Sunday, January 20, 2019

Retro Gaming Computer

File Under : Dumpster Tech

It's the depth of Canadian winter so time to do some projects. The idea was to build a small, portable gaming machine to run old skool windows games - the kind that you could play by yourself without an internet connection and a PS or MS online account.

The project goals were to build a true to the era machine with components from that period (no emulators running on an i7) which mean all the parts should be free or low/no cost. Thus the term 'dumpster tech', this kind of tech gets thrown away all the time, so let's recycle and have some fun.

First choice was deciding on an OS, we have win95, win98, win2000 and winXP. For the widest possible game choice i decided on win XP with service pack 3 and DOSbox to run dos games. While i have original MS cd's for all these OS's there is a better option, the releases by Lil Fella (https://lilfellauk.wordpress.com/) which strip out the crap, saving you a lot of time doing it yourself. Their gamer edition also includes the driver packs in case you don't have them already downloaded.

The hardware we settled on was an old Shuttle XPC, about the size of a lunch box. It boasts an intel 845 chipset, P4 cpu at 2.66gz and two DDR ram slots, which gave us 2gb of ram. We added an 80 gb ide hard disk and an Nvidia Geforce FX5200 AGP video card with 128mb of ram. We removed the floppy drive and mounted a cooling fan under the hd and installed a DVD, although it heat is a real problem an external optical can be used. The shuttle as has firewire so we can use additional storage if needed. And it has optical audio out, so using a headphone dac/amp can be done for quiet time gaming...the only thing it needs added is a carrying handle. (easily added)


The metal black look is kinda cool too. We dug out a PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse to complete the unit and plugged in an old Cambridge Soundworks 3 pc sound system, 2 satellite speakers and a small sub. You could use a USB keyboard and mouse once you tell the BIOS it is ok.


Note that the video output is limited to VGA so you need a monitor, television, or data projector that accepts a VGA input. Right now i am using a Dell 27" gaming monitor....cost $150 which is 10x cheaper than my first 12" VGA tube monitor with 256 colors. It's cheaper to be at the trailing edge!

Next stop was to download the Shuttle drivers from the web and do the install. Easy install, xp even picked up the correct video card. One mistake was to download and install the FX5200 driver from the nvidia site, thinking it was better. It screwed up the graphics totally so had to back it out and restore the windows xp driver. I played with different screen resolutions and settled on 1024x768 as the most useful. I also reduced the color depth from 32bit to 16bit to accomodate some windows games. We also downloaded and installed DOSbox (https://www.dosbox.com/) and headed to the abandonware sites to grab some old friends.

I thought of building a DOS only machine and may make that a project for an old laptop, but this was to be a desktop single person gaming box. Mmm if i had 4 of these boxes then multiplayer can be done, just like those old LAN parties we used to have with four 386 computers in the basement.

With DOSbox running let's kill some wee beasties...



Take that! and that!...ok let's get move on to some turn based strategy....first we rebuild the roman empire ....



then we refight the first world war...


and finally world war II....





time well wasted....ok now we just have to wade through the 18GB of downloaded games to see what to play next... see you next year!