homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Air Combat - General Buying a retro gaming PC

There is a big market on eBay offering retro Windows 98 for sale. Some of those appear to be built at home by a cottage industry. I'd like to buy a retro PC to play my favorite combat flight sims from the 1990s, but which? The new retro PCs have different hardware compared to what we had 25 years ago and it's a little confusing.

Just look up any Falcon Northwest PC ad in that era (do you want '98? '99? 2001?), and spec as close as you can.

Generally I would stick around these specs:

500Mhz Pentium III Intel CPU or higher
Voodoo 3 3000 AGP video card (16mb)
128mb-256mb of PC100/PC133 SDRAM
20GB-40GB PATA 7200rpm hard drive
Sound Blaster AWE64 or Live! sound card
8x DVD-ROM drive
300W-ish power supply
Windows 98SE

Just install Win98 on a virtual machine on a modern computer, why bother with a very old PC?
Free and easy to use:
https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player.html

Have people tested it with old games with consistently good results?

Not sure what you mean. This is an actual OS installation, from an actual installation kit from Micro$oft or whatever, in this particular case Windows 98 runs exactly as it would run on a physical machine but without the issues derived from using a decades old computer. If that's what you're asking, yes, any software that runs on Win 98 on a physical PC will run on a virtual machine. Le me reiterate, this is an actual Windows 98 installation if you use the actual M$ installation kit, in whatever format you have available, be that an old bootable CD or a .iso disk image on your harddrive or whatever.

[size:11pt]Gotta say I'm a bit confused regarding how virtual installs of old OS will function on a modern PC.

For example, my current system is a Scorptec Precision GTX 1650 Gaming PC, Intel Core i5 12400F 6 Core, Intel H610 Chipset, GeForce GTX 1650 4GB, 16GB 3200MHz RAM, 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD, SilverStone Precision PS15 RGB Case, 550W PSU, WiFi, Win 11 Home.

I have kept my old Win 98 and XP disc's. If I do a virtual install of, say, my Win98 on my current system (to play RB3D, EAW or MiG Alley), will they play well with the above GeForce card? Wouldn't the drivers be incompatible with the old sims? And where can I find updates to Win 98 or XP? Eg Service Pack 1 for example?[/size]

Your virtual OS runs inside your "actual" OS. I don't think Win98 even knows about multi core CPUs. But if you ran WinXP for instance you can allocate the numbers of CPU cores it can use. For Win98 you would allocate the maximum RAM it can use, the maximum space it can use (which is not on a real folder on your HDD... it's inside the virtual machine image files. So your virtual Win98 doesn't need drivers for your GTX 4080 or whatevers, there are no such drivers anyway, it uses whatever resources you allocate for video ram / video processing which will be massively bigger than what you had available at that time.

https://www.ibm.com/topics/virtual-machines
I'm sure you can find better guides, just do a search.

LE:

The same way you would do it on an actual computer. I doubt you can, Micro$oft doesn't support decades old operating systems. Just get a kit with the last Win98 and you're golden.

Cheers Korn.

I haven't looked but I would love to have an older setup but I would hate having to deal with all the DXDIAG issues and configs, etc...