I have been wanting to do this since the spring of 2004 but I haven't had all of the hardware that I needed to get the project done. I have more of the things that I need so now I can progress more with the project.
The system works for the time being right now but is not complete. It features an AMD K6-2 350Mhz processor to deliver plenty of processing power for ANY DOS game that was out there available. Even a Intel Pentium 166Mhz worked well enough most of the time. This DOS gaming project of mine also features the ASUS P5A-B super socket 7 baby AT form factor motherboard. I had one of these during 1999 in my first built computer.
It also features an ATI Xpert 128 (Rage 128GL) 16MB video card. The current project has an AGP version. The AGP video cards have the advantage of 4 times the bandwidth to the rest of the system than PCI for a total of 528MB per second. PCI only has 132MB per second.
But I want to use the PCI version anyway because I need to use it in something, I want my AGP video cards to be used for more demanding things, and even a PCI video card provides more than enough performance for these old games. I have tested the most demanding DOS game that I have on a Pentium 166Mhz machine with 48MB of SIMM RAM, 2GB hard drive (16MB per second speed), and the PCI version of the ATI Xpert 128 16MB video card.
It still performed very well, so it's only going to do better with a faster hard drive, more system RAM, faster processor and system BUS. The other reason why I want to use the PCI version of a video card is so that I can have enough physical room on the motherboard for the CPU cooler that I want to use to cool the processor.
The problem is that the AGP slot and the processor socket are too close. And although the 60mm cooler that I have started with works good enough for cooling and has enough room with the AGP video card, I want to use a bigger cooler that has a 80mm fan for I can use illuminated LED 80mm fans to get the light effects and for the cooling ability.
The hard drive that I have in this thing currently is a 3.2GB Maxtor IDE UDMA33 (33MB per second) 3.5 inch hard drive. I want more RAM in the system. Something like 80MB, 96MB, or even 128MB of RAM. This way I can have a little more than needed to run the games or programs good, but have enough memory left over to have larger disk buffers in memory for transfer cache. This makes the data transfer process more smooth, therefore more better performance can result.
I don't like Intel or their processors so I decided on AMD years ago. I will have more than 64MB of RAM in this when I am finished. I intend to have either 96MB or 128MB of RAM in the final system. I know that most people will argue with me about having 64MB of RAM or more for using DOS.
But they are unaware that some people have made versions of DOS and modified DOS to use upto 4GB of RAM like Windows 95, Windows 2000, and even Windows XP can. Some people complain about DOS and it's singletask ONLY abilities. I have DR-DOS 7.03 on this project system and I can multitask or taskswitch.
I have successfully ran two programs at the same time with DR-DOS. That is why I have at least considered this type of disk operating system for my gaming project. I will add and discuss this later, but for now I have some pictures of the project available.
Click on the pictures to see the enlarged view
Progress on building the case can be seen here.
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Here are some pictures that I 3-D modeled of my plans for the project. These are just some of the ideas that I want in this DOS gaming system.
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Here are some concepts that I made for the type of case badges that I want to put on the DOS gaming system.
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Here is some information about DR-DOS.
DR-DOS 7.03 can be downloaded from here
I had thought about trying FreeDOS for this system. I liked how DR-DOS had multitasking and I loved it's taskmanager, but I had difficulty getting everything setup. That is likely because I am new to DR-DOS and it has many more features to the traditional MS-DOS 6.22 that I have used for years.
I wish that I could find a 3rd party taskmanager that has the features and ease of use as the DR-DOS taskmanager.
So I decided to try FreeDOS because I read that it is 100% compatible with the traditional MS-DOS 6.22 that so many games and applications were designed for. The other reason is because I read that FreeDOS can also allocate and use up to 2GB of memory. There is a FreeDOS32 available but I don't know much about it. I figured that I might try FreeDOS because I also like it's liscensing, if I want to build these DOS powered gaming systems and sell them, I can legally offer FreeDOS for free and not pay any royalties or any money.
FreeDOS information is here
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"NaugleFest" 2004 Kristian M. Naugle