New to the hobby. Win98 or XP ? Also would love tips and knowledge
Posted by OctoNeko2@reddit | retrobattlestations | View on Reddit | 38 comments
Hey guys, i'm not the most knowledgeable guy in here. My only experience with pc build is building my gaming 1440p battlestation last year or so and I had quite a lot of fun doing so.
I'm also a lot into retrogaming, so I decided to go in and just bought online a combo made of a syncmaster 793s monitor and a winXP build i can't say much about since i didnt receive it yet.
I'd mainly be interested in playing mid-to-late 90s games such as Star wars Dark forces 1&2, Diablo 1, maybe some Final fantasy 7/8, Half-life and so on to early-to-mid 2000s games, think morrowind, Jedi Knight 2 & 3, Fable TLC, or Sims 2 as of the latest ones.
I don't think i'd connect the build to internet, which clearly gives a point to XP (USB support).
I don't know anything about DOS or game compatibility on XP. And I mainly intent to play from said games CD-ROMs (keep in mind i never saw a floppy disk in my life, i'm young)
Should I upgrade my incoming XP build or should i lean towards an 98 one ? (I did read that it would have a much better compatibility with 90s stuff).
Seeing that the technology isn't the same at all nowadays (Like I never connected something older than SATA i think lol), I'd also take any tips and general guides, it either being text/videos to get info as it's quite hard to grasp everythings, as there is so much info.
Also I always dreamt as a kid of owning a logitech g15 keyboard so I ordered one and I dont know if it would works on a 98 build.
Sorry if it's a lot of text, also please excuse my poor english, since i'm french (ribbits).
spoonerzz@reddit
i've got a dual boot bazzite / xp desktop with a 4th gen i5 and a 960 with a thinkpad running windows 98se, i recommend if you are limited on space
deulamco@reddit
Hardest thing for win98-era is to find proper hardware - that’s still working well. Else you still have some quite modern options :
For me, I failed to find still-working fine hardware to the point I accept winXP on Sandy Bridge with most capacitors being solid + workig well SFF build.
VivienM7@reddit
I would probably start with XP. If you're young and have always used the "NT 6.x" versions of Windows, XP will already be a substantial learning curve...
90s (and older) stuff is just... more different. Everybody knew how to deal with it back then, but today, you're going to be facing lots of odd learning curves like figuring out how to boot a Win98 installer with CD-ROM support, the fun of PATA and setting master/slave jumper settings, etc.
For us old dinosaurs, well, it's like riding a bike, you never really forget how to mess around with DOS and all the stuff even if you hadn't done it in 30 years, but... for you, that's a skill set you'd have to learn from scratch. Also, you could play with 90s stuff in software using something like 86box, that's a way of learning how to work it without the intricacies of period-correct hardware.
deulamco@reddit
Honestly, 86Box is too slow to actually use/run most of things for me.. That later I had to use UTM/Qemu instead.
OctoNeko2@reddit (OP)
I did have a Win98 PC when I was a kid but excepted messing with Paint and the single educational game I owned back in the day (With no sounds) I didn't really used it. WinXP is the first OS on which I started surfing and played my first "real" PC games. I do love both esthetic but I'm probably leaning more towards XP nostalgia. It is true that I never had to troubleshout at the time though
garosr@reddit
If you don't care about DOS games, go with xp. If you like the 9x looks you can even fully skin xp to look like 98.
deulamco@reddit
I was tired chasing DOS/9x system taht I eventually went with winXP on my Sandy Bridge i7 + 750Ti 🤷♂️
Nice_Duck_9366@reddit
If you want the retro experience I suggest try Windows 98se. Ideally a machine which supports both and do dual boot as already suggested.
majestic_ubertrout@reddit
For most of these XP is fine and so much easier to run. For Dark Forces you want Win98 in DOS mode and a ISA sound card.
OctoNeko2@reddit (OP)
I didn't even know that Dark forces was a DOS games. I just assumed that CD-ROMs were for PC and that DOS were on floppy disks.
majestic_ubertrout@reddit
CD-ROM was big starting in 93/94, so late DOS was CD-ROM. Also, no-one gamed on Windows until 97/98. It was a memory hog and most games needed all the memory you could give them. Plus without DirectX the software couldn't access the hw directly I think.
kalnaren@reddit
On the contrary, without a common API many games were directly coded to work on specific hardware. Some DOS games (I'm looking at you, Rowan Software...) you actually had to pick the specific included VESA driver you wanted to use when you installed the game.
majestic_ubertrout@reddit
Right, but that was just in DOS, no? I meant you couldn't do it in Windows.
kalnaren@reddit
IIRC Windows added an interpretation layer so that if you ran a DOS program in Windows, it would redirect hardware calls to where they had to go (like, for example, if the soundcard was configured on IRQ 5 Windows would redirect it to IRQ 10 or whatever). How exactly it did that and the limitations of it I'm not sure.
majestic_ubertrout@reddit
Yeah, I definitely recall that if you had a non-ISA soundcard you'd rather run Duke3D in Windows than DOS. And you got a sweet (well, sweet compared to nothing) wavetable in Windows as well. But I think that was at the point where those games were pretty easy to run?
kalnaren@reddit
Late DOS era games ran pretty good in Windows. Back when this stuff was contemporary I remember a lot of issues getting my sound working in both DOS and Windows (had MIDI but could never get digital sound in DOS working in like TIE Fighter).
I don't have too much issue now with my retro build doing either, but I'm also a lot older and know a hell of a lot more about computers than I did when I was a teenager :P. IIRC I never did get my SB Live! working properly in DOS, but that was probably because of lack of driver knowledge.
In my current rig I did have some issues in Windows when it would try to force the IRQ to 10 in DOS games. It did that when I had two ISA cards installed. Easily solved just by booting into DOS and manually initializing the cards.
j0urn3y@reddit
Are any of those games available on GOG? They’d run on current Windows if so
OctoNeko2@reddit (OP)
Yeah but it’s fun to use retro hardware. I also love physical releases which doesn’t exist anymore on pc
j0urn3y@reddit
That’s fair.
Yum_Kaax@reddit
Win98 provides access to a lot more games because of the DOS compatibility. That's my first recommendation for any vintage Windows computer. Quake, Doom, Kings Quest, etc... while many/most DOS games work in DOSBOX, many do not work so well.
WinXP has its own set of games, however many of them will also run fine in Win7 or even Win10/11. Not many games only worked in XP.
OctoNeko2@reddit (OP)
I guess my only loss for starters would be quake which I never played. i'm pretty sure I have an old CD-ROM version of DOOM somewhere at my parent's place. I don't really know any DOS games. Most classics I want to experience/replay on this setup are PC games.
Yum_Kaax@reddit
All the best reason to explore the old corridors of DOS gaming. Might and Magic World of Xeen was a solid favorite of mine for a long time. Dune 2, Warcraft 2, so many good ones from that time.
OctoNeko2@reddit (OP)
Had no idea Warcraft 2 was a Dos game, thought it was PC. I might want to dip a toe in it, especially since it seems there's some fun warhammer games on the support. But I think i'll get into XP first, just to get the hang of it and play the games I have on the ready which I'v been dying to try for a long time (Diablo 1, and always wanted to replay through Half life on a CRT monitor.)
kalnaren@reddit
"PC" colloquially refers to the IBM PC and compatible systems. I.e., anything running on or compatible with an x86 architecture.
Yum_Kaax@reddit
PC is the processor, Windows or DOS were the OS.
kalnaren@reddit
Ok, so one thing you have to realize about gaming between 1995 (late DOS-era/Windows 95) and 2005 (Windows XP) is that hardware was advancing at a speed that would give modern gamers whiplash.
We were getting full generational leaps every six months in that era.
We went from 3D graphics being fully software rendered to hardware transformation and lighting in 5 years.
Basically, what I'm trying to say, is that you're highly unlikely going to be able to build a single system that will play games from the early XP era as well as it will play games from the late DOS era. It's possible, especially if you get hardware that's fully supported in both XP and Windows 98 (they ran concurrently for a few years), but you absolutely are going to have to get your hands dirty with configuration stuff -especially if you've got newer hardware you're trying to get to work in DOS- and expect to have a hell of a hard time getting some of it to work. And the further away you move from the mid-late 90's, the harder it's going to be.
Ideally for DOS gaming you want something with ISA slots so you can use ISA sound cards (which probably won't work in Windows XP) and you're going to have better luck getting a PCI video card working in DOS than an AGP one -which is what you're going to need if you want gaming around 2005 or later.
You'd be far better off picking one of those two era, or building two separate computers.
sa547ph@reddit
Up to a certain point, I was then so stuck to Windows 98 because it was fast and responsive if it was properly tuned and given 128mb of memory, a monstrous amount in 2000. That it was the version of Windows a bit close to bare metal as opposed to WinXP.
Eventually and however, I moved to WinXP due to greater stability gains it provided, like better able to terminate a failed program.
As much as I would like to use the original media, the problem lies with their current state of quality, as I can't expect floppy and CDROM drives to work correctly today due to lack of parts, and these are likely have difficulty to read existing physical media unless you get hold of new-old stock drives fresh from 30-year-old boxes. I mean, I won't risk putting in a priceless shareware floppy into a Teac drive that's not seen proper rebuilding.
Oh, do I have to remember that some DOS games used unusual protection methods which actually prevented these to be backed up easily to another floppy, and later on some CD-protection systems which tried to stop people from imaging the discs and then running games from a virtual drive (so that CDROM drives last longer).
If using a drive emulator, technically you could use different SD cards for either version of Windows and which to boot from, and without needing to find a period-correct hard drive (difficult to get an intact Seagate with no bad sectors).
crabpoweredcoalmine@reddit
Trying to build a single machine that runs Dark Forces 1 and Fable will be a bad and expensive time. It's just too long of a timespan for back then. These days a decade isn't really that big of a change. Back then it was seismic many times over across all hardware. A late DOS-compatible machine will not run Fable well, while a machine that runs Fable well will not be DOS-native. DOS compatibility was already being abandoned by late Win98, not to mention that video cards that are very DOS-compatible will be irrelevant for playing even late Win98 3d-heavy games, and accelerators (early Voodoo) won't save you there since they were already irrelevant and obsolete by that point. Late Voodoo is expensive and fairly pointless unless you want bragging rights.
Pick one, basically, or build at least two: one for late DOS + Win98, and then skip a few hardware generations and build something that runs games deep into the XP era.
DrFrancisBGross@reddit
I like Windows 98 SE. XP is nice but I like to use DOS
bnelson333@reddit
I'm a proponent of having multiple retro machines, each being period correct for their intended game in terms of OS and video card.
PC gaming between the days of DOS and Windows XP changed dramatically every couple years and compatibility really wasn't on anyones mind at the time. That's why a lot of us have lots of retro machines. Because in order to play a specific game, you kinda need to have a machine built around the hardware it was expecting at the time.
It wasn't just "oh you might see less FPS" or something, it was straight up "this game will not run on this XYZ hardware".
Windows XP is a great place to start, it'll play a LOT of games from around 1999-2005 just fine. It even tries to do some compatibility stuff to play older games. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. My advice would be to optimize the XP machine you are getting (e.g. depending on how much RAM it has, what video card it has, you might be able to spruce it up a bit), but beyond that, if you want to play even more of what's out there, you'll probably be looking at playing XP games on XP and adding more machines to play DOS, Win 3.1, Win98, etc.
I personally have and use:
Realistically, you don't need all of those. The Windows ME machine will probably play most things that the 98 and 95 machines will play, for example. But I do this because again, I'm matching the amount of RAM, video card, and even audio card in that machine to what would have been period correct. It actually does make some difference in how the game plays, and I try to play the game as it was intended (from original CD-ROMs even).
One place I do prefer modern is the hard drive. Nostalgia sounds aside, those pre-SATA (IDE) drives were slooooowwww. Many of my retro machines have a startech IDE to SATA adapter, which allows me to use a modern 128 GB SSD and the computer thinks it's an IDE drive. It's SO much faster. Maybe not "period correct", but I don't care lol, I don't want it to take 10 minutes to boot up.
fragglet@reddit
Install the OS appropriate for the hardware you're installing it on. If it's hardware from before 2001 there's a good chance that 98 isn't going to work
CAR3Y4@reddit
XP in your situation. But, you can partition the hard drive and dual boot 98/XP if you want to. The issue with windows 98 is it’s a little bit harder to find drivers compared to Windows XP. Windows XP, you can use snappy driver. You mentioned that you are French. Depending on your country, snappy driver’s website may not be available
Scoth42@reddit
Despite what people say XP runs a lot of DOS stuff just fine. There's also a thing called VDMSound that greatly improves DOS sound and controller support in XP. It's what finally got me off dual booting Win98 and XP back in the day because it ran stuff so well. I'd give that a try and see if it suits your needs and then mess with Win98 only if you need to. I love Win9x but it's a whole different can of worms getting it going and keeping it going. If what you want to play runs on XP with VDMSound then I'd stick with that
DonManuel@reddit
Unpopular opinion, try Windows ME. Good DOS compatibility combined with acceptable USB-support.
OctoNeko2@reddit (OP)
I litterally never heard of that OS before, I looked it up. Thanks for the info. I might still dive in XP as a first though since I probably won't need DOS support for now.
FreshTomacco@reddit
You can very likely run 98 and XP on the same machine as XP era hardware usually has 98 driver support too. I went with the dual boot option personally.
crashprime@reddit
The issue comes down to the fact you bought something already.
Not even sure Windows 98 would run on that machine. You will need to post system specs to get any useful guidance.
OctoNeko2@reddit (OP)
The build I bought is bonus, I was mainly interested in the monitor that came with it since they’re quite hard to get in my area. I don’t mind building from scratch