Finally got both retro capable PCs running DOS and Windows games. It's a shame about the DVD drives though, I think I'd like to snag a new one at some point. The drive I'm using now was from an arcade machine, it's already got tons of hours on it.
What's next? Well, I'm not exactly sure..
I've imaged the 16GB CF card from the first machine, wrote it out to a second 16GB CF card, and reinstalled Win98SE on both of them. They've got fresh installs with only the specific drivers for their hardware (as they are not identical machines, just mostly similar)
And they have names! They're both named after towns in Legend of Blacksilver. All my other machines are named so too.
Meet Appia and Ironwood.
FINALLY
The two machines are connected via IPX on Windows. I couldn't seem to get them to find each other in DOS, but that's a project for another day.
I'm troubleshooting an issue where the Appia machine crashes after being idle for a while. Ironwood is still rock solid. I believe it's related to power saving features, so I've disabled all of them on both boxes.
Since we're only networking with two players, connecting them directly via ethernet is no issue. But if I want to allow networking with more than just two players, I'll need to look at getting a rack hub or switch (that supports IPX)
Turns out disabling all the power saving features indeed fixed my issue. Awesome~
