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.
No comments:
Post a Comment