First post, by badmojo
- Rank
- l33t
OR “Weirdo steals dusty rubbish from junk yard”. Depends who you ask. Either way I admit that I’m a little obsessed. I have all the retro computers I'll ever need but when I see these beauties sitting on the scrap heap at my local recycle centre, I just can't help myself. They never put this older stuff up for sale, it’s worth more as scrap metal apparently.
These might be of no interest to anyone but me, but I thought I'd show them off before I wrap them in plastic and shove them in the shed.
Here's a cool little 386DX40, complete and in great condition. Built like a tank and has 8mb RAM, 120mb HDD and 1mb video. It would have been a decent little performer back in the day!
ASUS ISA386C motherboard, 64kb cache, SIS chipset, and non-soldered on CPU which I haven't come across before. Someone wisely removed the barrel battery long ago:
Winbond serial and game port card:
UMC IDE controller:
Bog standard Trident VGA card, although it does have 1mb which is something!
All cleaned up and reassembled; a nice example of a home PC circa 1992. It works like a dream and already had DOS 6 / Windows 3.1 + heaps of games waiting for me on the HDD. I gave Prince of Persia 2 a run, wincing in pain as the screeching of the PC speaker hit my ears.
From ’92 to ’04, I can’t believe someone deemed this thing to be rubbish - a P4 3Ghz. It would have been a killer gaming rig once upon a time and is still a perfectly serviceable computer for most peoples needs. It was choked with dust and missing a HDD, but otherwise it’s fine:
Gainward 6600GT:
ASUS Motherboard, 1GB RAM and ridiculous Zalman cooler – this cooler alone would have been worth saving, I saw one new for 100 bucks the other day.
Dust free and back together; it looks fancier than my i5. It has a nice modular case with lots of fans / airflow. I’ve since added an Audigy SZ to finish it off. I installed XP and gave Farcry a run – very nice. Unfortunately though I have no use for it – I have a dual boot XP / Win7 on my modern PC – so into the shed this goes too.
And finally a “Pro Series” socket 5 machine. These bad boys were sold by a local (AU) company during the mid 90’s and were featured in a few articles / advertisements in PC magazines until ultimately disappearing. They were relatively high end and won a few “speed king” awards. The socket 5 100Mhz, #9 GXE64 video setup it came with was nice and all but not really fast enough to be useful, so I’ve upgraded it with a socket 7 166MMX, Tseng Labs ET6100, and Voodoo 1, Ensoniq Soundscape setup. And finally, this is a machine I do have a use for, it’ll serve me well as a Duke3D / Descent / Quake Windows 95 machine.
