appiah4 wrote:

Finished installing all 1998 games I'm interested in on my PIII machine. Tomorrow night I will install the 1999 games. It will then become my GoTo retro PC I believe 😀 I so love this build.

I will likely make a photoshoot post of it in System Specs soon.

Nice. I just finished setting up my 1996-2002 laptop yesterday. Sony Vaio with a Pentium M and a Mobility 9200. CD drive is trash though, it only reads about 1/5 disks I try.

Previous to finding Vogons I thought I was the only person who had several retro gaming PCs each for different periods- People said I was insane to do that and why shouldn't I just "install W98 on one PC" or "use DOSBox". Thank god i'm not the only person who does this.

My era specific PCs are two I haven't finished working on yet:

486SX 25mhz 8mb RAM 840mb HDD, Win3.11 and ACUMOS AVGA1 video card: 1986 - 1996

AMD Athlon 1.1ghz 1.3gb RAM 30gb HDD, don't know what to install and ATI Radeon 7000 video card: 1997 - 2007

Since those two PCs are far apart time period wise, I'll probably build or buy a PC from the mid 90s for 1994 - 1998 stuff.

Just grabbed a pair of hynix ddr2 800mhz modules out of my spare phenom ii rig instead of the 2g g.skill ddr2 667 sticks I originally tried. What do you know, they work perfectly on the ecs board. So mixing the g.skill sticks in with the rest of the hynix on the phenom rig at 667mhz. Not a bad trade off to make his multi-tab browsing a bit snappier.

Rawrl wrote:

Yeah, I had one as my main computer way back when, it went through several hardware iterations. The only major problem with them is most of them don't use a standard-sized ATX power supply, and have no way to mount one.

A Dremel is your friend and a SFX PSU with an ATX bracket. I have a nice spunky Corsair SF450 in there humming along. I used the SilverStone bracket instead of the Corsair version because it is the only bracket I could find with a stabilizing metal lip which helps keep that little guy mounted solid. Many of the late 90s Gateway cases have standard ATX screw holes, but have two issues. The offset screw hole is on the bottom rather than the top meaning you ATX PSU fan will be facing upwards in the case which wont be ideal for helping cool the guts of the case and the metal cutout in back is so small it leaves no room for the three prong power plug or power switch if there is one. SFX with bracket solves both issues. I did Dremel a tiny bit of the case in back so the power switch on the PSU sat flush against the case wall. Making a video of my build. Should be up soon hopefully.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01BYB33J8/ref … 4r3L&ref=plSrch

harddrivespin wrote:

Previous to finding Vogons I thought I was the only person who had several retro gaming PCs each for different periods- People s […]
Show full quote

Previous to finding Vogons I thought I was the only person who had several retro gaming PCs each for different periods- People said I was insane to do that and why shouldn't I just "install W98 on one PC" or "use DOSBox". Thank god i'm not the only person who does this.

My era specific PCs are two I haven't finished working on yet:

486SX 25mhz 8mb RAM 840mb HDD, Win3.11 and ACUMOS AVGA1 video card: 1986 - 1996

AMD Athlon 1.1ghz 1.3gb RAM 30gb HDD, don't know what to install and ATI Radeon 7000 video card: 1997 - 2007

Since those two PCs are far apart time period wise, I'll probably build or buy a PC from the mid 90s for 1994 - 1998 stuff.

You'll find that some of us have tens of different PCs and a "mountain" of different parts 🤣

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

ECS says this about all there 9xx chipset boards. I ran 2x2GB in a 945GCT (an INFERIOR board) fine. If that's the eMachines variant of the board you can flash it to the normal versions bios without issues

Very true. I have run across many boards that state a max of 2GB, but in reality will recognize just over 3GB which makes a big difference in performace Vista on up. You wont be hammering the swap file so much. I have a MSI K9MM-V AM2 budget board that states a max of 2GB, but takes 2x2 and uses just over 3GB.

Fun fact the solder points are present for a full pcie x16 slot above the x16 @x4. And the slightly more expensive version has that slot.

Opened up my Athlon 64 box and made it much quieter with a couple of new fans and an Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 I found in a drawer =)

Slight upgrade. Bezel swap.

oeuvre wrote:

Slight upgrade. Bezel swap.

Matter of personal preference, but I like the looks of the top bezel better.

May be getting an XT machine, so I started to look up 5.25" floppy drives to hook up to my Gateway so I can move data back and forth to it. Heading down to my trusty PC shop which saves almost everything and see what hey have. Not paying $40.00 or more for a floppy drive on Ebay. At least dual head floppy cables are still cheap.

liqmat wrote:

May be getting an XT machine, so I started to look up 5.25" floppy drives to hook up to my Gateway so I can move data back and forth to it. Heading down to my trusty PC shop which saves almost everything and see what hey have. Not paying $40.00 or more for a floppy drive on Ebay. At least dual head floppy cables are still cheap.

Be sure to research the different types and compatibilities. I recall that some 1.2MB floppy drives can't write/read 360KB floppies in a way that is compatible with 360KB drives.

That's one sweet looking Dell - the old bezel does look better to me as it lends viable contrast to the overall look.

Got the GA486 VS8 finally stable at 50mhz busspeed. Changed the ram to a 32MB FPM/60ns module, the cpu to an Am"5x86" and changed a vital detail in the bios... ISA bus divider to 1/5 from 1/4, which was causing instablity here and there(DoomII timedemo3 crash, in Quake... again crash during timedemo). Windows 98SE is running fine too, but I'm, of course, still a bit sceptical.

The only thing that does not run correctly on this board is speedsys - even at 25mhz fsb and underclocked cpu. It passes the mem test but crashes when plotting the graphs.

Doom shareware reached 60.72fps and even Doom II/1.9's "heavy" demo1(Map11) yields a respectable 41.34fps. Also Map22 plays fairly smoothly which is one of The make or break maps for a 486.
Quake demo1 yields ~14.1 fps. timerefresh at map "start" gives ~10.7

Created some 20 D64 image files from the disks I got today. I did it on the C64.
Used an SD2IEC as device 8 and the 1541-II drive as device 9. Saved the files on SD-Card.
Those old disks need to be backed up.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

liqmat wrote:

May be getting an XT machine, so I started to look up 5.25" floppy drives to hook up to my Gateway so I can move data back and forth to it. Heading down to my trusty PC shop which saves almost everything and see what hey have. Not paying $40.00 or more for a floppy drive on Ebay. At least dual head floppy cables are still cheap.

Be sure to research the different types and compatibilities. I recall that some 1.2MB floppy drives can't write/read 360KB floppies in a way that is compatible with 360KB drives.

Just picked up a TEAC 5.25" floppy drive and dual head floppy cable for $5 from that store so we'll see if it works. For that money, no worries.

Found an Apple IIc Plus system in a flea market. To be clear, I mean just the system unit. No power cables, monitors, disks or anything else. Asked the guy how much he wanted and he responded $200. I just walked away, that is an outrageous price for something not even guaranteed to work.

I need to move in with one of you guys who finds cool stuff for cheap in these flea markets 🤣

cj_reha wrote:

Found an Apple IIc Plus system in a flea market. To be clear, I mean just the system unit. No power cables, monitors, disks or anything else. Asked the guy how much he wanted and he responded $200. I just walked away, that is an outrageous price for something not even guaranteed to work.

I need to move in with one of you guys who finds cool stuff for cheap in these flea markets 🤣

I would have laughed, and offered him $15 dollars. Which is about the value of that in aforementioned condition. It's not even rare.

Scalpers are idiots.

liqmat wrote:

May be getting an XT machine, so I started to look up 5.25" floppy drives to hook up to my Gateway so I can move data back and forth to it. Heading down to my trusty PC shop which saves almost everything and see what hey have. Not paying $40.00 or more for a floppy drive on Ebay. At least dual head floppy cables are still cheap.

Idk why 5.25 drives are so expensive on eBay. Again, not exactly something that's rare.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

liqmat wrote:

May be getting an XT machine, so I started to look up 5.25" floppy drives to hook up to my Gateway so I can move data back and forth to it. Heading down to my trusty PC shop which saves almost everything and see what hey have. Not paying $40.00 or more for a floppy drive on Ebay. At least dual head floppy cables are still cheap.

Idk why 5.25 drives are so expensive on eBay. Again, not exactly something that's rare.

Because there are a lot of dumbass greedy scalpers. So irritating.

liqmat wrote:

Because there are a lot of dumbass greedy scalpers. So irritating.

I'm selling stuff on eBay ATM and I don't get out of bed for less than 40 bucks - you gotta do the photos, write a description, deal with the fucktards who send requests for BINs or ask dumb questions, then package things well (5 1/4 drives for example are fragile and need some effort to protect), and then drag the shite to the local P.O.

Giving stuff away or just tossing it out starts to look pretty good when I start considering the effort to reward ratio of selling retro hardware.