Planning on building a Windows 98 gaming computer

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It's not easy to find some solid information on what the best supported hardware is for windows 98, so anyone here know what stuff would work? This is mainly to play games which the drop of native 16 bit support destroyed or crippled. I'd rather not go overkill on parts that such games would take advantage of. Some newer games would be played just for the sheer reason that if it can do it why let it collect dust. Other considerations include parts availability since I know some parts are harder to find than others. Also, no need to go overly retro on the parts as long as the fully support sound, video and what not in given applications.

The Plan (to be edited as input is given)
Motherboard: supporting the lower ones
Processor: Athlon XP? K6?
Video Card: AGP 8x?
Sound Card:
Memory: 256mb? 512mb? 1024mb? what variation of ram?
Hard Drive: 120gb? 80gb? 40gb? 20gb?

Last edited by Pistonhead on 01 Nov 2010, 5:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Easiest way would be to run a virtualization platform like VMWare Workstation - which is paid, or Oracle's VirtualBox which is free. I know on my Mac, VMware Fusion setups a virtual machine using my physical processor, and it uses an HAL between the VM and the physical hardware in the form of emulating a Intel 440BX chipset, Intel PRO/1000MT LAN card, and it uses VMware's VGA driver for graphics between the host and client. Otherwise, it passes on the rest of my hardware and USB devices onto the guest. The more critical parts are emulated.

If you have Windows 7 Pro/Ultimate/Enterprise you have some virtualization capabilities in the form of Windows XP Mode on top of Virtual PC with Hyper-V - which I'm sure you can get a copy of 98 installed on it.

I don't don't want to be a smart ass or anything, asking how to build a windows 98 computer reminds of the old dilbert Unix Joke:

http://tomayko.com/writings/that-dilbert-cartoon

I don't even think you can get window 98 CDS even any more?

I've got a couple copies laying around and I'm not a fan of virtualization, I like it to just boot up, efficiently use all my hardware. Research tonight is leading me to believe it would NOT be hard to fix my old Socket A computer and run windows 98 on it. My current computer has an 80gb hard drive that I'd like to upgrade so that will probably suffice for 98. My main concern now is sound since I've researched how to get around the 512mb ram limit.

What games? Do you know for sure that they can run on newer hardware? (if they worked on XP or whatever you had before they will probably work on 98)

A lot of 16-bit games run way too fast on even a 486 (that's the reason for the 'turbo' button on some old 486 machines), and only work with Sound Blaster compatible sound cards.

Personally, I would just use DOSBox since it can emulate all the old hardware you need and even lets you adjust the speed to work with games that expect specific clock speeds. I know you're not a fan of virtualization but DOSBox is probably more compatible with more 16-bit games than anything you'll be able to build.

I like the idea of virtualization myself - I never liked dual-booting and since I use a Mac, I don't want the same problems that plague Windows to take out my Mac partition if something was to rewrite the MBR/GPT reserved partition.

Besides, even though the VM's hypervisor will emulate a regular VGA card and an Intel 440BX chipset - it will still work as it does on the native machine - VMware's drivers for the guest are bascially a bridge to the host.

I used to play a bunch of games, most notably Albion on dosbox. Slowing a processor down to play a games is no issue to me, there are programs out there that exist to bog down a processor on a newer computer to play older games.

Missionforce: Cyberstorm is one of my favorite games of all time, runs on XP just fine aside from sound issues. Playing it on an outdated Cyrix computer is an improvement for that reason. The installer doesn't work on XP, not that I'm complaining since figuring out that I can copy the files off the disc no problem.

Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 (and also other C&C games) also have run just fine on Windows XP but compatibility with any soundcards besides the one that was built into my Compaq's motherboard made the game crash left and right, my brother currently plays it on my old Cyrix for that reason.

Earthsiege 1 & 2 absolutely do no work with XP. They run on windows (NOT DOS!) but require native 16 bit support so dosbox isn't an option

Need I continue listing mcg? Some games just won't work on dosbox because it doesn't support windows, some games won't work on XP because it doesn't support dos. What I need is NATIVE 16 and 32 bit support.

try virtualbox -
http://www.virtualbox.org/

It's free and from what I've seen on people's laptops in class it works almost as well as VMware and Parallels(on the Mac).

You sound like you got it figured out then, my only advice would be to try to get a Sound Blaster compatible sound card if you can find one.

The question is what is "sound blaster compatible"? I have a Sound Blaster X-Fi in my main PC, Realtek AC97 in almost everything else, I have no idea what was in the Compaq - I'm assuming it was an SIS chipset but even it wasn't old enough for Albion and stuff, just RA2. Do I need an original Sound Blaster 16? Will a live suffice? Is some version of the Audigy completely backwards compatible? All I know is I want something that works, either that or I need to lose interest in the games I played when I was younger...which is hard as hell.

No, I mean an actual Sound Blaster 16/32/AWE compatible, a Live, Audigy, or XFi wouldn't work. I imagine it would be pretty hard to find one these days, but a lot of DOS games directly interact with audio hardware since that was back before there were libraries like Direct X or windows system calls you could use. The windows games will probably be fine with any sound card as long as there are win9x drivers for it.

I guess some guy made a build of VDMSound for windows 9x, but I have never used it so I can't vouch for it: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=900

I have not taken the time to carefully read through all the posts in this thread, but I have quite a stack of Win98 stuff and I will gladly give you as much of it as you want or need (and even pay the shipping, if necessary) ... and the SoundBlaster card I would recommend is a CT4780 (I think). That is a card originally made for Dell, and I know where to still get the drivers it needs. Oh, and I even have an old Oak Technologies dual-video card if you might want to try doing something with that.