UNBIT.de

On one of my retro systems, Tomb Raider 2 had always run flawlessly. However, when I wanted to blast my way through Venice with Lara yesterday, the game crashed instantly upon launching the Tomb2.exe with the message “Microsoft C++ Runtime library error (abnormal termination)”.

Here is yet another great example of how you can just continuously tinker with old hardware. Over the past few days, I swapped several graphics cards in my systems and, among other things, equipped a Windows 95 system with a Diamond Stealth 2000 Pro (S3 ViRGE/DX).

When I decided to play a round of Day of the Tentacle on my 486 again today, I had to struggle with random freezes on my PC. For no apparent reason, the game would stop accepting any mouse or keyboard inputs after a few minutes.

The S3 Graphics pedestal bug affected S3’s highly popular graphics cards from the mid-to-late 1990s, such as the S3 Trio64 and ViRGE series. Instead of seeing pure black in dark areas, players saw a noticeable dark grey or muddy charcoal block/glow.

Sam & Max Hit the Road is a fantastic adventure game, and every now and then I find myself drawn back to this classic. Recently, I wanted to play it on a system that is a bit more modern for the game: a Pentium 200 setup with a Sound Blaster 16 and a wavetable board for General MIDI.

Yet another strange phenomenon on my 286 PC.
After expanding the system with a Lo-Tech EMS memory board and loading the appropriate driver in MS-DOS 5.0, everything initially seemed to work fine. EMS was successfully detected and recognized by games. However, when I tried to play a round of Spear of Destiny, I noticed graphical glitches.

When I recently tested my freshly configured 286 PC with a few period-appropriate games, I encountered a strange issue with Prince of Persia 2. Everytime I launched the game via PRINCE.EXE, I was greeted with the message: Couldn’t find NISMIDI.DAT.

When it comes to finding a fast, stable, and feature-packed Socket 7 motherboard, you’ll often end up with one of the excellent ASUS boards. The ASUS P/I P55T2P4 is a true retro classic, and the slightly newer ASUS TX97-E is also a solid choice. However, there’s one board that many retro enthusiasts tend to overlook.

Lemmings 2 drove me absolutely crazy for years, because it just wouldn’t run properly on any of my retro systems. It would either crash immediately on startup, freeze the PC, or run with only Adlib sound effects or only music.
I’ve finally found a setup that allows Lemmings 2 to run flawlessly on all my machines.

The Sound Blaster 16 is considered one of the most iconic sound cards in PC history. It brought true stereo sound, 16-bit audio quality, and hardware-based OPL3 FM synthesis to millions of home computers – quickly becoming the standard for DOS games and multimedia applications.