I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum's basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it's never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.
Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn't want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.
Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn't have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).
So what were your favorite games from the 90's and early 2000s?
1600 x 1200 at 60hz is actually quite respectable today. You can still buy laptops with 1366 x 768 resolution in 2024!! 🤢🤮🤢🤮
I remember having a 1440 x 900 monitor and wondering how far we would go in 10 years....10 years later 1366 x 768 was more common and I wanted to die.
Amazing project btw, you might inspire me to do something similar.
I have a few of those "HD" laptop's rolling around, they are pretty horrendous (and easy to get for free). When LCDs first came out I was kinda disappointed that I was going from ~2k CRTs back to 1024x768. Even now the default is only 1920x1080 which is only 10% larger than the CRT for this PC.
My company just bought 30 new 1080p monitors for my office which can't display our main software completely. Imagine spending thousands of dollars for tech from 20 years ago that still cuts off information for average use. I could rant for hours about resolutions....
Oh man, we have 30+ PCs in the building that are used to control big automated machines, they used to run on XP at 1024x768. When they started to fall apart I offered up the solution of using modern machines running Debian and putting the SCADA software in a virtual machine, this was rejected. They instead went with Lenovo micro-PCs and Windows 10. They then paid a programmer to manually rearrange and scale up every machine page page to fit on a 1920x1080 screen. FML.