a good retro-gaming rig

[tyranthraxus]

I've been thinking of getting an old laptop to use for playing some of the

older games. I'm particularly keen to play some Ultima after all the talk

in that other thread. So with that in mind I was wondering whether anyone

has an older computer that they keep for playing some of their old

favorites on and what kind of setup they would reccomend?

 

I am thinking of getting a Pentium in the 100-200mhz range.

 

John

[Invader_dag]

i got a 486 66mhz, and it runs great for old games. Even Duke Nukem 3d runs on it!! And i have a Laptop, i think it's about 166 P1. It works good too. Just the other day a saw dozens of laptops and desktops at some thrift stores, only about $15 for them too. And if the gamin age you are interested in is around '93-'96, then i would say a 166 or 200 mhz P1 would do the trick, anything older i would say a 486 and about 66 to 100 mhz( i think they made them up 100mhz, not sure though)

[IceCold]

Well, currently I'm thinking about trying to pick up a small sized pretty fast 486, purely for older games. Or I may just use my p100, but it's very big . I have a 50mhz laptop which I use a little bit.

[BoOchan!]

I need to find a laptop as well for older games. I have an Old 8088 Datavue Spark, but theirs no harddrive and the thing crashes indefinately. The thing is pretty rare, I'll see If I could trade it for a 386/486 Laptop... Commodore Made some pretty good Dos 5/Win 3.x Laptops, I seen one but didn't get it

[IceCold]

If anybody wants to buy the laptop, pm me with offers(I'm just asking, not trying to make this thread off-topic)

[Ze_ro]

If playing old games is your goal, then you might want to be very careful about the speed of the machine, as many older games can run too fast on it (unfortunately, this is all relative... back when I had a 386, there were games that I had to manually slow down, and games that would run way too slow). I'd stick to a high-end 486 if I were you. and find yourself an older SoundBlaster card, like an SB16 or maybe an AWE64, that your games will understand... and DON'T run Windows! Stick to Dos, and you'll probably have less problems. Make yourself a nice Ultima VII boot disk, and you're all set!

 

Speaking of boot disks, you might want to look into system boot menus. Back in the Dos days when I had to scrape for conventional memory, I customized my config.sys and autoexec.bat such that my computer would come up with a text-based menu on startup (that looked like the one you use on Windows to go into "Safe Mode") with my own choices in it. It was VERY useful to be able to set up very specific memory settings.

 

Oh, and you might want to be careful about what kind of CD-Rom you put in the machine... I don't know if newer drives come with Dos drivers anymore. I never liked mscdex, but when you're doing Dos stuff, there's not much choice

 

--Zero

[Invader_dag]

Actually, you might want to install windows 3.1 on your system, incase some games require a form of windows. 3.1 should be free of those problems associated with all the 9x series. And i have a working external NEC cd-rom 1x drive, it works for my LapTop. If you need one, let me know and i`ll check the connection style