Mini Retro Gaming PC Follow-up. Also BENCHMARKS!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ก.ค. 2024
- I previously built a Miniature 90s PC from an old firewall here on the channel, and those videos received quite a number of comments, so thank you for that everyone! In this video i’ll follow up on some of the suggestions in those comments and try to install Windows 2000 and XP and I’ll also give Linux a go, and finally I’ll see if I have any more luck with getting networking and 3D acceleration working in Windows 98.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:33 Disassembly
01:11 Win2K Installation using emulation
02:28 Linux
03:51 Revisiting driver issues in Windows 98
04:55 Half-Life
05:34 Benchmarks
Music used in this video:
Blue Intermission by Congus Bongus [ / blue-intermission ]
Rumpus by Congus Bongus [ / rumpus ] - แนวปฏิบัติและการใช้ชีวิต
![ตีสิบเดย์ [FULL] | คู่รักแซฟฟิก "หลิงหลิง - ออม" จากซีรีย์ "ใจซ่อนรัก"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/zs8AfphGn2w/mqdefault.jpg)
![THE TOYS x NONT TANONT - ดอกไม้ที่รอฝน (spring) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/pPa1d5cC8M4/mqdefault.jpg)
I believe the PC will run XP & 2000 just fine, but it's best to install DOS first, then copy all the installation files over and launch the NT install executable (\i386\winnt.exe or something along those lines) directly from DOS, and then the installer will know which drivers to load on startup for the PC
QEMU and other virtualization software will install it, but because of different drivers and devices it likely won't run once the drive is in the physical host
Had the same unfortunate issue on a POS system, POS in more ways than one for sure
What he said!
I have the same bad experience with 2000/XP transferring OS from a virtual machine.
Try either:
1. Installing from DOS as said above.
2. Boot 2000/XP ISO from a USB and Easy2Boot
3. Rufus might work also.
If booting stuff is an issue, try "Plop Boot Manager 5".
This has been a very cool project to follow, and I can't believe you got 3d running.. Awesome!
Windows XP always gave me issues when moving hard drives between systems, it's better to try and install it natively. That way you'll know for sure if the hardware wants to work with it.
Yeah, perhaps I'll try it again at some point!
@@OddObsolete A PCI IDE Controller Card May Work. You'll have to temporally remove the Sound Card Though.
Win 2K and XP are failing to boot due to the fact Windows marries its configurations to hardware its set up with. I learned this back then by trying to migrate an HDD from an older PC to a much newer one and kept getting BSODs and same story Vice versa. It stayed this way until I believe 8.1 when it became agnostic again. (Windows-to-go)
Win 9X seems to be more agnostic and can reconfigure itself when I’d do the same back then
Great project, Would love to see similar projects in the future with old/discarded equipment and re-purposed like this :)
i don't remember which hardware it has, but those stutters in half life and other games are because you don't have the chipset drivers installed , so you don't have dma support on the compact flash, which speed up things a lot by giving the ide controller direct access to ram
the low score on floating point is partialy because of how the via c3 samuel2 core works, it basically has both l2 cache and floating point unit running at half the speed of the core
Good point! I did install some chipset drivers when I first installed win98, but I’ll double check if DMA is actually activated.
@@OddObsolete on such a slow processor it makes a big difference, but in windows only, no dos
wow, that's absolutely amazing! In the past a lot of that old pieces of hardware have seen the trash, that's a pity
The boot failures of win2k and winXP are indeed most likely due to the installation method in contrast to Linux (or one of the *BSDs) it is rather hard to move a windows install from one machine to another, the exact reasons I don't know (IIRC it has something to do with that certain core drivers get loaded so early it is not possible to change the config of those drivers or change them for the needed ones)
Yeah, you're probably right. Perhaps I'll take another stab at this at some point!
@@OddObsolete run w2k installer in qemu, at first reboot, power off the vm, DD image to cf card, let it finish the installation on real machine may help.
@@ErwinSchrodingermeow I tried that too, result was the same :(
Great videos so far mate, keep it up!
Thank you for your dedication!
Great, now I would like to build one for myself
Older NT based systems will generally not boot on a different machine than the one they were installed on. Especially if it's a different chipset.
To install an NT variant (this includes XP) on a machine without CDROM, you must format your hd (CF Card in this case) in FAT, make it bootable with windows 98 (copy the win98 boot disk to the hd) then copy the i386 folder from the installation cd to the storage drive. When finished, turn off everything, and plug the storage drive into the machine without cdrom (small pc) it will start win98 ms-dos, go to the i386 folder, and type winnt, the installation process will start, and it will be a slightly longer than usual, during the process you will be asked if you want to convert the fat drive to ntfs.
If the boot problem persists, then you have a problem with your CF to IDE adapter.
One more tip, people often use CF as a replacement for HD, and that's a mistake. CF in addition to being expensive, has little useful life, and low speed, its only benefit is its size and low power consumption, but it is more viable to use an ide / sata adapter, or a traditional hd.
obs. It doesn't make sense to use linux on an old computer, the only function of an old computer nowadays is to use old games and programs (free of emulation).
Hey thanks for taking the time to post such a detailed instruction!
Very cool thanks for sharing 😊
Playing Unreal on old firewall hardware. Awesome!
This is my new favorite channel.
big fan swedish man
TinyCore Linux's desktop doesn't actually support any kind of accelerated desktop; 2D or 3D. It uses software rendering only to save drive space by not including the drivers. You have make some tradeoffs to make a whole Linux distro less than 16MB.
That makes sense!
Man this is a good project yet I remember back then how awful were the via cpus. I like how you use it well and the case.
For Windows 2000. What you could do is do an in-place upgrade from 98.
Copy the Windows 2000 installer into a directory on the boot drive, and launch it from there.
I remember buying monitor like this. It was from another brand but booooyyyyyyyy.... That was EPICCC monitor back then for a kid like me and my friends. It was used and got some scars on the panel buuuut maan... Miss the childhood T_T Playing diablo 2, nfs, starcraft/broodwar and some valve ofcourse. I want those times back :((
Windows NT (2000 and XP) is not very happy when change some things in theirs hardware configuration, mainly the chipset and in the particular the storage interface adapter. So, the best is to use an PC with the same (or close enough) chipset or to install on the machine that you will use. Why did you not use a optical drive connected to the machine? Just had you hooked as primary slave or cable select on the same IDE cable. Another option is to delete everything from that CF card (except the system files: command com, io.sys and msdos.sys) and copy the i386 folder from the Win2k CD on the CF card and run setup.
If you can, may upgrade the memory to 256M or 512M (the integrated graphics take some memory) for windows 98. Also for linux the memory can be maxed to maybe 1G if the RAM is DDR1. Another useful upgrade can be using an small SATA HDD or SSD (laptop formfactor) with an IDE to SATA adapter and a IDE CD/DVD (even a slimline one with an adapter); that 8G CFcard is quite small and with few installed games it will fill up quickly, even if you use an USB stick for storing the game iso files. Another option can be to use one USB port for a cardreader with USB port that was used on the front panels in 2000s, that way you can use a 64G SD card for secondary drive to store iso files and have a front panel USB port, leaving the rear USB for a keyboard/mouse combo.
Very nice project, I would like to find a similar board to make such a lovely mini retro PC.
Hey, you should install the "side panel" with velcro. :)
The floating point module of CPUs was the weak-point of Cyrix processors, which was seen when Quake was released, when comapred to intel and AMD offerings of x68 processors.
While the C3 is, in a sense, two generations younger, compared to the Cyrix 5x86, they never really got the grasp of it
Which meant that they weren't that good for Win98 gaming and later, since many games of that era, in particular - shooters - were based on either the Quake 1 (and later, Quake 2) engine or Unreal.
I believe that this is what we see with the floatingpoint bench at 5:35
Yeah, that makes sense!
I have watched the first two videos already and I find this very interesting. Please find a usb sound card so you can install something like a voodoo2.
Also. Very cool that you found a way to get the built in 3d working.
You’ve done well. Yeah, not having an optical drive can be annoying but I’m glad you skipped it to keep the machine small and inline with the original idea. Although, I wonder if something slimline from a laptop could be mounted vertically?
Anyway, yeah. I really like the project.
Thank you! And that's a pretty cool idea with the slimline optical drive. I'll add that to my list of modification ideas!
From that machine didn't support 3d acceleration to support while installing latest directx 9 I'm very surprised about this. Mini PC Win98 with 3d Acceleration is quite rare now.
Yeah, a little weird that the DX update fixed it. I guess the GPU drivers simply didn’t work with DX6, or its just down to the whimsical nature of drivers in Win9x.
i had one of these with a similar cpu i managed to overclock it to 600 mhz and the gpu a bit and it really flies :)
That's awesome! This one does have multiplier settings in the BIOS, so might be possible to squeeze a bit more out of this one too.
@@OddObsolete give it a try . See if you can raise it up :)
Great project and video. Is that a Gunstar Heroes remix I hear? Also is DMA access turned on for the CF card? I noticed freezing on disk access when you showed Half Life.
Thanks! No, I didn’t even think about DMA, so I believe it is indeed off.
As for Gunstar Heroes, haven’t played the game and am not familiar with the Music, so I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Links the to music are in the video description.
NT, and hence 2k and XP, refuses to boot from removable media, your CF card is detected by it as such and the manufactures do everything they can to prevent you from flipping that bit. Individual Computers had a special CF card adapter that removed the removable media bit on the fly, no clue if Jens still has some to sell tough.
That could be it, although I think the BIOS actually reports it as not removable on this board. Win98 doesn’t think it’s removable at least. In any case, thanks for the suggestion!
It would be cool (though difficult) to build an appropriately scaled keyboard for it. I commented on the last video about using an iPad screen in a crt type case and have since found out that there are driver boards on amazon that even support vga. It'd be a little pricey costing around $100 US for a screen and driver board. No idea how much they would be or even if they're easy to get in Sweden though I imagine it wouldn't be too different.
I actually went ahead and ordered something along those lines. Hopefully I'll manage to make something of it! :)
Make a small Bootable Partition on CF card, then copy the cd files from install OS to the small boot partitiion, then boot from small boot partiotion and install on to a 2nd partition on CF card. this is what works.
Gonna have to give this a go at some point!
I know not everyone has VMware.. but I have a 468 laptop I couldn't get Win98 on.. I removed the hard drive, found an ide laptop drive to usb adapter. Plugged it into my pc, mounted it to VMware as the only hard disk (running the physical drive instead of a virtual disk). Installed win98, and pulled the drive right before first boot. Put it back in the laptop, and bam, win98 starting its first boot. This may work with other free virtual machine software as long as it allows mounting a physical drive as a primary drive in a VM.
Interesting! Perhaps Win9x is more forgiving than Win2k? Originally when I installed 98 on this machine I did it in the Aptiva, and then moved the card over, and it worked fine too.
@@OddObsolete It is without question! That said, in a pinch I've had 2000 and XP also work like this, but they do a lot more driver prep pre-first boot. So that first boot could be a make or break moment, it's possible for it to get confused from the hardware change and hang, but for the most part, i've gotten away with it as a last stitch effort. Using the Aptiva is great too! Always good to have multiple options!
I would pay decent money for a case like this.
Me too.
I recall that Unreal was bundled with S3 Virge(?) or S3 Savage3D(?) where it had had texture optimization for S3 cards.
It might be possible for you to find said version of Unreal and get a massive improvement in fidelity and performance. At least for Unreal.
It's basically the older versions of Twister-T
I tried Unreal Tournament, and it detects S3 MeTal support, but for some reason it looks and performs like software rendering, so something there doesn’t work properly.
@@OddObsolete Perhaps a patch for the game and not the fault of the GPU?
That's how it used to be, if I recall correctly.
(I was a 3dfx Voodoo boy, so I only know from the PC magazines I read back then. xD )
@@janwitkowsky8787 Very possible. I'm using the GOG version of the game, so I assume it has all the latest patches, but I suppose they could have done other things to that version that prevents MeTal from working correctly.
Where can i get a Clavister sx40, Odd & Obsolete?
Good question! EBay maybe. But Clavister was a young company back then, so they probably didn’t sell too many of the SX-40. It’s probably easier to find other similar devices. Look out for old networking equipment and you might find similar hardware.
I believe the Windows 2000 setup can be started from DOS by coping the installation folder to the disk.
I think a USB CD-ROM is a lost cause for win 2000 unless the bios has good emulation (like brand new servers can still boot from USB floppy (!).
NT in general is also particular with partition tables and such but that (7B blue screen) can be fixed in the registry. (i.e. it's not only the boot.ini that needs to change for it to boot)
PS: To clarify, installing it on other hardware and transferring the installetion can cause boot issues. PPS: I believe Windows XP boot should work from a USB CD-ROM.
Good to know, maybe I'll try the DOS method if I decide to give this another try!
@@OddObsolete A tip would be to do two partitions, one 98 with the 2k installer and one blank. Then if it works you could dual boot by installing 2000 on the second partition - worst case you have a very fancy bootloader for 98!
Perhaps you can make a bigger case with a 5.25" drive bay and use an IDE - USB converter to connect an internal CD-ROM drive. It's also possible to turn one PCI lane into multiple, or even to bet USB or Parallel sound cards working, so if you can get the sound card replaced elsewhere, then you can probably put a graphics card instead.
But with 5.25" it wouldn't be mini anymore! :)
@@OddObsolete just use laptop drive with USB adapter. You can mount it in vertical position (there is enough space on left side) and to not spoil that nice case you already made just make it open to back side keeping front as it is. Little bit awkward but it's not like you'll change disks every few minutes. Any old drive will work and you can probably find them for next tonothing locally and adapters to USB are few € on ebay or AE.
@@gorjy9610 Not a bad idea!
I'd like to think that WIn9x drivers confuse everyone tbh. I've had more than a few problems where I seemingly hit a brick wall, shutdown, go to sleep, wake up, boot the machine and everything is recognized just fine. Those are the kind of problems I hate most because I know the next time it happens; I won't be that lucky next time and have no clue how to actually fix it.
Haha yes, I know that feeling!
Nice job !
I think 3dmark 99's cpu score was better because it uses 3Dnow optimized code.
Also beware for that external CD solution. While it works great, there is one big flaw that makes it not as good as a proper CD-Rom drive : music. Many games from this era have music put as audio tracks on the CD-Rom, and when you do this, none of the musics will work ... This is true for quake, half life and many others !
For windows XP/2000 installation, maybe you can try to make a USB bootable drive from an ISO ? I heard that you can boot from USB when you mentioned linux.
Speaking of linux, what were the other distros you've tried ?
Yeah, I noticed there was no music in Half-life. Apparently it might work with WDM drivers for the sound card, but allegedly performance suffers.
I did try to make a Win2k USB installer, but weren't able to make it boot.
As for Linux, I tried AntiX and one more, Sparky I think. A limitation this CPU has is that it lacks PAE, which most distros seem to require.
@@OddObsolete What about alpine linux ? I think that one could work too :) (it may require more work to get a GUI though) This is apparently one of the latest "new" distros that is built with i586. I've tested it on a K6-2+ (emulated on 86box) and it seems to work. Though at some point my emulator crashes, but I think it's because of the emulator lol
For the Linux bit, I was surprised you didn't attempt to install an old version of Fedora, like Red Hat Linux 8 or 9, or Fedora Core 1. I'm not sure if those would have drivers, but I've seen case mods with VIA mainboards that had similar hardware and they were usually paired with stuff like Windows 98 SE, but I believe some Linux distros may have been used.
I actually did try Ubuntu 6.06 off camera, hoping that there might still be pre-compiled software easily available on the apt-get mirrors. But no luck there! I didn’t have time to go any deeper than that though.
I would've rather tried Adelie Linux
@@IAMSolaara doesn’t it run KDE? No way that’ll run on 112MB ram! But I have to admit I know next to nothing about Adelie.
where can I find the same thing your using
Keep an eye out for old business grade network equipment and you may find similar hardware. Also, some interesting devices shows up if you do an eBay search on “thin client”.
you should build print a mini set of speakers too..
Yeah, that would be cool!
test sbemu & setmul wit it!
Why don't you use a dual IDE cable to get the CD-rom working? You only need a molex cable from the PSU. You can remove it after finishing installing W2k.
Powering the drive would be an issue. The “PSU” is just an external 12v power brick - no 5v. Maybe I could wire something off of the boards power regulators, but I’m not sure that they’re up to powering a CD ROM drive.
@@OddObsolete you can use an external psu, watch this video th-cam.com/video/Ea1dcJ0QyAE/w-d-xo.html
Now that you have network working on Windows 98 you should be able to run Windows 2000 setup from a network drive. I have Win95/98/ME/2000/XP setup files on my WD NAS and it works fine.
Really? Hadn’t thought of that. Can you just copy the files from the from the CD to a directory and run them from there?
@@OddObsolete Yeah, that's how I did it.
Sure with 2000/XP you have to install them directly on the target machine.
I’m pretty sure I’ve moved win2k/xp installations between machines before, but I guess those machines were similar enough that it didn’t cause a problem.
Yeah, In some rare cases it works (if both systems have similar chip-sets).
After installing on a VM is very unlikely to work on a real machine.
I use a raspberry pi 4 that can do everything from 8k video playback to emulate any retro machine, comodore,Amiga,Atari,etc
Raspberry pis are awesome!
install a graphics card
Put more RAM in
If only I could find a low profile SD RAM stick bigger than 128MB!
OK
test more operating systems that are weird are
can you maybe make a Discord server, for your community?
i would love to chat with more of your followers and share ideas about our little nerdy stuff :D
Cool idea! I’m not super familiar with Discord, but I’ll look into it.
@@OddObsolete If you'd like to get in touch with me, i would offer to set you up with a proper and proffecional made Discord server.