First post, by Mau1wurf1977
- Rank
- l33t++
Hey guys!
I just recently discovered this forum and I love it to bits...
I started reading at the very first post and read my way through all the pages. It brought back sooo many memories!
I grew up in Austraia and my first computer was a Vobis Highscreen 386. One of you here posted a Vobis machine in this thread. It looked exactly like the one I had. With both floppy drives and the LED MHz indicator.
Mine was a 386 33MHz and I remember that the Turbo didn't work so we brought it back and it turned out that it was running in the non Turbo all the time (and I never noticed).
The video card also died one day and they ended up butting a slower card in it 🙁
My next PC was based on a Cyrix 486 40 and it wasn't the best buy. I was led to believe that it would outperform a intel 486 DX 33 but it didn't...
The next PC I got was my first build from scratch. I remember that it was a VESA local bus mainboard and I had a AMD 486-DX4 100 CPU. The BIOS was interesting as it looked like windows and you could control it with the mouse! Very fancy.
I remember that I put switches at the front of the case and soldered the wires to the mainboard to control the multipliers. So from the front of the case I could controle the FSB settting and the multiplier. I believe I could run it as a DX2 50 up to a DX4 120 😁
Next build was a Pentium 133 on a Gigabyte board. I loved this machine, had a 3DFX Voodoo and later upgraded to a Voodoo 2. But it wasn't any faster and I found out that this was because the cpu was to slow. You needed a PII.
So my final PC was a Pentium II 300 MHz. I got it when the Pentium II just came out and it was sooo fast.
Unfortunatly all these bits and peaces are gone. I moved around a lot, some time in the UK now I am in Australia. But the memories all remain.
I had the original Soundblaster and a Soundblaster 16 and also a Roland Sound Canvas daugther board.
This forum brought so many memories back that I am now also planning on building something. I am very much into DosBox, but would love to build something hands on. It will very likely be based around a 440BX chipset, simply because I don't want to play around with old AT PSUs and towers and like to mix it up with some modern and easily available bits.
I would also like to thank retro games 100 for his many questions. His questions kept the thread active and I got a ton of good information...
Looking back it was amazing how little I knew when I was a kid. I didn't have internet, so the only source of knowledge where computer magazines (which often where behind) and friends in school. Things such as the "hanging note bug" and the fact that SB16 wasn't compatible with SB Pro or that most AWE cards didn't have a real OPL chip are things I only found out recently...
It's so cool that now we can afford to buy all the stuff we wish we had as a kid. Most of it is also very cheap and, well basically it's just a really cool hobby to have and I am happy I am clearly not alone in sharing this passion...
My favourite games where mostly adventure games (Sierra and Lucasarts) but also Doom, Wing Commander and Privateer. I never had a Roland MT-32 but was tricked once in buying a card that was meant to be compatible (A Spea Media FX) and of course it wasn't...
So my project will be mostly based around running games of that era.
I have ordered lots of bits through ebay (here in australia most cheap stuff comes from asia). Especially little things such as IDE adapters or midi calbes are very cheap coming from asia. I also got a few Slot 1 and S370 boards coming along with many cpus, ram chips and other bits.
Anyway hello to all and talk to you soon!
