First post, by WarhammerDarkOmen
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi all
I've started building a rig for pure nostalgia of the old games i used to play on Windows 9x and DOS. I've been trying to do this with laptops (as they are often cheaper than desktops where i am and are small footprint on desks) but they have been terrible to work with especially with MS-DOS games and audio so... Time for a proper desktop but prices right now are stupid so I've been searching eBay endlessly for deals... Here's what I have with costs so far:
1, Dell UltraSharp 2007FPb 20 inch 4:3 LCD screen for £27 (on offer due to eBay promotion) I've heard they are amazing quality screens and are 4:3 which is what I'm aiming for. I did want to get a CRT but the prices are ridiculous but from what I'm hearing these hold up very well, anyone got experience with these?
2, i managed to snag a bundle for cheap, only £25! which consists of:
Aopen AK77-400GN Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2GHz)
2x 256MB DDR400 RAM
Sparkle TNT2 M64 Video card
300w PSU
Sony FDD
Pioneer DVD-RW
FDD cable and two IDE cables
3, a PCI mounted IDE to CF card converter for £5 as I have a Sandisk CF card from my previous attempts with laptops and i hate the noise of old HDD's spinning
So all in all so far I've got a machine and screen minus a case and a Sound Blaster Live! for under £60 so I think I'm doing pretty well? Does anyone have the model name for the Sound Blaster Live! which has the best MS-DOS support? Or is there a cheaper model i could use?
Games I aim to run are Warhammer Dark Omen, Recoil, Theme Hospital, Tomb Raider I / II, F22 Lightning 3 and loads of other games from that era. I expect a GPU upgrade might be on the cards but it's ultimately a battle to find the right GPU which has the right performance for 'newer' games but will also run Warhammer Dark Omen properly as that game is a nightmare to get running with 3D and that is my favourite game of all time.
Any suggestions welcome.
Windows 98: AMD Athlon XP 2400|512MB RAM|QDI 7X/400|Geforce 4 Ti 4200|Sound Blaster Live!
DOS: Pentium 100|32MB RAM|8GB CF|Sound Blaster AWE64
Monitor: Benq 1554e 15" CRT shared via KVM