Building the Ultimate Windows 98 Gaming PC

Building the Ultimate Windows 98 Gaming PC

My first experience playing video games was on a Windows 98 PC, playing games including Star Wars: Dark Forces, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, and Doom. I want to relive that experience through building my ultimate Windows 98 gaming PC.

Let it be known that I am not going for a period accurate build. I am instead using the most powerful components I could find that still support Windows 98.

The Hardware

Motherboard
Intel D915GVWB Socket LGA 775

I chose this motherboard because, obviously, it has Windows 98 drivers, and it has a lot of options for both internal and external expansion.

Internally, it has four SATA 2 connectors, IDE and floppy controllers, two PCI slots, and one PCI-Express slot. While Windows 98 doesn’t support PCI-Express, it could come in handy in the future.

Externally, it has four USB 2.0 ports, PS/2 ports, and serial and parallel ports. This provides a lot of options for connecting period hardware with all the convenience of USB 2.0.

The motherboard also has onboard Ethernet with Windows 98 drivers, so I won’t be needing a network card.

CPU
Pentium 4 630 3.0GHz 2MB L2 Cache

This is extreme overkill for a Windows 98 PC seeing as the 1GHz barrier was just broken at the end of Windows 98’s life. Some would argue that this breaks compatibility with speed sensitive DOS games, but most high-end, period correct Windows 98 builds I see use Pentium 3, which is beyond speed sensitive DOS games anyway.

RAM
512MB 400MHz DDR1 RAM

512MB is the maximum amount of RAM that Windows 98 natively supports.

Graphics Card
EVGA GeForce 6200 512MB

This may not be the most powerful graphics card that supports Windows 98, but it is the most powerful PCI graphics card with Windows 98 drivers I could find. Having a motherboard with an AGP slot would open up a few more options.

This card will blast through any of the games of the period at the native resolution of my monitor.

Sound Card
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 SB0100

I choose this card because it’s a quality sound card with a game port and Sound Blaster 16 emulation for DOS games.

Storage
128GB SSD

128GB is the maximum hard drive space that Windows 98 natively supports, and the SSD will be so fast that the SATA connection will likely bottleneck it.

Media Drives
DVD Burner, 5.25″ Floppy Drive, and 3.25″ Floppy Drive

The DVD burner (which will obviously also read and write CDs) and the floppy drives should cover most of the media from DOS through Windows 98. The only exception is that the 5.25″ floppy drive is not high density.

Monitor
ViewSonic VA912b

This LCD monitor has a 1280×1024 display running at 75Hz.

The Software

BIOS

The first thing I did was set SATA into legacy mode so the DVD drive and SSD work with Windows 98. I then disabled onboard sound and the serial and parallel ports to free up resources.

The system was super unstable with the USB controller locking up and blue screens of death around every corner until I updated the BIOS.

Drivers

The drivers were a bit of a mess.

The graphics drivers worked after installing NVIDIA ForceWare 77.72, ForceWare 81.98, and then 77.72 again. After installing 77.72, Direct X would not initialize. Installing 81.98 fixed that, but then I got errors on shutdown. After installing 77.72 again everything worked fine.

I have the original driver discs with my sound card. They install fine until it gets to the Sound Blaster 16 emulation and it blue screens. Upon reboot, the sound works except Sound Blaster 16 emulation is disabled due to the crash, but hardware manager shows no hardware conflicts. When I try to initialize the drivers in MS-DOS mode I get the following error:

Could not allocate code/patch RAM below 4 Mbyte boundary. Try loading SBEINIT.COM before SMARTDRV.EXE or minimizing VDISK RAM.
Creative SB16 Emulation Driver NOT loading.

The network driver for the motherboard installed and ran fine.

Additional Software

I also installed the Windows 98 Unofficial Service Pack, Direct X 9c (included with the Unofficial Service Pack), KernelEx, and Internet Explorer 6 to get it as up to date as possible.

Conclusion

What I Love

The CPU and RAM absolutely blasts through anything that will run on Windows 98 and the solid state drive only works to make the system even more snappy and responsive. The graphics card also plows through everything I have thrown at it.

The 128GB of storage is amazing for the time. I installed tons of games and applications have hardly put a dent in it. I had to organize my games by genre in the start menu to keep track of them all.

What Needs Work

The Sound Blast 16 emulation is the biggest bummer for me at this point. I have read that this sound card is particular with how the memory configuration is set up with DOS. I don’t have much experience with this and would appreciate help in fixing this issue. My current DOS configuration is as follows:

CONFIG.SYS
Dos=high,umb
Device=c:\windows\himem.sys /testmem:off
Device=c:\windows\emm386.exe ram

AUTOEXEC.BAT
SET CTSYN=C:\WINDOWS
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\SBLIVE\DOSDRV\SBEINIT.COM

Not only is the 5.25″ floppy drive not high density, I don’t have any 5.25″ floppy disks that aren’t. So I’m not sure if that drive works. It does look cool though.

Lastly, a CRT is really the way to go for a computer like this that would handle such a wide range of resolutions to negate interpolation issues. It would also have the right aspect ratio (4:3 vs my 5:4) for most games of the time. Though, I don’t really have the space for a CRT at the moment.