Sometimes the machines you throw together with cheap and low-end parts end up being the most fun and interesting of all, slow is indeed good! Wonderful video!
The best way to get computer hardware on the cheap is to get abondoned systems from friends or family ... Or even dumpster diving or putting a advert in the classifieds , you will be amazed at what you find
my friend actually found 2 amd 754's on a dumpster.It was standing in the rain.I took some time to clean it up a bit and both of them working fine just i gave most of my agp cards away only 1 i got left but misplaced it is a 9200 ati one i think.
This is definitely the case. I found an i7-920 system in a trash pile (dead power supply and hard drive), another system with a bad motherboard and a good 500w PSU, and a friend offered me his "old" GTX950 after he upgraded his to do VR stuff. A bit of work, a hard drive, and a 6-pin adapter later and I have a (sorta) modern gaming rig for $60.
It has been quite a long time! I almost forgot to make a comment on TH-cam Phil! It's like your video programs on TH-cam seems to be the only channel that lets subcribers share their experiences & ideas here in Phils Computer Channel on TH-cam! Nice to see you coming back bro 🍻 So far so long man 👋 Take Care 🙋
Still have my original Win95 and Win3.1 desktops. Still love turning them on from time to time to enjoy the "Dos" games they way they used to be played. Thanks for sharing.
Dosbox is amazing and is a great solution for playing most games and demos from all PCs since the first PC in 1981 to the last DOS games in the late 90s. Also can run Windows 1/2/3/3.11/95/98 and has good FM sound with support for pretty much all sound cards ever built for this time period. Free software and no clutter.
Where's the challenge in that though? Old hardware was a massive pain in the arse but when you got those games running it put a massive smile on your face
plus if you have any interest in software that's not games.... IDK, maybe you can code in Pascal or Turbo C in DOSbox. But also, these old computers will gain value in the future as most of them die and get thrown out (mostly capacitors blowing and owners have no idea they can be replaced) These are finite collector's items, even is you don't play any games at all on them.
it is supremely satisfying to preserve the past on real hardware. The satisfaction of a proper custom build is something that DosBox will never be able to provide.
Literally no joke, even 2-4-8 mb SIMM sticks go for 30-60 bucks now, that's not including shipping outside the U.S. I'm all for keeping a hobby sustainable but this is getting kinda silly and unattainable.
@@ToreDL87 Pretty much any hobby involving items of this age has been overrun by scalpers. They hoover up everything they can, and since there's a relatively limited supply with no potential of any of this stuff being made again, they can charge what they like. Every time I go looking for something on Ebay, it's the same handful of sellers offering everything at absurd prices. You can get the odd bargain every now and again, but they're becoming increasingly rare. And you're certainly not going to find something like a Voodoo card going cheap on Ebay these days. They're all in the hands of collectors and scalpers at this point. Maybe you'll get a one-in-a-million find at a flea market inside an old PC somebody's selling for $10 or something, but that's the level of luck required now.
@@CaptainKenway Yeah it's brutal, collectors are one thing, I'm guilty there, mind you, got the stuff back in the day for retail rates, and keeping it for nostalgia, was unaware there would be money behind it. But these scalpers... I don't even have the conscience to put stuff up for sale at scalper rates (which I would have to lest the item end up in scalper hands). Scalpers are ruining and making cheaper hobbies unattainable 😰
@ch282 Yeah the mid 2k's stuff just hasn't picked up yet, but it will. And when it does.. I have enough to get by for my use so not complaining for my sake, I'm just sad for newbies to the hobby.
i can remember back in 1987 my dad got me loads of pc parts off his work.I built my first pc a dual cpu IBM 386 sx 33 mhz(if i can remember correct)it ran with the 486 dx 2 66 mhz it had a rizer card for extra memory.In total it had 32mb ram but could only support up to 24mb....The good old days lol now i feel old :D
Was lucky to grow up playing games from the early 80's in the arcades to the 1st consoles and PC games but when you hear the specs from PC parts compared to today's PC it still makes me smile and shake my head 😜. Great video, thanks
After you have to deal with blue screens of death, random restarts, random video artifacts, sound hanging, black screens, buzzers beeping for unknown reasons, drivers not installing, games never starting or giving random errors, windows crashing to desktop, windows asking for obscure files you WILL understand what he mean with slow is good.
Hmm. Retro gaming philosophy is quite different from the vintage machine approach. I like the idea of putting together an old machine from old parts to see old software running on it and check out how useful it can still be. Having a machine that looks the part is important to me too to get that authentic feel. I guess I'm a bit of a historian too! :-) PS. there's a touch of nostalgia in this too because I came to PCs around 1988 as a programmer and systems administrator.
Excellent video. Really enjoyed watching this build. Was only thinking about your channel earlier today as I was dragging out a heap of old tech from the shed. So many old school pci cards I had stashed away.
I still have my PC Chips M848LU mainboard, just need to get a socket A processor for it. This is one of the best videos I've seen on your channel, Phil. Thank you so much for that.
I remember the fdisk/mbr command quite well... I had a Pentium 2 computer back in the day that, for some reason, kept losing the master boot record. To boot it, I had to first boot with a floppy, run fdisk/mbr, eject it, and ctrl-alt-del.
I wish I had have seen this video a couple of weeks ago! I just bought an Athlon 1000 MHz that showed up with about 30 bent pins. It was very challenging to get them straightened out enough that the CPU would socket, especially given my mid-40s eyesight. Using a mechanical pencil for that is a great idea! It would have saved me a ton of time.
The more dos and Window98 videos I watch, the more I am glad I kept that mac PCI Voodoo 5 5500, just recently flashed it to get the DVI port working as well. Been toying with the idea of getting a Geforce 4 TI4600, but decided that any games that need that would be XP games and I have an overkill XP/Vista/W7 PC for them.
Great video, Phil! It's clever to use newer parts and cripple them to slow things down. Great value to be had here, for sure! I'm gonna have to play around with some old junk I've got, see what I come up with. :) I really like the longer format by the way.
Subscriber gained! I bought a big box full of parts for £5 the other day and there's some stuff in there that I think I can turn into something! Never built a PC before, but it's gonna happen! Thanks man.
It's already happening! The motherboard in this box of stuff seems to have a Cyrix 6x86MX in it... That could make an interesting build right?? And there's an ATI Rage in there...
Definitely interesting for Pentium-era DOS/Win95/early Win98 gaming, although I believe the Cyrix CPUs had a weak floating point unit. But if you find any games that don't perform well, you can just pick up a cheap Pentium MMX 166/200MHz CPU and swap it out.
@@philscomputerlab Yes you are right. My son has been collecting chucked out computers and now the downstairs is crowded with them. I keep telling him to throw out some so that I can walk down there! But then I really can't critizise as I have woodworking machinery everywhere!
Definitely agree on the IDE SD card adapter for DOS, work brilliantly. Be aware though that SD or SATA to IDE adapters MIGHT not work in Windows 9x with DMA mode enabled. Just FYI, in case you're building a DOS/Windows combo PC.
I've noticed that IDE-SD adapters are great for newer hardware, but they don't work seem to properly for older BIOSes or systems especially if they still rely on cylinder/head/sector geometry... at least the ones I've found so far. For older systems you'll still need to use an IDE CF adapter.
Another excellent video Phil! I've never seriously considered building a retro gaming PC, but maybe it's something I'll look into doing at some stage now that I'm armed with the tips in this video. I know my dad was more into PC stuff during this time period so maybe it would be a nice surprise to build a bit of a retro gaming machine with him. Kind of a shame that we threw out much of our old PC hardware in a clean up many, many years ago; at the time it was just taking up space but now I look back and think "I wonder what we might have had that we just discarded".
I have a Duron 1.6 in a box somewhere. You could bridge across one of the laser cut components and it would give you all the cache back, turning it back into a Thoroughbred. OC'd to 2ghz it was the best $50 I ever spent.
Good choice for those who can't find/afford a Pentium or K6. The best investment that makes a difference, is a CRT monitor. 17 inch is better than 19 inch with low res.. Seriously.. CRT (many has forgot) gives the "best" picture with MS-DOS games. But they are hard to find these days. You can go with a LCD 1600x1200 (or 1920x1200 with aspect correction) which will do 800x600 or 320x240 as well as 640x480 pixel perfect, BUT with 320x200, a CRT will be best. A LCD with aspect correction can display it OK, but the LCD is too revealing of pixels. CRT's are more smooth n blurry. ;)
To get my DX2-66 I had to buy it from Ukraine, I think the chip itself cost about $50 in the end. That was much much cheaper then anything local where people will ask up to $200 for a DX processor. It sucks to think when I was a child you could get boxes on DX and SX processors basically for free, but now their like hens teeth.
I just got a Socket 7 HX board with a Pentium 100 from Kazakhstan for a good price $39 with some shipping, it was worth the long wait. The stuff selling in the US is like $90+ but things from Russian Federation, Ukraine, Poland, Kazakhstan, China, etc. are less than the local stuff
@@SiggyPony My parents didn't make me chuck the things that i ordered like you but they yanked my ethernet cable and took my phone away for a month for ordering too much.
Looks like a PC Chips M817 ? socket a (462) and a XP Tbred and either a Duron Spitfire/Morgan core or a Athlon Thunderbird in the grey. KT266A chipset can handle 133MHz FSB CPU's but the performance with the PC Chips mobo will be slower than most other socket A mobo's (though VIA is preferable to some old SiS chipsets - especially the sloowww SiS 730 which PC Chips used on the M810 LMR. Ive had over 50 computers (easily) and used to have 19 computers at home with 10 computers (cased and caseless) in my bedroom all running SETI@home 24/7 and when SETI got old I ran Folding@home but was in the top 40 in the UK on SETI@Home (back in the day).......you know you can get nForce mobo's with onboard GeForce 2 VGA.....A7N266-VM? I think thats the model I had......also had a GA7ZXE with a VIA KT133a chipset and had the FSB (168 pin SD RAM of course) up to 156MHz but have no idea how PC133 OR the chipset achieved this and not to mention the ridiculous frequency the PCI/AGP bus must have been running it.....KT133A also worked with Athlon XP Thoroughbred A & B CPU's and obviously other socket a processors such as the Duron Applebred which were great processors if on a budget as could re-enable L2 cache to same as athlon XP (256kb) from the 64kb default on a Duron. All I needed was a HB pencil and I joined two contacts on a bridge on the top of the processor as Applebred Duron were the same as the T'bred processors - just had an L2 cache bridge cut to lower the amount - or at least AMD had hoped so............ I had a 1600MHz Applebred which clocked (easily) to 2300MHz with the full L2 cache enabled and the CPU cost just £32 at the time! I cant remember what mobo the Duron was on but probably a Abit NF7-S, Epox 8rda3, Epox 8rdae and other nForce 2 based skt a mobos
All these parts were cheap until now!! Thanks Phil Computer Lab! Now all the prices are going to start to Skyrocket for socket A boards. All kidding aside are really great video thank you very much I am glad I actually have a few spare socket a boards and a few Athlons and two Durons I will have to recheck. Thank you again for the video.
Oct 2024: Value Village and Goodwill are good places to look. Just got a 486 ASRock mother board, 512MB RAM with case and power supply for $15. ATI Radeon 128MB for $13. PC Card to IDE drive with 8GB flash for $30. I already had a Sound Blaster Live SB0100. Best of all this was in Canadian dollars. Just about to download DOS games and Internet Archive is down. :(
@Phil - I love watching all your videos, particularly for the nostalgic value. Do you know what I also just realized? I DO NOT miss all the agony and time used setting up drivers, batch files, etc, especially in DOS. Modern PC computing has certainly spoiled us. That being said I think I'll stick with my windows 10, thanks, but keep making your videos!
Holy crap I use to have that board! I never got mine to run very well though, I guess it just needs Phil's magic touch! 😀 I am going to give this a shot in the coming months, thank you for the amazing tutorial Phil! 😁👍
Great video, I really enjoyed that, it brought back a lot of memories. For the longest time we used DOS 6.2 for Gaming and windows for everything else like printing, researching, E-mails and photo/video Editing etc... Worked out fine until Win98, then suddenly many of the new releases ONLY ran well on Windows 95B or 98, Grrrr Bummer. Thanks again. 👍🙂👍
I agree that Slow is good because of the older Sierra titles that were made with the hardware in mind that was out during those games' heyday. Nice PCI Sound card for DOS based games.
I’ve been trying to find parts to put together a 386SX build. I found some that are _relatively_ cheap on eBay, but it’s been ingrained in my head that I don’t need to be spending money too often and I’ve been holding back from actually buying.
Went on a bit of a ISA sound card spending spree recently; bought a couple of ESS cards and a Sound Blaster 2.0, the latter of which I got for a "bargain" under $100 Aussie dollary doos, so I can attest to how much it costs to do old-school retro gaming on period correct hardware. Even the ESS cards cost $32-45 including delivery, and they're just unbranded, non-collectable cards. I managed to save money on some of my 486 motherboards by buying untested and dodgy looking boards, some of which needed repair, but I've got the electronics background to be able to troubleshoot and repair the boards myself. The only other option would be to buy bulk lots and hope you get one working board, then sell off the non-working ones as faulty/repair required to recoup some of the costs of those boards. But even then it's still going to be expensive and time-consuming. Or you could just buy something newer and cheap, and just fiddle with the settings a little, and save a whole lot of money! You could easily pick up a whole system for under $100, which is cheaper than a "bargain" period-correct collectable sound card alone!
That's what I'm discovering. Because sound blaster cards were the most popular back in the day, that means they're the most popular with collectors, hence the high prices. And so ESS cards are much better value today, even PCI models. But they're really very compatible, and sound pretty good too.
Good video. The SD card use was interesting. I still prefer to use my older Pentium 233 chip for DOS as the motherboard has a few ISA slots, which are needed for my Roland SCC-1 Midi sound board & the Soundblaster. It makes games like Doom and Descent so much better in the music department. I also have a Soundblaster MCD 16 with a Yamaha DB50XG. The Yamaha is set as 300 and the Roland as 330.
Hi Phil, another good video. I cant think of much other, rather than first time viewers may have needed the segment where you calculate the 5 volt rail load to see if the Socket A will overload the markings on the power supply, but the CPU you chose is a low wattage one. But you have it all covered in your plays lists. Hmm now for the hunt on super low end thin client in dos mode ( HP / Cissco Wise ) PS , i still hang on to my SB16 and matching 2speed cdrom if still works after queuing up to buy it new when the price plummeted down to $800, then i saved more overtime money and bought 4 x 4meg sims at $100 each and upgraded yet again The gotek floppy emulator is great ( their OEM software not so good ) the 99 images are cool but you really waste a 4GB USB stick as the rest of the stick is unusable, but that is a cheap price to pay for something that works great - HAHA i know what you mean about finding your A4 printed 2 x 25 column per side list of software you have saved in each slot, i keep it in a A4 sleeve as my wife found it in the spare room and threw it out once thinking it was scrap paper Sites such as allbootdisk and winworldpc are excellent for all retro software to boot up and some support files. I have in the cupboard original 5.25 and 3.5 DOS 3 to Dos 6.22 retail and OEM packages, and i find they mostly work, but often you get a error somewhere, sometimes t can skip a file other times halt on something important and die. Some have never been opened, so it is true they loose there magnetic field over time, others like a junk cheap coloured disk i have in 3.5 work every day, all of the top brand, Memorex, Imation, Verbatim, have the best chance of lasting well. For 5.25 3M, BASF, Maxell, Memorex are pretty good later on the Le Floppy and Laser were just cheap mass produced items, they worked but they are made to a price. Regards George
Can't wait for your ESS Solo 1 review. I know it's not really your cup of tea, but I imagine for a lot of people the best route to a cheap 386/486 era machine are estate sales, flea markets, garage/yard sales, etc. People are at the point of basically throwing away such machines as "useless". That's the thing that tends to sadden me because every old PC deserves a good home. :) Okay, maybe not.
Cool idea. Never thought of lowering retro build cost by going with newer components and then slowing them down. Quite educational, and a nice channel too. Subscribing - with thanks :)
Hi Phil - great channel longtime watcher - you've finally made me pull my finger out and start my retro gaming rig - I have a dual Pentium 2 333mhz IBM Intellistation hopefully I can get it to work again, its been sat 10+ years!
I just had to send this your way, it's a PCI to PCIe 1x adapter, it's the perfect height to fit a half-height PCIe card in with itself, it even has a little plate for itself to cover up and it'll fit inside a computer, along with a half-height card.
I just love how your videos trigger all the nice sparks inside my head, I cannot thank you enough Phil for being able to keep my stupid old brain going :D
Hehe, I know exactly what you mean, i'm starting to find I do things over and over, and each time it's seems like it's something new all over again (which makes for cheap living!) :)
For DOS i think the best configuration would be and asus board that was released for pIII that has 1 agp slot 4 pci and 2 isa slots, the thing is that one of the best internal sound cards is sound blaster awe 64(isa) , for video would be an S3Virge for example that are compatible with univbe driver. My 2 Cents
Nice video. I bought some retro stuff recently. A unisys 386 16mhz with original mfm 43mb hdd. And a 486dx 33 system with a 256mb hdd. And 4mb 30pin memory. Also got a cheap mainboard with a 6x86 ibm cpu on it. For 15€. I only need to get my ibm mainboard with 486dx4 working. It gives an error code at startup.
An option for better game compatibility with the YMF744 is to go for an older VIA chipset with the 686A/B southbridge. With this setup you can run the YMF744 in DDMA mode and then you don't need the DSDMA TSR and EMM386 (you need a modified SETUPDS.EXE as it doesn't contain the PCI id of the 686A/B southbridge). MSI actually produced a board with the KT133A/686B chipset with a 12V P4 connector, the K7T Turbo2. Also SiS chipsets can be a nice option for the YMF744.
Yea thanks for the reminder, this is on my list of things to check out in future videos. I have an upcoming project with a T5710 Thin Client. Transmeta CPU, but it might have that older South Bridge. I wonder if SETUPDS could me modified for other chipsets?
Looking forward to that Transmeta project. There is a modified one I used on the SiS 645DX/962UA chipset for DDMA support, might also work for the VIA 686A/B southbridge, it can be downloaded from here: vsynchmame.mameworld.info/
Thanks, I believe I have a few Pentium 4 SIS motherboards, they work great as AGP test platforms, being Voodoo compatible and the Rage MAXX also works with them :) Do you think a modified driver for newer VIA South Bridges could be possible?
I tried to force DDMA on newer VIA chipsets for the YMF744, it initialized in DDMA mode but games refused to work. Duke Nukem 3D setup complained about DMA address wrong or not working.
Having fun with 775 rig got a whole pc for £15 added a q6600 and a hd 7700 overclocked has a antec super lanboy case still looks great and gets used daily by girlfriend as a photo editing system
In Soviet Russia the cheapest solution is P4 s478 - you can find an used set mobo+CPU+cooler+RAM for less than 5 bucks, and entire computer for 8.5~16 bucks.
Phil great video as always. I tweeted at you awhile ago but I'll throw it in here as well. I recently built an XP machine and I had an Nvidia GT410 laying around. Went on some benchmark sites to get an idea where it sits for a retro application and it actually lines up nicely with an Nvidia 8800GT in terms of performance and Futuremark scores. Seems to be rock solid in all the games I've tried so far. Just to give an example of what lies a little further along that curve. lol
one day i feel like you're gonna make a retro build and you're gonna say "today i'm going to use an old am4 board with an amd ryzen 7 processor, as for the graphics card i felt like i wanted to use something budget oriented like a nvidia gtx 1080 ti"
Personally partial to a slot 1 Pentium 2 at 230mhz. £10 price used, easy to install (slot one just plugs in like an expansion card, hear sink and all) and runs pretty much all the 90's software I can find without the need of cpu slowdown software. Iz nice. That and a stick of 128mb sdram wont set you back more than a few quid, and a period correct IDE drive is cheap as chips too. Only trick is getting a sound card both dos and windows compatible, but any ISA Sound blaster card, even the cheap cut down models (actual SB 16's run stupid pricy these days) will do just fine. For graphics I'd put any AGP card with about 32mb to run any late 90's game effortlessly and a PCI Mach64 card (windows 3.x compatible) for everything else. Wierdly, those old 5.25 floppies are ridiculously expensive now, £50ish for any listed working model. I don't feel those Flash cards are the best way of swapping data over though, a £3 usb switcher with any usb stick will let you switch it between two pc's with the press of a button, and a VGA to HDMI converter means no need for another monitor, just so long as you can set the aspect ratio correctly in the monitor settings. You can even buy new retro style beige cases.
I admit that tweaking a certain platform to get as much out of it as I can is fun as well. Playing with the hardware and dos itself are number 3 and 4 of the top ten dos games. I think though when I get to a certain point, I do simply just go one notch up the hardware ladder. Windows xp gamer setups for example have such a broad hardware spectrum that one never needs to risk the hardware by running it out of spec. But I really do love seeing what is possible out of some hardware generations. Sometimes it can be quite impressive.
The sole reason I'd go semi-high end for an Athlon XP build is because I still have the second CPU I owned, a Barton core 2600+. Spend no money on a CPU and just try to get a ASUS NF2 board and some BH-5 DDR because half the fun is honestly tweaking a system to get the best out of it, and part of me would like to eventually have a PC for each major era (eg. 486 for DOS, PIII/Athlon Thunderbird for Win9x, Athlon XP/P4/C2D for XP, etc) even if I have to deal with VMWare, Wine and DOSBox in the meantime.
Excellent Video Phil! I"m almost done for my Retro DOS Machine based around a Athlon XP. Question - what is brand of your test bench... it looks really nice. Can you put in a link in the comments?
I have a ton of 64 and 128mb DDR1 sticks ive been holding on to but never thought there would be a use for lol I might try building a machine like this now
Yup i have 4 sticks toshiba brand 64mb DDR1 SDRAM sticks a few micron samsung and nanya 128mb sticks and a unknown generic 256mb DDR1 sticks. I also have a ton of DDR2 in small sizes I cant recall off the top of my head and like 200 sticks of various 30pin and 72pin sims in both FPM and EDO lol
I bought 5 of these PC chips MBs, using them with matrox capture card Rt.100, work fantastic, bought extra MBs just as insurance. along with a Parhelia 256, CPU is a XP 3200+ , the capture card does all the work
Nice video - makes a change to see BIOS settings being deliberately made as bad as possible :-) Just out of interest, where did you get the PC build frame from? Commercial ones seem to cost more than new cases, so wondering if this could be made from simple items, such as wood or those aluminium frames & corners from Bunnings?
I have most likely seen them... I would just like to see you compare 775 to 1156 seeing as though they were so close together and one is still very usable while the other isnt.
Everything is expensive now, especially motherboards. Z68 motherboards, lga 1366 mobos, P5K mobos, socket 939...they are all at or higher price than brand new modern motherboards. I remember you could get a gtx 280 for like $20, now they are like $60. Its outrageous.
@@philscomputerlab those are still relatively cheap. Its mainly the desktop components that are overpriced. Although sff gpus are outrageous. I can get an i5 4570 optiplex in my area(california) for like $60-$80.
@@TrevorM1992 @Trevor Mundee Yes something along those lines! While you cannot play the latest games, it will get you into PC gaming and you can play a ton of older games. And when prices improve, you can upgrade the graphics card to a 750 Ti or 1050 Ti or 1650 or that new Radeon OEM card that got announced.
Awesome video! I know I for one would also love to see a similar video for a later Windows 98 gaming rig - a lot of the parts from windows 98 builds you've done in years past are similarly no longer easily available. I know you mentioned in this video all the Voodoo 3's are basically gone and you weren't kidding.
Or, you could run DOSbox. :) But kidding aside, nice build! Brought back some memories, especially when you had to set your memory timings manually. Haha.
This would make a good Win98SE build, it has native DOS support anyway and would run the Windows games too. For a "pure DOS" system, something like a Pentium 1 with 16 MB RAM and some 2D oriented video card with 2 MB V-RAM would suffice. Getting hold of a well perserved P1 build would be more of an issue, but builds that were essentially dumped can be restored with some work.
This is great, I lucked out on a 486 laptop a while ago but it's obviously a pain to modify and it uses some kind of proprietary memory expansions which I've never been able to find and 4 megs of ram is not enough for a lot of the things I want to do This seems really cheap and easy, motherboards seem a bit pricy compared to the rest but better than spending hundreds on an old IBM / clone
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Very nice video :) A similar stuff for those who wish to go the emulation way would be nice. Like getting the best out of PCem/86box on a modern multi-core machine. I know it's not going to be the real thing, but still very useful for many. I don't know if you had anything like this in mind for the channel.
I've been finding it's WAY cheaper to get full systems that nobody wants and pick out the components you need than to get the components individually. Those old systems are a gold mine for Memory, Cards, CPU's, Old IDE Drives etc. What pisses me off is that people are mostly just sending them off the the recycler. :( In the real world Slow is dead and dead is off to the recyclers or *gulp* in the garbage. :( So sad. TLDR: PEOPLE ARE THROWING THIS STUFF AWAY FOR FREE.
I love your video's, could you do one on the different aftermarket drivers and such for the voodoo 3? I've found it difficult to determine the differences
I have a MINT Gateway 2000 486 DX2-66, 16mb, 120?mb, 2-4x CD with WFW3.11, DOS 6.22. The only things I DON'T have are the original keyboard and mouse. The big cork feet are pretty deteriorated, though. I got this "curbside shopping" (free) with a bunch of original software (probably $2000+ retail new). I also found a Gateway 2000 486 DX2-66 LAPTOP - I forget most of the specs except it was 4mb RAM - but only Windows 3.1. I used that as my HAM Radio programming rig, the desktop was my retro PC. The laptop, unfortunately, fell from about 4' high and "exploded" on concrete during a move and that was the straw that broke this camel's back. So, if I'd had the laptop currently, I could be tempted to sell the entire desktop for a reasonable price (think "rummage sale" not "ebay" pricing!!!) But now without the laptop, I'll probably will the desktop to my kid!
Try using a Sandisk A1 (or A2) microSD card for operating systems. Their A-series cards greatly optimize OS and small file (4k IOPS) read and write speed, and is great for Windows XP and below, as well as Linux; better than most SD cards and USB 2.0 flash drives; or even most USB 3.0 flash drives.
Had no idea you could use a PCI style board to build a DOS machine! Might use the board from a Pentium 4 XP machine I have and build myself one of these!
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Sometimes the machines you throw together with cheap and low-end parts end up being the most fun and interesting of all, slow is indeed good! Wonderful video!
Thanks!
@@philscomputerlab this! i´ve worling on a beige box with pentium 3. and the problems are the fun! my 8086k 1070 rig just works, how boring^^
@@Schlomomo I love the strange quirks that old hardware can bring.
The best way to get computer hardware on the cheap is to get abondoned systems from friends or family ... Or even dumpster diving or putting a advert in the classifieds , you will be amazed at what you find
my friend actually found 2 amd 754's on a dumpster.It was standing in the rain.I took some time to clean it up a bit and both of them working fine just i gave most of my agp cards away only 1 i got left but misplaced it is a 9200 ati one i think.
That's a fact.
This is definitely the case. I found an i7-920 system in a trash pile (dead power supply and hard drive), another system with a bad motherboard and a good 500w PSU, and a friend offered me his "old" GTX950 after he upgraded his to do VR stuff. A bit of work, a hard drive, and a 6-pin adapter later and I have a (sorta) modern gaming rig for $60.
found a athlon full system by side of road
Found mine at a recycling center. A working Asus board with an AMD 1GHz CPU and 512MB of SDRAM. And I've been using it for a retro build as well.
It has been quite a long time! I almost forgot to make a comment on TH-cam Phil! It's like your video programs on TH-cam seems to be the only channel that lets subcribers share their experiences & ideas here in Phils Computer Channel on TH-cam! Nice to see you coming back bro 🍻 So far so long man 👋 Take Care 🙋
Still have my original Win95 and Win3.1 desktops. Still love turning them on from time to time to enjoy the "Dos" games they way they used to be played. Thanks for sharing.
Wish I still had my 486 rig ex wife made me sell all my old PC's when we moved house in 2010 :(
and the sound it makes when it turns on
Dosbox is amazing and is a great solution for playing most games and demos from all PCs since the first PC in 1981 to the last DOS games in the late 90s. Also can run Windows 1/2/3/3.11/95/98 and has good FM sound with support for pretty much all sound cards ever built for this time period. Free software and no clutter.
Where's the challenge in that though? Old hardware was a massive pain in the arse but when you got those games running it put a massive smile on your face
plus if you have any interest in software that's not games.... IDK, maybe you can code in Pascal or Turbo C in DOSbox. But also, these old computers will gain value in the future as most of them die and get thrown out (mostly capacitors blowing and owners have no idea they can be replaced) These are finite collector's items, even is you don't play any games at all on them.
it is supremely satisfying to preserve the past on real hardware. The satisfaction of a proper custom build is something that DosBox will never be able to provide.
Phil: "Here's a dos computer build that anyone can afford!"
Ebay sellers: "$$$$"
Literally no joke, even 2-4-8 mb SIMM sticks go for 30-60 bucks now, that's not including shipping outside the U.S.
I'm all for keeping a hobby sustainable but this is getting kinda silly and unattainable.
@@ToreDL87 Pretty much any hobby involving items of this age has been overrun by scalpers. They hoover up everything they can, and since there's a relatively limited supply with no potential of any of this stuff being made again, they can charge what they like. Every time I go looking for something on Ebay, it's the same handful of sellers offering everything at absurd prices. You can get the odd bargain every now and again, but they're becoming increasingly rare. And you're certainly not going to find something like a Voodoo card going cheap on Ebay these days. They're all in the hands of collectors and scalpers at this point. Maybe you'll get a one-in-a-million find at a flea market inside an old PC somebody's selling for $10 or something, but that's the level of luck required now.
@@CaptainKenway Yeah it's brutal, collectors are one thing, I'm guilty there, mind you, got the stuff back in the day for retail rates, and keeping it for nostalgia, was unaware there would be money behind it.
But these scalpers... I don't even have the conscience to put stuff up for sale at scalper rates (which I would have to lest the item end up in scalper hands).
Scalpers are ruining and making cheaper hobbies unattainable 😰
@@ToreDL87 Sell $5 less than cheapest scalper price, then it's not worth scalping by someone else
@ch282 Yeah the mid 2k's stuff just hasn't picked up yet, but it will.
And when it does..
I have enough to get by for my use so not complaining for my sake, I'm just sad for newbies to the hobby.
i can remember back in 1987 my dad got me loads of pc parts off his work.I built my first pc a dual cpu IBM 386 sx 33 mhz(if i can remember correct)it ran with the 486 dx 2 66 mhz it had a rizer card for extra memory.In total it had 32mb ram but could only support up to 24mb....The good old days lol now i feel old :D
Was lucky to grow up playing games from the early 80's in the arcades to the 1st consoles and PC games but when you hear the specs from PC parts compared to today's PC it still makes me smile and shake my head 😜. Great video, thanks
"Slow is good"
you don't hear that often.
Depends on the wife's mood.
@@NLuKa420 I thought the same thing
When you're driving with your parents
After you have to deal with blue screens of death, random restarts, random video artifacts, sound hanging, black screens, buzzers beeping for unknown reasons, drivers not installing, games never starting or giving random errors, windows crashing to desktop, windows asking for obscure files you WILL understand what he mean with slow is good.
i gained a few chromosomes by just hearing that
Hmm. Retro gaming philosophy is quite different from the vintage machine approach. I like the idea of putting together an old machine from old parts to see old software running on it and check out how useful it can still be. Having a machine that looks the part is important to me too to get that authentic feel. I guess I'm a bit of a historian too! :-) PS. there's a touch of nostalgia in this too because I came to PCs around 1988 as a programmer and systems administrator.
Phil you are a God among retro pc hardware kings.
I wish I had saved my hardware from the 1990s and early 2000s. I did save one of my systems from the late 1990s.
Oh man meee tooo
I love watching your retro videos. It's a hobby of mine as well. I'm building a tiny flat computer from the guts of a old Dell D800 laptop
I just wanted to say, Thank you. I have recently used your website for 98 drivers on my 3DFX build. Damn you saved me a lot of time.
Thanks for the feedback! Was there anything not our site that you were looking for?
I still got a Duron 750mhz with a GeForce 2 mx440 64mb standard pci. I use to play GTA vice city in that thing 😓
what about gta san andreas? It's enough to play medium settings?
Excellent video. Really enjoyed watching this build. Was only thinking about your channel earlier today as I was dragging out a heap of old tech from the shed. So many old school pci cards I had stashed away.
Phil! Do a video on MT32-pi, please ♥
I still have my PC Chips M848LU mainboard, just need to get a socket A processor for it. This is one of the best videos I've seen on your channel, Phil. Thank you so much for that.
I remember the fdisk/mbr command quite well... I had a Pentium 2 computer back in the day that, for some reason, kept losing the master boot record. To boot it, I had to first boot with a floppy, run fdisk/mbr, eject it, and ctrl-alt-del.
The music in Doom is perfect, exactly how I remember it. This sound card is awesome.
Fdisk/mbr. You just saved my day! :) Did not know that, when performing install on a nice old Pentium MMX.
Mine too. I was chasing this issue for days using CF cards on a Compaq Prolinea 4/25S. This command was the missing piece.
Haven't watched the entire video yet but doesn't that rebuild the master boot record?
Thanks for the long version. Fun to see the variations in how you set one up compared to my typical experience.
Yea there are heaps of ways of doing this :D
Really appreciate all the information and time you take to show us all that. I ordered that ymf744 for my windows 98 build I'm doing on socket 478.
I wish I had have seen this video a couple of weeks ago! I just bought an Athlon 1000 MHz that showed up with about 30 bent pins. It was very challenging to get them straightened out enough that the CPU would socket, especially given my mid-40s eyesight. Using a mechanical pencil for that is a great idea! It would have saved me a ton of time.
Cool video Phil I forgot about these old games. Ill have to look in my garage I have about 40 old pcs previous home owner left behind.
Edit: there was a asus TX97 mother board with a 200mmx cpu and a aopen ap5t with a 233mmx cpu and 30 or so mixed p2 and p3 setups
The more dos and Window98 videos I watch, the more I am glad I kept that mac PCI Voodoo 5 5500, just recently flashed it to get the DVI port working as well. Been toying with the idea of getting a Geforce 4 TI4600, but decided that any games that need that would be XP games and I have an overkill XP/Vista/W7 PC for them.
Great video, Phil!
It's clever to use newer parts and cripple them to slow things down. Great value to be had here, for sure! I'm gonna have to play around with some old junk I've got, see what I come up with. :)
I really like the longer format by the way.
Subscriber gained! I bought a big box full of parts for £5 the other day and there's some stuff in there that I think I can turn into something! Never built a PC before, but it's gonna happen! Thanks man.
Warning: It's a fun hobby and computer parts might take over your home :D
It's already happening! The motherboard in this box of stuff seems to have a Cyrix 6x86MX in it... That could make an interesting build right?? And there's an ATI Rage in there...
Definitely interesting for Pentium-era DOS/Win95/early Win98 gaming, although I believe the Cyrix CPUs had a weak floating point unit. But if you find any games that don't perform well, you can just pick up a cheap Pentium MMX 166/200MHz CPU and swap it out.
Anything to watch out for before my inexperienced hands start banging power supply connections onto everything and seeing if it works?
@@philscomputerlab Yes you are right. My son has been collecting chucked out computers and now the downstairs is crowded with them. I keep telling him to throw out some so that I can walk down there!
But then I really can't critizise as I have woodworking machinery everywhere!
Definitely agree on the IDE SD card adapter for DOS, work brilliantly. Be aware though that SD or SATA to IDE adapters MIGHT not work in Windows 9x with DMA mode enabled. Just FYI, in case you're building a DOS/Windows combo PC.
Yea on some chipsets, and with some adapters, the DMA mode will lockup the machine. I've seen this quite a few times so far.
that's why i still prefer cf to ide (the pins are the same)
Where can I find one with a bracket. I can't find them anywhere
I use win 98 se on ide sd adapter and all work just normal. + super sillience. :)
I've noticed that IDE-SD adapters are great for newer hardware, but they don't work seem to properly for older BIOSes or systems especially if they still rely on cylinder/head/sector geometry... at least the ones I've found so far. For older systems you'll still need to use an IDE CF adapter.
Another excellent video Phil! I've never seriously considered building a retro gaming PC, but maybe it's something I'll look into doing at some stage now that I'm armed with the tips in this video. I know my dad was more into PC stuff during this time period so maybe it would be a nice surprise to build a bit of a retro gaming machine with him.
Kind of a shame that we threw out much of our old PC hardware in a clean up many, many years ago; at the time it was just taking up space but now I look back and think "I wonder what we might have had that we just discarded".
I have a Duron 1.6 in a box somewhere. You could bridge across one of the laser cut components and it would give you all the cache back, turning it back into a Thoroughbred. OC'd to 2ghz it was the best $50 I ever spent.
Good choice for those who can't find/afford a Pentium or K6.
The best investment that makes a difference, is a CRT monitor. 17 inch is better than 19 inch with low res.. Seriously.. CRT (many has forgot) gives the "best" picture with MS-DOS games. But they are hard to find these days. You can go with a LCD 1600x1200 (or 1920x1200 with aspect correction) which will do 800x600 or 320x240 as well as 640x480 pixel perfect, BUT with 320x200, a CRT will be best. A LCD with aspect correction can display it OK, but the LCD is too revealing of pixels. CRT's are more smooth n blurry. ;)
To get my DX2-66 I had to buy it from Ukraine, I think the chip itself cost about $50 in the end. That was much much cheaper then anything local where people will ask up to $200 for a DX processor. It sucks to think when I was a child you could get boxes on DX and SX processors basically for free, but now their like hens teeth.
I would have them coming out my ears but my parents made me throw them all away lol. They've missed out on their retirement investment :P haha
I just got a Socket 7 HX board with a Pentium 100 from Kazakhstan for a good price $39 with some shipping, it was worth the long wait. The stuff selling in the US is like $90+ but things from Russian Federation, Ukraine, Poland, Kazakhstan, China, etc. are less than the local stuff
@@SiggyPony My parents didn't make me chuck the things that i ordered like you but they yanked my ethernet cable and took my phone away for a month for ordering too much.
@@pentiummmx2294 first world problems... greedy ebay sellers thinking they sit on a gold bar that none have.
You can buy a whole system here for that
I remember my first 256 color Cirrus Logic card in my 486dx2 when I was a kid it was a wicked card played all the games I had back then no issue
Wow... that’s nice! No more doubt about PCI sound board in pure DOS. Thank you!!
Yea it's arguably the best PCI sound card for DOS games.
Lemming music always lifts my spirit...
Looks like a PC Chips M817 ? socket a (462) and a XP Tbred and either a Duron Spitfire/Morgan core or a Athlon Thunderbird in the grey.
KT266A chipset can handle 133MHz FSB CPU's but the performance with the PC Chips mobo will be slower than most other socket A mobo's (though VIA is preferable to some old SiS chipsets - especially the sloowww SiS 730 which PC Chips used on the M810 LMR.
Ive had over 50 computers (easily) and used to have 19 computers at home with 10 computers (cased and caseless) in my bedroom all running SETI@home 24/7 and when SETI got old I ran Folding@home but was in the top 40 in the UK on SETI@Home (back in the day).......you know you can get nForce mobo's with onboard GeForce 2 VGA.....A7N266-VM? I think thats the model I had......also had a GA7ZXE with a VIA KT133a chipset and had the FSB (168 pin SD RAM of course) up to 156MHz but have no idea how PC133 OR the chipset achieved this and not to mention the ridiculous frequency the PCI/AGP bus must have been running it.....KT133A also worked with Athlon XP Thoroughbred A & B CPU's and obviously other socket a processors such as the Duron Applebred which were great processors if on a budget as could re-enable L2 cache to same as athlon XP (256kb) from the 64kb default on a Duron. All I needed was a HB pencil and I joined two contacts on a bridge on the top of the processor as Applebred Duron were the same as the T'bred processors - just had an L2 cache bridge cut to lower the amount - or at least AMD had hoped so............
I had a 1600MHz Applebred which clocked (easily) to 2300MHz with the full L2 cache enabled and the CPU cost just £32 at the time! I cant remember what mobo the Duron was on but probably a Abit NF7-S, Epox 8rda3, Epox 8rdae and other nForce 2 based skt a mobos
All these parts were cheap until now!! Thanks Phil Computer Lab! Now all the prices are going to start to Skyrocket for socket A boards. All kidding aside are really great video thank you very much I am glad I actually have a few spare socket a boards and a few Athlons and two Durons I will have to recheck. Thank you again for the video.
Oct 2024: Value Village and Goodwill are good places to look. Just got a 486 ASRock mother board, 512MB RAM with case and power supply for $15. ATI Radeon 128MB for $13. PC Card to IDE drive with 8GB flash for $30. I already had a Sound Blaster Live SB0100. Best of all this was in Canadian dollars. Just about to download DOS games and Internet Archive is down. :(
@Phil - I love watching all your videos, particularly for the nostalgic value. Do you know what I also just realized? I DO NOT miss all the agony and time used setting up drivers, batch files, etc, especially in DOS. Modern PC computing has certainly spoiled us. That being said I think I'll stick with my windows 10, thanks, but keep making your videos!
I try to make it as easy as possible with guides and starter packs, so that anyone interested can have a go without getting frustrated :)
Great content and system Phill. Keep up the good work. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands
Holy crap I use to have that board! I never got mine to run very well though, I guess it just needs Phil's magic touch! 😀
I am going to give this a shot in the coming months, thank you for the amazing tutorial Phil! 😁👍
Thanks!
Great video, I really enjoyed that, it brought back a lot of memories. For the longest time we used DOS 6.2 for Gaming and windows for everything else like printing, researching, E-mails and photo/video Editing etc... Worked out fine until Win98, then suddenly many of the new releases ONLY ran well on Windows 95B or 98, Grrrr Bummer. Thanks again.
👍🙂👍
I agree that Slow is good because of the older Sierra titles that were made with the hardware in mind that was out during those games' heyday. Nice PCI Sound card for DOS based games.
also daggerfall. running it on a modern pc causes jumping and climbing to become buggy
I’ve been trying to find parts to put together a 386SX build. I found some that are _relatively_ cheap on eBay, but it’s been ingrained in my head that I don’t need to be spending money too often and I’ve been holding back from actually buying.
There ARE DDR sticks lower than 256 MB. I believe the lowest DDR RAM sticks are 128 MB ones.
Nice, got to look for one then :)
Can confirm - I've got 2 Hynix modules in my drawer, 128MB each, PC2100. :)
I can confirm, I had two 128 MB Samsung sticks for a while in my Socket A machine at the time. I don't remember the speed, it was 15 years ago.
Below that, 64MB starts to go into the SDRAM category doesn't it?
Actually, my Google-fu turned up a 64MB DDR stick by Micron so they do seem to exist. I had no idea. :)
Check this one out: MT8LSDT864AG-133C7.
Went on a bit of a ISA sound card spending spree recently; bought a couple of ESS cards and a Sound Blaster 2.0, the latter of which I got for a "bargain" under $100 Aussie dollary doos, so I can attest to how much it costs to do old-school retro gaming on period correct hardware. Even the ESS cards cost $32-45 including delivery, and they're just unbranded, non-collectable cards.
I managed to save money on some of my 486 motherboards by buying untested and dodgy looking boards, some of which needed repair, but I've got the electronics background to be able to troubleshoot and repair the boards myself. The only other option would be to buy bulk lots and hope you get one working board, then sell off the non-working ones as faulty/repair required to recoup some of the costs of those boards. But even then it's still going to be expensive and time-consuming.
Or you could just buy something newer and cheap, and just fiddle with the settings a little, and save a whole lot of money! You could easily pick up a whole system for under $100, which is cheaper than a "bargain" period-correct collectable sound card alone!
Yea something like a Sound Blaster, they are not cheap any more. ESS cards, for years nobody cared, they make some really good sound chips.
That's what I'm discovering. Because sound blaster cards were the most popular back in the day, that means they're the most popular with collectors, hence the high prices. And so ESS cards are much better value today, even PCI models. But they're really very compatible, and sound pretty good too.
Good video, interesting channel ))
Thanks!
@
Maddy MURK я смотрю ваши видео и подписан на вас
О, Мурк! Что ты здесь делаешь?
Ну, я предполагаю, ответ будет в ты что здесь делаешь, чел?
Good video. The SD card use was interesting. I still prefer to use my older Pentium 233 chip for DOS as the motherboard has a few ISA slots, which are needed for my Roland SCC-1 Midi sound board & the Soundblaster. It makes games like Doom and Descent so much better in the music department. I also have a Soundblaster MCD 16 with a Yamaha DB50XG. The Yamaha is set as 300 and the Roland as 330.
Hi Phil, another good video. I cant think of much other, rather than first time viewers may have needed the segment where you calculate the 5 volt rail load to see if the Socket A will overload the markings on the power supply, but the CPU you chose is a low wattage one.
But you have it all covered in your plays lists.
Hmm now for the hunt on super low end thin client in dos mode ( HP / Cissco Wise )
PS , i still hang on to my SB16 and matching 2speed cdrom if still works after queuing up to buy it new when the price plummeted down to $800, then i saved more overtime money and bought 4 x 4meg sims at $100 each and upgraded yet again
The gotek floppy emulator is great ( their OEM software not so good ) the 99 images are cool but you really waste a 4GB USB stick as the rest of the stick is unusable, but that is a cheap price to pay for something that works great - HAHA i know what you mean about finding your A4 printed 2 x 25 column per side list of software you have saved in each slot, i keep it in a A4 sleeve as my wife found it in the spare room and threw it out once thinking it was scrap paper
Sites such as allbootdisk and winworldpc are excellent for all retro software to boot up and some support files. I have in the cupboard original 5.25 and 3.5 DOS 3 to Dos 6.22 retail and OEM packages, and i find they mostly work, but often you get a error somewhere, sometimes t can skip a file other times halt on something important and die. Some have never been opened, so it is true they loose there magnetic field over time, others like a junk cheap coloured disk i have in 3.5 work every day, all of the top brand, Memorex, Imation, Verbatim, have the best chance of lasting well.
For 5.25 3M, BASF, Maxell, Memorex are pretty good later on the Le Floppy and Laser were just cheap mass produced items, they worked but they are made to a price.
Regards
George
Can't wait for your ESS Solo 1 review. I know it's not really your cup of tea, but I imagine for a lot of people the best route to a cheap 386/486 era machine are estate sales, flea markets, garage/yard sales, etc. People are at the point of basically throwing away such machines as "useless". That's the thing that tends to sadden me because every old PC deserves a good home. :) Okay, maybe not.
Yea that review is coming soon :) If you live in a large city, the possibilities are endless, I agree.
Cool idea. Never thought of lowering retro build cost by going with newer components and then slowing them down. Quite educational, and a nice channel too. Subscribing - with thanks :)
Glad you liked it!
Hi Phil - great channel longtime watcher - you've finally made me pull my finger out and start my retro gaming rig - I have a dual Pentium 2 333mhz IBM Intellistation hopefully I can get it to work again, its been sat 10+ years!
Good luck, it's a fun hobby :D
I just had to send this your way, it's a PCI to PCIe 1x adapter, it's the perfect height to fit a half-height PCIe card in with itself, it even has a little plate for itself to cover up and it'll fit inside a computer, along with a half-height card.
I just love how your videos trigger all the nice sparks inside my head, I cannot thank you enough Phil for being able to keep my stupid old brain going :D
I need to do such a video every once in a while to refresh my skills :D
Hehe, I know exactly what you mean, i'm starting to find I do things over and over, and each time it's seems like it's something new all over again (which makes for cheap living!) :)
For DOS i think the best configuration would be and asus board that was released for pIII that has 1 agp slot 4 pci and 2 isa slots, the thing is that one of the best internal sound cards is sound blaster awe 64(isa) , for video would be an S3Virge for example that are compatible with univbe driver. My 2 Cents
I built a pretty decent dos/win2k rig, piii 500mhz, 320mb ram, 80gb hard drive, $30.
Nice video. I bought some retro stuff recently. A unisys 386 16mhz with original mfm 43mb hdd.
And a 486dx 33 system with a 256mb hdd. And 4mb 30pin memory. Also got a cheap mainboard with a 6x86 ibm cpu on it. For 15€.
I only need to get my ibm mainboard with 486dx4 working. It gives an error code at startup.
Today Phil and you magic touch Show !
Interesting, looks like my first computer (after upgrade). Used it to play Oblivion under Windows XP.
An option for better game compatibility with the YMF744 is to go for an older VIA chipset with the 686A/B southbridge. With this setup you can run the YMF744 in DDMA mode and then you don't need the DSDMA TSR and EMM386 (you need a modified SETUPDS.EXE as it doesn't contain the PCI id of the 686A/B southbridge). MSI actually produced a board with the KT133A/686B chipset with a 12V P4 connector, the K7T Turbo2. Also SiS chipsets can be a nice option for the YMF744.
Yea thanks for the reminder, this is on my list of things to check out in future videos. I have an upcoming project with a T5710 Thin Client. Transmeta CPU, but it might have that older South Bridge. I wonder if SETUPDS could me modified for other chipsets?
Looking forward to that Transmeta project. There is a modified one I used on the SiS 645DX/962UA chipset for DDMA support, might also work for the VIA 686A/B southbridge, it can be downloaded from here: vsynchmame.mameworld.info/
Thanks, I believe I have a few Pentium 4 SIS motherboards, they work great as AGP test platforms, being Voodoo compatible and the Rage MAXX also works with them :) Do you think a modified driver for newer VIA South Bridges could be possible?
I tried to force DDMA on newer VIA chipsets for the YMF744, it initialized in DDMA mode but games refused to work. Duke Nukem 3D setup complained about DMA address wrong or not working.
Think I saw you received an ALS4000 card, try this in the setup you got in your video as it should work great under MS-DOS.
I've finished my 478 build, now I'm onto 775. I bought a 2nd hand PC solely for the Asrock 4core dual sata2, can't wait to throw a q6700 in there.
Having fun with 775 rig got a whole pc for £15 added a q6600 and a hd 7700 overclocked has a antec super lanboy case still looks great and gets used daily by girlfriend as a photo editing system
In Soviet Russia the cheapest solution is P4 s478 - you can find an used set mobo+CPU+cooler+RAM for less than 5 bucks, and entire computer for 8.5~16 bucks.
Haha I love all the corrections in this video. Your brain works like mine does.
I've got that main board. It was very cheap about 10 years ago... Remember the jumper needing to taken off a short which made the board appear DOA.
Phil great video as always. I tweeted at you awhile ago but I'll throw it in here as well. I recently built an XP machine and I had an Nvidia GT410 laying around. Went on some benchmark sites to get an idea where it sits for a retro application and it actually lines up nicely with an Nvidia 8800GT in terms of performance and Futuremark scores. Seems to be rock solid in all the games I've tried so far. Just to give an example of what lies a little further along that curve. lol
Ok good to know!
As always, I like then I watch ;) I missed this kind of video, well done as always Phil :)
I used to have half this kit, but when it originally came out.
one day i feel like you're gonna make a retro build and you're gonna say "today i'm going to use an old am4 board with an amd ryzen 7 processor, as for the graphics card i felt like i wanted to use something budget oriented like a nvidia gtx 1080 ti"
Personally partial to a slot 1 Pentium 2 at 230mhz. £10 price used, easy to install (slot one just plugs in like an expansion card, hear sink and all) and runs pretty much all the 90's software I can find without the need of cpu slowdown software. Iz nice. That and a stick of 128mb sdram wont set you back more than a few quid, and a period correct IDE drive is cheap as chips too. Only trick is getting a sound card both dos and windows compatible, but any ISA Sound blaster card, even the cheap cut down models (actual SB 16's run stupid pricy these days) will do just fine. For graphics I'd put any AGP card with about 32mb to run any late 90's game effortlessly and a PCI Mach64 card (windows 3.x compatible) for everything else. Wierdly, those old 5.25 floppies are ridiculously expensive now, £50ish for any listed working model. I don't feel those Flash cards are the best way of swapping data over though, a £3 usb switcher with any usb stick will let you switch it between two pc's with the press of a button, and a VGA to HDMI converter means no need for another monitor, just so long as you can set the aspect ratio correctly in the monitor settings. You can even buy new retro style beige cases.
I admit that tweaking a certain platform to get as much out of it as I can is fun as well. Playing with the hardware and dos itself are number 3 and 4 of the top ten dos games. I think though when I get to a certain point, I do simply just go one notch up the hardware ladder. Windows xp gamer setups for example have such a broad hardware spectrum that one never needs to risk the hardware by running it out of spec.
But I really do love seeing what is possible out of some hardware generations. Sometimes it can be quite impressive.
The sole reason I'd go semi-high end for an Athlon XP build is because I still have the second CPU I owned, a Barton core 2600+. Spend no money on a CPU and just try to get a ASUS NF2 board and some BH-5 DDR because half the fun is honestly tweaking a system to get the best out of it, and part of me would like to eventually have a PC for each major era (eg. 486 for DOS, PIII/Athlon Thunderbird for Win9x, Athlon XP/P4/C2D for XP, etc) even if I have to deal with VMWare, Wine and DOSBox in the meantime.
As mentioned a socket 775 for retro/budget gaming? Still using a Dell SFF from that era as a daily driver ;)
Excellent Video Phil! I"m almost done for my Retro DOS Machine based around a Athlon XP. Question - what is brand of your test bench... it looks really nice. Can you put in a link in the comments?
I have a ton of 64 and 128mb DDR1 sticks ive been holding on to but never thought there would be a use for lol I might try building a machine like this now
64 MB? Nice :D
Yup i have 4 sticks toshiba brand 64mb DDR1 SDRAM sticks a few micron samsung and nanya 128mb sticks and a unknown generic 256mb DDR1 sticks. I also have a ton of DDR2 in small sizes I cant recall off the top of my head and like 200 sticks of various 30pin and 72pin sims in both FPM and EDO lol
I bought 5 of these PC chips MBs, using them with matrox capture card Rt.100, work fantastic, bought extra MBs just as insurance. along with a Parhelia 256, CPU is a XP 3200+ , the capture card does all the work
one man's junk is another man's treasure
lmao
H O L U P
I love how easy it is to get brand new agp cards for cheap
I just built a LGA775 PC and its great, its got windows xp and runs all the old stuff, trespasser, doom, quake, duke3d, biomenace, duke nukem 2
Nice video - makes a change to see BIOS settings being deliberately made as bad as possible :-) Just out of interest, where did you get the PC build frame from? Commercial ones seem to cost more than new cases, so wondering if this could be made from simple items, such as wood or those aluminium frames & corners from Bunnings?
I'd like to see someone.. make like an FPGA DOS PC.. maybe one that can run like windows 95 or 98
almost 47 mins of PCL YES. I would like to see your coverage of lga775 in modern games v say gen 1 core architecture
I've done a few videos on 775, at least one, but yes, there will be more :)
I have most likely seen them... I would just like to see you compare 775 to 1156 seeing as though they were so close together and one is still very usable while the other isnt.
Everything is expensive now, especially motherboards. Z68 motherboards, lga 1366 mobos, P5K mobos, socket 939...they are all at or higher price than brand new modern motherboards. I remember you could get a gtx 280 for like $20, now they are like $60. Its outrageous.
What about OEM SFF machines?
@@philscomputerlab those are still relatively cheap. Its mainly the desktop components that are overpriced. Although sff gpus are outrageous. I can get an i5 4570 optiplex in my area(california) for like $60-$80.
@@TrevorM1992 Hmm I could do a video about SSF and some cheaper Low Profile graphics cards. More for older games, Retro Games to tie you over...
@@philscomputerlab That would actually be amazing. Preferably a decent card under $40 USD. The one i always see is the HD 7570 1gb or r7 250.
@@TrevorM1992 @Trevor Mundee Yes something along those lines! While you cannot play the latest games, it will get you into PC gaming and you can play a ton of older games. And when prices improve, you can upgrade the graphics card to a 750 Ti or 1050 Ti or 1650 or that new Radeon OEM card that got announced.
Awesome video! I know I for one would also love to see a similar video for a later Windows 98 gaming rig - a lot of the parts from windows 98 builds you've done in years past are similarly no longer easily available. I know you mentioned in this video all the Voodoo 3's are basically gone and you weren't kidding.
Pentium 4 is the way to go for Windows 98. I've covered this in a few videos I believe, but they are a bit older, so maybe time for another one...
Or, you could run DOSbox. :)
But kidding aside, nice build! Brought back some memories, especially when you had to set your memory timings manually. Haha.
This would make a good Win98SE build, it has native DOS support anyway and would run the Windows games too. For a "pure DOS" system, something like a Pentium 1 with 16 MB RAM and some 2D oriented video card with 2 MB V-RAM would suffice. Getting hold of a well perserved P1 build would be more of an issue, but builds that were essentially dumped can be restored with some work.
i have the exact motherboard and it was in my first pc from 2004 and still works
Such a great video. I'm going to start doing this now
give us a part list
This is great, I lucked out on a 486 laptop a while ago but it's obviously a pain to modify and it uses some kind of proprietary memory expansions which I've never been able to find and 4 megs of ram is not enough for a lot of the things I want to do
This seems really cheap and easy, motherboards seem a bit pricy compared to the rest but better than spending hundreds on an old IBM / clone
Very nice video :)
A similar stuff for those who wish to go the emulation way would be nice. Like getting the best out of PCem/86box on a modern multi-core machine. I know it's not going to be the real thing, but still very useful for many. I don't know if you had anything like this in mind for the channel.
I've been finding it's WAY cheaper to get full systems that nobody wants and pick out the components you need than to get the components individually. Those old systems are a gold mine for Memory, Cards, CPU's, Old IDE Drives etc. What pisses me off is that people are mostly just sending them off the the recycler. :( In the real world Slow is dead and dead is off to the recyclers or *gulp* in the garbage. :( So sad.
TLDR: PEOPLE ARE THROWING THIS STUFF AWAY FOR FREE.
Yes, depending on where you live, you can get nice parts for free :)
Great video Phil, really enjoyed watching this one. I’m in the hunt for tualatin motherboard to build a dos/win98 machine😁🕹
Retrocengo
I love your video's, could you do one on the different aftermarket drivers and such for the voodoo 3? I've found it difficult to determine the differences
Just stick with the latest reference drivers :)
I have a MINT Gateway 2000 486 DX2-66, 16mb, 120?mb, 2-4x CD with WFW3.11, DOS 6.22. The only things I DON'T have are the original keyboard and mouse. The big cork feet are pretty deteriorated, though. I got this "curbside shopping" (free) with a bunch of original software (probably $2000+ retail new). I also found a Gateway 2000 486 DX2-66 LAPTOP - I forget most of the specs except it was 4mb RAM - but only Windows 3.1. I used that as my HAM Radio programming rig, the desktop was my retro PC. The laptop, unfortunately, fell from about 4' high and "exploded" on concrete during a move and that was the straw that broke this camel's back.
So, if I'd had the laptop currently, I could be tempted to sell the entire desktop for a reasonable price (think "rummage sale" not "ebay" pricing!!!) But now without the laptop, I'll probably will the desktop to my kid!
This seems like a good machine to run FreeDOS on and be able to use USB drives for storage.
Try using a Sandisk A1 (or A2) microSD card for operating systems.
Their A-series cards greatly optimize OS and small file (4k IOPS) read and write speed, and is great for Windows XP and below, as well as Linux; better than most SD cards and USB 2.0 flash drives; or even most USB 3.0 flash drives.
Damn... I've sold my socket A with voodoo3 a while ago 🙁
Had no idea you could use a PCI style board to build a DOS machine! Might use the board from a Pentium 4 XP machine I have and build myself one of these!