Choosing the hardware [Retro-PC series]

Scott Schiller via Flickr

When building a Retro-PC to run old games or ancient operating systems, you might want to use hardware that was available back in time. You can also try — and partially succeed — to run old software on a modern PC. The third option is to run that legacy software on an emulator or virtual machines. Let’s quickly compare these options.

Old hardware + old software:

• Software runs accurately, just like it was meant to be
• Peripherals of the time can be used
• Getting parts can be challenging and not that cheap (the older = the more expensive)
• Old PCs tend to be big, ugly and noisy
• Media you have (diskettes and CD-ROMs) might no longer work
• The most authentic choice

New hardware + old software:

• It’s not that hard to get MS-DOS or any Windows version running on a modern PC.
• CPUs are surprisingly backward compatible.
  • In general, even the oldest x86 software executes.
• Graphics (VGA and SVGA) on MS-DOS games usually work well.
• Accelerated graphics on Windows requires drivers.
  • You probably need to get an older card if you wish to run anything older than Windows XP.
• Getting sound on MS-DOS is hard (without ISA)
  • Getting sound with motherboards released in recent years might be impossible!
  • For PCI sound cards, your motherboard needs to support one of the legacy technologies such as SB-Link, NMI or DDMA (so anything released within last ten years is unlikely to work).
• “Well written” games do not get confused with the speed of your PC.
  • But many games either suffer from small artifacts — or are simply unplayable.
  • There are utils to fix speed issues, but they tend to work only if you CPU is just “a little” too fast.
• The most difficult choice.

Emulator/virtual machine + old software:

• You can easily download thousands of game images from nets, and start playing.
• Mounting game images (emulating disks or CD-ROMs) is sometimes cumbersome.
• Some MS-DOS games might not work under emulators (the most popular ones usually do).
• Setting up a virtual machine is more time consuming than an emulator, as you need to install an operating system, and possibly tweak hardware settings to make things work.
• Your host OS for an emulator could be the latest Windows, a modern Linux distro or Macintosh running OSX.
• MS-DOS games require emulator/virtual machine, whereas old Windows (e.g. games written for Windows 98) games might run on a modern Windows without emulation
• Perhaps the least “authentic”, but certainly the easiest choice.

My Retro-PC falls somewhere between “new hardware” vs. “old hardware” as it is “modern” compared to the software it runs but is entirely legacy compared to anything that you can buy 2014. I did not actually “choose” my hardware, as I already had a cute little IBM ThinkCentre (from 2004) at hand. I like the design and aesthetics of this small factor PC, but I cannot recommend it for a Retro-PC project — it only has two slow PCI Express x 1 slots, and just one VGA output. In practice, some of the later Windows games in my collection do not perform particularly well on this machine. On the other hand, this model still has adequate support for Windows 98, so I can easily do networking and accelerated 3D graphics on Windows 98 with the accessory soldered on the motherboard.

There’s a nice forum called VOGONS to discuss and troubleshoot many issues on getting the old software running on new hardware. I also might write more about what I learned about hardware, and especially getting sound in MS-DOS, in one of the following posts.

In a meanwhile, lets talk about the first things that sit on top of the hardware — a file system (FAT) and operating systems (MS-DOS and Windows).