I posted to Mastodon back in December about playing the original Half-Life for the first real time on PS2. Finally experiencing one of the greatest FPS games of all time was a revelation. So much so that I went out and installed it on my “gaming” PC right away. I needed to play it again the way God intended. With a keyboard and mouse. I wanted more Half-Life and wanted to play the expansions now. I barely knew of their existence prior to this. I could just get them on Steam, I think they are like $5 a piece. But if you’ve read my work before, you know it’s never that simple…
My “gaming” PC isn’t a spring chicken. I never replaced my old PC after losing it to a lightning strike in 2018. Just a few months ago I dug an HP Z440 workstation from 2011 out of the corporate bone pile and installed my buddy’s old mining GPU I bought for $60 so that we could play some more modern games together.
My console collection. From NES to PS5, I’m sorely missing some SEGA consoles.
I’ve always prefered the video games from the era of my childhood in the 90s and early 00s. I never was inspired to upgrade past the PS3 generation. Until my son got into the Switch and then later, the PS5, I was content never upgrading. During the pandemic, this preference (and a couple stimulus checks) led to me becoming a full on collector. My console collection grew but playing Half-Life awakened something that was latently waiting inside of me. For a while I have had a cache of old PC software that I had given up on playing again. The hassle of trying to install them on modern windows had dissuaded me. The memories of watching my uncle play Half-Life on his Packard-Bell had been stirred up inside of me. Maybe it wasn’t such a hassle after all…
Enter Stage Left: The Beige Beauty
I started browsing big box software on eBay just to see how much the other games that were refreshed within my memory sold for. On a whim, I looked up CRT monitors. I was floored how much they were going for. $150+ for monitors that started at 15" and most were beat to hell, weighed excessively, and looked like they were used by someone who smoked 5 packs a day. Then I found it. The “Beige Beauty” was calling out to me. She was a Compaq S710. She was in flawless condition. Cream colored, not yellowed. As if in a trance, all I could do is watch as my cursor found the “Buy Now” button. A second or two it hovered over, her allure was seducing. Maybe it was my recent tax refund check taking control, but I clicked the “Buy Now” button and didn’t look back. The seller reached out thanking me for my purchase, and raved on how good the monitor was. With how communicative they were during the shipping process, I wasn’t turning back at this point. I hadn’t really intended on purchasing a 30 pound, 25 year old CRT that morning but now I was all in. I didn’t even know anything about this CRT before purchasing. It’s not exactly a powerhouse of the era. More of the lunch-pail, blue collar, 9-5 variety. The brightness isn’t anything to write home about. Resolution and refresh rates are just good enough: 1280 x 1024 at 60Hz or 1024 x 768 at 85Hz. But the most important spec was price and at $150 it was in budget.
Later I did some research and found that the S710 is nothing special. A typical office work CRT usually bundled with the ProSignia 300 series towers, meant for small business. It being absolutely ordinary meant that information about it online was scarce making the hunt for it in ads like this actually pretty challenging.
I anxiously waited the next few days while I waited for my Beige Beauty to arrive. A half-week that felt like an eternity passed. Double packed and enconsed in an old child’s carseat box for safe shipping, it finally arrived. After cutting away layers on layers of cardboard, it was time to hook up it up to my PC. Surprisingly, Windows 11 works fairly seemlessly with a 4:3 monitor at a lower resolution. The first game I booted up was Half-Life to run the Hazard Course. In that moment its technical limitations didn’t matter. The motion was fluid, the scan lines were crisp, and the experience was delightfully nostaglic.
I was so excited to try the hazard course on my new CRT, I forgot to assemble the stand
You can play classic games on a modern PC but it often comes with caveats. Glitches, performance issues, crashes, etc. After re-experiencing playing a childhood PC game on a period appropriate display, my vision for my collection had expanded. My new quest was to find a retro PC to pair with my Compaq CRT.
ISO: Tall, Beige, and Handsome
The first step was to spec out my build. I wanted something familiar that could deliver the feelings of nostalgia I had for our family computer growing up. Our first computer was a Sony Vaio running Windows 95. That PC served us faithfully for years. Later we would retire her for an Acer Aspire, upgrading to Windows XP around 2003 or so. My goal was maximum compatibility with games from the DOS era up until that early XP era. XP was less preferred for playing DOS games without extra compatibility layers. I also needed to system that could play Call Of Duty as that is my all time favorite PC game and Windows 95 isn’t up to that task either. Windows 98SE was the sweet spot for maximum hardware and software compatibility. It had the most information available on enthusiast forums according to my research as well. I started browsing eBay for Windows 98 PCs. It was going to need to have support for more powerful hardware. A Pentium III would probably be a lot more period authentic but it wouldn’t be able the XP era games with 98 support that I wanted to play such as Call of Duty or Halo.
I was able to find an MPC workstation with an Intel D875PBZ board and a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 and 512MB of RAM. No sound card and just an GeForce MX4000. But it came with an 80GB drive with Windows 98SE and drivers already installed. The board had IDE and SATA built in. Plenty of room for expansion with 5 PCI slots too. At $150 I jumped on it as fast as I could. I needed a keyboard and mouse to match. With advice from Lemmy’s retro computing community, [email protected], I went looking for a Microsoft Intellimouse and an IBM Model M. I was able to find affordable listings for the Intellimouse, an optical mouse. (I may be going for vintage but I’m not going all the way back to rollerball mice) The Model M was anything but affordable. Instead I found a comparable IBM KB8923 Keyboard for a more reasonable $40 rather than the $200 Model M’s in good condition typically go for. I ordered a SoundBlaster SB0090 sound card and then waited eagerly for my latest haul to ship.
My initial eBay score. It was a good price all things considered.
Broke in multiple ways
I focused on ordering an already working system so I could avoid the frustration of needing to fixing up old hardware and playing the Windows Driver lottery. Unfortunately, a push of the power button resulted in a brief moment of the fan spinning up and then nothing. The power supply was dead. I brought the new PC to work for my hardware wiz coworker to look at and see what we could do to jumpstart it back to life. Luckily, we had an old PSU on the work bone pile. A vestige disected from an old, junked PC from long ago. Sadly that luck didn’t last long. Another try powering up the PC resulted in it booting but it gave a the familiar mechanic shriek of a failing hard drive. Hung on a black screen with a single white cursor.
Of course, we had a replacement drive on the bone pile as well. That’s not the point. The seductress I had named “Beige Beauty” sentenced me to 20-year-old-device-and-driver-support hell. I could only hope that my punishment was just for a little while and not eternity. The first trial of my torment was getting an OS on the device. Thankfully Windows 98SE has been archived, with an activation key, on the Internet Archive. So I burnt a CD, popped it into the disk drive, and booted up the Win98 installer. While that installed, I hunted down chipset and sound card drivers. These were not too hard to find at all thanks to the folks at VOGONS.com and PhilsComputerLab.com. I also grabbed some shareware and freeware games from the era and burnt them to disc as well. But then the next hell quickly became apparent: no USB storage support by default in Windows 98. It took several tries to find a working USB driver and each attempt burned another CD-R. Thankfully my workplace had a huge spindle of them. A thin layer of dust settled on them from a decade of non-use. We probably would never use them again otherwise, so I helped myself. Eventually USB was working. Drivers would not be much of a hassle after that.
Windows 98 was up and running without any devices missing drivers. One problem remained though. One whole device was missing! My Soundblaster card! On-board audio was working; I figured that was good enough for right then. Installling and testing games proved that wrong. The on-board audio was just abhorrent. The audio would drop out at higher volumes, audio didn’t play at full speed, and it was all very distorted. Not to mention it was apparent the MX4000 was not going to cut it running any somewhat demanding 3D at a decent resolution. It was not a promising start. Audio issues would have to wait as the 3D performance was more pressing.
The Geforce 6800 GT was one of the fastest cards you could get back in 2004, just behind the 6800 Ultra and the 6800 GT OC
I returned to eBay one last time and ordered the “Holy Grail” of my retro build. A GeForce 6800GT. A beast of a card back in the day, it is basically the most powerful AGP slot graphics card that still had 98 support. I snagged it for just $150. It was much less painless than trying to order one of today’s GPUs. With the 6800 in place, games no longer struggled with frame rates in the single digits. They ran full speed. My GPU problems hopefully solved, the Sound Blaster issues remained the only chad left hanging.
First I tried switching the PCI slot it was plugged into. That helped as much as the device finally showed up in device manger. But when I went to install the SoundBlaster driver, it said it could not detect my SoundBlaster device?! I checked device manager and it reported there was a resource conflict error and that I should reboot. So I did. Now there were no resource conflicts. Also no sound. And no SoundBlaster anywhere to be seen. I tried moving it to yet another PCI slot. The SoundBlaster showed up again. Still no sound. I tried a different driver, this time from VOGONs. It just caused the computer to Blue Screen. BSOD. Reboot. No sound card again. Desperate, I decided to disable every onboard IO port that I could. Sound, Serial, Parallel, the works. Still didn’t work. When I was in the BIOS, disabling the kitchen sink, I noticed there was an option for manually specifying IRQs per PCI slot. After checking Resource Manager for free IRQs, I saw that IRQ 5 was free. I rebooted the computer one last time. I set the SoundBlaster’s PCI slot IRQ to 5 and with bated breath booted Windows.
The So What
Viola! I heard the Windows 98 boot sound in all its glory. Now I could start playing my games for real. Call of Duty: United Offensive ran at the vsync cap. Halo ran with out frame rates drops. Half-Life and its expansions were running absolutely beautifully. I’m really looking forward to installing more games and adding to my vintage PC library. Through this process I definitely remember why upgrading to XP, 7, and even Windows 10 was such a big deal. Win9x is a huge PITA when things go wrong. And things always go wrong with Windows. But with my problems solved for now, I can’t wait to experience playing retro PC games on actual vintage PC hardware, just like I do with my console collection. And even if I do experience a Blue Screen or two, its just an authentic part of the experience. The “Beige Beast” as I’ve come to call it, has made a fine addition to my collection.
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