Asking for a friend - real hardware for DOS thru Win98 - what's a good list of components?

02k-guy

I'll tell you right off the bat, this friend is not "a gamer". And, wants to stick with Intel processor and "no tricks required" video.

And a USB port and LAN.

Also: already know I (whoops - meant my friend) will inevitably get real floppy drive(s) - even though swore would never do any more floppy based software archiving.

So that's about it - need a platform that can boot to both DOS all the way to 98SE, and run Windows based hexers, ISO editors, 7zip and WinRAR, etc.

TIA, etc, etc,,,,

SomeGuy

What you are describing is similar to what people refer to as a "tweener" system.

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/how-do-you-define-a-tweener.60584/

In a nutshell such a system ideally should have:
-Have any Pentium, K6, or Athlon era CPU
-Have a generic AT or ATX case
-Have BIOS support for *two* real, internal floppy drives. (And BIOS support for 360k, 720k, 1.2mb and 1.44mb)
-Have Ethernet Networking (easy to add)
-Have Windows 95 OSR2 or 98SE as the primary OS for easy DOS access (ME/2000/XP are more difficult)
-Have USB ports for flash drives.
-Have at least one ISA slot and plenty of additional slots (AGP/PCI)
-Ideally the FDC should support FM encoding, but that is rather uncommon and hard to tell just by looking. This would be used for accessing some non-DOS disk formats.
-The motherboard should use a coin cell CMOS battery instead of a Dallas or Odin integrated clock/battery chip.

If we are talking about specific components, for maximum flexibility, I'd personally go with a generic ATX system rather than some OEM system that has everything built in.

If you do get some OEM system that you just want to plop down and start using, you need to first be sure you can dig up the right drivers for all hardware components.

As for specific, I'd probably stick with Nvdia AGP/PCI cards that have Windows 98 driver support. (There was a thread about those somewhere on the forum, that would be the Geforce 6xxx series or earlier)

Networking would be a generic realtek network card. Win98 should work with Gigabit speed cards.

Motherboards of this era that had built-in USB probably had 1.1. So you will probably want to add a PCI USB 2.0 card.

If you were concerned about DOS sound then looking for a real-mode compatible ISA sound card or built-in sound system would be important. Otherwise any PCI sound card would do.

The IDE on motherboards of this era may not all have LBA48 (over 127GB) support. An easy way around this is to add a PCI SATA controller.

02k-guy

@SomeGuy - thanks SG. An excellent outline of what I'm thinking of.

"If we are talking about specific components, for maximum flexibility, I'd personally go with a generic ATX system rather than some OEM system that has everything built in."

Yup, white box only - almost goes without saying - unless someone is already a brand specific fan boi and knows all the pitfalls of proprietary systems.

Imma leaning towards something like this image
: may have owned or built a number of these "back in the day".

ctrlc

A quick search brought me to this list of contemporary (at the time) Win98 compatible motherboards:

https://msfn.org/board/topic/175820-modern-motherboards-working-with-windows-98-the-list/

SimpleDiskette

If you mean a high-end windows 98 computer that also runs ms-dos 6.22 You may want a Athlon, K6-xx or Generic Intel Pentium II(I). paired with 63 MB RAM and no more, as MS-DOS 6.22 goes crazy with 64 and over RAM, If the computer is gonna be commonly used and needs a decent storage space, I'd recommend over 36 GB, Rather if this is gonna be a lower-end computer more for just using internet or basic features then use a basic Socket 7 with Pentium (66+ MHz) and just about 27 MB. This lower-end computer is also capable of running earlier ms-dos versions. 5.x Doesn't really matter because it really doesn't know that extra memory that it doesn't need even exists on the computer.

Also this is the more basic part, there's a lot more I can say but I just don't feel like writing it.