Best Classic Games for Old PC w/Win 98?

[Fort Apocalypse]

Hey everyone,

 

I have an old PC (Pentium III) that I was going to setup with some old games on for my kids (and me of course). I need the games to run in Win 98 because the primary purpose of the PC is for printer sharing at the moment, and I don't want to spend the time at the moment to try to get DSL linux to work with the cheap wireless card that is in it.

 

I tried some of the Sil's Single Emulator (S.S.E.) games that I thought were fairly thin and might run well (based on MAME v.029) but even those were slow.

 

I haven't tried many of the single game emulators which might be good picks, but it would help if people could suggest some that might be faster even than S.S.E.:

http://caesar.logiqx.com/php/emulators.php?id=single

 

I was starting to look at some abandonware games. There are just so many to choose from.

 

Could anyone suggest some abandonware games or emulators that might run at a reasonable speed that would be fun enough for either toddler, pre-teen, and for someone who appreciated these games during their heyday? Especially educational games that might still be fun for kids today. Note: my kids like Frog Pong on the Atari Flashback 2, and they've gotten into DOS games before, so I'm not worried about them not liking old games (and we don't have any game console other than the FB2 and a Jakks Atari games).

[Zenoff64]

Hey everyone,

 

I have an old PC (Pentium III) that I was going to setup with some old games on for my kids (and me of course). I need the games to run in Win 98 because the primary purpose of the PC is for printer sharing at the moment, and I don't want to spend the time at the moment to try to get DSL linux to work with the cheap wireless card that is in it.

 

I tried some of the Sil's Single Emulator (S.S.E.) games that I thought were fairly thin and might run well (based on MAME v.029) but even those were slow.

 

I haven't tried many of the single game emulators which might be good picks, but it would help if people could suggest some that might be faster even than S.S.E.:

http://caesar.logiqx.com/php/emulators.php?id=single

 

I was starting to look at some abandonware games. There are just so many to choose from.

 

Could anyone suggest some abandonware games or emulators that might run at a reasonable speed that would be fun enough for either toddler, pre-teen, and for someone who appreciated these games during their heyday? Especially educational games that might still be fun for kids today. Note: my kids like Frog Pong on the Atari Flashback 2, and they've gotten into DOS games before, so I'm not worried about them not liking old games (and we don't have any game console other than the FB2 and a Jakks Atari games).

 

I've got a few of those "Encyclopedia of games" type discs from the mid/early 90's filled with random freeware/shareware games I could iso and send to you to try out if you'd like.

 

Lots of interesting stuff on there to check out.

[Fort Apocalypse]

Hey everyone,

 

I have an old PC (Pentium III) that I was going to setup with some old games on for my kids (and me of course). I need the games to run in Win 98 because the primary purpose of the PC is for printer sharing at the moment, and I don't want to spend the time at the moment to try to get DSL linux to work with the cheap wireless card that is in it.

 

I tried some of the Sil's Single Emulator (S.S.E.) games that I thought were fairly thin and might run well (based on MAME v.029) but even those were slow.

 

I haven't tried many of the single game emulators which might be good picks, but it would help if people could suggest some that might be faster even than S.S.E.:

http://caesar.logiqx.com/php/emulators.php?id=single

 

I was starting to look at some abandonware games. There are just so many to choose from.

 

Could anyone suggest some abandonware games or emulators that might run at a reasonable speed that would be fun enough for either toddler, pre-teen, and for someone who appreciated these games during their heyday? Especially educational games that might still be fun for kids today. Note: my kids like Frog Pong on the Atari Flashback 2, and they've gotten into DOS games before, so I'm not worried about them not liking old games (and we don't have any game console other than the FB2 and a Jakks Atari games).

 

I've got a few of those "Encyclopedia of games" type discs from the mid/early 90's filled with random freeware/shareware games I could iso and send to you to try out if you'd like.

 

Lots of interesting stuff on there to check out.

 

Thanks for the offer! No need to do that, though. I was actually just checking out the games that have been licensed to be free on sites listed on http://www.abandonwarering.com/ as well as others. There are a number of full-versions of games that have been freed. I was just looking for maybe the top 10 that would be good for me and the kids.

[Rybags]

Half Life will run on older machines than that. It's even got software rendering mode for non-3D cards.

Unreal Tournament although you'd want at least a TNT2 card there.

Unreal. I think it's similar to HL for system requirements.

 

Some Playstation emulators should work well - some games might be pushing it though if they're graphically intensive.

It should be fine for emu stuff for consoles like SNES and Megadrive and anything earlier.

Amiga and ST emus should be fine at default speeds and slightly above.

MAME should be fine too, but probably forget about it for most games released after 1990 or so.

[Linkz1]

If your kids like Star Wars, there's a few games that would be perfect. X-Wing, Tie Fighter, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, Dark Forces and Jedi Knight to name a few. Jedi Knight can run without 3D graphics acceleration as well.

[darthkur]

Hey everyone,

 

I have an old PC (Pentium III) that I was going to setup with some old games on for my kids (and me of course).

 

 

That's funny since "the old Pentium III" is what I'm using right now as my "new computer". It does run XP though so that's a plus. I have a wide variety of emulators running on this from Stella, MAME, Meka, Atari800Win PLus 3.1, Handy, three different NES ones and a few others and they all run fine. Now with yours still running Win 98 I'm not certain if it'll make a difference or not. I wouldn't think it would but then again I'm no PC expert.

[Fort Apocalypse]

Hey everyone,

 

I have an old PC (Pentium III) that I was going to setup with some old games on for my kids (and me of course).

 

 

That's funny since "the old Pentium III" is what I'm using right now as my "new computer". It does run XP though so that's a plus. I have a wide variety of emulators running on this from Stella, MAME, Meka, Atari800Win PLus 3.1, Handy, three different NES ones and a few others and they all run fine. Now with yours still running Win 98 I'm not certain if it'll make a difference or not. I wouldn't think it would but then again I'm no PC expert.

 

Mine's a P III 450 MHz. It has a good bit of memory (128MB). It can't even run Frogger in S.S.E. (based on MAME 0.029) without skipping a little. The NES emulator I have on it also skips a good bit, as does Stella. Win98 runs acceptably well (boots slowly by today's standards, but responds quickly enough). An older winamp version runs just fine on it. There is not much resident on it that would cause it to churn (no anti-virus).

 

Basically just looking for stuff with very light requirements you'd suggest that would be fun with some educational stuff.

[gdement]

Mine's a P III 450 MHz. It has a good bit of memory (128MB). It can't even run Frogger in S.S.E. (based on MAME 0.029) without skipping a little. The NES emulator I have on it also skips a good bit, as does Stella. Win98 runs acceptably well (boots slowly by today's standards, but responds quickly enough). An older winamp version runs just fine on it. There is not much resident on it that would cause it to churn (no anti-virus).

I used to run a computer about that speed, it ran Nester and I think FCE Ultra fine.

I don't remember what Genesis emulator I used, but in my old files I see installers for Genecyst 8-18-98 and Gens v1.80, v1.91, and v2.11. At least some of those must have worked.

 

MAME v0.69 ran good, and I also apparently used v0.81, don't know if there was any speed difference between those.

Newer versions of MAME get much slower.

 

 

Basically just looking for stuff with very light requirements you'd suggest that would be fun with some educational stuff.

Civilization II would run easily. I don't know if you'll find that for download but it should be cheap on ebay or such.

[darthkur]

Mine has a 1GHz processor and 640megs of RAM so I can see where the differences would come in. When I had my 700MHz one I noticed a lot of the emulators didn't run right. So, yeah, you'll definitely have a bit more limited options. I'd say older CD-Rom games would be the best bet.

[Inky]

Sim City Classic, The INcredible Machine

[Cobra Commander]

I played the hell outa "Rainbow six" on a system similar to that.

[+stephena]

Mine's a P III 450 MHz. It has a good bit of memory (128MB). It can't even run Frogger in S.S.E. (based on MAME 0.029) without skipping a little. The NES emulator I have on it also skips a good bit, as does Stella.

If the PC has an OpenGL card (or one can be easily added), Stella performance on such a system should be smoother. The main bottleneck in Stella is getting video data to the video card, and OpenGL tends to make this faster.