Hello there.

This is going to be my first post. I have recently ( as in: three months ago ) been struck with a little bit of nostalgia bug, and have, with the use of regular lurking on Vogons, built two PCs meant for retro gaming.

[random blether, you can ignore]

I got my first PC in november 1995. It was a brand spankin new Socket 4 system with Pentium 60, 8 megs of memory and 545mb of hard drive. Top of the line if you count out socket 5 which was very expensive back then. It served me well for three years, getting upgrades ( more RAM, VRAM, sound card and CD-ROM ) of the usual late 90 style. It also was bought at the cusp of the clock race. Not only, as it turned out, it was on a dead platform, but also it was instantly obsolete, in spite of my upgrading it. It did play Quake tho.

It was replaced with a 233mhz K6 in June 1998. 64 megs of ram, AGP, Riva 128. I was a king of the world. Then I run Unreal on it and poor K6 was violated. It also happend to have too little memory for Blood 2, which meant loads and loads of swapping. Otherwise it was a fine system. When funds allowed, it got upgraded. It has gotten a better CPU - 350Mhz K6-2 and more memory. Finally my Super Socket 7 system ended as 450mhz K6-2, 192Mb of ram and Riva TNT2 M64.

I destroyed the K6-2 by overclocking. It did boot at 500mhz at least. 525 proves too much...

I later have gotten duron 700 on ECS k7s5a board. Which was night and day in comparison to K6. That later transformed to 1700+ Athlon which ended my "classic" phase in 2007, when I bought Core 2 Quad paired to GTX 8800. It sure was nice to have a first paycheck at a new job.

I say "classic" period, because of a single thing I correlate it with.

My PCs were always too slow, too little and too constrained to play then current games at full detail with no hiccups. Actually, most of my gaming then was on low detail and silky smooth 20 fps. Whence came the idea for my 'retro gaming' PCs. As a revenge 😀

[random blether ends]

I wanted to build two maximum overkill PCs for games from 1993 to 2004. Earlier games I have no intrest in, later games I can run on my current PC. So this left me with two periods to consider:

Dos - Windows 98 era - from 1993 to 1999.
Windows 98 - Windows XP - from 1998 to 2004.

I wanted both PC to positively overkill whatever is thrown at them. Especially when talking about games from the megahertz race, so 1996 to 2000. I make no attempts to make them 'era correct'. I make it a priority to make them as compatible as possible, for their respective time.

Also - I want them to be cheap. Throwing money at problem is not my style and there is a certain perverse pleasure in getting old quality hardware for $2. Besides - for some reason 3dfx cards are expensive as hell.

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Machine No1 - 1993 to 1999

I already had 1000mhz socket A Athlon Thunderbird on my trash heap, so platform was decided for me. I can underclock it to ~600mhz if necessary, and disable cache to make it slower. Possibly to the level of 400mhz S7 cpu.

Biggest problem here seems to be DOS sound, so I decided to hunt for a board with an ISA slot. Possibly with a will to plant AWE32 in it, because I can.

I managed to finda a Soltek SL75-KAV board for $3. Listed as "Old athlon board, should work". The board booted fine, overclocking features are operable and it can be configured with dip-switches, so, if I so choose, I can change bus speed and clock speed of the CPU. Provided I unlock it via gold bridges.

By doing a little shopping around, I have gotten myself 768 MB of SDRAM modules.

In 1996 such amount of ram would cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of 'a lot'. I paid $3. One module turned to be DOA. $1 lost. I wept for hours. The machine will have just 512 MB of memory, which, I guess, is more then enough for a windows 98.

Storage, originally, was supposed to be a 4 gig laptop SSD, connected via SATA-IDE adapter. That however failed to work correctly - Windows refused to install, or even to detect the drive. So I ended up with an 80 gig WD hard drive. I was intending to buy something smaller and more fitting to the era, but 20 year drives are probably worn out and, it seems that locally all drives below 80 gigs cost about the same.

Graphics wise - era correct would be something of the kind of Riva 128, or TNT. However I _really_ wanted to overkill here, because I will, most likely, play on a high resolution screen. After a quick search I found a GeForce 4200 Ti. It has a good Win98 support and can be passively cooled. Both of which I exploited.

Sound is provided by an Aztech AZT2320 ISA sound card, which I am not happy with, as it is crackly and noisy. Suprisingly the Soltek built in audio adapter provides DOS compatibility mode, which I will probably try at some point. Currently however I am hunting for something better.

The case is an "el chapo" HTPC case called "I-Box Magic". I got two of them cheaply. The cool thing about it, is that it has about half the volume of the regular ATX midi tower case, but accepts normal ATX components.

Originally I intended to omit the optical drive. However both this board and the the one I'll speak of below, have very wonky USB boot support. So normal, out of the box DVD drive. LG I believe.

PSU is a 250 watt Fortron unit. Heavy as all hell, for its power rating, but gets the job done, probably because of the 25A 5V rail.

Lastly. I added realtek 8139 NIC and a no-name USB add on card. I'll use the network for the purpose of getting stuff via FTP from my home file server.

The machine, when all put together, looks like this:

I fully intend to get a pair of VooDoo2 12MB cards into it, just for the heck of it. I always wanted them. What also needs to be done, is making this beast more silent. The stock AMD cooler is really noisy in comparison to what cools my 5820k.

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Machine no2 - 1998 to 2004ish.

I originally intended just for a one machine to get built. But as the project progressed, I concluded that I need two, unless I wish to face compatibility or performance issues.

When putting together the Machine No1 intended it to be built on ECS K7S5A motherboard - purely for nostalgic reasons. However when I already had it, i found the Soltek board with an ISA slot.

I already had a board and already was considering building another machine. Obviously, I decided to do it.

I bought Athlon 2400+, but I killed it because of failed heatsink installation. Then I found a NOS Athlon MP 2400+ on the cheap. It should work on XP boards with no issues. It also should be better binned, so possibly there is untapped OC headroom.

K7S5A officialy supports up 1GB of ram. So I, of course, bought two 1GB modules and installed them. YOLO, right? The board booted fine. So now I had 2GB of memory.

If I wanted to overkill the GPU as much as I did on the previous machine, I really needed something fast. On AGP. It turns out that fastest AGP cards are also quite expensive. About twice, or more, then their PCIE versions. After much searching I managed to land a Radeon 4650 1GB version for a sensible price. It had windows XP support ( by the way, No2 is an XP system ) it had AGP and it sucks power from 12V rail. It also has a very modest cooling solution, which I probably should do something about.

I would also consider AGP->PCIe riser card, if such thing existed.

Storage is provided by a 160GB drive I had lying around. It is connected via IDE->SATA adapter and is totally unremarkable.

Like with the No1 this one has a generic LG DVD-ROM, case, Realtek 8139 NIC and an USB card.

PSU is a poor man's "Arena" junk which I already had and intend to replace with a the same Fortron unit No1 uses.

Innards look like this:

This machine is not as much of an overkill as the previous one, but it also edges on the period of gaming I can run well on my main rig. However, I am considering to upgrade it to a dual-core s939 system. Or possibly go overboard and set up a dual Athlon MP system. I don't know yet.

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Both machines in working order - yellow 'No1', blue 'No2'.

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Both machines are getting integrated into my home network, but considering time constraints, it takes some time. Both run 3d mark 2000, 99Max and Final Reality for hours, so I am happy with that. Scores - I'd don't remember 😀

I also run some scene demos on the No1 for an hour or so.

Regarding their future - both need to be made more silent. I remember their times fondly, but in comparison to what sits by my side, both retro builds whine loudly with their 60x60 fans. No2 is surely going to get passive cooling solution for the GPU.

No2 also needs the board to be recapped. One capacitor is already bulging ever so slightly.

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I am slowly catching the bug, by the way. Besides my main machine, I have several computers which I can consider 'retro' already. My doughter uses q6700 Dell SFF. My man cave houses similar Dell SFF as a CNC router host and a dual socket F 12 core workstation. The last one would probably do fine with some 2009 GPU. In SLI/Crossfire mode.

I am also being bothered by a will to build a socket 5/7 system for the mid-90s games.