Windows 98 rises from the ashes!!!

Hi everyone,

Just had to share this. I’ve been wanting to obtain a retro gaming PC for some time now, and I finally got one — in fact, the circumstances and end result couldn’t have been much better. My coworker told me he had an old PC sitting in his basement, which he said I could have, and I said, heck ya, I’ll take it off your hands if you want. So he finally brought it in, and I took it home, which included the CPU, monitor, and a box o’ stuff (keyboard, mouse, etc.).

Well, I couldn’t be more pleased. Turns out it’s got an AMD K6-2 @ 475 MHz. The CRT monitor has turned a little yellow, but it’s not horrible. It works. It did contain a 64 MB stick of RAM and an additional 32 MB stick of RAM, but I swapped both of those out for a 128 MB stick that I bought online. (That’s MEGA-bytes guys … remember those days? 😀 )

Unfortunately, right out of the box, the hard drive died on me, so for storage I am using a Compact Flash to IDE adapter. Works like a charm, and for Windows 98, it’s really fast. (That part made me nervous, I admit, because I had never used something like that before.)

It’s got onboard video and sound, but I made a couple of upgrades. Turns out that I still had my Diamond Monster 3D II accelerator board sitting on a shelf, so I installed that, and now I’ve got a nice 3dfx Voodoo2 capable machine. I also purchased a Sound Blaster AWE64 online, brand new, and installed that. Works great.

Another thing I bought, that I found brand new, sealed, is a Gravis GamePad Pro. What a great controller — I wish I had something like this back in the day, but what I had was some no-name controller that I bought at a local trade show for five bucks or something like that.

My coworker was able to supply the original Windows 98 install CD and the motherboard CD, and everything was pretty painless to set up. It’s not 98SE, unfortunately, but I can live with that.

The machine was surprisingly clean when I opened it up, and is in real good condition. (The keyboard was a bit gooey, and I had to clean that.)

Now on to the REALLY good stuff … the games. I am having a ball with this time machine, going back and re-living all the classics. So far I’ve installed the following, most of which I bought my own copies of back in the day that I kept all these years: Doom, Quake II, Duke Nukem 3D, FIFA 96 and 97, Need for Speed I and IIse, Links 386 Pro, and Virtual Pool.

On eBay I also bought copies of Quake I and Redneck Rampage. Quake I is installed with the GLQuake patch so it uses the 3dfx card, but I haven’t installed Redneck Rampage yet.

Some other titles I want to get include Heretic, Hexen, Half Life, Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, and others. GOG.com is a good source for some stuff like that.

I even installed my registered version of WinZIP that came on a floppy disk in the late ’90s!

I’ll be busy for a while.

Some other trivia: It came with a fax/modem card installed, which I removed, and some literature for AOL.

Here are a couple of photos. Not pictured are the speakers that were also included, including subwoofer.

Thanks for reading! (As a token of gratitude to my coworker, I bought him a $25 Amazon card.)