Nuff said. We can close this thread now. Everyone drive safe and have a lovely rest of the week. :D

What if I wanna play Army Men or Quake or Close Combat or Flight Simulator '98?

I actually own the Army Men box set (war chest) and while it's been a while since I installed or played them, it worked fine the last time I did. Shit, maybe I should try them again....things may have changed.

0_0
You got the big box, I just got the one with the first two around the early parts of the last decade. I remember they kinda worked on Windows XP, but not sure about 7... maybe I'll dig around and see, for now my hard drive crashed.

While its not as old as Pentium 1 or 2 era, I have a motherboard with an Athlon XP 2.2ghz with 512 megs of ram and a Voodoo 5 PCI installed for the video card. I haven't powered it on in a long time, so it might not even work anymore. Thing ran Unreal engine games great though.

I used one until I got annoyed by how much space it took, how it emitted a high pitched sound, how the resolution was limited and you got a headache if you put a higher resolution :p I love CRTs for their warmer look but practically, I'd need a huge and expensive CRT to get what I want and those aren't easy to find in good shape. Now I use my LED LCD screen and it works perfectly - I run WInXP at 1920x1200 on my retro PC <.< Not very retro but still cool.
Considering GOG only has about 5% of all games released back then .... I'd say nope :p

I wanted to play Bridge Commander, an underrated Star Trek game. Because the license expired it's impossible to get hold of. The same goes for soooo many other games including most Star Wars games, many strategy games, tons of action games, etc. etc. There's a reason I built this PC and it's because there's a HUGE amount of games that cannot be played on a modern system full stop - even GOG can't perform miracles.

My older retro-PC is a Pentium-133 with Sound Blaster 16, Roland SCC-1, Roland CM-32L, 3Dfx Voodoo 2, ie. a perfect machine for DOS games and early Win9x games... but in the end I'm not really using it at all anymore. At least for DOS era games, I find it much easier to get games running on DOSBox (with Munt, nGlide etc. if needed) than on the real thing. For instance, for the life of me I can't get "Lethal Weapon" to run on that retro-PC, but on DOSBox it runs great without a hitch, with all bells and whistles.

Some early Win9x games (especially with Direct3D acceleration, 1995-1999 or so) are the main reason I still need another retro-gaming PC. I have another desktop also for that purpose, it has some ATI Radeon X800 Pro, some single-core AMD CPU etc.

But the best retro-gaming PC I have is an old IBM ThinkPad T41 laptop. It is surprisingly great for that purpose, running both Windows 98SE and Windows XP side by side, seems to run the most problematic games fine etc. The only compatibility "problem" I've found in it is that some older PC games seem to rely on you having a separate numpad on your keyboard (e.g. Heavy Gear 2, and I think some Tomb Raider games; albeit I guess they can be played also without), but then you can connect any external USB keyboard to it if needed.

And it is much easier to keep around than a big old tower PC. I was thinking of buying a couple of other ThinkPad T41 laptops as replacements, if and when this one dies.

Some early Win9x games (especially with Direct3D acceleration, 1995-1999 or so) are the main reason I still need another retro-gaming PC. I have another desktop also for that purpose, it has some ATI Radeon X800 Pro, some single-core AMD CPU etc.
Yeah, that's why my P166 is gathering dust. Pre-3D card games are easy to get running in DOSBox or a Virtual Machine without all the extra hassle.

The machine I built now is to target the hardest range of games to play on modern machines: games from 1997-2003. Nvidia broke support for many of these years ago and while the OpenGL games still work fine, the D3D ones struggle in many ways. In fact, most games refused to even detect my graphics card until I found 2003 drivers on my old hard drive.

Right now, I put my retro PC right next to my modern one and have a second VGA cable running to my main monitor with a wireless keyboard and mouse + headphones for controlling it. This way, I can turn it on, switch input on my screen, replace my keyboard and mouse and start to play. Minimum of effort.

P3 600
3dfx Voodoo 4
128 RAM

I was happy to discover that Need For Speed Porshe Unleashed doesn't run on my modern PC and there is no solution googleable so I will play that game on my retro after I finish Hot Pursuit 2 on PS2.

It's actually on my "to play" pile - I loved that game back when I was at uni. It was the first NFS game I played for a long time and I remember it was one of the first to let you mod your car GranTurismo style, with upgrades of parts and so on.

Yes, I admit finding quality CRT in a good shape is hard nowadays. Just few weeks ago I bought 17'' Flatron - it was barely used (you can see it by the color of plastic, screen shape, brightness, doesn't do any high pitched noise etc) but truth to be told I'm not perfectly happy with the purchase. Image quality (especially on the edges) is much worse than I remember from my Sony Trinitron (and worse from my Eizo PVA). Happily it is not visible in games. But it has one GREAT advantage over my neiboughring LCD. NO FCKING BLURRING. I bought it mainly because I just couldn't stand loss of picture sharpness in moving pictures while playing. In my time I did test some LCDs: T/N,IPS, PVA using Pixel Persistence Analyzer's Racer Test. Haven't came across ANY where above speed of 2 - the label would stay clear and sharp. Then my 15 years old CRT came - dang: speed 20 - no blurr.
Don’t have the access for those state-of-the-art gaming 240 Hz monitors – maybe playing on them you will not experience blurring but until I see it – I’ll keep my LCD (work)/CRT (retro gaming) setting.

I guess I'm less fussy :) as long as the ratio is correct for me, I'm good to go. It used to bother me a LOT but a poor CRT screen bothers me even more these days. I mean, look at the following pros and cons:

LED IPS LCD:
- more reliable colours
- pure white
- lower power consumption
- uses less space
- often allows for several inputs so you can hook up several PC's at once
- more options
- no distortion, blurring, etc. around the edges
- can do all resolutions up to its native resolution + higher resolution
- much better to use for longer periods of time

CRT:
- better black (usually)
- less image lag, no ghosting
- no pixel distortion due to the screen not having a native resolution
- more retro in look (slightly fuzzy)

So yeah .... LCD has a ton of advantages compared to CRT so it depends on how important the CRT advantages are for you personally. My screen has deep blacks but then again it's an expensive one, and there's very very little lag or ghosting - it's really not noticeable in the games I play. The pixel distortion is the only thing that remains and if you pick a resolution at half the native resolution (800x600 for me); the distortion is minimal.

Hm... What model do you exactly own? Would you be so kind and test your LCD with the program I mentioned - if you have spare 5 min? I just wonder how contemporary high-end LCD handle this blurring/ghosting problem.

Sorry if this has already been asked (I read a lot of the thread, but not all of it).

What about memory (RAM)?

I saw you mention the important thing to look for was MB and CPU, you could swap out the others pretty easy. Does that include RAM? Pretty much any stick of RAM from that era will do the trick and it's not so important to match the RAM to the processor the way it is today to take advantage of double, triple channel, etc.??