I'd like to have an SMP 486 running two am5x86-133s, with a special SMP version of DOS. It would also be an EISA/VLB 2.0 board with USB ports. The VLB graphics adapter would be S3 Virge GX, TNT2, Voodoo3, or some late model SVGA chipset never released on VLB. The soundcard would have perfect SB Pro, WSS and adlib support, as well as an MPU-401 interface fully compliant with MT 32. It should have good SNR when hooked up to a stereo. The disk drive would be solid state and connect directly to the SCSI card without a special adapter.

To stay within the bounds of reality...

Socket 3 motherboard with VLB, and PCI slots. Preferably Micro ATX, but baby AT would work in a pinch.
Am5x86-133 OCed to 150 MHz on a 50 MHz bus. (Or one of the rare 150 Mhz chips.)
64 MB RAM, EDO or SDRAM
Tseng ET4000/W32p VLB video card
Obsidian 2 X24 dual-Voodoo2 PCI video card
Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with full RAM
Gravis UltraSound PnP with full RAM
PCI Intel 82557 NIC
PCI SATA card
Fast SSD
Onboard IDE fine for DVD-ROM drive

Strangely I don't have a dream machine. After years of building retro rigs, I've managed to build and play with just about every piece of hardware that I've ever wanted to get my hands on. Everything has its problems and quirks.

Oh I've always wanted a Falcon Northwest PC though. 😁

I'm going to put a voodoo2 in my 486 😁
Just for playing the 3dfx version of GTA though. (for now)

[Edit]
Voodoo3 is incompatible with my 486, card is known good but boots up to solid colour screen.

Go Voodoo3. Then you don't waste one of your 3 PCI slots, plus you get superb 2D.

Like swaaye I already have a my dream retro rigs plus hundreds of pounds of spare parts. Video cards alone, I have 130+ and still looking for a few more, 🤣.

My dream computer would be some new hardware, something that would push my 24" Dell Ultrasharp U2410 and then 2 more for a nice tri-setup.

A quad-core 486 120 with four turbo buttons, and the most powerful stablest floppy drives known to man. four of them. and a gus and a sb16 AND a sbpro *AND* as sb awe32 with a s3 trio64v+, voodoo2, dualbooting win2k and win98 and win95 and linux and macos 7...

leilei that is just too hardcore for humankind. 😐

leileilol wrote:

s3 trio64v+

Now that's just asking way too much here, aren't we supposed to be realistic?

This one

sliderider wrote:

This one […]
Show full quote

This one

We may have to wait a few million years on this one 😜

@Pyro, this sounds close to the C128, has both a Z80 and an 8510.

I played around with the CP/M Plus OS that came with it, very fun indeed 😉

I have several ideas for "dream computers", so I'll just post them all:

Intel Core i7 975 3.3 GHz @ 4.4 GHz, 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 in SLI, 32 GB RAM, 160 GB SSD, 1 TB HDD, Windows 7 Ultimate x64/Linux Ubuntu 10.04 x64.

Intel Pentium IV Extreme Edition 3.74 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce 7900X2, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB HDD, Windows XP x64.

2x Intel Pentium III-S 1.4 GHz @ 1.7 GHz, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, 1.5 GB RAM, 80 GB HDD, Windows 2000 Professional/Windows 98 SE.

Motorola 68060 50 MHz @ 66 MHz, Cyberstorm PowerPC 233 MHz @ 300 MHz, 16 mb on-board RAM + 256 mb on PPC board + 512 mb on Zorro III, extra True-color (32-bit) video card, 3dfx Voodoo3 PCI, 16-bit soundcard, 20 GB HDD, AmigaOS 4.1/MorphOS/Windows NT 4.0 Workstation PPC.

My dreamcomputer? Would be based on an ATX socket 3 board with atleast PCI *drools*

My ultimate dream computer is very close to my current setup:

Motherboard: Aewin AW-MB700 a.k.a WIN Enterprises WINIP-06046
CPU: Pentium IV 3.4Ghz Extreme Edition SL7CH
GPU: Reference nVidia Geforce 6800 Ultra 256mb AGP
RAM: 2GB DDR400 / PC3200
Int. sound1: Live 5.1
Int. sound2: AWE64 Gold w/28mb
Int. sound3: Gravis Ultrasound Extreme
Int. sound4: Roland SCC-1A

Svenne wrote:

Motorola 68060 50 MHz @ 66 MHz, Cyberstorm PowerPC 233 MHz @ 300 MHz, 16 mb on-board RAM + 256 mb on PPC board + 512 mb on Zorro III, extra True-color (32-bit) video card, 3dfx Voodoo3 PCI, 16-bit soundcard, 20 GB HDD, AmigaOS 4.1/MorphOS/Windows NT 4.0 Workstation PPC.

WinNT Workstation on PPC sucks, by the way. I have yet to find a single "publicly released" native app. (Thankfully it runs 16-bit x86 apps just fine.)

Same goes for OS/2 PPC. There is a demo CD of apps, but for the life of me, I can't find any evidence that ANY of them were ever commercially released, just the demos.

TheLazy1 wrote:

leileilol wrote:

s3 trio64v+

Now that's just asking way too much here, aren't we supposed to be realistic?

Yeah... don't forget the 3DOblaster and the Amstrad Mega PC components so it's also two consoles in one

leileilol wrote:

TheLazy1 wrote:

leileilol wrote:

s3 trio64v+

Now that's just asking way too much here, aren't we supposed to be realistic?

Yeah... don't forget the 3DOblaster and the Amstrad Mega PC components so it's also two consoles in one

They had such cool computers in Europe back in the 80's. If shipping wasn't so high, I'd have them all.

Actually, my dream computer is not such an out of this world machine. My regular PC would do fine, provided it would be 100% backward compatible. With one mouse click, I could turn it to any past machine, ST, C64, Amiga, 286 etc. Actually, this is already possible, except for the 100%.
And it would have a universal media bay, which would accept all relevant storage media from tape to cartdrige.

if I had a holodeck I could have it all while not dealing with massive piles of old shit. How about that idea? 😉