adventures in 32-bit computing

Buying my first vintage computer

I’ve been interested in retro computers basically as long as I’ve been alive. “My” first computer was a Tandy TRS-80 Model 100, which by the time my 3-year-old self was typing gibberish onto its screen in ~1995 was already an old machine. My next computer was an outdated but not exactly retro machine, a Mac Color Classic, which I used nonstop from about 1997 to ~2001. In 2000, my parents bought our first proper modern machine, a Dell Dimension 4100, a truly powerful machine for its day which sported an 866MHz Pentium III, 128MB of PC133 SDRAM, a nVidia Riva TNT2, and a Creative Sound Blaster Live! card. In the meantime, though, I had discovered both my uncle’s old NES, and my cousin’s old Commodore 64, and while I was enthralled with the razzle dazzle of Windows 98 gaming, I still had a big soft spot for those machines of yesteryear.

That soft spot never went away. Through circumstances out of my control, the Tandy and the Apple of my youth were lost to time, as was the Blueberry Clamshell G3 iBook I had as a teen. Unfortunately, with current pricing trends these are not machines I can afford to replace. I was extremely excited to get a C64 Maxi, but COVID-19 caused US distribution to fall through. I had a rapacious apetite for a vintage computer to play with, but didn’t have one. I had gotten an eMac for free from a colleague, but as would be just my luck, it was the ONLY model of eMac entirely incapable of running Mac OS 9–this particular model was only produced for 6 months in 2005, the total number made are probably in the very low thousands, and yet out of all the eMacs on earth, that’s the one I get.

I simply had to go out and buy a machine, then.

Choosing a machine

The problem with the eMac, as mentioned, was that it could not run Mac OS 9. OS 9, besides being nostalgic for me, is backwards-compatible with most older Mac software, going back to the mid-90s at least. Meanwhile, OS X, which runs on that eMac, is forwards-compatible with modern macOS. What I’m getting at here is that for a retro computer to be interesting, it has to run software that cannot be run on a modern machine without emulation (and it’s not that I’m particuarly opposed to emulation, either, more on that later). The eMac was not the first early/mid-2000s machine that I’ve picked up, and the Windows side of things is much the same story–it can be very difficult to run Windows 98 on hardware from the mid-2000s, and the number of titles that run on Windows XP but cannot be made to run under Windows 10 are vanishingly small, nowhere near enough of a library to make a dedicated XP machine worth its weight.

While machines from the 1980s and early 1990s are also fascinating to me, they are relatively expensive–and trending upwards–as well as trivial to emulate. I can emulate a C64 or an Amiga flawlessly on my cell phone. As much as it would be fun to own the real deal, these machines do not support modern peripherals or displays, and have extremely limited options for loading software downloaded from the internet on a more modern device. There are CF card adpaters for most of the 80s machines, which works well enough, but buying not just a computer, but also a CF adapter, and also a particular mouse, and a particular joystick, and a video converter, just to play games that I can emulate on every computer I own, is not an enticing deal.

So I settled on a Windows 98 build. Parts for Windows 98 machines are still cheap. The Pentium III 1.13GHz CPU I picked up was only $9 including shipping, for example, while a 486–if you can find one–will set you back closer to $50. Windows 98 supports USB keyboards and mice, can (with enough effort and disregard for security) be networked to a Windows 10 machine for file transfers, and despite being compatible with the accessories and monitors I already own, can work backwards and run almost any DOS game as well. Windows 98 games are hard to run under Windows 10, and while any DOS game I could run on the real hardware I could easily run in DOSbox, the “2-for-1” nature of getting Windows 98 and MS-DOS (and optionally, 3.1 and 95, though I don’t see much point) in one affordable machine was just too good to pass up.

my big beautiful beige boi

"The big beautiful beige boy"

So I started shopping for Windows 98 machines on eBay, and I ended up having great luck. I found not just any Windows 98 machine, but my Windows 98 machine, a Dell Dimension 4100 from 2000–the exact make and model that I had grown up on. It was spec’d out slightly different, with a 733MHz CPU, but it had everything I needed: a Sound Blaster Live, a Pentium III, two working CD-ROM drives, a big 160GB IDE HDD, and most importantly, a stylish beige case. The best part? It was $75, shipped. To top it off, I found the exact same GPU of my youth as well, an ATI Radeon 9600, for only $20

I’ve upgraded some of the parts, but here’s the breakdown of the specs:

  • Dell Dimension 4100 ($75)
  • Intel 815 chipset
  • Pentium III 733MHz, 370 Socket
    • I have a 1.133GHz model in the mail ($9)
  • 128MB PC133 SDRAM (currently 384MB, $12)
    • shipped with 256, but one stick was dead, replaced with a 256MB stick. Extra stick was $12. BIOS limits it to 384, otherwise I’d go to 512
  • nVidia RIVA TNT2 M64
    • the M64 in particular is apparently “the bad one,” but it was the same one I started with as a kid.
  • Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600 Atlantis, 256MB GDDR, AGP4x, 400MHz core, 200MHz RAM ($20)
  • Sound Blaster Live! SB0100 (a rare lucky Dell without the maligned Dell OEM card)
  • Realtek Gigabit PCI Ethernet Card ($10, amazingly Realtek still ships 9x and DOS drivers)
  • 56k Modem (I really don’t know what to do with this lol, any ideas let me know)
  • Sony 48x CD-ROM/R drive
  • Creative aftermarket 12xDVD/48xCD drive
  • 160GB Seagate UltraATA133 HDD
  • IDE-2-SD adapter card ($15)
  • Rosewill RC-200 ATA-133 PCI RAID card (15)

Including some extra adapters (DVI cables, DVI to HDMI, VGA to HDMI, etc) here and there, I’m all in for under $225. The machine can pretty much run ANY Windows 98 game at 1280x1024 on ultra settings, and slightly more modern games like Call of Duty 1 or GTA San Andreas on medium-high. I’ve had mixed luck with DOS games, but I haven’t dedicated much time on that front yet. The machine is happy to run MS-DOS 6.22 or 7.10 natively, though, which is fantastic, and the SBLive DOS drivers include full SB16 and GM emulation for compatibility with almost all DOS games. And with DVI output (even for DOS!) I can plug it into my HDMI capture card with a simple passive adapter.

as of 2024, this machine is still going strong, though the 1.13GHz P3 actually doesn’t work with this motherboard, so it’s been swapped for 1 GHz; the 9600 died months after installation, I bought a new old stock 9550 to replace it, which still works great. The machine has brought me much joy, and can output native 1080p which looks absolultely goregous

"Windows 98SE running at 1080p"