You gotta love it when people can provide you with old computer hardware for free or at a low price. Over the past week, I got a fair bit of old computer parts from one of my good buddies:
-Two 286 boards, one fully functional, the other has faulty RAM as it locks up during POST while testing the RAM (both also need new batteries)
-A 386SX board with cache slots (I'm gonna have some fun with this one and try to push the hardware as far as it can go before becoming unstable)
-An ISA-only 486 motherboard (I posted about this earlier, works well, but needs a new battery)
-A VLB Socket 4 Pentium motherboard (had a bad tantalum capacitor on the -12V rail. I never replaced the capacitor, but I don't know if the cap is actually necessary; it may be as the motherboard does not POST)
-Two Socket 7 Pentium motherboards, one from Soyo (does not POST), the other from AOpen (fully functional)
-Some I/O cards
-An ISA RAM card with 1MB of RAM on it (can't remember the name of the card)
-A SCSI CD writer (this is going in my 486DX2 build)
-A 60MHz Socket 4 Pentium
-Two 166MHz non-MMX Pentium CPUs (on the Socket 7 motherboards)
-4 4MB 30-pin SIMMs
-2 72-pin SIMMs of unknown size
-2 32MB PC-100 SDRAM sticks
-An AT power supply (fully functional)
-An ATi Mach 32 graphics card (fully functional)
-Two 5 1/4-inch floppy drives
-A GAL16V8 for when I get a SoundBlaster 2.0 CT1350B in the future
This was all free of charge. Hopefully, I can get some good RAM for the second 286 motherboard (both have 10MHz Intel 286es, but one has a Cyrix 287XL) and I can get the Socket 4 Pentium and the non-working Socket 7 Pentium up and running.
And yesterday, I was at a family friend's pawn shop and found ANOTHER Roland MT-32, a 2nd-generation unit, this time. I nearly fell on my a** when I found out how much he wanted for it. It was really beat-up, but it works beautifully (although it seems the audio output is noticeably lower than a 1st-generation MT-32). This MT-32 cost me, I kid you not, $10.
Also bought a generic ESS AudioDrive ES1868F-based sound card for $5. And let me tell you something, for a cheap generic card, its audio quality blows a lot of more expensive cards out of the water; VERY loud audio output, a decent amount of filtering that strikes a good balance between low frequencies and high frequencies, and very little noise. I was really impressed with this card; despite its use of ESFM, this has become one of my favorite ISA sound cards.
I'll post some pictures of everything I got over the coming days.
Creator of The Many Sounds of:, a collection of various DOS games played using different sound cards.
