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Old computers are great. I didn’t know where else to place this post, but this seemed like a good place to do it. Some people I’ve heard before of putting together an old system so they can play old Sierra games in their glory – without the glitches and crashes that occur on modern machines. My dad has an old computer, and I have a “new” one – well, now I’ve put together an old computer too, exclusively for Sierra gaming – and it’s great! I salvaged components from a few old computers I picked up for all for free (my brother works at a place that gets old computers donated), and in the end I’ve got a great Sierra gaming system. Now I can play my favorites again properly, as well as those games I never completed because of speed issues (I’ve never been a fan of slow-down utilities). So reply to this post if you too have put together an old Sierra gaming computer!
486 – 66 mhz, ESS sound card, 40x CD-rom, 500 meg HD (fits all the old Sierra games!), 3.5 floppy, 17″ Dell monitor.
I just need to buy a nice new tower case, and I’ll have to watch for another monitor cause the one I have doesn’t do 16-color EGA, only black and white. Odd, but what do you expect from a free used monitor? It runs from 320×200 to 800×600 in 256-color VGA properly. -
(re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming)
My company was throwing out a bunch of old equipment recently, and I brought home an old workstation. It has a 166MHz Pentium processor, so it’s a little newer than yours, but so far I’ve been able to play all my Sierra oldies with it. It’s great because I never hesitate anymore before buying an old DOS game.
The machine was originally running NT, so I reformatted and installed Win98, and I had to add a sound card. (I learned a lot that week!)
I use the same monitor I use with my regular computer, and it works fine. I’m going to get a switchbox so it’s easier to swap the monitor between the two machines.
-emily
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(re: re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming)
It was funny to read this post. I was just putting together a Sierra game system just yesterday. It’s one of those ideas I have been toying with for a long time. Plus I was cleaning out a lot of extra parts I have around here, becasue I seem to always accumulate parts and systems when I fix computers for people. The system I put together is a Gateway 166 mhz mmx processor. I wished it was slower. I can play most of the Sierra games without error but some like Space Quest 5 I get an error which i’ve seen so many times because of speed. It still plays but because of the unable to initialize audio hardware error is there I don’t get the full affect on sounds. Like when Roger sits in the captains chair! The cool thing to do is get a Sound Blaster sound card and update the sound drivers and run the general midi drivers for the older games. It is so much cooler that way! I’m going to start posting in here more often!
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(re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming) have you tried the GoSierra patch? It fixes that “unable to initialize audio” bug in some games. I have used it on my old machine (same processor of yours) to get sound running for games like PQ1 (the VGA remake).
I’m too lazy to look up the URL right now, it’s linked elsewhere on this site, or you can download it from the Quest Studios site…
-emily
ps the sounds in SQ5 *are* priceless… -
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(re: re: re: re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming)
Have you guys seen my “Custom Build Space Quets Computer” article on my website? It’s located here:
http://www.spacequest.net/misc/customsqpc.shtml
Here’s a picture of the working version: http://www.spacequest.net/rotzooi/sqcomputermooi.jpg
Pretty cool, ey?
Frans van Hofwegen
SpaceQuest.Net -
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(re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming) I saw this thread and just HAD to post about my system… I just put together a P100 for my DOS gaming. I managed to locate both an SB16 and an AWE32, and an old Matrox Millenium video card at work. I already had the P100 left over from when I upgraded my sister’s computer, so I got mine built for free as well. I did spend a little bit on a Roland MT-32 off E-bay because I’d heard that they were abundant and cheap. I’d always wanted one but couldn’t afford it as a teenager since it had ~$500 price tag back then. Anyway, it was money well spent… the game music on an MT-32 is AMAZING!
(Just had to share!)
GeoffP -
(re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming) I just need to buy a nice new tower case, and I’ll have to watch for another monitor cause the one I have doesn’t do 16-color EGA, only black and white. Odd, but what do you expect from a free used monitor? It runs from 320×200 to 800×600 in 256-color VGA properly.
The monitor? Check the video card first. Usually monitors are not the problem when it comes to display modes, especially low resolution and color. In fact, the only problem I’ve ever come across with monitors and display modes is the refresh rate can be a pain. However, newer video cards absolutely SUCK at supporting the old EGA/VGA graphics resolutions. I’ve had old Sierra games (which never flickered once on my Number 9 VLB video card) flicker like mad on my GeForce 2 MX. As for making a new “old” system, I’ve thought about it, and have more than ample parts, including a 386 motherboard, with an i386/33, i387, and close to 64 MB of 30 pin RAM. XD Not sure if it still works though. I’ll have to find an ISA video card.
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(re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming)
Here’s what I have.
Sierra games from 1979-1983 go onto an old IBM PC from 1982 I found in a neighbor’s trash. He threw the monitor away, too. It has a 8086 processor, two 1.2 MB floppy drives (seems like a waste), one external 720 KB floppy drive, a 15 MB hard disk, an old mouse, an AdLib card, and a high-res (640 x 480) EGA card. The cache and RAM slots (with the old push-in RAM modules, not the nice chips we have today) are all filled to the max, giving me a whopping 960 KB of RAM. It even has an old modem which is too slow for anything. I play really old, boot-from-disk (Flopper) games on this dinosaur. My neighbor left Window 1.5 on it and it’s useless.
I have a Tandy 1800 DLX for DOS Sierra games from 1984-1995. Amazingly, only Police Quest 4 and SWAT 1 doesn’t run on this. The RAM is maxxed to 8 MB (with those risky RAM expanders that allow more chips to fit onto the extra slots), it has a 2x Creative CD-ROM, two large 520 MB hard disks, an external 1.2 MB floppy drive, and two 2.88 MB floppy drives (the format that never made it). I also stuck Windows 3.5 on it, and I replaced the modem with a 56kbps and a broadband card. Have Internet Explorer 5.1 for Win3.1 on it, though the Cirrus Logic card has no problems ever displaying graphics. I use the on-board Tandy 3-Voice for both music and digitzed sound. And a PBTV for watching TV (in 64 colors) through Windows. DOS 2000 in the main OS. It’s great for a good many of games that require 4 MB of RAM. The processor is much too slow, though, for the Police Quest games, and a few others that started coming out from 1993 onwards. I have no problem with Larry 7, strangely enough, nor with Larry 6, and the early Sierra CD games.
My last old PC in a PowerLeap’d AT&T Pentium 150. It has a PCI SoundBlaster Live!, am AMD K6 550, 1024 MB RAM, a PCI TV card, WinXP Home, 240 GB total internal HD space, a PCI broadband/FireWire/USB 2.0 card, two DVD-/+RWs internal and such. I run, using Virtual PC if needs be, all my old games made since 2002 on this machine, unless the game needs a Pentium III and up, which then I’m using the PC I’m using to type this.
I also have a Power Macintosh 7800/180 PowerPC for Sierra games I have on the Mac. Under System 7.5.5, the Mac ran everything great. Under 9.2.2, it’s very choosy. So I hacked OS X Panther onto it (lost my warranty according to Apple) and it plays nothing old! Luckily, I have the old LC III and an Apple IIe Platium, which I still send to Apple and upgrade to a Apple IIgs instead.
Then, of course, it my gaming consoles: TurboGrafx-16 w/ CD-ROM, Sega Master System, PC Engine Turbo Duo, FamiCom Titler, Super NES II, Genesis CDX w/ 32X, PlayStation with MOD chip, Japanese PS2, for those region 2 movies and adult games only found in Japan, an old NES, Atari Jaguar, 5200, 7800, Super Arcade II and Lynx, a ColecoVision, a Sega Saturn with super MOD chip, a 3DO FZ-10, a Dreamcast, Super Famicom, Nintendo64 with a Japanese Disk Drive (works, but I don’t know what to do), a Memorex CD-i w/ MPEG, a Goldstar CD-i/DVD combo, a Pioneer LaserActive, GameCube with Game Boy Player, Game Gear, Sega Nomad, Game Boy Advance, and, finally a NUON DVD player. Total games: 2500, 60% on PC alone. I also still have, but not hooked up: VIC-20, Apple 1 (pain in the butt), TRS-80 monochrome, TI-99 w/ tape drive (tapes were high tech!), and a Bandai Playdia with no games. In other words, if there’s a game I want to play, I’ll play it not matter what!
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(re: re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming)
My god! You have quite an impressive collection there. By any chance, did you ever get some of your friends from Westwood to give you a tour of the facility? They had a library room behind the render-farm that was just FULL of computer games, console games, DVD’s, and books. I never got around to asking, but I think that little library had just about every game from 1993 on that was worth playing (and more than a few clunkers too).
To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what I mourn for more…
1) Westwood being shut down
2) Being laid off during corporate restructuring
3) Never seeing that library again.I’d say it’s pretty evenly matched. I’m the first to admit I’m a computer geek and this little room was like my BEST friend for the year or so I was at Westwood. <
> Hey Ken – did Sierra ever have anything like this (a library of software/games/movies/books that employees could check out)?
-David Reese
lordcorenair@netscape.net -
(re: re: re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming)
Only issue I have is constantly misplacing crap. Some computers are dissasembled all over the place 😀 like the tandy’s becasue i always *MORE* power per unit.
actually, since i’ve scrapped lots of crap, i’m working on small home network using OSs from Red Hat and SuSE Linux (don’t trust any other versions) to WinXPHome and WinXPPRo (include Mac 9.2.2 and Mac Panther when the time’s right). With PC, it’s just PowerLeap that damned computer to a K6-3/550, but with Apple PCs, money is the concern. Plus the nasty rumor the Virtual PC doesn’t run on Mac G5 (load of crap, it’s Panther that doesn’t run it *well*)
if invited to my house, you’d only see, right now, just the Compaq and Mac in the living room, a GameCube, a broken PS2 (sniff sniff sob sob) and two or three PCs I’m building.
I’ve been to Westwood in the old Arville Office when I was friends with Rick Coco Gush, and a few other guys who have went into the ether. Brett was very nice when Virgin/Viacom owned the company, but, as in Sierra gets bought by VU Games, EA chopped Westwood into so many pieces, and Brett because a jerk! (To me, anyways.) If I recall, in the early ’90s, Westwood and Sierra were in a pissing contest for the better product. Seems to me (just me) that the games were one par to one another, thought Westwood released far more less than Sierra did. I think it would’ve been groovy if Sierra did buy Westwood. Imagine Legend of Kyrandia being installed in C:\SIERRA\KYRANDIA and using Sierra installation programs and such.
When the company moved to Summerlin, I didn’t visit at all, as I hate Summerlin and the horrible wackos that in produced to crowd Vegas streets. I’m sorry, but i’m not going to drive for more than 20 minutes to get somewhere, yet the Scummerlins are driving an hour or more, causing all of our traffic jams! GRR!!
Plus my buddy, Mr. Lands of Lore (and Kyrandia) Rick left in 1998 or so, and I just stopped supporting Westwood after that, exept for NOX. NOX is cool, NOX is fun. NOX doesn’t have a serial number anymore.
However, Ken, if you’re reading, did Sierra have a gigantic library like Westwood? Or Nintendo. I heard the Big N has every arcade machine ever legally made for the employees to play.
Well,
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(re: re: re: re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming) Ken, if you’re reading, did Sierra have a gigantic library like Westwood? Or Nintendo. I heard the Big N has every arcade machine ever legally made for the employees to play.
We did try to assemble a library of games, and computer magazines, a couple of times — but, overall, we really weren’t very organized in this area.
There were a few reasons, the largest of which was that the company was scattered across 15 or so locations. Dynamix in Oregon, Sierra and Brightstar in Seattle, Papyrus in Boston, Headgate in Utah, Berkley in San Francisco, The other Sierra in central California, Coktel in Paris, Impressions in another part of Boston, etc etc. There really wasn’t a place for a library.
Also: I really didn’t support things like playing games at work. I certainly supported playing games after work, but had a different opinion about the workplace. I always think work means work. If you have time for playing games at work, then somehow you missed the fact that competitors are out to kill you. As VU Games seems to have discovered, it is TOUGH to make money selling software. We succeeded only because we worked harder, worked more hours, and worked smarter, than our competitors. Microsoft and Electronic Arts are tough companies to beat. Taking market share from them had nothing to do with playing games…
-Ken W -
(re: re: re: re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming)
Ah, the Kyrandia games. Those were interesting – I would have loved to see Sierra get involved in those games. But, as you said, Sierra and Westwood were competitors at the time. Much like Westwood and Blizzard were for quite some time in the RTS genre.
-David Reese
lordcorenair@netscape.net -
(re: re: re: re: re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming)
Westwood had the same policy. In fact, personal games were not to be loaded on company machines (though a few of us testers managed to bend the rule a little bit during lunch breaks so we could get some Counterstrike in). The stuff in the library was for personal entertainment and definitely not for the workplace.
The higher ups at Westwood felt the same way you did, Ken. That makes what ended up happening that much more puzzling. After the release of Tiberian Sun, the Westwood brand just sort of fizzled off into mediocrity (which ultimately led to the closure).
-David Reese
lordcorenair@netscape.net -
(re: re: re: re: re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming)
I assumed as much. John C. Dvorak wrote in an article or book (pick one, he writes so much) that work is work, games are games. Nintendo’s policy is similar to yours. I have no idea about Microsoft.
That’s the problem with many small developers these days I visit. They’re always playing games when they should be designing them, like Ion Storm. I never recall ever hearding of work being done, just lots of Quake LAN games or something.
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(re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming HELP!!!!)
Hi! I just got my hands on an old 486 with DOS 6. I also got my hands on a Win 95 CD and a CDROM drive. What is the complete command to make the computer accept the drive and where ( autoexec, config.sys…)do I input it? I seem to remember it was “Mscdex” but I forgot the rest. It’s been a long time since I last did this in the good ol’ days of DOS. Thanks for your help.
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(re: re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming HELP!!!!) William,
Try the following autoexec and config files (attached). Make sure to substitute your CD rom driver for OAKCDROM.SYS (although that driver works well for most drives). I did not post it because of possible copyright, but it’s real common and you should actually have it if you have some old disks kicking around.
CONFIG.SYS
DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=EMM386.EXE NOEMS
DOS=UMB,HIGH
DEVICEHIGH=OAKCDROM.SYS /D:CD1
BUFFERS=30,0
FILES=40
LASTDRIVE=Z
FCBS=16,0
BREAK=ON
STACKS=9,256AUTOEXEC.BAT
@echo off
PROMPT $P$G
PATH C:\;C:\DOS
LH MSCDEX.EXE /D:CD1 /L:D
LH SMARTDRV.EXE
LH DOSKEY.COM -
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(re: Building Old Computers For Sierra Gaming HELP!!!!) Well, to get this thread a little back on track — I have built a computer for old-school Sierra gaming as well. I have a Pentium 200, 50 meg RAM, 1 ATAPI Creative CD-ROM (50x I think), Soundblaster 16, 3 1/2 + 5 1/4 drives, 1 350meg hard drive + 1 100 meg hard drive running Dos 6.22 + Win 3.11 for Workgroups. It runs great — I finally have all the gear/know-how to get my Sierra games running perfectly! And so much fun to build!
I also have a 486SX, 25mhz, 8 meg RAM, 100 meg hard drive, Soundblaster Pro, 2x Proprietary Panasonic/Matsushita CD-ROM w/Interface Card, 3 1/2 + 5 1/4 drives.
Both computers have slow, useless modems! Wish I could get them connected to the net with Winsock and surf in style!
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Well, here’s yet another year-old thread I’m resurrecting due to my newly-found member status! 🙂 It’s cool that this thread is here because a group of friends and I were talking about building some old computers to tackle our favorite games as they were “meant to be played.”
This also got the gears turning in my head for the creation of the SierraBox! Basically, a tweaked 486 or early Pentium with enough hard drive space to store ALL the Sierra games with a nice interface to access them all upon startup. Maybe even put the pic of HalfDome in the little square where the computer company’s logo goes. 🙂
This got me thinking even more, living in an “attractions” town such as Orlando, to open a Sierra Cafe of sorts… have these computers all around like an internet cafe, serve food themed to each adventure (Daventry-style mutton chops or an Astro Chicken Sandwich anyone?), and even have the option of people keeping their save-game disks on file at the restaurant, like some places do with personal beer steins! They already have a Pac-Man Cafe here which is very successful… but of course, many more people have played Pac-Man…
I found a good (but sad) source for old computers to be dumpsters. I live near the college, so when it comes time for everyone to move out, it’s like a goldmine! I found three computers in a single day… all P2’s or below… and the only problems with them were that the user managed to muck up Windows 95 to the point of it not booting up anymore. So I wiped the hard drives clean, wiped the grunge off of the cases, blew out the dust, and sold them to friends to use as Linux boxes!! 🙂
Tom.
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Yeah, it’s an interesting thread worth continuing.
My dedicated DOS PC is a Pentium 150 with 48MB of RAM, a 1.5 GB HD, Trident 64V+ onboard graphics, Sound Blaster 32 (a slightly less fully featured version of the AWE32), and a 16x CD-ROM drive.
This PC runs FreeDOS Beta 9 Revision 5 (this isn’t the latest stable release, but I’ll only upgrade when v. 1.0 is finally released), which uses its own CD-ROM controller, namely SHSUCDX instead of MS-DOS’s MSCDEX. This creates problems with some games, e.g. Inherit the Earth CD (an excellent adventure game), Flashback CD (luckily the original disk version works fine and is much better anyway), etc., and some audio CD player utilities. And for some reason, all of the classic Origin releases fail to run on FreeDOS. Why that is, I have no idea.
My regular home office/gaming PC runs Win98SE, which is fine for many DOS games, but it still feels somehow good being able to play these classics on an actual DOS PC.
Oh, and as a tip to those thinking of building dedicated DOS gaming PCs, Univbe has been released to the public and is available free of charge from http://www.scitechsoft.com/ftp/sdd/univbe67.exe . You can load it through a simple line in the autoexec.bat file: lh c:\univbe\univbe.exe, with c:\univbe being the directory to which it was installed. It’ll improve the running of graphic intensive DOS games, and make many others more compatible with your specific graphics setup.
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It’s not necessary to build a separate computer to run all of your old applications. I’ve always been a DOS nut and try to get it working wherever I can. My laptop is currently setup to quad-boot MSDOS 7.1, win95c, win98se, and winXP.
~True DOS mode fully supports both midi and wav through SoundBlaster and mpu401 emulation, as well as cd-rom and full joystick support (even MS Sidewinder 3D). Max available conventional memory under the current emm386 settings is 658kb.
~win95c and 98se supports full directx acceleration, joystick support, and full midi and wave playback.
I’ve always had a desire to write a tutorial for this kind of customization online, but I’ve never taken the time to do it. Would any of you find this useful?
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“It’s not necessary to build a separate computer to run all of your old applications. I’ve always been a DOS nut and try to get it working wherever I can. My laptop is currently setup to quad-boot MSDOS 7.1, win95c, win98se, and winXP.” (Brandon, the quote function does not seem to work in Firefox or IE for me)
It’s not that simple. At one time muti-boot was good solution, but increasingly it is becoming less so. There are many reasons to have older hardware. Many older games have speed bugs and slowdown utilities aren’t very good on a lot of new hardware, especially with the new dual core CPUs, which may before long be the only CPUs that you can get. Modern motherboards have no ISA slots, which rules out the use of some cards that you might want to use, such as some of the Roland sound cards.
Then there some of the earlier 3D games that used add in 3D cards that can only be paired with older PCI graphics cards. Mask of Eternity can’t be run at higher than 640×480 resolution on modern AGP cards (now being replaced by PCIe.) The only way around this with a “Glide Wrapper,” but these are imperfect and you will take a big performance hit using them.
If you don’t want to set up an old machine, emulation, such as with DOSBox, is a better route for most, and does not require you to find install disks for the older OSs, and if you are fortunate enough to have the install disks for Windows 3x, the next version of DOSBox will let you install it. you will be able to run the old 16 bit Windows games on XP that don’t work natively (think of the Windows version of KQ6) under XP and the new 64 bit Windows will not run any 16 bit code.
And lastly, you can no longer find DOS and Win9x drivers for a lot of the newer hardware, so you might be stuck with 640×480, 16 colors for your graphics card in Win9x, or have no audio.
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I have work arounds for all of these problems. Laptops are the most difficult however, since upgrades are limited to pcmcia, as well as type I and II support. So far I’ve had success with all of my laptop investments; my very old Compaq Armada, NEC Ready 220T, and my NEC Versa Sxi. I’ll be picking up a new Gateway 4530gz later in the week.
If there is enough support, I’ll seriously consider writing something up.
The idea is to be able to run DOS fully, no problems, on any modern machine.
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I picked up my new gateway laptop and have started the process of setting up my routine quad-boot configuration. So far I’ve run into tremendous difficulties with the pcmcia cardbus controller. I had a similar issue while doing the same configuration on my old laptop, so it’s not too surprising. I’ve just about solved the issue but not after several hours of research over the course of two days.
Reflecting on this situation I’ve come to the decision that it would not be possible to properly document the procedure to create a quad-boot setup similar to my own. There are too many hardware factors that come into play that can, for the most part, be surmounted through extensive research, but such statements in a walkthrough would be inappropriate and create unnecessary pitfalls for some who may try to follow the instructions.
Most of the headache comes from Windows 95. I love the OS, for sure, but it’s a pain to setup properly on modern machines. DOS, on the other hand, is not nearly so difficult. It would be much simpler to write a walkthrough to dual-boot msdos with your current OS. That I can do for sure, laptop or pc. But right now, I have work to do and a lot more research ahead of me to get this thing running.
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