Hello all! In my first post I decided to rebuild my Windows XP LAN party machine from the early 2000's. Since then I've pulled some parts out of storage and set up a Vista-era machine, but Vista still feels a little too modern, so I'm going to skip that one for now.

I don't remember many details about my family's first PC beyond it running Windows 95 and having an Ensoniq Soundscape sound card (don't know why that detail sticks in my memory), but our second was a Packard Bell Multimedia PC in that weird wedding-cake style case with a 233 MMX. I wasn't able to make any major upgrades beyond expanding the RAM because I was a poor teenager, so this meager system carried me all the way through high school until I finally built my Pentium 4 system around 2000. As a result, I skipped over a generation of PC hardware that a lot of people seem to love: The Pentium 3 / Voodoo era.

I was gifted a garment box full of random components a while back and in digging through them I found this 600EB Slot 1 Pentium 3 and an Asus branded TNT2 Vanta. So with those two things in hand I decided I'd start building something and here's where I'm at today on my extremely professional test bench:

After some research, I went on the hunt for a 440BX motherboard. Unfortunately the options I found on eBay all seemed absurdly expensive (regularly $150+) for a system that I was, at best, building as a curiosity. Thankfully about a week ago a listing popped up for what I considered a more reasonable price and for $60 I got these:

- AOpen AX6B
- Celeron @ 300Mhz
- Mixed PC-100 SDRAM totaling 448MB

Right now the Pentium 3 is hanging out on top of the case because the board doesn't recognize it. The latest BIOS revision is 2.35 and this board is still on 1.2, so I've got some flashing to do. For the rest I added a 30GB Maxtor HDD and a CD drive that I had in storage. I bought a Gotek floppy emulator since I've never used one. I have a network card on order which produced a wonderful rush of nostalgia along with some period-appropriate beige peripherals all totaling about $30. The case actually came from my high school computer lab and was generously *ahem* donated to me when no one was looking. It's nothing special, but I've used it for a lot of builds over the years and its seems completely appropriate for this. The widescreen monitor is only temporary and I'm on the lookout for a decent CRT at my local Goodwill.

Lastly, I was originally going to go with a Sound Blaster Live! but since I have a few ISA slots and do plan to delve into DOS gaming (which I didn't do a whole lot of when I was a kid) I decided on a Yamaha ATC-6631 with a YMF719 chipset. I was hoping for an Audician 32 Plus, but I was getting impatient waiting for one to pop up on eBay so I got this instead. I read a few threads on here that seem to indicate that it's just as good of an option. I might mess around with some wavetable boards which I've never done, but ultimately I'm planning to pick up a Roland SC-55 or 88. Being a musician (violin) MIDI has always fascinated me, and it wasn't until a few years ago that I even heard about using external MIDI modules for gaming. (I missed most of the DOS era too... My family's first PC was in 1995 when I was around ten years old.) I plan on building a dedicated DOS machine in the future, but I'm happy to experiment on this system first.

Shockingly, everything worked the first time I turned it on and I'm installing Windows 98 as I type this, but I'm not ending here. Since I'm using a lot of this hardware for the first time I'm planning to experiment a bit with all the things I missed growing up. So far I'm thinking the final build will include, at the very least, the ubiquitous two Voodoo 2's in SLI. I've also read a lot of good things about Geforce 2's, so I might pick one up for when, I suspect, the frustration of getting the Voodoo cards to work properly sets in. I'll probably pick up a Pentium 2 to play around with and who knows, maybe I'll even throw in a SCSI card and see what that life's all about.

Cheers for now!