VOGONS


post up pics of your "computing area"

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Reply 281 of 2202, by feipoa

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Nice to see such a large collection of white/beige cases. Which one of those is your everyday computer?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 282 of 2202, by Tiremaster400

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The Pentium III in the center with the router on top is the daily computer I use for reading on the internet and downloading for the older computers. It's a 600 Mhz with 390 megs of RAM and GForce 4 with 128 megs of RAM. Surf internet mostly with this and play UT99, Quake III, and Deus Ex.

In the dother room, I have a Pentium IV 2.2 gig with GForce 5 I use for watching movies on the internet and making ebay bids down to last second as the Pentium III isn't fast enough.

Reply 283 of 2202, by Mau1wurf1977

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Awesome setup! Question about the second image. There are two thin desktops (The ones with the red triangle marker). What computers are these?

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Reply 284 of 2202, by Tiremaster400

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Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Awesome setup! Question about the second image. There are two thin desktops (The ones with the red triangle marker). What computers are these?

Those are 2 industral 386 computers I just got last week. Haven't booted them up yet been busy with work and other distracting games. I opened one up and it appeared to have 2 bios chips on mutha board. I'll post more on them later as I progress. They are really neat though.

So many projects.......

Reply 285 of 2202, by raymangold22

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Tiremaster400 wrote:

The Pentium III in the center with the router on top is the daily computer I use for reading on the internet and downloading for the older computers. It's a 600 Mhz with 390 megs of RAM and GForce 4 with 128 megs of RAM. Surf internet mostly with this and play UT99, Quake III, and Deus Ex.

In the dother room, I have a Pentium IV 2.2 gig with GForce 5 I use for watching movies on the internet and making ebay bids down to last second as the Pentium III isn't fast enough.

You use the 300GL as your main computer? I absolutely detest the design of those things (they were the cheapest of the PC300 series, at least they use rubycon caps). Mine is slowly dying, going to get rid of it soon. When it worked fine, it sported 1GB of RAM & 700Mhz P3 --> which wasn't bad.

Words don't describe this thing... slot CPU instead of a socket... PSU cooling, and that baffle takes the cake!
ibm300gl3.JPG

Reply 286 of 2202, by Tiremaster400

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raymangold22 wrote:
You use the 300GL as your main computer? I absolutely detest the design of those things (they were the cheapest of the PC300 ser […]
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Tiremaster400 wrote:

The Pentium III in the center with the router on top is the daily computer I use for reading on the internet and downloading for the older computers. It's a 600 Mhz with 390 megs of RAM and GForce 4 with 128 megs of RAM. Surf internet mostly with this and play UT99, Quake III, and Deus Ex.

In the dother room, I have a Pentium IV 2.2 gig with GForce 5 I use for watching movies on the internet and making ebay bids down to last second as the Pentium III isn't fast enough.

You use the 300GL as your main computer? I absolutely detest the design of those things (they were the cheapest of the PC300 series, at least they use rubycon caps). Mine is slowly dying, going to get rid of it soon. When it worked fine, it sported 1GB of RAM & 700Mhz P3 --> which wasn't bad.

Words don't describe this thing... slot CPU instead of a socket... PSU cooling, and that baffle takes the cake!
ibm300gl3.JPG

I know, I know but I got 6 of them for free and it was convienant at the time as my pentium 2 died at the time and some of these out of the pile worked fine with no problem. This is the first computer I used for the internet when I first got a cable connection at my new house in 2009. I have better computers now, I just never decommissioned this junker as it works fine and it never quit on me yet even after leaving it on for days on end.

I've been playing X-Com for the last couple of days on a 386-25 tower I just freed up the upper memory on. That game is awesome!!!!

Reply 287 of 2202, by Iris030380

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XCOM on a 386 25? That must be horrendous when someone launches a phosphor rocket and you view from the top level. I remember almost losing my mouse cursor entirely when there was lots of smoke on-screen on my 486SLC-33.

I never knew what it was like to play XCOM and TFTD with smooth frames until 1997! 😁

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Reply 289 of 2202, by Tiremaster400

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I wanted to put this 386-25 through a torture test but the frame rate does drop during combat!!! Perhaps I'll start a new game on a 486dx2 or early Pentium. Would a Pentium 66 be too fast for X-com?

Reply 290 of 2202, by Mau1wurf1977

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This is what my "man cave" currently looks like.

My mein retro PC is my super socket 7 time machine. A hybrid out of mostly new parts apart from the main guts.

The 486 is on the shelf but might make this a dedicated Sound Blaster 2.0 / CMS machine and the time machine will do AWE / MT-32 / CM-32L / Sound Canvas.

The PC next to the time machine is my media server and video capture machine.

img1280yh.jpg
img1281we.jpg
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Reply 291 of 2202, by bestemor

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That was an effing lot of Roland modules on those shelves....! 😅
(envious, obviously...!)

And, what on earth have you packed inside that fluffy duvet !? 😳
Probably some very special Roland baby module that has to be kept extra warm.... 🤣 🤣 🤣

Reply 294 of 2202, by gerwin

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That is a neat computer room you have there. Well organised and safely stored retro hardware all around. Wish I could check out these boxes and envelopes, then maybe borrow something. 😉

At Ikea wooden storage racks are very afforadable, I bought two of these a while ago.

Never considered putting a tower behind a screen....

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 295 of 2202, by HunterZ

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My current house has a walk-in closet, so I have a lot of my PC and console stuff in bins (and boxes). I'm moving to a new house this weekend though and am not sure where it's going to go yet.

I also have my gaming desktop's case behind my 24" monitor 😀 Combined, they are still less deep than some bigger CRTs.

Reply 296 of 2202, by Totempole

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This is my "Retro-Computing" Area:

ijiw6.jpg

They're nothing special, but they're more than suitable for my needs, which is to run various games released between 1990 and 2000.

The PC on the left:

Pentium 2 Slot1 400MHz
Intel 440ZX Chipset Motherboard
256MB PC133 RAM
32MB XFX Riva TNT2 M64
2x 80GB Seagate PATA Hard Drives
500GB Hitachi SATA Drive
VIA VT6421A SATA Controller Card
Sound Blaster AWE64 Value ISA (Primary)
Sound Blaster Vibra 128 PCI (Secondary)
3Com 10/100 Ethernet Card
48x Mecer CD-Rom (PATA)
15" Mecer CRT Monitor
Genius SP-S350 Stereo Speakers
Generic Black ATX Chassis
Cooler Master GX-650 Watt Power Supply
5.25" Drive Bay Speaker (As Internal PC Speaker)
IBM PS/2 Keyboard & Mouse
XGR 4-Port USB Hub Mousepad

The PC on the right:
Pentium 3 Slot1 450MHz
Intel 440BX Chipset Motherboard
256MB PC133 RAM
32MB ATI RAGE 128 Pro
2x 80GB Seagate PATA Hard Drives
500GB Samsung SATA Drive
VIA VT6421A SATA Controller Card
Sound Blaster AWE64 Value ISA (Primary)
Sound Blaster Vibra 128 PCI (Secondary)
SiS 900 10/100 Ethernet Card
22x LG DVD-Writer (PATA)
15" Mecer CRT Monitor
Logitech X-140 Stereo Speakers
Generic Black ATX Chassis
Thermaltake Litepower 350Watt Power Supply
5.25" Drive Bay Speaker (As Internal PC Speaker)
Genius PS/2 Keyboard & Mouse
XGR 4-Port USB Hub Mousepad

Both machines are very similar (that was my intention). They both have
Dual-Boot Windows 98 Configurations, both hold the same data and
they're linked via ethernet. The biggest difference is the graphics card,
they originally both had Riva TNT2 M64's, but I later decided to put a Rage
128 Pro in one of them, so I now have a spare Rage 128 and TNT2 M64
for each machine.

Reply 298 of 2202, by Totempole

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HunterZ wrote:

You said it was intentional that they have similar specs; would you be willing to explain why?

Basically, when I originally started this project, it was never my intention to
have 2 machines, but eventually I got to thinking, what would I do if one of
the hard disks failed? So, I bought a second set of hard drives and cloned them.

Then I figured, if I have a second set of data, why not build a second
compatible machine, so I did. I then linked the 2 machines via ethernet so
I could network certain games.

That's pretty much the whole story.

You see, the 2x 80GB drives in each machine are loaded with Windows
98SE and the 500GB holds the CD-Images of my games so I don't have to
do any CD-Swapping.

Now I know legally speaking this isn't really acceptable, but it's really
convenient nonetheless.

Reply 299 of 2202, by HunterZ

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It doesn't matter now, but you could put your ISOs on a networked drive, and it would still be as fast as a classic CD-ROM drive (probably 6x or so for Samba over 100mbit ethernet).

You can run some installed games over LAN as well: I actually set up an X-Com install on a shared drive on my LAN this week and pointed D-Fend Reloaded at it from two different machines. The only time I notice any delay is when saving my game, and it's much more convenient than having to zip the game folder and copy it across every time I switch which machine I'm playing on.