ok for things like Lucus Arts games and stuff like, but the only real problem I had with it was that it came with this crappy ATI rage pro integrated AGP graphics that quite frankly blew bigtime and as a consiquence had not AGP expansion slot. Well, I had one obsure PCI video card laying around by chance called a Starfighter 2 or something like that, and basically the Dell didn't like it. So, I looked around on Ebay for some PCI cards. Let me just say that people have to be out for their minds or something. Have you ever looked at the going price of an old TNT 2 PCI card on ebay. There is no way I was going to pay some idiot 30 something bucks for something I could go down to the thrift store and pick up for 5 dollars. The only problem is that I work odd night hours so getting out to look around for old bits and pieces is a little tough. That being said you would not believe the volume of old hardware that you can find out at your local thrift type places. Just look through the phone book in your area and visit some and you'll find all kinds of great deals on stuff that used to cost $$$ when it was new. I just happen to have this sweet little place down the street from me that has all kinds of stuff, hard drives, network cards, monitors, whole computers, whatever, for dirt cheap. I manage to get out to one place and picked up a whole PC for 20 bucks. It's a PIII 667Mhz that came with a 19 inch CRT, keyboard and mouse. That and given the amount of Abandonware that is out there it is was a no brainer for someone like me that grew up dreaming about getting a system like that when they first came out. I was looking up info on my 266Hmz PII and I couldn't believe that thing cost like $800 buck when it first came out, and that was just for the processor. It's funny how it's not worth anything now.
Back to my original issue, I had this 266 I'm working on with no AGP expansion capability and all these extra AGP card laying around. One other factor was I found my old European Air War disk laying around and it looked like crap on the integrated Rage pro. So, what to do, ah I got it, I'll throw together this 866Mhz PIII with an AGP expansion slot. Yeah I know I am all over the place, 266, 667, 866. I told you I had a lot of old hardware. So that is what I did, build it up and install the OS. Hum, a little memory here (512Megs), a little Diamond viper v550 16meg AGP video card there, mix in some Windows 98 and.......Blam! Pretty sweet little machine. Just let me say this. Just surfing the web with this thing made me realize that for everyday tasks, you don't need any of this new crap (dual core, ddr2, PCI Express, non of it. Not to mention 2 of my favorite games, European Air War and Day of Defeat (Half-Life Mod) will run perfect on it. Oh, sure it's not gonna run Crysis or anything but graphics arn't everything. I mean DOD (Day of Defeat) has some on the best online gameplay ever and it's like anchient. Same with Unreal Tournament 2004, however I would probably stick in my old Geforce ti4400 128megger for that one.
So now I got two extra gaming PCs. One 266Mhz for playing things like the Quest for Glory series, the King's quest series, the Space Quest series, Ultima 7 (Black gate and Serpent Isle), shall I go on. Ok, then you got the Wing Commander series, Star Control 2, Doom 1 and 2, bla, bla, bla, I can go on for ever. And the best part is they're all free. Well not all the Space Quests but you get the point. The best part was that I found out European Air War still has a pretty nice following and people have made all kinds of mods and enhancements for it. EAW by the way is without a doubt one of if not the best WWII combat flight simulators every created. Especially after you install the 1.28 Unofficial update patch the gives you higher resolutions then the oringinal 640x480, changes all the sounds, adds new planes and textures too. It's pretty sweet now.
So this leads me to my point, where is the community? I can't believe that nobody else out there isn't totally into this. I mean I am sure there are some but, try looking for tips on setting up an old gaming machine and you will see what I am talking about. I would love to meet some others that share my passion for the lost arts. I will probably be adding a section to my website about the subject or I may just make a new web site that catalogs the best of the best in old hardware and games. I really had to do a good bit of searching around for info on old graphics cards and sound cards to find out what was the best you could get for a particaular series. I did find one interesting section of a forum where this one guy was talking about building a retro pc with like 5 different sound cards and two or three graphics cards so he could cover the whole spectrum of implimentation, Glide, D3D, Mini and OpenGL along with stuff like Proaudio Spectrum, Sound Blaster, Roland. It's really nice to have all the different chipsets represented.
The first thing I did was put grab this old 266Mhz Dell Gx1 I had been given by someone who bought a new PC and knew I was into computers all hot and heavy. So they decided to throw me a bone. Mind you this machine has been unused and in my possession for probably 8 years or more. Well, I installed windows 98, which happened to be the original OS that was on it, I think, oh who knows it coulda been 95. Well, that machine turned out to be ok for things like Lucus Arts games and stuff like, but the only real problem I had with it was that it came with this crappy ATI rage pro integrated AGP graphics that quite frankly blew bigtime and as a consiquence had not AGP expansion slot. Well, I had one obsure PCI video card laying around by chance called a Starfighter 2 or something like that, and basically the Dell didn't like it. So, I looked around on Ebay for some PCI cards. Let me just say that people have to be out for their minds or something. Have you ever looked at the going price of an old TNT 2 PCI card on ebay. There is no way I was going to pay some idiot 30 something bucks for something I could go down to the thrift store and pick up for 5 dollars. The only problem is that I work odd night hours so getting out to look around for old bits and pieces is a little tough. That being said you would not believe the volume of old hardware that you can find out at your local thrift type places. Just look through the phone book in your area and visit some and you'll find all kinds of great deals on stuff that used to cost $$$ when it was new. I just happen to have this sweet little place down the street from me that has all kinds of stuff, hard drives, network cards, monitors, whole computers, whatever, for dirt cheap. I manage to get out to one place and picked up a whole PC for 20 bucks. It's a PIII 667Mhz that came with a 19 inch CRT, keyboard and mouse. That and given the amount of Abandonware that is out there it is was a no brainer for someone like me that grew up dreaming about getting a system like that when they first came out. I was looking up info on my 266Hmz PII and I couldn't believe that thing cost like $800 buck when it first came out, and that was just for the processor. It's funny how it's not worth anything now.
Back to my original issue, I had this 266 I'm working on with no AGP expansion capability and all these extra AGP card laying around. One other factor was I found my old European Air War disk laying around and it looked like crap on the integrated Rage pro. So, what to do, ah I got it, I'll throw together this 866Mhz PIII with an AGP expansion slot. Yeah I know I am all over the place, 266, 667, 866. I told you I had a lot of old hardware. So that is what I did, build it up and install the OS. Hum, a little memory here (512Megs), a little Diamond viper v550 16meg AGP video card there, mix in some Windows 98 and.......Blam! Pretty sweet little machine. Just let me say this. Just surfing the web with this thing made me realize that for everyday tasks, you don't need any of this new crap (dual core, ddr2, PCI Express, non of it. Not to mention 2 of my favorite games, European Air War and Day of Defeat (Half-Life Mod) will run perfect on it. Oh, sure it's not gonna run Crysis or anything but graphics arn't everything. I mean DOD (Day of Defeat) has some on the best online gameplay ever and it's like anchient. Same with Unreal Tournament 2004, however I would probably stick in my old Geforce ti4400 128megger for that one.
So now I got two extra gaming PCs. One 266Mhz for playing things like the Quest for Glory series, the King's quest series, the Space Quest series, Ultima 7 (Black gate and Serpent Isle), shall I go on. Ok, then you got the Wing Commander series, Star Control 2, Doom 1 and 2, bla, bla, bla, I can go on for ever. And the best part is they're all free. Well not all the Space Quests but you get the point. The best part was that I found out European Air War still has a pretty nice following and people have made all kinds of mods and enhancements for it. EAW by the way is without a doubt one of if not the best WWII combat flight simulators every created. Especially after you install the 1.28 Unofficial update patch the gives you higher resolutions then the oringinal 640x480, changes all the sounds, adds new planes and textures too. It's pretty sweet now.
So this leads me to my point, where is the community? I can't believe that nobody else out there isn't totally into this. I mean I am sure there are some but, try looking for tips on setting up an old gaming machine and you will see what I am talking about. I would love to meet some others that share my passion for the lost arts. I will probably be adding a section to my website about the subject or I may just make a new web site that catalogs the best of the best in old hardware and games. I really had to do a good bit of searching around for info on old graphics cards and sound cards to find out what was the best you could get for a particaular series. I did find one interesting section of a forum where this one guy was talking about building a retro pc with like 5 different sound cards and two or three graphics cards so he could cover the whole spectrum of implimentation, Glide, D3D, Mini and OpenGL along with stuff like Proaudio Spectrum, Sound Blaster, Roland. It's really nice to have all the different chipsets represented.
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