Creating a vintage PC involves selecting older hardware and software options.
Creating a vintage PC involves selecting older hardware and software options.
Use the installation media or ISO file on a USB stick, connect it to the machine, and start from there. If the system is very recent, drivers may not support it, making a virtual machine the most reliable option. Have you checked compatibility settings or a Windows 98 emulator?
running win9x games in compatibility mode fails more often than not and there is no such thing as a "win 98 VM" for gaming either - never seen it working. ever. this exactly matches my experience stay below 1 GHz CPU speed - more will cause trouble with some games stay below 1 GB RAM size - windows 98 can't even use that much and more will cause trouble watch the size of your HDD - windows 98 has no native support for NTFS and the size cap for a FAT 32 partition is somewhere around 120 GB AFAIK - given how "small" all the games and applications are by todays standards, you probably won't need terabytes of HDD space anyways don't know about your radeon 3450 but you will probably not find win 98 drivers for any graphics cards newer then the geforce 6000 series (if you are using a pentium 3 or first gen. pentium 4 you probably won't have PCI-express on your mainboard and be stuck with AGP graphics cards anyways) and while you're at it, get a sound card (SB16 or AWE32 compatible) and a 3dfx voodoo card for maximum compatibility with 90's games
I received a sound card from the XP time in my computer, a Sony SB Live! 24-bit.
that was a solid card, and for some reason the only one I had that was fully EAX compatible was the best. Many games wouldn’t let me use EAX with cards outside Creative’s line that claimed EAX support. For a 90s retro PC, the SB Live isn’t ideal since that chip lacks DOS compatibility. It doesn’t seem there’s a universal fix for early 90s games—DOS support and specific graphics were essential to unlock their full power. By the late 90s and early 2000s, different hardware became necessary: a Pentium 2 or 3 (or AMD K6) clocked under 500 MHz, a SB 16/32 plus a 3DFX card would work well for running DOS games and playing most titles to their best. Some of the games I played on that setup still didn’t run perfectly on newer systems—Tomb Raider needed a 3DFX card and DOS sound, WipeOut 2097 ran too fast, Resident Evil required a 3DFX card and had performance issues, later games like Win 95 and XP benefited more from GeForce 3/4 Ti or Radeon 8600 paired with a SB Live and a slower single-core CPU (yes, some games struggled on dual cores). Scarface had trouble with multithreaded CPUs and modern GPUs, Outcast needed a 2 GHz CPU and SB Live for EAX, Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance suffered from poor PC ports and fog bugs with newer hardware, and XP games generally did better with a GeForce 3/4 Ti or Radeon 8600 and a SB Live alongside a slower single-core processor.
I owe it to the experience of running into these issues myself. I bought my first PC in 2000—it was outdated and far behind, and I often had to stick to cheaper options. I used games from the bargain bin because the Steam holiday sale hadn’t existed yet. That machine gave me enough material to write a book about it, but eventually I upgraded it later. Unfortunately, many of my old games wouldn’t run on the new hardware due to missing soundblaster support, too fast a CPU, or similar compatibility problems.