Retro PC Parts... Worth it? And How?

[terpsy]

A friend returned a machine I built for him about 10 years ago. It had been sitting for 5-6 years

The parts still run, I was thinking about moving them to a Lian Li 205 and having a Retro PC.

ASUS P5KPL-VM, Intel E8400, 2x2GB DDR2-800, NVidia 8800GTS 512MB

Is it worth it? Any guides on how to get Windows XP to install from USB and install all patches and drivers?

Should I go with Windows X64 instead?

Your thoughts, experience, advice greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

 

[matt167]

Retro requires a disc installation.. X32 is what I would use. I ran a similar computer as an XP gamer up until 1yr ago except I had a GT730 1gb.. It was an OG Doom 3 box basically, but ran pretty much all my boxed copy early 2000's stuff... Mine was built on a Dell Optiplex 755 mini tower

 

[GotNoRice]

Only you can judge if it's worth it for you. Entertainment value, nostalgia, etc, are all subjective.

"Retro" is too vague. What is your intended purpose for this PC? What are you going to use it for? Is there a specific game that you want to be able to play that you can't currently play using your main computer? Do you still want to be able to use it to perform other tasks also (web surfing, etc)?

Questions such as which OS to install would be almost completely determined by your intended usage. That computer would run Windows 7 or Windows 10, 32-bit or 64-bit, just fine. I would personally avoid XP at this point unless there is something specific you need it for. One example would be EAX games with a creative sound card, since EAX was removed starting with Vista.

 

[NamelessPFG]

Never thought a Wolfdale build would already count as "retro"; to me, that usually implies something that was built in the Win9x or earlier age, usually with ISA slots for old sound cards and other esoteric hardware like the Forte VFX1 VIP card. (Let's just say that people griping about today's VR HMDs have no idea how good they have it now...)

Alas, the stuff I'm thinking of now is getting unusually expensive if you don't get lucky at private sales or events like Vintage Computer Festival. 3dfx Voodoo cards have especially seen a spike in value, 486 and earlier systems are commanding weird premiums, period-correct CRT monitors are going for hundreds now if you don't find any at thrift stores, and if you're going into non-IBM-compatible systems that aren't old Macs, like anything to do with the Commodore Amiga, Acorn Archimedes/RiscPC, Sharp X68000 or Fujitsu FM Towns... sorry about your wallet. Even old Macs are starting to tick up a bit if it's something like an SE/30 or IIfx, despite general inferiority to the Amiga line.

32-bit Windows will prevent you from effectively using all 4 GB of your system RAM, but it also means you can still run 16-bit apps and games from the Win3.1 era. It's a trade-off, but if your explicit purpose for this build is backwards compatibility, you're probably better off devoting this system to 16/32-bit software and leaving 64-bit stuff to a platform that isn't over a decade old. 45nm Core 2 is seriously deficient in IPC compared to Haswell, let alone the umpteenth iteration of Skylake Intel's pushing now and Zen 3.

Questions such as which OS to install would be almost completely determined by your intended usage. That computer would run Windows 7 or Windows 10, 32-bit or 64-bit, just fine. I would personally avoid XP at this point unless there is something specific you need it for. One example would be EAX games with a creative sound card, since EAX was removed starting with Vista.

I cannot emphasize this enough.

I actually have an old Pentium 4 EE 3.2 GHz/GeForce 6800 Ultra build specifically built to run both 98SE and XP because it's about the fastest hardware you can get that still runs 98SE natively, the mobo chosen is an industrial one with a fully-functional ISA slot (critical for sound cards that support certain obscure features that DOS games utilize), and the hardware also happens to be amongst the best available for a period-appropriate 2004 build anyway, making it pretty competent at running the likes of Far Cry, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. Also, I don't have the space for separate 9x and XP builds, so having one computer that covers both periods effectively is a plus.

As for the EAX part, what Vista actually removed was the DirectSound3D API. You can restore EAX by wrapping the DS3D calls to OpenAL, which is what Creative's own ALchemy utility does; it's really not all that different from wrapping 3dfx Glide into Direct3D or OpenGL. The trickier part is if anyone's managed to wrap the EAX calls into EFX (the free OpenAL equivalent) without incurring the legal wrath of Creative; that way, free OpenAL renderers like OpenAL-Soft could completely replace the need for any sort of Creative-based hardware whatsoever.

Hard mode would be Aureal A3D 2.0/3.0 with wavetracing; I don't think a wrapper exists for that, and AU8830 Vortex2 cards only have Win9x drivers that work well. You pretty much have to make a 9x build around a Vortex2 card if you want A3D support that works, and it's certainly worth it because it kicks the crap out of what Creative was offering at the time, especially with headphones.

Despite that, though, there are some games that have functionality flat-out break even with the wrapper in place; Battlefield Vietnam outright loses several of its ambient sound effects and the music playback when running on anything later than XP, for whatever reason. Doesn't happen in BF1942, doesn't happen in BF2 either, it's just that uniquely early-2000s kind of PC compatibility jank that force us to build old computers for that proper experience.