Heya all,

I've finally decided to have a proper, dedicated machine just purely for old retro games. My uncle is giving me a machine later today so I will edit to let you know the specs,..

I was wondering what is the most suitable hardware in a pure old skool dos/win machine. Eg. RAM/CPU/Video card and even software.

Let me know what you think!

Depends on how old-school you really mean. For those REALLY old DOS games a 486 running at say 33 MHz will do just fine, and maybe 16 or 32 MB RAM. Video card's more or less irrelevant, anything will work.

For those "really oldschool" ones, using Mo'slo works just fine, been there & done that with half dozen of them.

What is recommended...
486 DX4/100
24 MB RAM (NOT 32 - IMPORTANT)
2 separate HDD's, preferably installed 2 HDD racks in a MIDI size case (with 3x5,25" bays) - this makes you able to use two operating systems on your machine without having to deal with dual boot. Like, DOS 7.1 and Windows 95. Windoze is very convenient for archivization, file management and the like. Not to mention there are a good few oldschool Windows games that you might want to play.
CD-R/RW drive - you can record CD's from any Windows version, and IIRC there are also burning programs for DOS too... that makes mass transfer of data far more efficient then using floppies.
1 to 4 MB graphics card, PCI naturally (8 would be better, but AFAIK most of these will have problems with 486-class machines; 1 MB is just enough for DOS games, Windows ones would benefit from a better one)
Sound Blaster compatibile soundcard (most of them are compatibile with that... though I advise against SB16 compatibility, it just doesn't sound right)
DOS 7.1 (or Freedos, any will do; both are better then DOS 6.x with LFN and FAT-32 support) & Windows 95 B or C (also known as OSR 2.x - 95A does not have FAT-32 support so it is NOT reccomended)

Why?

However, that should be a good configuration!

Some games have problems recognizing 32 MB or more of RAM and fail to run in such an enviroment.

Had that with Space Hulk, and there might be other titles with the same problem.

PS. Side note - the RAM must be EDO. This type of RAM is easily identifiable by fewer - but larger - chips on its PCB. It is faster then normal SIMM memory.

Hi guys I am back well I will not be as active as I used to but I will say what I think.
The fithhourseman is correct on these specs from what I reckomend. I would also say for video car I would use a 1-2mb one.

Ah great help guys. When you ask "how old skool".. the latest game I'll probably be putting on is Albion (graphics wise).

OpenG.E.M. is a really good file manager for dos. I use it for my dos computer. Its fast on old hardware and ITS FREE NOW.


OpenG.E.M. Homepage

Yeah that is a good one.

I've decided to put on FreeDos and use it with OpenGEM or Gaze (I had Gaze on my first system and finally found a download to it!)

I'll let you know how I go after I finish today :)