First post, by Licentious Howler
- Rank
- Newbie
My father had an old Pentium III and several spare parts in his basement for quite a time, just collecting cigarette-tainted dust, and it occurred to me--why not make something of it?
Well, it was a learning process for sure, and I had to wipe the hard drive once, but it's done and good.
Images of the case (pretty huge, avg. 1MB):
http://i.imgur.com/gFWbXKh.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/f2xfHdx.jpg
Specs:
-Pentium III - 600 EBMhz (can't find the exact clock speed, but that's what it says on BIOS boot.)
-ATI Rage 128 Pro AGP 4x
-Sound Blaster Live! (it's a Dell pack-in because of the Driver CD.)
-128 MB RAM (max may be 256... not sure.)
-A Seagate(?) HDD, 30GB
-2 CD/DVD Rewritable drives - (Lightscribe and LG)
-3 1/2 Floppy drive (probably generic Dell, can't find info)
-2 USB 1.0, printer, and a joystick/MIDI port on the sound card
-the PSU is definitely stock.
Image of the inputs:
http://i.imgur.com/GgMepdu.jpg
And the innairds:
http://i.imgur.com/lIonNyY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/2JmwCrs.jpg (shot of the SB Live)
There are also 2 PCI ethernet and phone line adapters, but I have no reason to use them, just kept them in there to keep the case closed up as the original metallic tabs are long gone.
First thing's first: it's pretty ugly, with the smoke-stains and random black DVD-tray, but I foraged for parts that worked and wouldn't cost me anything to get, so that's what I get at the price of "free". I did clean things the best I could, especially the dust-caked fans, which all run fine now. As for the build process...
One very curious element to the PC is a lack of a proper monitor; it used to be paired with a Sony Trinitron, but the picture is too dim to be useful for games anymore, and I didn't really want to sift through hundreds of cruddy office-tier CRTs in thrift stores--not when I saw a much better opportunity presented by this ATI card; It's always been a little underpowered for late 90's PC games like Serious Sam, but it has video out in the form of S-Video. I decided it would make a lot of sense to use it for my trusty Sony Wega HDCRT TV then!
Of course it means I can't truly tweak the resolution, as the card must scale all output to 640x480i, but it does the job pretty sharp and well, as the driver allows me quite a bit of flexibility in its output. Amazingly, almost all text is easily legible even on the desktop save a game here or there. Unfortunately, still pictures can have a bizarre "displacement" artifact of sorts, but in motion with normal games, it's no issue. The benefit of rich and beefy CRT speakers is nice as well, though it's a waste for the EAX portion of the sound card until I come up with a multiple-speaker solution. The absolute best part of this however, is that even running games 800x600 (or a Widescreen variant) looks pretty sublime because of the softening nature of the CRT--it's basically nice Anti-Aliasing at no cost of performance!
Images of the TV setup (though as always, images don't do it justice):
http://i.imgur.com/uh3yalc.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Zb1sLiM.jpg
The presence of a USB port allows me the use of an optical mouse (I winced a bit, thinking "no track balls=blasphemy", but then I figured a "TV PC" is already pretty 'sacrilegious'), which allows me to navigate on pretty much any surface, fixing the issue of a lack of a desk, and the keyboard on my lap.
The big caveat to this however; I don't know what to do with the mess of wires and tower in the middle of the floor, save to lug the tower back out of the way when I'm done with it! Maybe I can get obnoxiously long extensions for the keyboard and mouse? Maybe experiment with a controller setup? Not really an issue for now.
A Pentium III kicks the crap out of every DOS game I've tried, save the infamous Carmageddon -hires, and even then it's a comfortable 20-30 FPS or so, and for the Windows 98 games, I can usually keep the high settings with a fairly low res, and it looks much better than I thought it would - probably not as nice as a proper high-res AA monitor setup, but pretty close. I can't really say this would be my preferred setup for a really intensive FPS though, and there are a lot of pre-2000 games where I would just prefer on a legitimate rig anyway, but if I'm playing something with an external controller/joystick like Descent, this would probably be the bitchinest way to go about it!
In this process I also learned a great deal about how PCs used to function and even more nitty-gritty make-up of Windows, and drivers, drivers, drivers - my how I had taken for granted the basic functionality of everything in modern PCs. Thankfully my father was very deliberate about storing all of his CDs and floppies, which is the only reason I even got the thing working in the first place. Heck, I've still got more to learn because drivers are the reason I can't get Hitman and the 3dfx version of Carmageddon to run (via wrappers)!
Uh, that's about all I had to say and this is going on way too long anyway, hope you like what you see!
