The best way to get computer hardware on the cheap is to get abondoned systems from friends or family ... Or even dumpster diving or putting a advert in the classifieds , you will be amazed at what you find

Phil: "Here's a dos computer build that anyone can afford!" Ebay sellers: "$$$$"

Sometimes the machines you throw together with cheap and low-end parts end up being the most fun and interesting of all, slow is indeed good! Wonderful video!

Still have my original Win95 and Win3.1 desktops. Still love turning them on from time to time to enjoy the "Dos" games they way they used to be played. Thanks for sharing.

"Slow is good" you don't hear that often.

Dosbox is amazing and is a great solution for playing most games and demos from all PCs since the first PC in 1981 to the last DOS games in the late 90s. Also can run Windows 1/2/3/3.11/95/98 and has good FM sound with support for pretty much all sound cards ever built for this time period. Free software and no clutter.

Really appreciate all the information and time you take to show us all that. I ordered that ymf744 for my windows 98 build I'm doing on socket 478.

Excellent video. Really enjoyed watching this build. Was only thinking about your channel earlier today as I was dragging out a heap of old tech from the shed. So many old school pci cards I had stashed away.

Was lucky to grow up playing games from the early 80's in the arcades to the 1st consoles and PC games but when you hear the specs from PC parts compared to today's PC it still makes me smile and shake my head 😜. Great video, thanks

I love watching your retro videos. It's a hobby of mine as well. I'm building a tiny flat computer from the guts of a old Dell D800 laptop

Phil you are a God among retro pc hardware kings.

I still have my PC Chips M848LU mainboard, just need to get a socket A processor for it. This is one of the best videos I've seen on your channel, Phil. Thank you so much for that.

it is supremely satisfying to preserve the past on real hardware. The satisfaction of a proper custom build is something that DosBox will never be able to provide.

Hmm. Retro gaming philosophy is quite different from the vintage machine approach. I like the idea of putting together an old machine from old parts to see old software running on it and check out how useful it can still be. Having a machine that looks the part is important to me too to get that authentic feel. I guess I'm a bit of a historian too! :-) PS. there's a touch of nostalgia in this too because I came to PCs around 1988 as a programmer and systems administrator.

Another excellent video Phil! I've never seriously considered building a retro gaming PC, but maybe it's something I'll look into doing at some stage now that I'm armed with the tips in this video. I know my dad was more into PC stuff during this time period so maybe it would be a nice surprise to build a bit of a retro gaming machine with him. Kind of a shame that we threw out much of our old PC hardware in a clean up many, many years ago; at the time it was just taking up space but now I look back and think "I wonder what we might have had that we just discarded".

i can remember back in 1987 my dad got me loads of pc parts off his work.I built my first pc a dual cpu IBM 386 sx 33 mhz(if i can remember correct)it ran with the 486 dx 2 66 mhz it had a rizer card for extra memory.In total it had 32mb ram but could only support up to 24mb....The good old days lol now i feel old :D

Great video, Phil! It's clever to use newer parts and cripple them to slow things down. Great value to be had here, for sure! I'm gonna have to play around with some old junk I've got, see what I come up with. :) I really like the longer format by the way.

Thanks for the long version. Fun to see the variations in how you set one up compared to my typical experience.

The music in Doom is perfect, exactly how I remember it. This sound card is awesome.

I just wanted to say, Thank you. I have recently used your website for 98 drivers on my 3DFX build. Damn you saved me a lot of time.

Great video, I really enjoyed that, it brought back a lot of memories. For the longest time we used DOS 6.2 for Gaming and windows for everything else like printing, researching, E-mails and photo/video Editing etc... Worked out fine until Win98, then suddenly many of the new releases ONLY ran well on Windows 95B or 98, Grrrr Bummer. Thanks again. 👍🙂👍

It has been quite a long time! I almost forgot to make a comment on KZfaq Phil! It's like your video programs on KZfaq seems to be the only channel that lets subcribers share their experiences & ideas here in Phils Computer Channel on KZfaq! Nice to see you coming back bro 🍻 So far so long man 👋 Take Care 🙋

I still got a Duron 750mhz with a GeForce 2 mx440 64mb standard pci. I use to play GTA vice city in that thing 😓

As always, I like then I watch ;) I missed this kind of video, well done as always Phil :)

All these parts were cheap until now!! Thanks Phil Computer Lab! Now all the prices are going to start to Skyrocket for socket A boards. All kidding aside are really great video thank you very much I am glad I actually have a few spare socket a boards and a few Athlons and two Durons I will have to recheck. Thank you again for the video.

Wow... that’s nice! No more doubt about PCI sound board in pure DOS. Thank you!!

Lemming music always lifts my spirit...

I wish I had have seen this video a couple of weeks ago! I just bought an Athlon 1000 MHz that showed up with about 30 bent pins. It was very challenging to get them straightened out enough that the CPU would socket, especially given my mid-40s eyesight. Using a mechanical pencil for that is a great idea! It would have saved me a ton of time.

Fdisk/mbr. You just saved my day! :) Did not know that, when performing install on a nice old Pentium MMX.

sweet memories!! great video as always phil!!

Great content and system Phill. Keep up the good work. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands

Holy crap I use to have that board! I never got mine to run very well though, I guess it just needs Phil's magic touch! 😀 I am going to give this a shot in the coming months, thank you for the amazing tutorial Phil! 😁👍

The more dos and Window98 videos I watch, the more I am glad I kept that mac PCI Voodoo 5 5500, just recently flashed it to get the DVI port working as well. Been toying with the idea of getting a Geforce 4 TI4600, but decided that any games that need that would be XP games and I have an overkill XP/Vista/W7 PC for them.

Hi Phil - great channel longtime watcher - you've finally made me pull my finger out and start my retro gaming rig - I have a dual Pentium 2 333mhz IBM Intellistation hopefully I can get it to work again, its been sat 10+ years!

Subscriber gained! I bought a big box full of parts for £5 the other day and there's some stuff in there that I think I can turn into something! Never built a PC before, but it's gonna happen! Thanks man.

I have a Duron 1.6 in a box somewhere. You could bridge across one of the laser cut components and it would give you all the cache back, turning it back into a Thoroughbred. OC'd to 2ghz it was the best $50 I ever spent.

Brilliant as always!

@Phil - I love watching all your videos, particularly for the nostalgic value. Do you know what I also just realized? I DO NOT miss all the agony and time used setting up drivers, batch files, etc, especially in DOS. Modern PC computing has certainly spoiled us. That being said I think I'll stick with my windows 10, thanks, but keep making your videos!

Cool idea. Never thought of lowering retro build cost by going with newer components and then slowing them down. Quite educational, and a nice channel too. Subscribing - with thanks :)

I remember the fdisk/mbr command quite well... I had a Pentium 2 computer back in the day that, for some reason, kept losing the master boot record. To boot it, I had to first boot with a floppy, run fdisk/mbr, eject it, and ctrl-alt-del.

Hi Phil, another good video. I cant think of much other, rather than first time viewers may have needed the segment where you calculate the 5 volt rail load to see if the Socket A will overload the markings on the power supply, but the CPU you chose is a low wattage one. But you have it all covered in your plays lists. Hmm now for the hunt on super low end thin client in dos mode ( HP / Cissco Wise ) PS , i still hang on to my SB16 and matching 2speed cdrom if still works after queuing up to buy it new when the price plummeted down to $800, then i saved more overtime money and bought 4 x 4meg sims at $100 each and upgraded yet again The gotek floppy emulator is great ( their OEM software not so good ) the 99 images are cool but you really waste a 4GB USB stick as the rest of the stick is unusable, but that is a cheap price to pay for something that works great - HAHA i know what you mean about finding your A4 printed 2 x 25 column per side list of software you have saved in each slot, i keep it in a A4 sleeve as my wife found it in the spare room and threw it out once thinking it was scrap paper Sites such as allbootdisk and winworldpc are excellent for all retro software to boot up and some support files. I have in the cupboard original 5.25 and 3.5 DOS 3 to Dos 6.22 retail and OEM packages, and i find they mostly work, but often you get a error somewhere, sometimes t can skip a file other times halt on something important and die. Some have never been opened, so it is true they loose there magnetic field over time, others like a junk cheap coloured disk i have in 3.5 work every day, all of the top brand, Memorex, Imation, Verbatim, have the best chance of lasting well. For 5.25 3M, BASF, Maxell, Memorex are pretty good later on the Le Floppy and Laser were just cheap mass produced items, they worked but they are made to a price. Regards George

Such a great video. I'm going to start doing this now

Good video. The SD card use was interesting. I still prefer to use my older Pentium 233 chip for DOS as the motherboard has a few ISA slots, which are needed for my Roland SCC-1 Midi sound board & the Soundblaster. It makes games like Doom and Descent so much better in the music department. I also have a Soundblaster MCD 16 with a Yamaha DB50XG. The Yamaha is set as 300 and the Roland as 330.

I just had to send this your way, it's a PCI to PCIe 1x adapter, it's the perfect height to fit a half-height PCIe card in with itself, it even has a little plate for itself to cover up and it'll fit inside a computer, along with a half-height card.

Cool video Phil I forgot about these old games. Ill have to look in my garage I have about 40 old pcs previous home owner left behind.

I agree that Slow is good because of the older Sierra titles that were made with the hardware in mind that was out during those games' heyday. Nice PCI Sound card for DOS based games.

I remember my first 256 color Cirrus Logic card in my 486dx2 when I was a kid it was a wicked card played all the games I had back then no issue

Top notch channel

Good video, interesting channel ))

I just love how your videos trigger all the nice sparks inside my head, I cannot thank you enough Phil for being able to keep my stupid old brain going :D

Great video Phil, really enjoyed watching this one. I’m in the hunt for tualatin motherboard to build a dos/win98 machine😁🕹 Retrocengo

Good choice for those who can't find/afford a Pentium or K6. The best investment that makes a difference, is a CRT monitor. 17 inch is better than 19 inch with low res.. Seriously.. CRT (many has forgot) gives the "best" picture with MS-DOS games. But they are hard to find these days. You can go with a LCD 1600x1200 (or 1920x1200 with aspect correction) which will do 800x600 or 320x240 as well as 640x480 pixel perfect, BUT with 320x200, a CRT will be best. A LCD with aspect correction can display it OK, but the LCD is too revealing of pixels. CRT's are more smooth n blurry. ;)

I admit that tweaking a certain platform to get as much out of it as I can is fun as well. Playing with the hardware and dos itself are number 3 and 4 of the top ten dos games. I think though when I get to a certain point, I do simply just go one notch up the hardware ladder. Windows xp gamer setups for example have such a broad hardware spectrum that one never needs to risk the hardware by running it out of spec. But I really do love seeing what is possible out of some hardware generations. Sometimes it can be quite impressive.

I love how easy it is to get brand new agp cards for cheap

Definitely agree on the IDE SD card adapter for DOS, work brilliantly. Be aware though that SD or SATA to IDE adapters MIGHT not work in Windows 9x with DMA mode enabled. Just FYI, in case you're building a DOS/Windows combo PC.

Phil great video as always. I tweeted at you awhile ago but I'll throw it in here as well. I recently built an XP machine and I had an Nvidia GT410 laying around. Went on some benchmark sites to get an idea where it sits for a retro application and it actually lines up nicely with an Nvidia 8800GT in terms of performance and Futuremark scores. Seems to be rock solid in all the games I've tried so far. Just to give an example of what lies a little further along that curve. lol

I’ve been trying to find parts to put together a 386SX build. I found some that are _relatively_ cheap on eBay, but it’s been ingrained in my head that I don’t need to be spending money too often and I’ve been holding back from actually buying.

Very nice video :) A similar stuff for those who wish to go the emulation way would be nice. Like getting the best out of PCem/86box on a modern multi-core machine. I know it's not going to be the real thing, but still very useful for many. I don't know if you had anything like this in mind for the channel.

Haha I love all the corrections in this video. Your brain works like mine does.

Phil! Do a video on MT32-pi, please ♥

There ARE DDR sticks lower than 256 MB. I believe the lowest DDR RAM sticks are 128 MB ones.

Interesting, looks like my first computer (after upgrade). Used it to play Oblivion under Windows XP.

Awesome video! I know I for one would also love to see a similar video for a later Windows 98 gaming rig - a lot of the parts from windows 98 builds you've done in years past are similarly no longer easily available. I know you mentioned in this video all the Voodoo 3's are basically gone and you weren't kidding.

Nice video. I bought some retro stuff recently. A unisys 386 16mhz with original mfm 43mb hdd. And a 486dx 33 system with a 256mb hdd. And 4mb 30pin memory. Also got a cheap mainboard with a 6x86 ibm cpu on it. For 15€. I only need to get my ibm mainboard with 486dx4 working. It gives an error code at startup.

one day i feel like you're gonna make a retro build and you're gonna say "today i'm going to use an old am4 board with an amd ryzen 7 processor, as for the graphics card i felt like i wanted to use something budget oriented like a nvidia gtx 1080 ti"

I built a pretty decent dos/win2k rig, piii 500mhz, 320mb ram, 80gb hard drive, $30.

This is great, I lucked out on a 486 laptop a while ago but it's obviously a pain to modify and it uses some kind of proprietary memory expansions which I've never been able to find and 4 megs of ram is not enough for a lot of the things I want to do This seems really cheap and easy, motherboards seem a bit pricy compared to the rest but better than spending hundreds on an old IBM / clone

Thank You Phil, Awesome video.

Great tutorial!

In Soviet Russia the cheapest solution is P4 s478 - you can find an used set mobo+CPU+cooler+RAM for less than 5 bucks, and entire computer for 8.5~16 bucks.

Today Phil and you magic touch Show !

Can't wait for your ESS Solo 1 review. I know it's not really your cup of tea, but I imagine for a lot of people the best route to a cheap 386/486 era machine are estate sales, flea markets, garage/yard sales, etc. People are at the point of basically throwing away such machines as "useless". That's the thing that tends to sadden me because every old PC deserves a good home. :) Okay, maybe not.

I've finished my 478 build, now I'm onto 775. I bought a 2nd hand PC solely for the Asrock 4core dual sata2, can't wait to throw a q6700 in there.

Great long video! Big thumbs up!!

I just built a LGA775 PC and its great, its got windows xp and runs all the old stuff, trespasser, doom, quake, duke3d, biomenace, duke nukem 2

Excellent Video Phil! I"m almost done for my Retro DOS Machine based around a Athlon XP. Question - what is brand of your test bench... it looks really nice. Can you put in a link in the comments?

I've got that main board. It was very cheap about 10 years ago... Remember the jumper needing to taken off a short which made the board appear DOA.

I used to have half this kit, but when it originally came out.

Hi Phil, thanks for this great Video. Is there any chance that we will know which benchtable you are using?

How do these sound cards fair in modern settings? Do they still work with Windows 7?

Brilliant

As mentioned a socket 775 for retro/budget gaming? Still using a Dell SFF from that era as a daily driver ;)

Great video again Phil ive only been following your channel for a few months but thanks to your videos and input on here and twitter ive already done Dos, Win 98 & XP builds but I still want to build more :) One thing I would like to know and maybe you could a video on this especially for the thin client PCs without optical drives is there any drivers out there that allow the use of a USB cd drive (especially for those Lucasfilm talkie and Star Trek CD games) theres some conflicting info on the net as to whether this is possible apparently there are some old panasonic drivers from years ago that may work but ive had no luck with them.

To get my DX2-66 I had to buy it from Ukraine, I think the chip itself cost about $50 in the end. That was much much cheaper then anything local where people will ask up to $200 for a DX processor. It sucks to think when I was a child you could get boxes on DX and SX processors basically for free, but now their like hens teeth.

Nice video - makes a change to see BIOS settings being deliberately made as bad as possible :-) Just out of interest, where did you get the PC build frame from? Commercial ones seem to cost more than new cases, so wondering if this could be made from simple items, such as wood or those aluminium frames & corners from Bunnings?

AWSOME!!!

I bought 5 of these PC chips MBs, using them with matrox capture card Rt.100, work fantastic, bought extra MBs just as insurance. along with a Parhelia 256, CPU is a XP 3200+ , the capture card does all the work

It isn't the same, but I've got a crappy PC-Chips+VIA motherboard with a low-clocked Pentium 4 laying around. It might be useful for something like this!Great video, Phil (:

one man's junk is another man's treasure

The sole reason I'd go semi-high end for an Athlon XP build is because I still have the second CPU I owned, a Barton core 2600+. Spend no money on a CPU and just try to get a ASUS NF2 board and some BH-5 DDR because half the fun is honestly tweaking a system to get the best out of it, and part of me would like to eventually have a PC for each major era (eg. 486 for DOS, PIII/Athlon Thunderbird for Win9x, Athlon XP/P4/C2D for XP, etc) even if I have to deal with VMWare, Wine and DOSBox in the meantime.

For DOS i think the best configuration would be and asus board that was released for pIII that has 1 agp slot 4 pci and 2 isa slots, the thing is that one of the best internal sound cards is sound blaster awe 64(isa) , for video would be an S3Virge for example that are compatible with univbe driver. My 2 Cents

Went on a bit of a ISA sound card spending spree recently; bought a couple of ESS cards and a Sound Blaster 2.0, the latter of which I got for a "bargain" under $100 Aussie dollary doos, so I can attest to how much it costs to do old-school retro gaming on period correct hardware. Even the ESS cards cost $32-45 including delivery, and they're just unbranded, non-collectable cards. I managed to save money on some of my 486 motherboards by buying untested and dodgy looking boards, some of which needed repair, but I've got the electronics background to be able to troubleshoot and repair the boards myself. The only other option would be to buy bulk lots and hope you get one working board, then sell off the non-working ones as faulty/repair required to recoup some of the costs of those boards. But even then it's still going to be expensive and time-consuming. Or you could just buy something newer and cheap, and just fiddle with the settings a little, and save a whole lot of money! You could easily pick up a whole system for under $100, which is cheaper than a "bargain" period-correct collectable sound card alone!

@Phil have you released your list of disk images on your gotek USB? I would love to see what you've put together.

This would make a good Win98SE build, it has native DOS support anyway and would run the Windows games too. For a "pure DOS" system, something like a Pentium 1 with 16 MB RAM and some 2D oriented video card with 2 MB V-RAM would suffice. Getting hold of a well perserved P1 build would be more of an issue, but builds that were essentially dumped can be restored with some work.

Great video Phil. Where can i find the compatibility matrix spreadsheet?

An option for better game compatibility with the YMF744 is to go for an older VIA chipset with the 686A/B southbridge. With this setup you can run the YMF744 in DDMA mode and then you don't need the DSDMA TSR and EMM386 (you need a modified SETUPDS.EXE as it doesn't contain the PCI id of the 686A/B southbridge). MSI actually produced a board with the KT133A/686B chipset with a 12V P4 connector, the K7T Turbo2. Also SiS chipsets can be a nice option for the YMF744.

i have a sb awe32 with the x2 connected on the wavetable header, my gravis gamepad conflicts with the x2. the s2 never did this. ive even lineout from the x2 to line in soundcard. my machine is a p3 800mhz 512mb ram. dos 6.22. can you help? and, would running the x2 or x3mb external with a midl cable with joystick adapter work?

I’d love to build an old *Dos* gaming machine, but I don’t have any room to spare. Mind suggesting suitable laptops of good quality? (proper quality control, an option to source parts to in case of a failure and maybe one with a sound card, because that thing was optional back then)

I love your video's, could you do one on the different aftermarket drivers and such for the voodoo 3? I've found it difficult to determine the differences

Try using a Sandisk A1 (or A2) microSD card for operating systems. Their A-series cards greatly optimize OS and small file (4k IOPS) read and write speed, and is great for Windows XP and below, as well as Linux; better than most SD cards and USB 2.0 flash drives; or even most USB 3.0 flash drives.