Vintage 486 Gaming System

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Scooter_man

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Hello all. Just for nostalgia, and tired of running a DOS Emulator (DosBox), I setup an old 486 last night.

This machine is a 486 DX2 80-mHz in Turbo Mode or 20-mHz with Turbo button off. I put in the motherboard's max of 16-meg of RAM and a 1-meg Diamond Speedstar 64 video card and a Soundblaster 2.0 sound card.

Top this off with a 500-meg HDD, an 8x CD Rom Drive (assigned as Drive D), a 3.5 Floppy Drive (assigned as Drive A), and a 5.25 Floppy Drive (assigned as Drive B).

I installed MS Dos 6.22, DosShell, and Windows 3.11 so I have a fairly flexable choice of how to run it. In it's time it would've been a heck of a system, but now it's just old junk.

Funny, I never remembered Win 3.11 running so fast and smoothly - especially at 800x600 Resolution with 65,xxx colors.

I've just started installing old games (abandonware) and so far no conflilcts and everything seems to be going well.

There have been only a couple of instances in which I had to slow down the machine on certain programs, normally it just flies. Funny, I almost forgot how to manually setup the CD-Rom and Soundcard drivers in the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys - it's been too long. I guess i'm spoiled with auto-config everything on Win XP or Vista.

Sorry, but the DOS Emulators just aren't the same - different look and feel. Silly? Maybe! Fun? Absolutely!

I'll have to snap a couple of pics and put them up here later.
 
Nice... I had a similar machine... DX/33, 8 non turbo.

Those were the days where every upgrade was leaps and bounds better. I kinda miss it. Nowadays it's how many more cores can you add to a CPU.

You just don't feel performance bumps like you used to is all.
 
Rob I envy you... Brings back memories of my AMD DX-4 100 that I had...

You have to put on the old "Curse of Monkey Islands" games and Commander Keen and Duke Nukem both the original and 3D!

Screen shots please of your setup and of it running!
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I will host the pictures if you need!!!!!!
 
Despite my fiancée's grumblings, I have parts in my closet to build a similar system. I'm going to hook up a Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS and TQS, and use them to play the Wing Commander games. Those were the days...
 
Ok, some pics. Front, Front while running, inside rats nest, MS Dos Prompt, DosShell, Win 3.11, Oregon Trail, Doom, King's Quest 1, you get the idea. Sorry, the dark-band scrolling of the screen as seen through the camcorder (cheap junk). It shows up on some resolutions more than others, but what can you do...

Oh yeah, added a Serial Mouse (on Com1) and now good to go.

front.jpg


front_on.jpg


inside.jpg


dosprompt.jpg


dosshell.jpg


win311.jpg


oregontrail.jpg


doom.jpg


kq1.jpg
 
Yeah, the good old times before the Internet.

Why don't you use a separate hard drive on your main machine? that way it will be even faster without additional space.
 
The memories are brining back tears... I remember playing Doom multi-player and having to upgrade my 2400 modem to a 14.4 because it was too slow...

*TEARS*

Thanks for that... BTW: That is the same AT-Case I had for my DX-4 100. I had a Hitachi CD-ROM though...

Can you get that original Oregon Trail for free now? My partner loved that game as a kid and I would love to get a copy for him.

Steve
 
Cool. Its nice to visit memory lane every so often. Don't have to worry about malware on those systems, either.

Now, really impress us by installing OS/2 Warp 3 then run all that stuff under Warp instead :)

Sure, Windows 3.1 would zoom along nicely on a 486-66 or higher system, but remember how often it crashed when you tried to do a few things at once? GPF errors that locked the machine totally...
 
Fantastic! I remember when the 486 was the smokin processor to have.

We've been considering doing the same; as many old games don't play the same on new machines.

I swear, even some very late 90's early 2000's games will run fine under Win7, but are missing some parts of the soundtrack to them.
 
Originally Posted By: Virtuoso
We've been considering doing the same; as many old games don't play the same on new machines.

I swear, even some very late 90's early 2000's games will run fine under Win7, but are missing some parts of the soundtrack to them.


Exactly the problems I was having, only with XP and Vista (on different systems obviously). I got tired of running DosBox DOS emulator - just not the same look/feel/experience.

I just downloaded the entire Commander Keen series and other misc games I used to play years ago - probably will be up all night now...
 
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
Makes me want to fire up my old 8088!!!


Well, maybe not an 8088 - but a 486 is pretty flexible in the era of games you want to run (all 80's up to mid-90's) with relative ease.

One thing about the old 8088's, they're built like tanks and will still run 50-years from now.
 
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
Same case as the OP's.


those cases were very popular, I built one for my parents with a Cyrix 300mhz CPU.

Cyrix...geez, whatever happened to their CPU-making efforts?
 
That's a really cool machine. Probably some of the best specs for a 486 machine that I've ever seen. Where did you get the parts from? I had an idea to do something similar not long ago, but I didn't do it because I couldn't find the parts.
 
Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
Cyrix...geez, whatever happened to their CPU-making efforts?

Last I remember, they were trying to name their processors based not on their own clock speed, but on the clock speed whatever Intel CPU they thought was equivalent based on integer operation performance; e.g., a Cyrix M2 333 was a 250 MHz CPU that was supposed to be equivalent to a Pentium II @ 333 MHz. Since their floating point performance absolutely stank, and partly also for other reasons, their processors got clobbered in any comparison that involved any kind of multimedia or gaming. That was pretty much the end.

Soon after that, VIA bought them up and they just kind of faded into obscurity.
 
Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
That's a really cool machine. Probably some of the best specs for a 486 machine that I've ever seen. Where did you get the parts from? I had an idea to do something similar not long ago, but I didn't do it because I couldn't find the parts.


I have a couple of Ham Radio buddies that are pack-rats. A couple (2 or 3) of old computers given to me from them and a $3.00 computer I bought from the local flea-market and there I was. I took the best parts from each (and working floppy-drives) and built it. I guess I was lucky in finding what I did, but for the investment I won't complain. I was quuite supprised that the one (in the case that I used) was a 486 DX2-80, added RAM/Soundcard/Video card/Drives from the others and it fired right up.

Now i'll get into it more when it cools off, maybe add another hard drive, put more games on it, etc.
 
The 486DX2-80 I had was a Cyrix as well. It was dual speed 40mhz and 80mhz and it ran Doom and Doom2 and Duke Nukem 3D quite well. I wish I could put those old games on my current system!
 
Originally Posted By: xxch4osxx
The 486DX2-80 I had was a Cyrix as well. It was dual speed 40mhz and 80mhz and it ran Doom and Doom2 and Duke Nukem 3D quite well. I wish I could put those old games on my current system!


You can boot to a freedos cd, and play all the old games on a newer pc.
 
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