First post, by Epirean
So I picked up two Compaq Presario systems and a crate full with retro stuff. I already have my ultimate retro gaming pc (Pentium 3 with Voodoo 4500) but spare parts are always great to have, so why not pick those Compaqs up. One of them was just an ordinairy Pentium 3 Presario, nothing special. The other one seemed like an ordinairy Pentium 1 system, but after inspection, I saw how special it was and decided to clean it up completely and keep it for myself.
It is a Compaq Presario 4122 pizza box system, with a Pentium 150 mhz CPU and 16 MB memory. However, it comes with an onboard S3 Virge graphics card that has expandable memory (it has 2 MB right now), and a built in ESS1888 soundcard with Soundblaster emulation, AND a Wavetable slot right on the motherboard! It also has 2 USB ports, which are not very common on Pentium 1 systems in my experience. I can also change the CPU speed to something below 100 mhz through jumpers on the board easily, which is awesome for some DOS games I have. What I also really love, is the Windows 3.1 style BIOS the system comes with, with a working mouse driver built in, so you can easily adjust the addresses of the soundcard for example. It also came with a Quantum Bigfoot 5.25 inch HDD which still works, although I disconnected it and built in a CF to IDE drive.
Also a curious detail, the pc has a official Compaq sticker with the serial number on the bottom, that also contains the logo of the Ministry of Transport of my country. Pretty cool! Compaq probably produced these units specifically for the government I think? It was loaded with a clean Windows 98 first edition installation, but it was really very slow. Right now I am in the progress of turning it into a Dos 6.22 machine, to check how the soundcard sounds in DOS games compared to my very noisy Soundblaster 16 and my very quiet Aztech Galaxy Soundblaster Pro 2.0 clone. I also understand that the S3 Virge is a 3D accelerator, is that right? I will look for games that support it soon.
I really love this machine, it is almost the perfect DOS machine for me, it just lacks a Voodoo graphics card (I love old Glide games), and the CMOS battery is I think soldered on, I am not sure, I wasn't able to get it moving, and the rest is just perfect. See attachments for some photos.
PS. It was a pain in the *ss to find the correct Diagnostics disks for the system, in order to restore the cool graphical BIOS partition on the machine (the BIOS is installed on the first 6 MB of the primary master drive). Is there a way to upload them to Vogons with the proper instructions on how to create the partition?
