Some games run fine and some games crashing on my retro pc
Posted by edgeofthemoon91@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 4 comments
Hello everyone, I recently built a retro pc to play old games. It runs windows 98 and ME from a 128GB SSD, has a Intel Pentium 4, Nvidia GeForce 4 ti 4200 128MB AGP 8x GPU and a Sound Blaster Live SB0220 sound card. I ran 3d mark 2001 and it runs fine with no issues, however when I launch a game, some games runs fine but some games run fine for a couple of minutes and then locks up the pc and I can't do anything until I restart it. Example, I played Tomb Raider 3 and it just locks up the pc after a couple of minutes or just crash with a Direct3d error message. Games like Oni and NOLF runs fine with no issues. I made sure to replace old thermal paste from the CPU and GPU before the assembly so I don't think it's overheating. I suspect if this has to do something with my power supply since I'm using a newer MSI MAG A550BN PSU or the SSD. What do you think? Have no idea what's going on, tried searching online but I couldn't find anyone that's facing the same issue as mine. The Gefore driver version I'm using is 45.23 and my motherboard is an oem Samsung which was pulled off from a Samsung pc. Thank you for reading my post.
giantsparklerobot@reddit
Some SSDs are finicky with old motherboards, especially the mSATA-PATA adapter types. So it's not outside the realm of possibility it's the SSD. However it seems that if it was the SSD then no games would run and certainly not 3DMark which is exercising the system pretty well.
I'd look at the following:
Run
memtest86to test your RAM. A bad RAM chip could definitely cause intermittent issues, it'll only cause problems accessing memory in the bad cells but otherwise be fine.Boot into Safe Mode and run a disk scan and defragment. One crash for another reason could have corrupted some files on disk which causes other problems later.
For games that are crashing try to find updates for them on the Internet Archive or WinWorld or wherever. Some old games had bugs that were only evident with certain hardware and driver combinations. A Direct3D error sounds like such a problem. Not every game is using every Direct3D function, some are even using OpenGL, so only some games will call some function (or calls it in a way) that causes the crash.
Reinstall the GeForce drivers and DirectX or even update DirectX to the latest Windows 98 supports. So a Safe Mode defrag after those installations. The defragging is mostly performative on SSDs but might help.
Scoth42@reddit
Do not do a defrag on an SSD. There's no point, and it adds wear and tear to the cells for no good reason. Wear leveling means when you're accessing a particular block, it may not even refer to the same physical cell anyway. The reason defrag helped in spinny disks days was it took a noticeable amount of time to seek the head back and forth across the disk, as well as waiting for the right sector to end up under the drive head to read/write it. This isn't a problem with SSDs since it doesn't care whether a file is sequential or not, so there's even less reason to defrag.
giantsparklerobot@reddit
A defrag on an SSD is fine if it's not being done all the time. And the issue isn't about physical location of blocks like on an HDD. With FAT32 Windows can have issues if the drive is too logically fragmented.
An old Windows machine for a hobbyist isn't going to do enough writes over any period of time to cause issues on an SSD outside of premature failure of the drive. Old machines simply can't write all that fast. Disabling drive hibernation will do far more to prolong the lifetime than worrying about running a defrag once in a while.
Just4m4n@reddit
I had the same behaviour using a SSD for a pentium III rig. But I used a ide sata adapter. Once I reverted to good old Berta - the original HDD, the problem went away.