Hello VGC!
So recently I told you all about my playing around with an old 1996 IBM aptiva computer.
Well, I listened to you and decided that a Voodoo card from around 1998 and some additional RAM would probably be what's best for that computer.

But anyways, this thread isn't about that. I thought the conversation about old PC parts and stuff was fun enough that it deserves a broader thread. One that is relevant to anyone that likes playing around with old hardware.

So I'll open this by sharing what happened with the old junk computer that I wanted to salvage the GeForce 2 MX card from.

I took a look at that computer again, and thanks to the GeForce card and the 730MHz Intel Celeron processor, I guessed that it's from around 2002. That would make it a perfect machine to install windows 98. Why win98? because a lot of RTS games from the RTS golden age are a total bitch to get up and running on modern hardware, like Red Alert or Age of Empires 2.

The problem was that the computer had no hard drive, and no RAM, and thus no OS to begin with. So I went scavenging, and inside an old copyer that was being thrown away, I found a hard drive. And after digging around at home, I finally found 128MB of RAM that would fit onto the motherboard.

I installed the harddrive into the computer case and hooked it up to the IDE bus, and popped in the RAM. I then burned a windows 98 boot disk and started the computer, hoping for the best. And lo and behold it worked! I got the DOS prompt from the boot disk and ran fdisk on the harddrive, and it turned ut it had 30gigabytes on it!

Then I started the computer with the installation CD for windows 98. At first it got stuck in a loop of wanting to format the harddrive and then wanting to do it over and over. After running fdisk again it started working for unknown reasons and I got windows 98 up and running on the computer.

Now I had an OS, but I couldn't run any games and had only 16  colour mode because the OS didn't recognise the graphics card. And I had no sound. So I went and found the win9x drivers for the Nvidia GeForce 2 MX card, and it installed flawlessly. Now I could run games.

The sound card was much harder to fix. After some reading on the card, I identified it as a Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit card and started looking for drivers. This was hard as hell because Creative labs doesn't support old OS's for their old cards anymore. I found some drivers, installed them and nothing happened. I finally found an ISO of the old CD that came with the card and used it to run the installation on the computer. It worked and finally the computer recognised the Sound Blaster!

I popped in a music CD and started playing it when scratching noised appeared. I tried playing games and the same thing happened. I was just about to give up on the card and just order some cheap sound card on Ebay when I found a new device icon in the control panel. In it, I found that the output to the card was set to 16-bits. When I changed it to 24-bits everything started working again, and sounded amazing!

Finally the build is complete! I have a beast of a windows 98 machine with top notch graphics and sound hardware for its time, and all the harddrive space I'll ever need.
I've been playing Red Alert and Tiberian sun and had more fun on the PC than I've had in a long time.

Is there anyone else who thinks old PC hardware is fun? Cheers!

I wish I kept some of my old rigs - I tried to play one of my all time favourite Myst-likes yesterday (Timelapse), had a lot of visual glitches and finally gave up.

Solution: https://www.gog.com/game/timelapse

It's not too late to build one!

People are throwing away old PCs left and right :)

I'll check it out, though it seems that version has problems as well (seems to be due to AMD drivers). Guess I'll have to find some really old rig for stuff like that, oldest one around the house I can (maybe) get to work is some old Athlon 3000XP with GF4 Ti4400.

Last weekend I put together a mid 2000s gaming PC with Windows XP and played some Xpand Rally, undrappreciated racing game. I will use this PC for games that don't work on Win7 and games that look like sh!t on widescreen monitor.

I wish I could still run my old pentium 2 333mhz sli voodoo 2 12mb and 128 ram.. The problem is I actually don't have any monitors left.. I only have 2 Apple Cinema displays but they don't accept passive vga to dvi so I should buy a powered converter but that's 150 bucks while10 bucks could be spend on a 2nd hand old monitor.. But then i have all those old stuff in my house again

I still have a Pentium 4 up and running with XP and a Pentium 2 Windows NT machine stored away.

The cmos battery is dead on the Pentium 4 but it reconfigures itself fine on startup, except the time resets to 2002 which has funny side effects. (Web browser claims everything is unsafe, all certificates are out of date) I'm not sure what GPU is in it. For some reason it's still getting windows updates after I managed to install an old USB Wifi stick.

The NT machine doesn't have a GPU but it ran the original Unreal tournament very well, as well as Half-Life death match and Age of Empires 2.

I have boxes full of old PC games too, don't give me too many ideas. I have enough of a gaming back log already. No time to go into full nostalgia mode!

Do you consider having old stuff in your house to be a problem?

Ditch the geforce and get a radeon 8500 or better GPU. Some of the games from that era had Tessellation. Also try out some gems like Sacrifice, Evolva, Battle zone 2 etc. :p