Best Gaming Windows

[Amice Golden]

Iwas wondering if someone could help with what parts to get, I really don't know where to start. I want the computer to run all games from the era well but using parts that aren't impossible to get and won't cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds if possible.

The only thing I really suggest is to take a well-engineered motherboard with good BIOS support, none of those crappy boards with integrated GPU and/or just no, one or two BIOS updates available - their performance is mostly very poor compared to top boards of the time (even while having a good AGP video card installed).

If you want a really fast Win98(SE) PC for later games, you can go with the AMD Athlon 64 platform. Boards with VIA K8T800 Pro chipset still have full support for Win98(SE). You can take something like that for a really fast one:

Theres more than one option that is good. Start with a good motherboard that will give you the least amount of incompatibilities and trouble. ATX board with a 440BX chipset. Theres nothing wrong VIA, SIS or some overpowered option but the 440BX are just the most stable and bug free.

There are two main issues to consider when building a Win98 system: performance and compatibility. In short, the higher you go up the performance ladder, the worse your compatibility with older games gets.

If you intend to play DIrectX 5 games which rely on palletized textures and table fog, don't go above the GeForce FX series for your GPU. And if you also want to play DOS games on that machine, you'll have an easier time if your motherboard has ISA slots so that you can use a more compatible sound card.

For budget Win98 machines, I still stand behind a socket 754 Athlon 64. They are at the higher end of CPU performance for Win98 games, but if you get a "Cool 'n Quiet" model they are multiplier unlocked and you can downclock them. But overall they are still very inexpensive versus other parts you could get.

CPU: Athlon 64 3000+/3200+ Cool 'n Quiet

Cooler: Any modern cooler that latches to AM4 will work, this is a feature I love about Socket 754

RAM: 512MB - You need 3rd party patches for Win98 to go 1GB+

Motherboard: Socket 754 with VIA KT800 Chipset (this is to support DOS mode audio with a PCI card)

VGA: Geforce FX 5500 - close in performance to a 4200Ti, but cheap and can be bought New Old stock very easily, I recommend using a GLIDE wrapper to start out, get a Voodoo 2 if you find games not working

Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy 1 - Pretty much the same price as an SB Live 5.1, but it's a slightly nicer card. Some people recommend Audigy 2s, but 1s work well.

Storage: SD2IDE Adapter - Many Socket 754 boards have SATA ports on them, but some of them are iffy on getting Win98 to boot from them. SD cards to dirt cheap and being able to eject the storage and copy files directly to it from a modern PC is very handy.

Floppy - Gotek Floppy emulator, you may need one to set things up. They are handy to have.

CDROM - Your choice

If you are going to play a lot of games in pure DOS mode a Yamaha YMF 744 card is recommended for its great DOS compatibility. However, if you are going to mainly play later gen DOS games as games were still releasing for DOS when Win98 was around. Then the Audigy might be fine for you if you run it from within Windows. The Audigy can emulator SB16 so you have 16 bit sound, and most later DOS games can use either MIDI or CD audio for music so the SB Live/Audigy's bad Adlib emulator isn't a problem.

There are lots of quite specific builds here with specific CPU recommendations and RAM. For a "good" Windows 98 PC you really don't need to be that specific because the recommendations we're giving are a generation or two newer than what was out during the Windows 98 era.

Literally any socket 478 Pentium 4 CPU is "good" enough for Windows 98 and fast enough (or faster) than the CPUs people were using at the time (up to 1.4GHz Pentium 3) (but make sure it is compatible with your board - buy the board first!). I would aim for 2GHz and up, and these are easier to find than the older slower ones.

Sound cards are tricky - yes you can spend lots of Yamaha PCI sound cards but a loved/hated Soundblaster Live (or Audigy1) will give you basic sound in DOS and good sound in Windows games. They're dirt cheap and readily available, but you might be waiting for a while for a Yamaha to crop up.

Video card - People are suggesting expensive high-end AGP cards that simply are not necessary for "good" Windows 98 gaming. An Nvidia MX4 440 or FX5500/5600 or ATI 9250 are more than fast enough for Windows 98 gaming (as in, they're as fast as or faster than high end cards available at the time).

This is on the basis that you want to play games from 1995 to 2000. If you would like to play later games, a Windows XP PC is a million times easier to build and use because you can use much cheaper, more reliable, quieter, cooler, more readily available, more powerful, energy efficient hardware like Socket 775 stuff.

At the top end, I would see the year 2003. That's when the DirectX 9 games started coming. DX9 had Win2K or WinXP as a prerequisite. There is an unofficial port of DX9 for Win98, but why not use WinXP for it?

On the lower end, it depends on whether you still want to play DOS games. If, no, it will be much easier here as well.

You will be best served with P4 or Athlon systems of 1800-3000 rating. Whereby the Athlon systems need power supplies with a lot of power on 3.3V or 5V. For P4 you can use cheap, current power supplies. Also, most Athlon boards have bad capacitors that need to be replaced.

This is not correct. You have to install Win98(SE) with max 512 MB RAM, but after that, you can put in a second 512 MB module after adding "MaxFileCache=524288" under [vcache] within the system.ini - maybe it's not unproblematic in all cases, but with most games it should work.

At the top end, I would see the year 2003. That's when the DirectX 9 games started coming. DX9 had Win2K or WinXP as a prerequisite. There is an unofficial port of DX9 for Win98, but why not use WinXP for it?

The GeForce FX series has support for all the old D3D features but its DX9 support is very bad. GeForce 6 cards run DX9 much better than the FX series but the legacy D3D features aren't supported. I'm not sure which Radeons support what.

We should assume that his childhood was actually in 1998. And to relive that would mean play games of that era. On hardware of that era. Seems cut and dry to me. Further explanation would be helpful but I don't think its needed.

Really most of these suggestions are fine suggestions and will work with some tinkering if you don't mind compatibility issues. Some of the suggestions are a bit crazy to me like voodoo 2 SLI. Video cards from 2003 and things of that nature.

Bro.

What you really want is a geforce 2 with an older driver like 12.XX for a video card. That compatibility will play the vast swath of titles from early D3D 5 stuff up to early DX 7 Titles that pretty much encompass everything That I think a good 9x machine will play. Later on if you have the money you could add voodoos but I dont think they are necessary for most the 9x era games.

Pentium 4 with a sis chipset was a pretty good suggestions, or a Pentium 4 with a PCI/PCI connection. I wouldn't recommend a P4 board without pci/pci or in the sis case I beleive they retained DDMA but thats still not as good as a PCI/PCI

If you were really patient and bought things low as possible, Its probably possible to build such a system for around 100 dollars minus the case and power supply. case and power supply is the problem becasue you have to pay shippings on those or you could just try and find one locally on craigs list or marketplace drive and get it. Thats what I would do.

I was actually wrong. The ATI Radeon no longer have support for D3D5 faetures (fog table, paltettized textures). From this point of view, the FX5900 would be first choice. If you want to stay with DX7 then the GF2 GTS/TI/Ultra or GF4MX 440/460 would be the best choice.

You could compensate for the lack of these features with an add-on card from 3dfx, but it will be expensive.

There are a lot of dos games I want to play too like Sierra titles and Lucas arts adventures, and FPS of the time. Also some of the more demanding games like half life and some into the early 2000s if possible?

There is literally no difference between Pro and Pro for workstations in terms of gaming. It might have a couple less apps out of the box, but that can be fixed in pro by five minutes in the start menu, or by powershell.

ReFS has too many limitations for me to use it normally. No hard links, no native compression, no page file, no quotas, no native encryption, no extended attributes, etc. The encryption can be worked around via using BitLocker, and junctions are available instead of hard links, and it is posible some of the other missing features have alternatives.

The check summing and integration with storage spaces is nice, but I would rather use BTRFS or ZFS for that sort of thing if posible. It also works well with Hyper-V vm images, so I might use it for that if the need ever arose.

Btw there is a workaround if you want to use ReFS on normal W10 Pro. You can create the storage spaces array and format it as ReFS in a windows version prior to them deprecating the feature. Saves you the expense of a pricier windows license if it matters.

3a8082e126