All this talk of upgrades and new stuff inspired me to get back to my perienial and evolving legacy box project. 5 gears in reverse so to speak.

At one time it was a pure DOS P-90 16mb edo ram box, and in another it was the "Glide Rocket"; a good old Voodoo 5 card, 1.2mhz processor that drove the last great glide based games to their max. Now the focus is on the late dos/early 3D era.

For this build I settled on an old Abit VA-6 slot 1 mobo from the parts box, a P-566, 256mb PC133 ram, Diamond 3D-2000 Pro [4mb], Voodoo 1 [4mb], a trusty Turtle Beach Montego A3D sound card, a lean Win98se install [with a great unofficial "service pack"], one 100gb HD for Win98 and Win games, and a teeny 1.3gb HD for IBM-DOS 6.3 and dos games. It's all packed into a super space efficient Cooler Master Elite 360 mini tower [super cheap too] along with a Rosewill 350w PS.

The abit BIOS allows for jumper free down-clocking of the cpu when the P-566 is too fast for an older cpu cycle linked game, and also permits a "BIOS dual boot" by selecting the DOS hard drive as the boot drive. This works really well and totally eliminates the need for a fussy dual boot install.

Ram and cpu are excessive for many of the games I have installed, but you'd never know it. The overhead ensures that the mighty 4mb Voodoo 1 gives it's all, which though even limited to 640x480, it's still quite impressive. All the extra ram makes Win98 and apps real snappy, putting to rest the "too much ram is a waste" debate that raged when 32mb was the norm.

I elected to use the Voodoo 1 since a fair number of very early 3D games were coded specifically for this card and either don't run or run poorly on later iterations of the card. EF-2000 v2 is a good example. It's nice to see some of these in glorious 3D once again.

The Turtle Beach audio card has a servicable DOS driver and clear instructions on how to configure the autoexec.bat so it can work in pure DOS, as well as offering some of the first 3D positional sound then available to Windows.

After several long nights of research and testing I discovered that very old versions of Daemon Tools do the best job of creating and mounting virtual drives for games of this era. I needed to roll back to version 3 to finally get in-game music to actually play in Outlaws one of the tougher nuts to crack.

I also manged to get my USB flash drives working reliably, though a USB2 upgrade card did seem to cause serious file corruption issues. Game install benefitted greatly from having converted a substantial part of my collection to ios or bin/cue images. No CD's required for anything, just the ocassional image needs to be mounted.

Some essential apps like CClean needed VisualBasics 6, so I installed that MS patch, and DirectX was upgraded to 9c so that my USB Logitech and Saitek controllers work. I installed Acronis [v8 is Win98 friendly] right after freshly the OS and immediatley made an image backup of C: where only the OS resides. I made 2 more interum images so I could roll back to critical junctures in just a few minutes time. It's amazing to re-experience just how brittle W98 really was and knownig you can fully restore a squeekly clean and lean install in 5 minutes is a god send.

Well there you have it - Retro World. Windows 7 waits yet again... �

EDIT 10-23-2011:
The project evolves. A few days ago the 1.6gb DOS drive broke which inspired a re-think of the dos component of the rig. Result - early 3D is clearly the raison d'etre of this build so I decided to rely on MS-Dos boxes and reboot to dos [basically MS DOS 7.0] for DOS stuff, and focus on a wider range of early Windows 3D games. And "Early" 3D has expanded to mean the 3dfx Glide era with a cut-off around 1999/2000.

I've replaced both video cards, this time with the unusual tandem of an AGP Voodoo 5 5500 as the primary 2D/3D card, with a PCI Voodoo 2 as secondary. While messing around with old 3dfx reference drivers I discovered the V2 *can* be configured to act like a Voodoo 1 if needed, so the problem of getting the some of the earliest 3D games running is solved while still offering support for those which actually prefer the later V2, and not to mention the Voodoo 5 - the queen of glide cards. With the V5 and V2 in lash up I seem to be able to make games that prefer either the Voodoo 5 or the V2 or the V1 happy.

The majority of the DOS games I have installed run fine in an MSdos box - which means USB controllers and PCI audio is no problem. But some games require a dos re-boot [probably not enough conventional memory] , so now I need to study the ancient "boot-to-dos" config texts again. But I won't beat myslef up on this one since it's not pure DOS games that are driving this build. And DosBox works so well in XP...

EDIT 3-2-2012:

Another compact case and power supply is on order, this time to build a W95/Dos legacy box to complement the "glide rocket" previously discussed. It will center on a P200, the aforementioned Diamond 3D-2000 Pro [2D card] and a Diamond Stealth 2200 for 3D. This latter card features the short-lived Rendition Verite chip and for which a few very early 3D games it is the exclusive card for which it was designed to run - CART Racing being the main object of interest.

Since the "glide rocket" legacy box no longer needs to shoulder the slow cpu limited games anymore it's getting an upgrade to either a P800, or using a different mobo, a Duron 1100.

When it's all done I'll have a W95/Dos box, W98/glide box, my current XP box which I'll retain, and the Win7 rig whenever I get around to putting that one together..

Thanks for the reply.  Perhaps the people I talked with didn't fully understand how to resize the PC resolution through windows?  I don't know, but I did just take advantage of a cyber Monday sale to buy myself a nice shiny new Samsung 23" LED 1080p display.  So, I'll get to tinker around with this whole retro game on the flatscreen issue myself.

wow what a thread! and what a labour of love. thanks for sharing the details, amazing what you have achieved..  Trav dont throw anything else out, i will be happy to pay shipping if you give me an alert next time Mr Trav is getting itchy throw it out thougts.

I'd recommend holding on to the CRT. Some DOS games really do look better on a CRT, at least if it was decent quality to start with.

Man you guys are making me so nostalgic. I miss my old commodore 64, and reading Steve Jobs bio isn't helping. Back when we had tape decks and floppy's, those were the days when computers were computers and not just overpriced, overhyped and over complicated things. 

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Thanks for the advise Jenny100.  I'm definitely planning on keeping the CRT.  It's been a tank, owned it for 5 years now and was still going strong when I finally replaced it.