[BloodEagle]

Your CD-Drive comment reminded me of Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, since (on a 56x drive) the installer will claim that your cd-rom is spinning faster than is physically possible.

[Mongoose]

Oh wow...I think our family's 11-year-old Dell has that exact same GeForce card in it. There's a 95/98-era game called Glover that I picked up at a used book/CD sale that I can't get to run properly on this machine, even using a Glide wrapper; maybe I should see what it does on that old box.

[sigtau]

Interesting, Moongoose.  I would have invested in an ATI Rage instead, but the power requirements were just far too steep for the ****ty-ass 100W power power supply.  Now, you might be thinking that I can simply upgrade the PSU, but that's not the case--the power supply is completely proprietary-shaped, and essentially cannot be replaced.  Googling about shows that the GeForce 2 MX cards use around 4W-5W while delivering decent old-card performance, so I figured that would be a far better choice that sucking the life out of the entire power supply (and crippling the entire system).

Anyone here still use a Sidewinder?

[Mongoose]

I'm all about the Sidewinder 3D Pro, at least for Descent purposes.  (I usually use my Cyborg Evo for FS.)  A member of the Descent community came up with a custom-made gameport-to-USB adapter for it a few years back, so I've been able to keep it going strong on modern hardware.  It's probably the best-feeling stick I've ever used, in terms of its motion and throw.

[jr2]

It's likely that I'll have to do some crazy things with the partitioning (since the BIOS refuses to recognize the 40GB drive, resulting in me falling back on the only smaller drive I had--2.5GB) if I upgrade again.

OK, what's the model number?  I've been there done that and I have h4x. 

EDIT: I mean of the motherboard (OEM computer model number eg pavilion dv14nx will do if you can't get that)

[Nuke]

I'm all about the Sidewinder 3D Pro, at least for Descent purposes.  (I usually use my Cyborg Evo for FS.)  A member of the Descent community came up with a custom-made gameport-to-USB adapter for it a few years back, so I've been able to keep it going strong on modern hardware.  It's probably the best-feeling stick I've ever used, in terms of its motion and throw.

joysticks kinda took an evolutionary step backward after the sidewinder series of sticks. modern joysticks may have more buttons and axes, but in terms of sensor resolution things have diminished quite abit. for example you see 10 bit resolution touted like an amazing new feature these days, but there was a point back in the '90s where it was stock on most moderately priced joysticks.

[sigtau]

Wondrous news!

The good: This is now a Windows 95 gaming computer, because 98 was just too damn unstable on the machine for some reason.  Lucky for me, this doesn't rule out any of my baseline games (the list I had in the first post), and may affect only a handful of the ones suggested here.

The bad: I can't find sound card drivers for this.  I might need to purchase a new sound card, and I have decided to wait for the video card to arrive in the mail before I do any further toying with expansion slots.  Hopefully it'll be easier if I do buy a new sound card, because I'll know exactly what I'm getting (and if I shop effectively, maybe even a driver disk to save me some time).  The current card was a Creative CT4790 (which is of the Sound Blaster series, but I don't know if it was Live, Live Pro, 16, or AWE-32, and googling tells me absolutely nothing).

The ugly: PCI bus error on POST, starting with the second Windows 95 bootup since this project started.  I don't know why it started, but since I'll be removing pretty much everything from the expansion slots when the graphics card gets here, it should be a problem that should be of little importance.

The extra: I don't have to buy speakers, I just dug up an old pair in the pantry (of all places to find some).

The postmortem:  Don't ever, ever, ever expect a project involving archaic, old hardware to take you a week to complete.  This will likely span into next week for me due to school, but since this is something I can literally feel my way through on the as-I-go basis (considering the first computers I ever repaired were of the Windows 9x/Intel Celeron/Pentium MMX/2/3 generation), it might be easily completed even sooner than that.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Could be a regular Sound Blaster. My old PC had a sound card that did not fall into any of the specific Sound Blaster categories.

[Davros]

it is a regular pci soundblaster
my vote for win95 would be a live or a vortex 2 card (a3d 2.0 rocks)

ps: if you need drivers for that pci card go to vogons (Very Old Games On New Machines)
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewforum.php?f=9

ask for swayee he will sort you out with them

[Flipside]

Been playing Sonalysts Fleet Command a lot since I got the old computer working. 'Tis fun

[jr2]

<snip>

You did use '98 Second Edition, right?  Gold (non-SE) Win '98 had issues.  SE was rock-solid, and the reason that people remember '98 as a good thing.  Sorta like XP... pre-service pack 1 it had issues too.

And, about what I said earlier... usually I can patch the BIOS of computers of that era to support large hard disks and better CPUs and newer memory... however I don't think the memory tech will help you, you said it was FPM or EDO, right? (72-pin SIMMs, before SDRAM)

[asyikarea51]

*Stumbles into thread*

*Sees the following words: Magic Carpet, Death Rally, Terminal Velocity, Descent, One Must Fall, A-10 Cuba! (the only game which I couldn't do A SINGLE SENSIBLE THING apart from dropping random bombs on AUTO PILOT and missing the target 100% of the time ), Shadow Warrior, Doom, Duke Nukem, Grand Prix 2, Sidewinder 3D Pro*

Oh, those days...

That said, does Interstate '76 even work on Win 98/98SE? Don't remember at all but I think there were one or two games I played a long time ago that worked on '95, but I don't remember them working on '98...

[jr2]

You could use partitioning and the PLoP boot loader to multi-boot 95 and 98 SE I think...

[sigtau]

it is a regular pci soundblaster
my vote for win95 would be a live or a vortex 2 card (a3d 2.0 rocks)

ps: if you need drivers for that pci card go to vogons (Very Old Games On New Machines)

Well, reading the name of that site that you wrote there ("...on new machines") is sort of a turnoff here, because I need Windows 95 on a Pentium MMX to recognize the card as a Sound Blaster.  Unfortunately, installing the stock SB driver that comes with Win95 (using OSR2 here, by the way) actually crippled the entire OS for some reason because I had to delete some of the conflicting hardware entries (leading to a pleasant "Operating System not found" error on startup, which isn't terrible because I know how to fix it).

I might resort to reinstalling the OS with all of the expansion cards removed, and I'll insert them one at a time and install them one at a time as I need them.

You did use '98 Second Edition, right?  Gold (non-SE) Win '98 had issues.  SE was rock-solid, and the reason that people remember '98 as a good thing.  Sorta like XP... pre-service pack 1 it had issues too.

And, about what I said earlier... usually I can patch the BIOS of computers of that era to support large hard disks and better CPUs and newer memory... however I don't think the memory tech will help you, you said it was FPM or EDO, right? (72-pin SIMMs, before SDRAM)

Yeah, SIMMs.  Old mainboard is old.  And yes, I did use Second Edition.  It just doesn't like the older hardware for some reason.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Freelancer?

[BloodEagle]

Freelancer?

NO.

[ssmit132]

A-10 Cuba! (the only game which I couldn't do A SINGLE SENSIBLE THING apart from dropping random bombs on AUTO PILOT and missing the target 100% of the time )

Don't worry, originally I couldn't even fly the plane using the mouse, and that lasted for a long time (I can now, though) and just blew up random stuff. That was the demo, I never got the full version, maybe I should do that some time.

I second (third, fourth?) the suggestion to try Grand Prix 2. That's still a favourite game of mine, and there's still a decent community if you want to download addons and stuff.

Also, may I suggest some of the old Need For Speed games? I'm thinking Need For Speed II (SE), but The Need For Speed (the first one) is not too bad either. I wish my old desktop still worked then I could still play Need For Speed II.

[BlueFlames]

Freelancer?

Not with a 233MHz CPU.

[headdie]

Just looked through my back catalogue of games and come up with:

Ground Control 1 should just run on a 233
Rainbow 6, I have 3 but the first possibly second might run
Theme Hospital
Total Annihilation
Wipeout 1/2097(XL)
Mega Race
Unreal Tournament ("only" requires a 200mhz )

Problem is most of the games of this kind of era I have are still at my parents so I cant just flick through them

[Davros]

@ sigtau
dont let the name of the site put you off it also supports Very Old Games on Old Machines (has a big retro pc section)
and swayee posted an archive of every soundblaster driver ever released if he doesnt have the correct driver for you no one does