Great advice! Just started with the retro stuff a few months ago, and it's a big rabbit hole, so be prepared. #1 Stay away from old power supplies. Bought two old Antec psu's from ebay, and had to send both back, and one shorted my Super 7 motherboard. 2# A lot of motherboards on ebay that claim to be "tested", have not really been tested, so be prepared to have to send back faulty motherboards. I wish I would have watched this video before I started with retro. #3 Aspirin, have a big bottle of aspirin, because you're going to have headaches, lol.

@telostia

Ай бұрын

Yeh old psu is def. A no no. The tech doesn't change much so any cheap new ones works, probably best to get a decent psu and get some converters instead for old connectors

Lol this cracked me up... So much memories with these parts. I think i stil have a slot 1 pentium 4 with rd ram! Amd phenom is quite reliable too for cheaper alternative. I love this content, it's literally recycling old parts for good use!

Interesting video, like!

great video!

Nowadays there are two utilities that you could use to overcome the fast CPU and ISA sound problem. For ISA sound, there is SBEMU that emulates a sound blaster on newer motherboards with AC97, so you don't need an ISA slot/sound card anymore. To slow down the CPU there is CPUSPD, and it supports socket 478, 775, AM2, and AM3 CPUs. Both utilities are available for free on Vogons forum. So in summary you don't need old hardware anymore, and could run (almost) all DOS games on more recent (and cheap) motherboards.

Socket A build with ISA slot, AMD Athlon XP mobile cpu and Socket 370 build, ISA slot and VIA C3 CPU's are the best choice by far.

I am building mine from a super socket 7 motherboard with a Pentium MMX 233mhz overclocked to 300Mhz. Can be slowed to 386 speeds by disabling caches and CPU features like Branch Prediction using SetMul utility.

Good solid advice. For my two cents, I might mention drive overlay software can give you access to large partitions in dos. ESS sound cards are great for DOS, like you said, and if it has a wave blaster connector, Serdaco makes great affordable modern wave table modules (not sponsored, just think they make great stuff)

@dim0n1

8 ай бұрын

if you mean from 40 to 150 eur cheap 🙂

@ozzyp97

8 ай бұрын

​​@@dim0n1 I think "affordable" is a fair description for their cheaper offerings, at least compared to any vintage option you're likely to find.

@dim0n1

8 ай бұрын

@@ozzyp97 at the end, unfortunately its true, retro collecting start to be a expensive hobby :(

If I were to build a DOS/Win9x machine today my first choice for hard drive would be a 40gb SSD + a cheap sata to ide adapter. (But you can always use the "SeaTools for DOS 2.23" trick to use any size drive if you have larger spare drives around) For mouse go with a CHERRY M-5450, comes with an adapter for PS2, works solid in DOS and even has multiple colours to choose from ;)

Avoid VIA chipsets.... I have nightmares about stability issues on VIA chipsets

@86smoke

8 ай бұрын

Yes, i can still remrember it, but there are ways to make those work stable. However, back then we were not aware of those ways because the Internet wasn't accessible to most of us and it was hard to get that knowledge.

@axescar

8 ай бұрын

Last upon a time I had Chaintech 5AGM2 based on VIA MVP3 - nice, stable and reliable board

@guywiththepixelatedface1260

8 ай бұрын

@@86smoke Indeed. At the time I went for Intel chipsets and was just fine. There were one or 2 others that were good too iirc, but I can't even recall their brands. One chipset I can remember was the 440BX. I think I must've built a couple of systems using that, since I can remember the chipset model.

@Timmy8878

8 ай бұрын

​@@86smokeI personally avoid intel 865/875 chipsets due ich5 burning issue. Also I dont like pentium 4 sis chipsets that has really big incompatibility issues (not working usb keyboard, mouse, bsod with many pci hardware). I dont like ali chipsets from socket 7 era due agp problems (low speed and incompatibility). Ali chipsets from pentium 4 era also burning like ich5. Via chipsets are nice in my experience. Didnt notice any problems with via appolo 133t (pentium 3) and via 880 ultra (pentium 4). Using last in my main retro build

@AlejandroRodolfoMendez

7 ай бұрын

For what I remember those had shitty cooling hence the issues

I like my Pentium 3 for dos but the Pentium 4 Dell I have is good too for win 98 but it crashes from going to full screen to a window, it just a bit less stable. I once could not get in because the usb keyboard needed drivers to work so logging in using safe mode allowed to keyboard to use compatibility mode just to install the drivers.

@KITR-UK

8 ай бұрын

What VGA card you use?

@turbinegraphics16

8 ай бұрын

@@KITR-UK I think it was a rage 128 agp but I swap cards all the time

Thank you for an informative video, these little differences in various graphics and sound cards are not widely known. However, there is a cardinal error in what you say about disk sizes and partitions. There are four records in the MBR partition table, yes, but in DOS, partitioning works by creating (usually) one primary partition and one extended partition in which you may stack any number of logical drives you can fit into your HDD space. Not going into details about how that is technically achieved but I know the structure, have worked with it for years. So you can very well fully utilise even a 40G drive under dos, given its 2G partition limit, you're just gonna have many logical drive letters :) Just one note of caution - try not to have more than 24 logical drives (A and B are reserved, so only 24 letters remain), else you'll end up with drive letters "[", "\", "]", "^", etc. (ASCII chars beyond "Z") which are quite difficult to access :-D Actually, you may use a program that "turns off" some of those partitions (by changing its type byte) so you may have as many as you like, fully utilizing even a 100G or larger disk, just not simultaneously...and you always need to reboot for any change to manifest. Back in the day, I used to have multiboot with DOS, W98 (or XP? not sure now) and Linux and several data partitions, so on my 100G HDD, I had three primary partitions (for the systems, though linux doesn't require to reside on a primary one) and one logical with seven FAT16 drives (2G each) and about three more for non-DOS data (one FAT32 and two ext3). Thus, in DOS, I was able to access 16G of HDD space, and I could add more drives if I wanted to, just by shrinking the large FAT32 partition.

@KITR-UK

8 ай бұрын

Actually no, you're wrong :) If we're talking about DOS 6.22, which I was, but I admit I didn't specifically stated that, you can certainly create up to 24 logical drives, however, you can't create primary partition larger than 2GB or extended partition larger than 8GB. Or you can create primary partition 2GB but logical partition won't let you create more than what's left of 8GB. In case of extended partition, you can create 24 logical drives out of it, but you will always be limited by 2GB per partition limit and 8GB altogether limit.

@Beus38

8 ай бұрын

@@KITR-UK Well, my memories have somewhat faded but I know for sure that I was most definitely able to access HDD surface beyond the first 8G mark from DOS 6.22 (which I was also talking about). I know about the 8GB limitation which was a BIOS thing but with newer BIOSes that overcame this problem (namely, being only able to use 24 bits for sector number), even DOS could cooperate nicely, at least according to what I remember. It may also be caused by the fact that I always created the partitions in linux. DOS understood everything I made but it I admit it may not be possible to create the same using only DOS's fdisk. Nevertheless, I can say for sure that it is possible, though maybe only with certain BIOSes and with the help of linux :-)

@KITR-UK

8 ай бұрын

@@Beus38Faded indeed :) However, you gave me a topic for another video.

@Beus38

8 ай бұрын

@@KITR-UK Looking forward for that one then, and glad to spark an inspiration :) Actually, in (hopefully) near future, I plan to re-create my DOS-W98-XP-Linux multi-boot setup on my old 2003 laptop that I still keep, so I'll let you know exactly what was needed to make the setup work (or what I didn't remember correctly, if I fail) :)

@Beus38

4 ай бұрын

@@KITR-UK Well, I'm getting back to you, admitting that my memory indeed played tricks on me :) I have been playing with my freshly built 486 and SuperSocket7 rigs for some time now, trying various things on them, and even dug out my old 120G disk sitting in my last desktop (P3 from around 2000 which I still have, too) before I moved to laptops, and inspected my partition table there. And indeed, I had all the partitions that were intended for DOS 6.22 (all 1G in size, not 2G like I mis-recalled) laid out in such a way, that the last of them ended precisely at 1024th cylinder - exactly the boundary beyond which DOS cannot go - after which, several big FAT32 and ext3 partitions were sitting :) And I had my LILO set up so that it changed the type of the extended partition back and forth between 05 and 0F depending on what I boot, to make both DOS and Win98 recognise it correctly :) I also did some experiments on a clean HDD, but even when I tried various techniques combining DOS, linux and Win98, I wasn't able to get DOS recognise anything beyond the 1024th cylinder (i.e. 8.4G) :) So, yes, my memory failed me and you were right, one can only create logical drives up to the 8.4G lmit in DOS :)

What about shitty socket 423? It was horrible when it first came out and is hard to find nowadays. Performancewise, similar to P3 tualatin, but exotic as hell. Nonetheless, slot1 is an optimal choice. Edit: Threre is a memory extension for Awe64 value/gold that utilizes SIMM 72pin modules. I have two of those and those work greart, allowing to load awesome sound fonts. Anyway, costwise it is far better to buy fully working P2 system than all the parts separately

@ozzyp97

8 ай бұрын

Those 72 pin adapters aren't exactly cheap though, depending on your requirements it might be worthwhile to look into AWE32/SB32. You could even get real OPL3 with the former, though it'll certainly cost you.

do you have a special bios for that g7s620-n ?

@KITR-UK

8 ай бұрын

No, it's a standard BIOS.

There are USB to PS/2 adapters but it is not guaranteed to work. I have multiple USB mice that would not work with an adapter but one Logitech optical mouse does and so does a Logitech keyboard I got in 2004 and it came with an adapter. But I recently found a 5-pack of new old stock Logitech PS/2 optical scroll mice for 20$ so I took them.

@Beus38

8 ай бұрын

The mouse itself needs to support both USB and PS/2 connection protocol for the adapter to work. Most modern mice don't, so they won't work with any PS/2 adapter. The same goes for USB keyboards and using them with PS/2 adapters.

@gentuxable

8 ай бұрын

@@Beus38 exactly. Because you can get PS2/VGA KVM for very low prices used these days thought I point it out.

good guide but professional desktops with nice cooling concepts are best. I am a big fan of FSC. ProC5/ProC6 = excellent machines. small, silent, good components. Power on-of via keyboard..you will miss that if you ever had that.

Like!

If sy want play dos games then strongly recommended to buy a very old keyboard without windows buttons. Many games default key mapping uses space, alt,ctrl,shift buttons. On original old keyboard all button managable with left hand(right on cursor arrows). But if u have windows buttons on keyboard, then the ALT button is not reachable easyly :(

#KITR Bruv are you sure Pentium 3 is best CPU on Slot 1 😏✌👉 Anyway nice video!

@KITR-UK

8 ай бұрын

I am pretty sure, yeah :)

I'm one of those people who feel that OPL3 was very poorly utilised in the first place, so it hardly ever sounded good to my ears, and hence the Creative CQM too me just sound a bit different to OPL3, but very rarely worse. They are just different types of bad. Then again, there ARE a few exceptions, where OPL3 actually came into it's own, such as Tyrian, but I'm not sure I've tested that with CQM, so I can't say if it sounds bad in that game.

@KITR-UK

8 ай бұрын

Well, if you want to know how it sounds, here you go: kzread.info/dash/bejne/onWemK-ae5Scoco.html

IMHO cheapest alternative - PCem if software only DOS/Win9x gaming on your modern PC. If you want real hardware, just buy some cheap thin client - have luck with Wyse Cx0 with SBEmu couse sound chip not have any drivers for DOS

@pentiummmx2294

3 ай бұрын

or DOSBox or Boxer, or if you got a really beefy PC, use 86box