First post, by Sharon_Apple
A few years ago I bought this machine along with others off of a recycling pallet. I only have the PC, no accessories or monitor. I'm finally getting around to using it for a retro build. As far as I can tell it's original except that the last owner wiped the HD and put WindowsXP on it. I think it's a somewhat unusual machine, and I wanted to document it before I change anything, and I thought others might find it interesting.
The motherboard appears to be by Intel, with 3 DIM slots and a Pentium 2 CPU clocked at 400MHZ. There is an AGP slot, but it isn't populated, instead there are 3 PCI cards that make up the video system. The first is a Toshiba Impact! DVD decoder, the second is a NEC PowerVR 3d accelerator, the third is a Brooktree chipset, which I think is a ATI RageII+ with a TV tuner and VGA out. The Brooktree is connected to the DVD decoder with a ribbon cable, and has an spdif and stereo analog input and a custom output that goes to a rear panel with RCA, svideo, SPDIF, and Dolby DIgital outputs. There's an unremarkable Realtek Ethernet card, and an ISA Ensoniq Vivo90 with custom pin output connectors that also feed into the rear panel.
I'm planning on removing the video cards entirely, and replacing them with a Voodoo 3. I haven't decided if I'm going to leave the Ensoniq or replace it with a Soundblaster Live! Either way I will be taking it back to Windows98SE.
