First post, by Kodai
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Ok, so I've been putting off building a retro rig for a few years now. My last one was crushed in a moving debacle. So I started buying parts the past couple of days (and blew a nice chunk of my budget on a CM64 that just popped up on ebay when looking for other items, 🤣), but I cant believe just how much I have forgotten about when it comes to vintage hardware. After hours of racking my brain about what the best mobo & CPU should be for a 90's style time machine, I went and bought a Asus P2B-F board.
I figure that with UDMA-33 workarounds it should make a decent DOS/Win 98 rig if I want to put in some larger HDD's. But to be honest, I really cant remember a lot about late 90's hardware and was wondering what you guy's have to say about it. Is a 450MHz PII going to cause problems in DOS, how about 1GB of PC133 RAM? And yes, the rig will mainly (I'd say about 70% of the time) be in DOS native and either dual boot or swap drives in an open chassis for Win 98. I have several sound cards and video cards to swap in and out depending on what I feel like playing. On the video card fron, I have a Geforce 256 AGP, Diamond TNT PCI with Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 1, two 12MB Voodoo 2 cards for SLI and of course a couple of those damn S3 ViRGE 3D decelerator's (which I NEVER plan to use). On the audio front, I have an Audigy Live and a 2 ZS, SB32 CT3670 ( I have 4 working 16MB 30 pin SIMM's so I guess I could max out the ram to 28MB on this baby), a Yamaha XG based ISA card, an Ensoniq Soundscape S-2000, and a Turtle Beach Vortex 2 PCI card. I also have some giant conglomo sound card with EVERYTHING on it. I will edit this post and try to stick on a photo of it later. I also have some other unnamed sound card with a wavetable board of some sort on it, and no its not a GS based board, but some Crystal chip board. I'll try to toss in some pics of that as well. Maybe you guys can give me some clue as to what they are. I need to get a Sound Blaster Pro 2, but those seem to have become kinda rare now days and pricy.
For MIDI, I will use a Music Quest MIDI Interface and my external modules. I was going to use a PAS with SCSI port to drive a Reno CD-ROM drive, but the drives bearings went out. I'll have to look into fixing it. Its like the NEC TurboGrafx/PC Engine kinda thing, if I guess correctly. So how does this setup sounds so for?
So here are the pics. They are a bit large, but I couldn't shrink them and show chip detail.
Any help in identifying these boards would be much appreciated. Unless somebody knows that they are worth it, I doubt I will use them. They will just rest forever in the bottom of a vintage scrapheap, 🤣. By the way, Conglomo Card is just over 13 1/2" long and seems to have 3 proprietary, and 1 IDE interface for CD-ROM drives, Modem (unkown speed), wavetable header, joystick and I assume it doubles as a 401 port.
