Something weird happened when I was home during the spring and summer lockdown of 2020; I started getting oddly nostalgic, especially for hills and blue skies.
The new sense of free time definitely was a factor. My wife and I started a garden, painted the inside of our house, and began sorting through old boxes of possessions and junk. We became pretty familiar with eBay and thrift stores in the area too, as we unloaded a ton of old clothes and house stuff we would never use again. While doing so, I came across all my games, a few toys, and some old electronics. I spent hours trying to figure out how to run some old PC games, like SHOGO and Black and White. It’s possible yes, but there’s weird software hurdles and headaches to go through.
Then, much like any other 3am YouTube rabbit hole, I came across the recent trend of “classic PC gaming”. People are hunting the internet, yard sales, and pawn shops for old hardware to restore and run classic stuff on. There’s even the CRT fanatics out there, fighting for TVs and monitors with that old buzzing tech. I became hooked, had some fever dreams of doing this myself, but thankfully came to my senses and dropped it…
…Until a couple of months ago, the beginning of 2022!
I’m at work one day, and after befriending the new IT guy over the past year, and I noticed a ton of old computers and tech from the school is getting surplussed out. I mention my crazy idea of a classic gaming PC and asked him what the odds are that he’d have a Windows XP compatible computer, half joking since education should have much more modern resources (right?). Without missing a beat, he pulls out a slim HP workstation, saying “let me know when it’s running”.
Setting up a computer is not foreign to me and I thoroughly enjoy giving it a nice clean as well. However, this particular computer gave me some issues from the get go. After obtaining a Windows XP Pro ISO, and some necessary software, I hit a few walls. It had windows 10 running on it (somehow) and was CRAWLING when it turned on. I wanted to get into the BIOS and set it up to boot to a USB or DVD with Windows XP Pro but I was met with firmware passwords.
I spent a few days researching how to get around this but there’s nothing. Finally I found a forum thread where an IT specialist for a college said that their palette of desktops from HP could have their BIOS accessed simply by “pressing enter three times…”. Much to my surprise, it worked! We’re off to the races, at least with the speed of an 80GB 5200rpm hard drive…
Windows XP boots up way faster than I remember it as a kid. The computer my colleague donated has an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300, and 4GB of ram. I considered throwing in an SSD but it appears through research online that Windows XP does a lot of file paging and data accessing, which would wear out even the best SSD. I plan to get a 500gb or 1TB hard drive for 40-50 bucks in the future.
Graphics were another confusing area. See, this compaq HP has a proprietary power supply that provides only 240 watts of power. Graphics cards, especially the higher end gaming ones, require a bit of juice, requesting anywhere from 350 watts and up power supplies. The case itself also limits the size of the card that can fit in the computer. After some research (and a 9.99 price tag) I settled on the ATI 6450 low profile graphics card. Look, it’s not a great card (google benchmarks from the original Crysis) but I honestly don’t plan on playing games past Doom 3 on this computer. It’s meant to be a time capsule of my first computer, the games I played around then, and some older stuff I missed out on.
Sound also didn’t work. This computer was purchased in a mass school/business order, and the bios has admin passwords and security that my colleagues and I couldn’t get around. The problem – I can’t enable audio for some reason. I found a few folks online who had issues when buying second hand computers like this and their work around was installing a PCI sound card. Another blast from the past added to the rig was a Creative Labs sound card. Quick eBay purchase for this was also necessary, and it was just another 10 bucks.
Earlier I mentioned having other necessary software. I got a virtual ISO mounting program, the latest Windows XP drivers for the graphics card, and a few other goodies like VLC player. Reddit actually has a Windows XP subreddit with a lot of resources, links, and tutorials if you’re interested in doing something like this. I spent a lot of time going back and forth there, searching for ideas or solutions, and then archiving it to a thumb stick. I also went and found a lot of classic PC games on archive.org that I do own, physically or on steam, and burned the images to those games to discs so I could install them on the computer. Reddit.com/r/WindowsXP was a huge help by the way!
After a good dusting and wipe down of all the components and case, some new thermal paste, and some older accessories, this thing is done. I haven’t had a chance to purchase a new hard drive just yet, so I’m still rocking the 80GB hard drive that came with it. Much to my surprise, it’s running like a champ. I’ve managed to install a few older games, relive some glory days, and nothing melted considering it’s age. A few colleagues have dropped by to see it and it was a sort of holy experience for us all to see the Windows XP logo pop up after a couple of decades.
This is definitely a novelty, yes, but it’s got a lot of positive potential. I rescued something from the land fill, gave it a new life, and now have yet another source of entertainment when it’s appropriate. While I plan to continue cleaning the house and decluttering, I think I pitched enough stuff during lockdown to suffice having this around for the occasional fun. I encourage you to YouTube tutorials and showcases of people doing similar stuff, as well as the video below that I created on the process.
