Hi there!
I'm hoping someone can help me,
Ive been a console gamer for years, but decided I wanted to play some of my great childhood PC games which are all on here.

I'm a complete novice when it comes to PCs. I would preferably want something cheap, simply to play old games like baldurs gate, alpha centauri, jagged alliance etc. Also if possible something that can be easily portable like a mini or shuttle pc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Games on GOG are modified to work on newer systems, so compatibility shouldn't be a problem. Just check what games you want to play, and make sure what you buy has the necessary system requirements .



EDIT: If you want something portable, buy a laptop .

Yes for playing old games you can almost buy whatever and it will be fine. But don't buy something old and used; you might run into trouble.

No Mac but Windows 7 and no Intel HD graphics chip but a regular AMD or Nvidia graphics card.
This might spare you some troubles. Performance wise are all current machines able to run older GOG games (especially when they offer a dedicated graphics card from AMD or Nvidia).

One of these posts to make me feel old... :-)

As the others said, all of them should work on any of today's machines if you get them from GOG. My recommendation would be to get a mouse - touchscreen may or may not work (ymmv) and touchpad is just PITA...

I'm not familiar enough with the current brands to give you a good specific recommendation, but I will say a lot of this depends on specifically which type of old school games you're going to play.

If you're doing any old first-person shooters, for example, realize that virtually all of them are built to use a mouse and don't behave as well with a controller or touch controls compared to some modern games- so to toxicTom's point, it might be worth thinking about your physical setup for that class of games. Personally I've not been able to enjoy old shooters on my laptop. Point and click adventures are in that direction too, though not as much. On my laptop I find side scrollers and strategy games work great, but from a control side the rest are meh and I have to move to the office and my desktop.

Now if you're talking waaaay back, as in Commander Keen, DOS-era, I recommend you take a look at the requirements for a piece of software called DosBox. Most of the games of that era on GoG are actually running on that piece of free software to work on your modern machine. It can be surprisingly rough on low-powered systems, particularly if you are using filters to make the graphics acceptable on modern LCD displays. The CPU tends to bottleneck way before the video card on those old games, unlike just about any modern game (except MMO's).

I'll also comment that for games in general, especially older games where you tend to load a lot (as in save, save, save, die, reload in old adventure games or loading every time you go to a different building in old RPG's) running the game on a SSD as opposed to a HD is awesome. It is so much faster and less disruptive to the experience that you'll wonder how you ever enjoyed the game originally on your old HD. (Let alone StarFlight floppies!:P)

Sorry not to give you specific hardware requirements, but that's my perspective in general and I'm sure others with more current knowledge of pre-assembled pc brands will give you more specific ideas.

An old 386 or 486 will handle old games.You have a couple of problems:
1.Finding them.
2.How long will they last?
3.Finding one in good condition.
4.It will end up being a waste of money.
5.If you need to play modern AAA games,you will need a NEW PC.

Any PC you have should be good enough. You might even consider switching your OS, DOS games run in DOSBox which runs pretty much anywhere, and for Windows games I am using Wine.

If you buy old games from GOG they are already made compatible for modern versions of Windows and sometimes even OS X and Linux. If you want to run the original retail releases though it depends. Some games still run great, some games are more compatible in Wine than on modern Windows and some games are hopeless. It always depends on the game in question.

The ideal solution would be to find a PC from the era or re-build one from the parts, as that will always run the way it was meant to, but I don't think that's really what you are looking for. Plus who wants one of those bulky loud ugly grey boxes when we have nice and sleek PCs these days?

Pretty much any dual core CPU with a cheap Onboard/Nvidia/AMD GPU will run old games, you also mentioned portability so I presume you want a laptop. I would answer the following questions before going ahead:

- How much is your budget?
- What else do you think you'll do with the laptop/desktop?
- Do you have an intention to play more modern games too? (PS3/PS4/Xbox quality graphics)

Specifying budget amount is very important as it gives people an idea what kind of system you can get.

6. You won't be able to play games bought on GOG and will have to hunt down old disks and cd roms instead. (doesn't sound like a good idea, see 4)

That's strange as my 486 has Gog games installed.

I'm not all that tech savvy so I guess I made wrong assumptions then, but I'm genuinely surprised to hear that. What OS are you running them on? Were you able to run GOG's installers on it? Did you have to do any manual installation, apply workarounds? I'm still not convinced it would be a comfortable and satisfactory setup for someone who has no prior experience with PCs.

XP,and I think from memory I had a couple on my 386 and no workarounds.But I think the 386's could of been disk
installed.Only wish XP was still viable,as it was the best OS.

If you want portable, a refurb laptop is probably the way to go. Older PC's tended to be large. I'm cheap too, and I'd recommend a refurb laptop of some sort, similar to some of these:

http://www.blairtg.com/index.php/shop-computers/laptops.html

You can probably get something perfectly portable and fine for older games for around $200 or less. (edit: sorry, I didn't realize you were in UK. There's probably a Microsoft certified refurber over there too, but the link I provided is US based.)

fwiw, I'm still running XP on an intel core 2 duo (ancient PC, vintage maybe 2007?) w/ 4G ram with an nvidea video card. It still plays many newer games fine, and is more than fine for older games. But XP is on the outs so newer windows is probably worth it..