Building a retro windows 98 Gaming PC

[comda]

Greetings CH users!

Some of you folks may remember that for a while now, I've wanted to build something older that suitable for older games. I've got about 3 builds going, and have mixed results on all three of them. I get not everything is plug and play, (more like Plug and pray here) so ill be tackling one issue at a time.

Current machine im dealing with has a SpaceWalker AV11 mainboard. AGP/PCI/ISA. Along with this is a 600Mhz Celeron socket 370 CPU, a Chaintech Branded Nvidia 4200 Ti (128mb) Graphics card, 512mb of ram, and a nice AWE32 Soundblaster card.

After getting the board posting and having windows 98 SE installed, i ran into some bad ram and it kept Blue screening. So i gave it some better ram, memtested it and reinstalled windows just to ensure everything is proper. Sound and video works, and everything appears to be good. However my current issue, is the PCI slots. If i put ANYTHING into PCI the machine will boot, show the windows 98 boot screen show the black screen right before login and then restart.

Being that ive set up the hard drive (80gb seagate) for 20gb windows 98 SE, i will try to install XP on here via the second partition and see if this also happens in XP. But in the meantime, is there perhaps a BIOS setting i have incorrect?

I want to add a USB PCI card. Just to be cleare, i did have it booting the PCI card before but i pulled it apart (dont remember why) and now no matter what, it wont boot in. Not with my USB 2.0 card, or the 10/100 based ethernet card i have.

lastly on my current issues, is i have 2 copies of GTA 2. One is the modern redistributed copy that rockstar gave away free for some years, and another that appears to be the original on a EXPLOSIVE disk. I have a copy of the modern one running on a IBM THINKPAD A20M and that runs fine (the laptop is still on its factory install) but ANYTIME i install the game myself, i have issues. be it the games laggy, or refuses to open, or in this case, the game opens and plays intro video, but pressing ANYTHING kills the application. AM i missing some crucial software, and or updates in Windows that could be causing issues. With the specs above, im MORE then good enough for this game.

Im sure i'll run into other issues, but for now this is what im faced with. Any help is accepted. Thanks guys.

[Ajfer03]

For the PCI issue, I personally would back up all important data on the comuter, gather all driver info needed for redownload, and just do a clean reinstall of windows 98 with your cards installed. Once that is done, you could put all of your games and whatever else back onto the computer as you like.

As for your game, you could try using snappy driver installer to try and get any drivers that you missed. It works very well for me, because I use the offline version and anytime I setup a new computer, I just plug it in and let it do it's work.

Hope this helps somehow.
Anthony

[comda]

Hi Ajfer03,

The install was a clean one. Barely a day old and from an OEM Windows 98 SE disk. No pirated OS's here. The computer just acted weird in general, as the day i got that working, it managed to kill an ODD drive, and then the other day a second one failed with it.

As for the drivers, everything was there except for my GPU and AWE32 card, which i got offline easy. I'll be trying another fresh install later on with perhaps a smaller hard drive as i was using an 80GB divided up into partitions.

For the *censored* of it, i dug out more stuff and put together a different PC of the same era and have different results. Will keep the post updated tho.

Thanks.