It started with a dream...
Well, with a monitor.
An old Dell monitor I picked up from a friend.
No one else would have thought it to be anything special.
After all, it's gross, icky 4 by 3.
But this monitor was special.
DVI and VGA input, USB 2.0 hub, height adjustment and VESA mounting - standard office monitor
stuff.
The special part was the refresh rate.
75 hz.
Not quite 144, but much better than the scrub-life 60hz monitors I have everywhere else in the
apartment.
But I didn't just want to play the latest and greatest games at a smooth 75hz at glorious
1280 by 1024 - oh, no.
I wanted to go back and re-live my childhood 4 by 3 gaming dreams.
I wanted things to feel like they felt, play the games I would've played back then, and
fulfill the PC Master Race-ness that I didn't even know existed yet.
Enter Krillin - my latest Windows XP rig.
The basis is a Dell Optiplex GX620 - a tiny office PC with a power brick the size of the
tower, and an 8-pin power connection for it... for some odd reason.
I got this in a lot from _____ and I couldn't help but throw Windows XP Black Edition on
it and start setting things up how I like.
Krillin is small and loud, but can pack a punch.
Sometimes.
Spouting a Pentium 4 650 ULTIMATE EDITION with 2 threads at 3.4GHz and 2GB of RAM, with
a 250GB hard drive that has BOTH molex AND SATA power connections somehow - it means
business.
...just not for gaming.
Once I installed everything, found a cheat code printout from 2007, and used Ninite to
install my essential software, it was time to roll.
I also just had to grab the most ridiculous gaming keyboard, mouse, and gamepad I could
find.
Why not?
Let’s test some games, shall we?
The benchmarks..
The KrillinMarks… started out well!
At full resolution, Angry Birds ran at 80 to 90 FPS.
Whoooooo!
...no Chromium BSU, a port of a Linux shmup, holds
a rock-solid 50 FPS throughout.
Not bad.
Counter-Strike 1.6 ran a whopping…
20 frames per second?
Even at 640x480, this game just would not run.
It was very unfortunate.
I just wanted to headshot some scrubs!
Things were looking so good, too.
CS:GO literally wouldn’t run due to not supporting recent-enough shaders, though.
Heh.
Thankfully, Warcraft 3 held up around 40 to 45 FPS - a totally playable framerate for
that game.
That was nice to see.
After watching the Warcraft film, I’ve been dying to get back into this universe.
Lastly, the pride and joy, the main game I’d been hoping to play here.
Old School RuneScape.
Or 2007Scape.
Or whatever you prefer to call it.
15 to 19 FPS at full resolution using OSBuddy.
While it’s totally playable, and probably all I ever really played the game at as a
kid, it’s not really what I was going for.
Despite passing 3 GHz in clock speed, the 2 threads of the Pentium 4 650 alone isn’t
built to handle the gaming demand I ask of it.
If you wanna play some super basic older games, like Zoombinis, or mobile ports like Angry
Birds, then Krillin will serve you well.
But for normal gaming?
Not necessarily.
HOWEVER, there is one thing that this little PC seems to do well at - EMULATION!
I haven’t gone into extensive testing just yet, but I was able to run Donkey Kong Country
and a couple PSX games at full speed on this bad boy - as long as I ran things at native
resolutions.
Looking quite promising!
More work will be required to hook it up to a proper CRT TV and do more extensive testing,
but this may have just become my main emulator box.
It even has a CD-ROM drive if I just wanted to pop games right into it.
Yes… it’s only a CD drive, not DVD…
I don’t even.
But this is not my final stop on the Windows XP build train to fulfill my childhood dreams.
Where will we go next?
Who knows.
Until then, I’ll keep tinkering with this bad boy - maybe I’ll find something to save
it.
I hope you enjoyed this different style of video.
If you did, be sure to whack that like button, get subscribed - as I have a lot more awesome
videos coming - and I’ll catch you in the next one.
My name’s EposVox and thanks for watching.