I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum’s basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it’s never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.

Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn’t want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.

Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn’t have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).

So what were your favorite games from the 90’s and early 2000s?

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    That sounds like a fun project, although I’d recommend XP over Me. XP has a DOS emulator, and it’s a lot easier to configure drivers for.

    My favorite games from that era are Star Wars: X-Wing and Wing Commander: Privateer. Both games stood out as exceptional back then. Warcraft was also an excellent game. Command and Conquer is worth checking out too.

    Edit: I’m pretty sure I played the first two games on Windows 3.2, so I’m not sure how they’ll play on Me or XP.

    • Nik282000@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      23 days ago

      Did you play Squadrons? The mission briefings were still not up to X-Wing/Tie Fighter standards but the flight was 10/10.

      I seem to remember having issues with XP and Dos games but if ME is too problematic I will try 98 and XP. Though if I’m going with XP I’ll be using a half built P4 PC that I have hanging around.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        I never did play Squadrons. I joined the Army right after the X-Wing era and had a several year gap where I didn’t touch a computer at all.

        Now that I think about it, if these are straight-up DOS games then you don’t need Windows at all. You can just load MS-DOS and then run the game straight from the command line. I think you’re right that XP broke a bunch of old DOS games. It’s been so long that I completely forgot we were mad at Microsoft for the removal of DOS back then and the move to an emulator only experience.

  • PraiseTheSoup@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    21 days ago
    • Jazz Jackrabbit
    • Descent
    • Need for Speed 2
    • Witchaven 2: Blood Vengeance
    • Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness

    These are the games I remember best on our win95 IBM PC. My personal favorite of this era is Hexen: Beyond Heretic but that has been mentioned a few times already.

    • Nik282000@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      Jazz Jackrabbit

      Epic game music, up there with Sonic for getting stuck in your head.

      • PraiseTheSoup@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        Epic game music

        Not sure if the wordplay was intentional, but I chuckled a bit. Agreed though, the music was awesome.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    21 days ago

    alone in the dark, any of the sierra games (but especially kq 5,6, and 7), lands of lore 1+2, master of orion 1+2, sam n max, sim town, myst, ultima underworld, sim ant…

    • Nik282000@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      UT GOTY was one of my main reasons for this project. I played the hell out of that game!

      • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        21 days ago

        Oh, a person of taste! :) May I recommend BunnyTrack maps? I played those a lot in the 2015 timeframe and enjoyed myself immensely.

  • MeanEYE@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    21 days ago

    Original, and in my opinion best, Fallouts 1 and 2. M.A.X. which doesn’t get as mentioned as it should. Good old Blizzard games back before they turned evil. Sanitarium, awesome game from a studio who released it and promptly died after.

  • parricc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    Keep in mind you’re not going to be able to run all games between those years on a single build. Quite a few older games need older hardware, especially slower CPUs. Then, the DOS support on ME has a ton of issues that broke many games (one of the reasons people hated it), and XP is needed for a lot of the later Windows games in that range.

    That said, it should work very nicely as a 9X build, which also happens to be the era with the least emulation support. If an older DOS game doesn’t work, you can always use something like eXoDOS on a modern computer.

    One additional cool thing you could consider down the road is something to really take your midi experience to the next level like an SC-55 MK II.

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      I remember buying C&C Red Alert many years ago, and being completely unable to play it due to CPU speed. Moving the mouse to the edge of the screen would instantly zip to the edges of the game world.

    • Nik282000@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      It’s been literally 20 years, but I seem to remember having more issues with XP than ME as far as Dos compatibility. I have already run into some audio troubles so a dedicated card might be the next step.

      • parricc@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        Yeah, XP would definitely have more issues. 98SE probably would have the best all around compatibility. But there are some Win95 games that only run on Windows 95. The computer you’ve got is really nice for the 1994 - 2001 era, though. What you could do is get a pullout tray, and have different drives with different loads, and switch them out as needed. Ultimately, if the games you want to play work, that’s what matters.

      • bitwaba@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        Yeah, I used to run win 2000 on my desktop and had some games that I couldn’t play from the win95 era. So I resized my mom’s old windows XP machine and pulled a 2 gig partition out then installed win98 on that. I used the windows disk manager to mark the partition I wanted to boot from as active, so it was completely transparent to my mom when she would need to use the computer, including booting.

        If I were going to do a system like this again today, id probably do something similar. An MBR formatted hard drive can have 4 primary partitions. FAT16 had a max partition size of 2gb, but fat32 was introduced in win98 so you could go with whatever partition size you wanted there.

        So you could have a 95, 98, ME, and XP installation all on one drive and just switch between them using the drive manager to change the active bootable partition then rebooting.

    • xyzzy@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      Up voted for recommending real Roland hardware. I have an MT-32, CM-32L, and SC-55mkII to cover all my compatibility bases.

      • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        I would also suggest the modern emulated alternatives if you struggle to get hold of the original hardware

        MT32-pi: https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi (covers the MT-32 & CM-32, can also do some general midi with sound fonts, so in theory you could emulate a soundcanvas too)

        Then there’s the sound cards too

        PicoGUS: https://github.com/polpo/picogus/ (emulates a Gravis Ultrasound, SB2, AdLib, Tandy & also the MPU401 if you do end up with real midi hardware)

        Also gonna just drop the goldlib too: https://pcmidi.eu/goldlib.html but that one might be a bit separate from what OP is currently doing

  • iAvicenna@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    512MB RAM? Go wild cowboy. As for games:

    • Arcanum
    • Planescape Torment

    if no one mentioned them.

    • Psythik@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      Yeah seriously that’s an ungodly amount of RAM for a PC of this vintage. My old WinMe machine had 128MB.

      (And an 800Mhz PIII. I later added a GeForce 4 MX 4000 so I could actually play games at more than 15-20 FPS. It was my first graphics card purchase ever. Also upgraded to XP cause Me would BSoD so often that I never got a chance to do a proper shutdown at the end of the day. When the machine crashed, I was done for the day.)

      • blusterydayve26@midwest.socialEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        I remember going from 128 -> 192 MB in order to upgrade from ME to XP so I could learn programming with Visual C# 1.0. It was completely doable, assuming you manually disabled almost all the background services.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    See if you can play some Phantasy Star Blue Burst on that. Also gotta try the original Marathon, you can look up and down!

  • Tylerdurdon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    Oh the nostalgia from seeing those icons. You should join the Microsoft Network! Crack open ICQ! Get on AOL and see if “you’ve got mail.” Heck, I may still have one of those CDs with 2500 hours on it!

  • Yuri addict@ani.socialEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    i remember my dad used to have a samsung syncmaster CRT would probably preferred it over my more modern but crappier TN display

    • Nik282000@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      As long as it wasn’t stuck at 60Hz, CRTs had the better picture up until at least 2010. I get why they went out of favour but if someone made an 80lb, 16:9 4K CRT I would buy it.

      • Yuri addict@ani.socialEnglish
        0·
        21 days ago

        i would still prefered that samsung crt over the TN 1366x768 display panel im using on my desktop cause the colors are just so dogcrap