Old Hardware, old OSes, old games, Returning to 1997 / 1999 games and the hardware we had then Options

[Kiwi]

I was working long hours for short pay in those years, but enjoying myself. It was the only time in my working career that I liked going to work, and doing the job, which was teaching computer subjects in the local community college's CAE program.

I bought many games that I never had time to play back then, and ran into tons of trouble on one I did try to make time for - Icewind Dale. I had two PCs then. The older was a P1 MMX 233, with 128 MBs of RAM and an 8 GB Hdd. I also had a P2/400 machine, with 128 MBs and a 13 GB Hdd. Both had ATI video cards and Creative AWE64 sound blasters. Both connected through a DVM switch to a NEC Multisync display.

IWD played fairly normally on the older PC, although the audio was faulty, and did not run at all smoothly when much of anything happened on screen, so I didn't do more than test it there.

IWD didn't run at all of the P2/400, and the problem appeared to be driver conflicts. I never solved those, and have never again built another PC with an Intel MB in it. I didn't use another Intel CPU for 5-6 years after that, and still haven't used another Intel chipset in a mainline system, nor did I use anoother ATI video card in that 5-6 year period. My income today is fixed, and relatively limited, and if I had any other choice, I would still be working, but there was obvious (unprovable) age discrimination.

I'd discarded the Intel SE440BX motherboard, and my old P1's MB needed repair beyond what it was worth. The oldest anything I had in the saved old parts left from upgrades was an AMD 760 motherboard and Athlon 1.2 GHz processor. But the old stuff is so cheap, the shipping is the biggest expense. It does seem that there is more that can go bad over time than just the capacitors leaking; a lot of the MBs are DOA now.

Once again, I have P2s, one in an Abit BX-6, with the same i440BX chipset, and after three reformats and reinstalls, swapping components freely, I keep getting a very slow setup of Windows98se. In a dual-boot, W2K is always faster with that machine. There is also an Asus P2L97, and Win98 on that one seems very normal. My chosen test game is Freespace, and the only thing I need to do is set up an extension on my keyboard tray for the joystick. IWD is next, after that.

Rather than disassembling the PC with the Abit MB, I'm considering replacing Win98 with Damn Small Linux, and when looking at WINE, I saw that both Icewinds have been played in WINE.

So, with that in mind, I thought I would ask here about the limits of Retro gaming. Do the fans of these old games also enjoy using the old hardware with them? If so, does anyone on here have anything interesting to share about the subject?