Win98 rig question

Posted by Underfyre@reddit | retrobattlestations | View on Reddit | 4 comments

Much to my wife's dismay, I'm thinking about going ahead with my plan to build a 90s PC for gaming to go along with all my retro consoles.

After doing research I'm leaning towards a 440BX build with a Pentium 2. I'm not super pressed on period correct-ness, mostly because the "vintage" market is a bunch of vultures and the good stuffs for the time are way too over-priced. Otherwise I would be getting some SLI Voodoo 2s. Because the market is the way it is, I'll most likely be going for a GeForce 2. Even getting a Ti or Pro is cheaper than a single Voodoo 2.

Anyway, my main question is going SCSI versus IDE. Obviously SCSI was a pipe dream growing up, so I have no idea if the faster speeds are even observable in daily use. These days a guy has expectations in how fast a system boots up, so if I can alleviate some of that pain I will. I just don't think the price points between the two options will be worth it. Shit, I wonder if I can do a SCSI raid setup? I'm sure at least someone out there has experience on this. I'll either be using an IDE compact flash or a SCSI sd card.

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TheGr1mKeeper@reddit

I know this wasn't really your question, but the best advice for building a Win98-era rig is to make a list of what games you want to play on it, and then tailor your build to those requirements. Specs were changing rapidly at this time, so compatibility could be iffy.

As far as HD interfaces go, keep it simple and stick with IDE unless you're trying to do something specific. Solid state speeds on IDE are more than enough.

Underfyre@reddit (OP)

Investigating m.2 to IDE right now.

Never mind, now we're looking at PCI SATA cards. Good thing I don't have scruples about period correctness.

gcc-O2@reddit

I would use one. There are some cheap Sil311x that may need their onboard firmware reflashed from RAID mode to SATA mode; see vogons.org. It's not even that period-incorrect; Win98SE treats it like a SCSI card.