hardware coverage for vintage software/games

[Keatah]

Do you think this is good coverage for running the vast majority of PC software and games?

 

Modern i7, 64GB, GTX1080

Pentium III 1.4, 1GB, GeForce4600 128MB, AWEGold64

486 DX2-50, 16MB, CL5422 1MB, SB16

 

And of course VirtualBox, DosBox, PCem for convenience and picking up other combos of speeds and hardware. And for playing this on i7s or i9s.

 

Just trying to get a good solid perspective before I clear out extraneous PC hardware that doesn't support those configurations. I'm not too concerned with disk storage as I have enough to adjust up or down. Thoughts and commentary are welcome.

 

[MrMaddog]

The four eras of PC gaming are DOS, Win 9x, Win XP and modern...  You got the 486 for DOS and the i7 for modern games, so if you can dual boot Win 95 & XP on the Pentium III, I guess you got it all covered.

 

 

[wierd_w]

I would say the PIII is probably good for basically all cases.  Old enough to still have actual real-mode support. New enough to have PCI based UMBs, so you can have maximally free conventional memory.

 

Also new enough to put enough memory in to do a "hardened" 9X install.

 

(Use syslinux boot loader with the memdisk "kernel" image. Uses 1kb of low memory to hook INT13 disk interface, and the memory free register used by XMS drivers. Provides very nice, and high capacity ram disks loaded from persistent storage at boot time, in a multiboot menu.  Set up a 9x install in a 512mb FAT16 partition, turn on drivespace3, turn on ultrapack on everything, defragment it, then image it.  Use that as the image used by memdisk. Your 9x deploy is now "very hard" to break, because each boot is a fresh, clean install experience. Similar can be done for the system partition for a real DOS 6.22 image, with both 9x and Dos not seeing each other's volumes.  I can give much more detailed instructions if you need them. There are also ways to get 9x to load out of a ramdisk created by something like XMSDISK by exploiting the undocumented /mount option for scandisk... but the memdisk solution is superior in basically every way.)

 

 

Edited November 11, 2019 by wierd_w