DOS Retro PC with Parts nobody wants

I have no idea why people don't want lga 775 parts. The compatibility is immense. being able to run DOS all the way through to Windows 10 is crazy.

LGA775 just refuses to die. Core 2 Quad systems paired with an SSD, 8GB of RAM and a decent video card can still make for a good basic daily driver. One of the best platforms Intel has ever made IMO.

Phil, you're a tresure for the community! While everybody gets obssessed with period-correct parts which are super expensive, you're always showing us different ways to play MS-DOS games with all sorts of hardware at very reasonable prices. Thanks for keeping up the website with tools and for all your video content. You are an example to be followed in the retro gaming circles. I have learned a lot about DOS gaming and hardware tips from you. Thank you SO MUCH for your work!

Crazy to think how dependent modern CPUs are on their internal cache, that disabling it cuts a 667 MHz system down to the performance level of a 286/386 from the 1980s.

A socket 775 system running a 386 game properly is a testament to the x86 retrocompatibility.

Great stuff. I built a nice high end 775 Windows XP after watching your previous videos Phil. Only cost me about 40 euros in total - E8400, Abit IP35 Pro, 4GB Corsair Dominator and GTX 285. Runs like a dream.

Great video as always Phil! I remember buying that C-Media card brand new in box in my local computer store back in 2003 for €14.99! Its great to see that these cards are still being made!

This is a very good alternative for people who are just getting into the hobby. Retro parts are carrying such a crazy premium now that it's hard to find good deals, glad I bought all my stuff some time back whilst it was still reasonable!

Hey Phil, there are some really interesting CPUs for 775 available. The Celeron 400 series, codename Conroe-L. They are native single core processors (the last native ones that Intel produced) with up to 2.2GHz and only use up to 35W and are available for pennies.

It's good that in 2023 we can now get motherboards and DOS working properly. Took them long enough right? Those DOS utilities are beyond anything people in the DOS era would have thought of. I detect correct sound here too, I feel like I'm a little kid at my cousin's house. Another note, there is nothing wrong with using DOSbox for certain things, if your retro hardware build doesn't do everything you wanted to.

The core 2 duo or quad fell out of favor a bit more recently for a very simple reason imo, it was still pretty reasonable to use as a daily or even for a lot of modern games. Sure the instructions set or lack thereof became an increasing issue. So naturally what was used for modern stuff till quite recently isn´t really looked at for "dos gaming" purposes as it is probably considered to new. Had a c2q 6600 clocked at 3.2ghz for years, was an amazing pc and held up damn well. In regards to old games, i really stopped worrying so much about using older hardware and building a retro pc for that very purpose. Dosbox came a long way and if you add roland 32 emulators you are probably good to go for the vast majority of games on your overpowered daily machine. Still loved to work with old hardware, and would still do but i would lie if i had the time. And just buying retro hardware to then have it sit in a shelf is a bit of a waste, like hoarding cars.

Wow Core 2 Duo for DOS and a board that uses PCI Express instead of AGP? That's insane! If LGA 775 become more expensive, we can place the blame to Phil. =) Nice video!

I had 775 for a really long time, it is still used as a primary computer by ma parents. I replaced the E6550 with Xeon E5450 which is equal to Q9650. You can watch youtube without problems, system is working for it's age very well.

LGA775 is the most underrated platform for the widest range of usability (and with that, the Radeon x600 or x700 is the most underrated graphics card for Windows 98 specifically), and Intel 4th Gen is the most underrated platform for XP or a hybrid XP/7 or XP/10 system.

Hey man! I swear I love your videos. If your creator studio showing you high watch hours, that'd be me! haha! I watch videos over and over. I wanna see you making a gaming pc with gt 210 and pairing it with some dual core to play games like GTA SA and stuff, haha! Maybe on some 4:3 monitor, maybe CRT?

Oooh another video! ❤ Awesome with a Core2Duo project, I'm planning out my Core2Duo for this weekend as I just received a graphics card of the exact same type I used so many years ago, so now I can build an exact copy of my system I had before for Windows XP. Have a great weekend Phil and sleep well as I'm sure you're heading off to sleep in a short while 😋 (from posting this video that is)

I love this! I like to think after watching your channel there is no excuse not to get into retro gaming with so many interesting hardware options.

For the past few years I have really enjoyed playing my old dos games with dosbox. I have spent some time setting up DBGL and using dosbox ece my experience has been amazing. With the ability to quickly dial in speed and sound settings and being able to easily capture the game play from the same machine makes it handy. I can also zip my entire DBGL directory and copy it across to any of my machines. I still play dos games on my older machines like my pentium2 and pentium3 machines because of the authentic sound quality from my old ISA sound cards like the ess audiodrive es1868f or the awe64 but I really find myself in DBGL more because of the simplicity and features it offers. I also think that using such newer hardware and having to adjust all those settings and running tools like cpuspeed in dos is just very time consuming and then having to change all those settings back to run windows would be a total headache. For me I came into dos games around the tail end of the era, so speed sensitive games I'm not really nostalgic for. My elementary school had an old game called digger installed on most of the computers in the classroom. I went and tracked down that game and found out it was speed sensitive but someone back in the early 2000's made a new version that fixed that issue.

I love your benchmark pack. Thanks for putting it together for all of us.

Big fan of cpuspd 🎉 You can set up a batch file to scroll through the various options then record a topbench result for the iteration. This helps profiling your bios config and I found this helped me dial in compatibility on a few picky games