Welcome! Need some pictures!

Nice system to start out with 😀 You're a bit similar to me which started out with an almost unmodified Compaq (see link in description), but now I own several systems all thanks to inspiration from this forum basically 😜

I would suggest you to place some wanted ads around for hardware you are looking for. Maybe you'll get lucky. People that have an old Voodoo card laying around normally sell them if you give them a fair offer. You suggestions for a viable card is pretty good, though as you probably know a voodoo card for playing Glide games is almost compulsory for the time period your computer is covering. The Geforce DDR is actually pretty easy to find cheap on Ebay. Just keep looking if you want one 😀

Also nice to see some other Norwegian signing up. I had just started to believe it was only me as active poster here 😜

Just got out my old dvd copy of "The Moment of Silence", which I can't play on my main system anymore thanks to the stupid Star Force copy protection. It plays perfectly on this Compaq fortunately 😁 Also had a go at The Curse of Monkey Island, and the sound is just awesome running through my home theater system. I guess I should get some crap quality grey plastic box speakers though.
I'll try to sort some pictures later, but I need to tidy my place up a bit, it looks like a dump at the moment.

I have a compaq desktop en series also. Very nice machines and quite easy to work on with the drive mechanism that flip out. Excellent find.

Okay, I said I'd sort some pictures, so here are a few. Only got a simple compact camera, so please don't mind the quality.

Here's the machine in all its errr, glory.

Close up of the front bezel, looks a lot more nicotine yellow in real life unfortunately. (Not my fault, I don't smoke).

This is my old Yamaha WaveForce 192XG. This came out around the same time as the original SB Live or perhaps a little bit earlier. I remember when I first installed this in my K6-2 300MHz back in the days. Sound would hang, system crash, and nothing worked like it should, until I figured out that I needed new "VIA All-in-One" drivers. After that, I was completely blown away by the midi quality of this card. I'm really happy it's got a second lease on life 😀

Here's the insides of the Deskpro EN with sound card and 512MB ram installed. The ram I had sitting around on an old broken TUSL2 board. Broken, but never binned. Never know when you might need a couple of old sticks of ram or a Celery 800.

And here's the system with Firefox 2.0.0.20 showing the Vogons forum 😁

Nice system. If you didn't know, plastic yellowing usually has nothing to do with smoking but rather with flame retardants in the plastic. More information here: http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/189

Yeah, I do realize that plastic yellows with age, but it does yellow from cigarette smoke as well. I expect this one isn't really yellowed from smoke though, but the colour is pretty much the same.

i use kernel-ex it lets you run newer xp stuff like newer version of firefox or firefox-palemoon and flash.

cdoublejj wrote:

i use kernel-ex it lets you run newer xp stuff like newer version of firefox or firefox-palemoon and flash.

Hmm... That sounds interesting. Not that I really need a very modern browser on this system, it's just for running older Win9x era games anyway, so browsing was just for fun. Did a run of 3DMark99MAX and 3DMark2000, and the TNT2 Pro (16MB) looks to be a severe bottleneck compared to the CPU. Also, tried installing a 120GB HDD, which was detected just fine by the BIOS, but fdisk only reports roughly 48GBish. I guess the problem could be from the HDD being two-platter or something, not sure. It's a Seagate Barracuda drive. I think the 10GB drive will end up being too small for this system, but I'm not really too keen on paying for another drive when I got this spare one already. Any chance something like Partition Magic would allow me to partition and use the full 120GB? As far as I remember, Win98se allowed for up to 137GB, so I'm surprised it's not working.

Yes, Partition Magic will do the work.
You can boot from the WinXp cd and use Xp partition manager. But AFAIR - this tool can't create FAT32 volumes with more then 32 GB in size (MS limitation to migrate users from a FAT32).
Plus - 137 GB isn't FAT32 limitation. It is Win9x limitation, because Win9x isn't supporting LBA-48 specification.
And yes, Win98 Fdisk is bugged. 64GB limit. AFAIR - this is fixed in WinME and you can download the modified Fdisk.exe for Win98 and Win98SE.

Okay, one session with Partition Magic later, and the system now has "120"GB split into 3 partitions. 32GB for system and applications, 40GB for file storage and 40GB for games. Removed the old drive, just to discover that what the BIOS reports being a 10GB drive, is actually a 20GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8. I wonder why the BIOS only reports it being 10GB. The only jumper that is set is Cable Select.

LunarG wrote:

cdoublejj wrote:

i use kernel-ex it lets you run newer xp stuff like newer version of firefox or firefox-palemoon and flash.

Hmm... That sounds interesting. Not that I really need a very modern browser on this system, it's just for running older Win9x era games anyway, so browsing was just for fun. Did a run of 3DMark99MAX and 3DMark2000, and the TNT2 Pro (16MB) looks to be a severe bottleneck compared to the CPU. Also, tried installing a 120GB HDD, which was detected just fine by the BIOS, but fdisk only reports roughly 48GBish. I guess the problem could be from the HDD being two-platter or something, not sure. It's a Seagate Barracuda drive. I think the 10GB drive will end up being too small for this system, but I'm not really too keen on paying for another drive when I got this spare one already. Any chance something like Partition Magic would allow me to partition and use the full 120GB? As far as I remember, Win98se allowed for up to 137GB, so I'm surprised it's not working.

can be useful if you are like me and brave enough to use it get various files and maybe look up some stuff.

Be careful with that drive in Win9x. Go beyond writing a certain gigabyte and you'll lose everything

I know that machine anywhere. The ones I had were were a little different, they had a proprietary psu, and no agp. Sound and graphics were integrated.

They could only boot with a maximum of 512MB which ticked me off because why put three slots in if you can't go to 768MB?...well anyway, I suped them up the best I could, with max ram, better gpus, and cpus, then I let my Dad give them away to elderly homebound clients who needed a machine for email and light browsing.

zstandig wrote:

The ones I had were were a little different, they had a proprietary psu, and no agp. Sound and graphics were integrated.

Sounds like the small form factor variation that use a riser

Indeed they were.

Thanks to the magic of ebay, this system is going to receive Voodoo 2 SLi for 3D gaming. Only 8MB cards unfortunately, but I'm sure it'll be good enough. Don't know if I will replace the 2D card as well at some point, but for now I guess the TNT2 "Pro" (Compaq specific card from the look of it) will do for desktop graphics.

Gratz with getting SLI 😀

What is next beside maybe a 2D card? Another system or another upgrade 😉

Next up is another system. This one pretty much only happened by accident, but I though, well, now that I've got it, I better get some use out of it, hence the Voodoo2's.

I've been gathering up parts for a more proper retro build. A 486. It's going to be all the things my PC wasn't back when a 486 was my main computer.
I'm currently staying with my fiance in England, but when I get home, I've got a load of parts waiting for me to put them together into a working gaming rig.

Specs should end up being:
Spring Circle SiS496/7 based PCI Motherboard
It's ST486DX4 100MHz
2 x 32MB FPM RAM
4GB CompactFlash Card with IDE adapter
48X CD-ROM drive
Matrox Millennium 2MB PCI
Gravis Ultrasound (1MB)
D-Link DE220 10Mbit Ethernet Adapter
145W AT PSU
Cooler Master ATX case (Temporary, until I can get my hands on a suitable AT tower case).

The motherboard came with an intel 486DX2/66 CPU installed, and naturally with the correct jumper settings for this. I've been finding it difficult to find any documentation for this motherboard, but I've found pics of the same motherboard with a DX4 installed, so I hope I can compare the jumper settings to get mine set up correctly. If not, well, I'll just run it with the DX2 for now. I'm guessing it'll be hard to get by with GUS as the only sound device, so I'm expecting to get an SB16 for better compatibility.

LunarG wrote:

Thanks to the magic of ebay, this system is going to receive Voodoo 2 SLi for 3D gaming. Only 8MB cards unfortunately, but I'm sure it'll be good enough. Don't know if I will replace the 2D card as well at some point, but for now I guess the TNT2 "Pro" (Compaq specific card from the look of it) will do for desktop graphics.

I have a bunch of Dell-specific ATi Rage 128 Pro Ultra cards, and the ATi-supplied Rage drivers won't work with them, you have to use Dell's drivers.

Hopefully this "TNT2 Pro" is different, but there were a lot of OEM shenanigans going on in those days, so I wouldn't be surprised if it needed Compaq specific drivers. 😒