Question Building the ultimate retro pc to run ms-dos 6.22 to windows Xp (Help)

[thatpcgamer1903]

Hello, I’m looking for hr ultimate or aka golden build of hardware that can run dos 6.22 through windows Xp. What hardware would you recommend? I know there is a patch out that allows windows 98/95 to run 2gb of ddr ram, but that is the max limit I’m wanting my motherboard to support . This machine isn’t planning on going to the internet but will occasionally connect to the internet to my ftp file server from my windows 7 machine. Also I’m looking for at least at a minimum a pentium 4 single core system, I will be using compact flash cards for my storage drive so I can just easily swap them in and out with out having to do hard drive swaps. And I don’t feel like buying a bunch of old hdd’s. I do have plenty of cd/dvd rw rom drives in my storage so I’m not worried about that, what kind of power supply should I be going with? I’m looking for something relatively new like early 2000’s new. Where it has a bunch of pci cards and 1 agp slot, “NO PCIE”

Also what should I be looking for a pc case? I want it to have at a minimum 3 5 in a quarter” bays 2 for the dvd drives and 1 for the compact flash cards.

 

[Eximo]

Tough question. Really depends on what you have to spend and parts availability/compatibility.

You are over thinking needing a compact flash to IDE conversion. That is for much older machines.

Plenty of early 2000s machines that had SATA and you can just used a modern SSD with a FAT32 format. Just force IDE mode in the BIOS and DOS and Windows won't know the difference.

PCI and AGP + 1.5 Gbps SATA should be right around that Pentium 4 / early Athlon XP era.

You want a PSU that has somewhat large 5V and 3.3V rails, but other than that you would just use the ATX and EPS and molex/floppy connectors as needed. You can even get a modular supply and get extra cables if you need them. All of my AGP cards of the time required a 4-pin molex. Also some sound cards that needed a floppy connector or even a Molex for the older big units.

This might work okay. 4 accessory power connectors, and a good 100W on the 5V and 60W on the 3.3 volt.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/xf...ied-fully-modular-atx-power-supply-mag-a650gl

I would go to some second hand stores to look for chassis, and even potentially parts. Pawn shops are another good source. Sometimes people abandon machines there.

As for new chassis, just look for ones with 5 1/4 bays, they tend to support the older form factors. You could even look for 3.5" drive bays. Old Cooler Master E-Lite / Supercase style chassis are still manufactured as far as I know, just modern facelifts.

 

[TerryLaze]

Hello, I’m looking for hr ultimate or aka golden build of hardware that can run dos 6.22 through windows Xp.

It's not even possible at all if you want a good experience with all oseseses.
To run XP well enough to run XP era games you need a much more powerful PC, a single core CPU is going to struggle big time, especially if you go above service pack 2.
And if you go for a bigger CPU then the older OSes will have a lot of issues with the newer hardware.

You need one system for dos up to win98 and one for XP.

You are over thinking needing a compact flash to IDE conversion. That is for much older machines.

It's just super convenient because you can just swap them and have a new system let alone just stick them into a card reader and manipulate them on your modern system.

 

[Eximo]

I suppose, but swapping SATA SSDs isn't too bad, especially if you get one of those front or top loading bays that would make it pretty easy.

My old BitFenix Ghost chassis has an external SATA bay on top, and it has old school 5 1/4" bays and the like in the internals, but was otherwise quite modern. I used to drop in 3.5" hard drives for backup purposes and at the time I worked on a lot of friends and family PCs, so was constantly needing to extract files off of machines. Later replaced it with a USB SATA docking station.

I ran DOS and XP and 7 on my Athlon X2 6000 and that was fantastic for old games. Windows 7 was on a pair of stripped SSDs, and XP and Dos were on a dual boot on a hard drive. Though it did have PCIe, that old 8800GTS still ran most old games fine as long as they were happy with XP, not every game was. I don't think I ever tried Win98 on it.

 

[Eximo]

Big 5 1/4" bay

https://www.newegg.com/icy-dock-mb830sp-b/p/N82E16817994238

Or dual 2.5" drive in a 3.5" bay.

https://www.newegg.com/icy-dock-mb522sp-b-2-x-2-5-drive-to-3-5-bay/p/N82E16817198067

 

[TerryLaze]

I don't think I ever tried Win98 on it.

Yeah that's the big problem, anything that can run XP games well will also run vista and 7 pretty well but win9x will have issues with the hardware.

Dos runs on anything even a modern system the only issue is having sound, and sbemu fixes that for some chipsets, it's ok for general gaming but I guess for a purist it might be somewhat questionable to do that.
https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU/releases

 

[Eximo]

It was an M2N SLI Deluxe, so it still had a few PCI slots. I had a Sound Blaster Live in there with the SB16 emulator, so my dos games still worked with decent sound.

 

[NedSmelly]

I agree with the idea of two different systems for DOS and XP gaming.

For DOS, I’d build around supporting Quake and Wing Commander 3, and real mode Sound Blaster. So Pentium 1 and an SB16. maybe a 3dfx Voodoo.

For XP, I’d build around Battle For Middle Earth - so probably a Core 2 Duo or Quad with 8000-series Nvidia GPU. A bit more flexibility is possible, as some Nehalem and Sandy Bridge platforms have legacy XP support. I used to play BFME on a Pentium 4, and it wasn’t sufficient for the major battle levels.