VCF West 2025 - The Windows 98 Machine
The Current Specs (as of 7/15/25)
- Intel D875PBZ Motherboard
- 3.2GHz Northwood Pentium 4 (Socket 478)
- Nvidia GeForce FX5950
- 128GB SSD/1TB HDD
- 2x DVD drives (one of which is a burner)
- 1.44MB Floppy
- Aureal Vortex 2 sound card
- BlueSCSI v2 (for optical drive emulation)
- AHA-2940UW SCSI card
Given this is the system that started my Windows PC retrocomputing arc, it's only appropriate that it has the most effort put behind it and the longest story to tell, with multiple chapters.
The First Incarnation: Dell Dimension 4100
This machine began as a thrift-find Dimension 4100. I spotted it for pretty cheap ($8 or so) and scooped it to give to a friend, who handed it back to me some years later as he was looking to downsize. One day in 2023, I got this itch to play some SimCity 2000, as the Mac version of it didn't allow quite the number of cheats, so I got the 4100 down and began to dig into it.
Another motivator was that a fellow retro collector was looking to downsize and was giving away a large chunk of extra parts, among them a Radeon 9250 AGP. I needed to stick this into a system, so why not the 4100?
This system originally had a Pentium III Coppermine (933MHz) and a ATI Rage 128 Pro, so this would have been a hell of an upgrade on the video front. I got it all dialed in, and for the most part, it was great. I could play all manner of games on this system and they handled pretty damn well.
I also added in the various cards that would stick around for a bit at this point, like the SIL3114 SATA card.
But in building up this system, it gave me the itch for something better. This was fueled by the fact that the CPU fan was beginning to go, and in these systems the CPU fan and CPU cooling baffle are all one unit and not easily separated and replaceable. The proprietary nature of the 4100 made me feel like this system was a dead end, and I should think about something else, and thankfully something else happened not long after.
The Second Incarnation: Asus CUV4X Custom Build
Seeing as we were still in the land of Coppermine here, not much changed in the CPU department, but it was nice to be on a standard ATX system with standard components, unlike the Dimension 4100. I brought the 933MHz P3 forward, as well as all of the cards and drives.
The case was some generic beat up beige case, but hey, at least it was standard.
This was kind of a successful failure as this was the product of me seeking out a Tualatin system, but again, it was still a win, because I got closer, and I had a system I could build up rather than being stuck due to proprietary garbage.
It didn't take long for fortunes to change, though...
The Third Incarnation: TUSL2-C and Lian-Li case
I doubled down on my efforts to find a Tualatin-capable board and thankfully one popped up at ewaste and I was able to broker a trade for it. The only thing stopping me was that the board I ended up with had been hit hard by the capacitor plague.
Decided I wasn't going to just give up, pulled the offending caps off the board, and placed a Mouser order to get it all done. This all hit at a really messed up time though, as I had to essentially move out of my room (floors getting replaced) and as such my garage workspace was all sorts of messed up. I also caught COVID around this time, so that was fun.
Despite it all, I got the caps replaced, and at the end of it had a fully functional TUSL2-C! The CPU on it was a 1.2GHz Celeron, and while that would do for now, I hungered for more. A quick trip to eBay rendered results: A 1.26GHz Pentium III-S. The III-S chips were notable for having double the L2 cache as the regular Pentium III/Celeron chips. I would have loved to get a 1.4GHz III-S but alas, they're quite pricey so I opted to just hang back. I mean, Win98 was already going to fly on this machine.
Plus, I mean, this was a Tualatin Pentium III. They're known for running pretty cool. There's likely some room for overclocking, so that's exactly what I did, and as of current it's sitting at a 1.4GHz overclock and perfectly stable.
By this point I was still using this beige, unassuming chassis. Cool if I wanted a sleeper PC, but man. It'd be nice to have something cool. That's when the perfect case showed up at an ewaste facility I frequent: an aluminum Lian-Li case, much like the one LGR uses for the Megaluminum Monster.
Appropriately, it even had green fans installed in it. Little on the nose, there.
Next up was the video card: While the Radeon 9250 was getting the job done for the most part, something better would be nice, as this card's a little on the weaker side. I mentioned this within earshot of Tech Ambrosia, who suggested the GeForce 6600GT, as they were relatively low-key but still performant.
This ended with a challenge: She bought one on eBay, and told me I could have it if I could meet her at VCF SoCal. Alas, I wasn't able to make it (LOTS of life stuff happened around SoCal in 2024) but she gladly handed it off to a friend of mine who was in attendance and willing to hold it.
With that, the third incarnation was completed, and it was awesome. There were quirks here and there, but for the most part, this system ran like the wind.
A New Challenger Approaches! (The Fourth Incarnation)
As I write this, I'm in the final stages of prepping for VCF West, and, well...developments happened.
Initially, I planned on transitioning this system to an AMD Athlon XP-based setup, with a Asus A7N8X motherboard and Athlon XP 3200+, which would net a fair boost over the Tualatin of before. I had even acquired a swank Zalman cooler! This system was going to rock, but given the difficulties in getting this system stable for VCF, I wanted to wait until after West to actually install everything.
(Brief intermission: In the quest to get this system stable I actually downgraded video cards, moving over to an Dell OEM Radeon 9700TX, figuring the drivers would be better and it would be more period correct, which would hopefully mean more stability. Alas, Direct3D is just cursed, and using OpenGL ended up being the fix.)
However, as fate would have it...I went to the ewaste facility a few days ago as of this writing, and boy oh boy did fate have something in store: I was there to acquire a case for Windows Across the Ages (the table next to mine): An old, mid-00s Alienware. What I didn't know was that there would be some good hardware in it, acquired for a steal: A 3.2GHz Northwood P4 system and a GeForce FX5950. Uh. Yeah. This changes plans a bit. Don't get me wrong, the Athlon is still a good system but at least according to old articles, the 3.2GHz Northwood (especially at 800MHz bus speeds) lays the smackdown on the Athlon.
But more lucrative was the FX5950. These cards are NOT cheap, and here I am with one for far less than eBay prices (especially since the friendo running Windows Across the Ages agreed to go halfsies with me on the whole lot). 10000% this card was going to the show provided it worked (and it did, thankfully), and if I'm in for a penny, might as well be in for a pound, right?
I decided to just throw caution to the wind and transition everything over to the Pentium 4 board. This had several side benefits:
- Integrated SATA that's separate from the PCI bus so it isn't sucking down that bandwidth
- Integrated Gigabit Ethernet (since my gigabit card died)
- Integrated USB 2.0 (no need to burn a PCI slot for it)
- It just looks cool, it's a black board.
Of course, getting everything working wasn't the easiest thing (and this board doesn't support dual floppy drives so I had to pull the 5.25" 1.2MB drive), and the whole escapade caused me to launch a side thing where I write my documentation, you can find that here.
But, in the end, it all works, and as I type this it's currently playing UT99 and is plenty happy with it.
So, what about your experience with Windows 98?
This is to answer a question that I'm sure is in the back of peoples' heads: Why are you nostalgic about Windows 98?
It really was one of the first OSes I used when I really began gaining consciousness and started actually knowing how to use a computer. It was the late 90s and I lived in a not-so-great town with my mom and we got one of those cheapo HP Celeron boxes with 98 onboard. Not sure how we ever ended up with it. All I really remember is that it came with some fun home design software and I spent hours playing it like I would The Sims on the Compaq Deskpro we'd get a number of years later.
This would continue later on, in the early 00s: Right after life kinda upended everything (my sister ended up moving back in with us after my father had passed away) one of the things we got from a neighbor was an old Compaq Deskpro, which had a super fast (joking) Slot-1 Pentium III in it. Along for the ride was Windows 98, of course.
That 98 install carried us for a long, long time until eventually we Did Some Things and upgraded to XP, which despite the relatively low specs (it did only have 128MB of RAM, after all) was a breath of fresh air mostly due to being NT-based.
I did put in a lot of hours into various games on that Deskpro. The Sims. Diablo II (so many play discs broken). Planescape: Torment. Divine Divinity. Unreal and Unreal Tournament. Starcraft. That Deskpro did eventually become mine after the family computer was upgraded to a newer (but still old) Compaq Presario. At which point I threw an ATI TV Wonder USB on it and made it a makeshift TV, too.