CowboyJMB

Ok, so I have been wanting to make my Ultimate DOS Machine for playing old games on for a while now. The question was, what I was going to use. I had 3 choices:

1.) Make my own custom machine from scratch.

2.) Use my uncle's old Packard Bell (A 486 Machine)

3.) Somehow find the original 486 that my family had back from my childhood.

#3 is quite impossible actually, as it was an IBM PS/1 (Newer model, NOT the one with the Power Supply in the monitor.) and I have looked all over the net for it with no luck.

#1 was a more likely choice, but then I really didn't feel like doing that, and hunting down ALL the parts I needed.

SO I was going to go with #2, but then on Friday I took another look at my IBM Aptiva (We upgraded to this from the PS/1), and think it will do quite nicely. It is a Pentium machine, and originally had Windows 95 on it. However, DOS games really don't do too well in this, even when you exit out into DOS itself.

So I reformatted the hard drive with the copy of DOS 6.22 that I have, and then loaded Pirates! Gold on as well. I will tell you what, that game worked the best I had ever seen it work since I have had it! Working in a pure DOS environment does wonders for it. So I am going to use this Aptiva as my Ultimate DOS Gaming Machine.

Specs:

2 GB HD
32 MB of RAM
Pentium Processor (133 MHz I think...)
16x CDROM Drive though I am not sure.
3.5in Floppy Drive
MWAVE Soundcard/Modem


This is what I have for now, but I AM thinking about making a few changes. Changes such as putting in a 5¼in floppy drive, and possibly taking out the MWAVE and replacing it with a Sound Blaster 32 card.

I am also going to buy Windows 3.1, and a fresh copy of DOS 6.22. (The copy I have was a copy and the last disk has errors.)

So, I think this could work. Yeah I know, that I could just use a DOS Emulator, but then it kinda takes the fun out of it. Not only the fun of putting it together, but the fun of just having a seperate machine just for that purpose.

I would like comments, and also some help. My problems will be getting the OS's to work with the hardware. The drivers for the video chipset are on the Aptiva CD, but how would I load that so DOS (and in the future Windows 3.1) would recognize it?

Also, concerning the OS, would Windows for Workgroups 3.11 be ok for this? Or do I just want plain 3.1?

Skie

Wow... Good luck. I just might stop by one day to play a few games.

A few suggestions... Definately get rid of that MWave sound card. I believe those didn't have proper DOS drivers. I used to have an Aptiva with one, but I don't remember the specifics of the card anymore. Regardless, a decent Sound Blaster 16 or 32 should be perfect for what you're trying to do.

Windows 3.1 should be more then enough. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was for business networks. I doubt you'll need it.

DOS 7 that came with Windows 95 was a bit of a crippled version of DOS. Not a lot, but there were enough differences. Stick with DOS 6.22 for any DOS games.

What kind of video card do you have? ATI Rage if I remember correctly. I don't think you'll be able to use the Windows drivers with that card. It's been quite some time since I've done anything with DOS, but I honestly don't remember DOS needing video drivers. I know some games had the drivers built in. i.e. there was a version of Mechwarrior 2 that was made specifically for ATI cards.

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CowboyJMB

Ok, thanks. About the video, it isn't a card, it's on board. I was just wondering about it because when I was installing this one game, it said that no SVGA was found, which is untrue because the video is SVGA.

Larry63

This is the way I built my Ultimate DOS Machine some time ago, I think the following setup is correct. I remember it worked great, very stable. I was able to run many of my old games with no problems.

I took a fresh XP-Pro machine that had a Pentium 4 (around 2.6GHz) with 2GB of RAM; and I loaded a free copy of MS-Virtual PC.

In a Virtual PC set up as a medium grade Pentium with 32megs of RAM and good graphics; I loaded a free version ROM-DOS 7 (a better version of MS-DOS - it has a smaller memory requirements and is more stable).

The Virtual PC allowed me to mimic any hardware I wanted, with as much RAM as I wanted, without the worries of incompatable hardware, or driver induced crashes. I did crash my Virtual PC on a few occasions, I think because the hardware was still able to out run the game software. When I slowed things down a bit, everything worked better than I was ever able to get in the past.

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Larry63