Who uses real hardware?
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Just wondering who else here has an old machine(s) they like to play their DOS games on?
I’m maybe a little too much into old hardware hehe, and currently have 5 set up (with another one waiting for some parts). Here’s a small taster. I’ll send more pics soon 🙂
On the left we have “Mopoke” – an Atari PC3 8088 I rescued from an eWaste bin. On the right is “Shallow Blue”, a Pentium I 166 – that one gets a lot of use for this club.
As fantastic as DOSBox is, I’m certainly all for real hardware. I’m loving the Atari branded PC. This is my main PC setup:-
Modern PC on the right, my old XP era machine on the far left, and in the middle under the desk, a metric ton of cables normally hidden by the chair + a Dell Dimension 486SX 33 + a PII 400. The PII has basically 2 sets of sound and video cards in it and a DOS/Win 98 dual boot which I can pick and choose between depending what I’m running. The Dell was something of a barn find – it was absolutely revolting when I got hold of it, including petrified chewing gum stuck in the expansion slots. Miraculously everything still worked when cleaned up.
It doesn’t get all that much use but I’ve got an old Mac set up on the left. They can be quite good fun with DOS/early Windows era gaming – e.g. playing Dark Forces in 640×480. I got the big Apple Studio monitor with the primary intention of DOS gaming but Apple being Apple, it doesn’t have all the usual controls and is set up slightly differently. It works OK most of the time but the brightness isn’t what it should be using it as a PC monitor and some DOS games you simply can’t see what you are doing. I’m loathe to get rid of it so I’ve ended up with 2 CRT’s in here and vertical stacking with my main PC monitors to fit everything in. I’ve a KVM switch to connect the two DOS machines to the other monitor.
Never been aware of any degradation with Sound Blasters myself. My ears have probably degraded more than they have so maybe I just don’t notice. I still have my original Sound Blaster 1.5 card from about 1991 working in another PC on the top floor. For these PC’s down here, I feed all the various audio outs through a little board I got off Ebay that combines 6 signals into one, then into my line in on the modern PC so that the audio comes out in one place whichever machine I’m on. There’s a Roland CM-64 + SC155 for MIDI games at the front left that feed into that as well.
If I fiddle around with caching settings in the BIOS, these two machines cover near enough everything put out during the 90s. I’ve got a few older machines upstairs for EGA and earlier. I’ll grab a picture of them next time I’m up there.
Nice setup pix! Cable salads tend to be unavoidable don’t they? Looking forward to seeing some of your other gear.
Here’s a bit more of my stuff:
Picture 1, living on top of each other you see “The Beige Baron”, a Pentium II 333mhz, and the same Pentium I from the last photo. Under the blue cover on the left is the Atari computer.
Picture 2 shows a (still unnamed) Compaq Deskpro 486. I’m still on the lookout for a matching monitor. Covered up is my pride and joy – a 386DX 33 called “Chip”. I’ve recently ordered a new case for it, so when that arrives I’ll post a photo of that too. (Sorry about the cat litter. I only just realised it was in the photo!)
I’m lucky I have the space for all this stuff, but as you can see I still need to get creative with how I set them up!
Space is definitely an issue with this hobby. When I moved house a few years back, I got somewhere literally twice the size I would otherwise have needed purely to accomodate all this stuff. The house was strangely underpriced (for reasons that still aren’t clear to me), so it barely cost any more. A big loft room for all my old systems was a must have which is where all the older DOS machines are. It’s a lot more than just PC’s in there but I’ll spare you the rest. These are all the computers running DOS:-
The monitors in here don’t neccessarily match up with the PC under them for space reasons. So the system on the right of the desk is an Amstrad PC1640 which was a common budget PC over here. It’s an 8Mhz EGA machine which is slightly too slow for most EGA games I find, so the PC driving the monitor is actually the 16Mhz 286 on the floor. That’s got my old Soundblaster and an MT32 set up.
I wanted a composite CGA setup so I fitted the Amstrad itself with a CGA card which is driving the Apple monitor on the far left that’s sat on the IIGS. The PSU driving that PC is actually built into the EGA monitor so I have to have that switched on if I’m using that setup. The IIGS under the composite monitor is connected with a SCART cable I knocked together into a TV in the corner.
The little grey machine is a Japanese FM-Towns 486SX25. They usually run Towns-OS but you can run DOS on these machines so it sort of counts as a DOS setup. It’s more or less a PC under the hood but with some bells and whistles bolted on to do things like sprite manipulation. It was one of the first machines to have a CD-ROM drive (back in 89 if you can believe it) and loads of DOS games got unique enhanced releases.
Left of that is a Tandy TX 1000 with an IBM CGA monitor. I love these old Tandy machines for the extra speaker channels and the 16 colour graphics mode. That’s probably the one I’d keep if I had to choose from all of these.
And as promised, here it is. “Chip”, my 386 DX-33 (on the left)
I mentioned earlier that it’s my pride and joy. That’s because I built it as a tribute to the computer I had as a kid. It’s the same (or as close as possible) as the original in all the important ways, but upgraded in all the ways I wished it had been back in the day.
The only original component is the keyboard (that’s why it’s so yellow!)
Specs:
* 386DX-33
* 8MB Ram
* 120MB HDD
* Maths Co-Processor (I don’t need it, but it always bothered my that the POST screen said I didn’t have one!)
* Tseng Labs 1MB graphics card
* Creative Sound Blaster 2.0
* MS-DOS 5.0 & Windows 3.0I’ve recently been piecing together the original DOS machine, an IBM 5150 which has been proving to be quite the undertaking to get fully set up and running. Nearly there now. I just got hold of the keyboard to complete the hardware set. I’ve still not got the floppy drives sorted out but have an CF hard disk installed so they aren’t strictly needed.
Provided you temper your expectations, some of the earliest DOS games are really quite good fun. I’d love to see a month covering some of the oldest titles like Round 42 here.
Nice collection everyone!
I’ve been into collecting laptops (mainly due to space!)
I have 5 or so identical laptops from 2006 which I’ve setup as dosbox gaming machines so several people can play games at once, so they are portable, feel semi time appropriate and have a 4:3 screen so the games look right. I’ve been showing my kids many old dos games with them every school holidays and they love it!
I’ll have to get the older laptops out of the shed and fire them up 😀
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