I set off on this journey intending to build something resembling the computer I grew up with, which was a 486sx with 4MB of ram. I ended up with the computer I wished I had back in those days, but there's just a few nagging lose ends to tie up.

First, the build. An EBay purchased nameless PC, with Asus P/I-P55T2P4 motherboard, 64MB of RAM, a Pentium 200, a 1MB Trident SVGA card on PCI, and a Soundblaster 16 on ISA. I swapped out the Pentium 200 for a Pentium 233 MMX. The system then saw it as a Pentium 225 MMX. I also swapped out the Trident video card for a Diamond Stealth S3 Virge 2000 3D, the so called - "3d decelerator". Good 2d, and I can add a Voodoo card later. The CPU cooler was trash, so I added a cheap one by Startech. The old cooler didn't even have any thermal paste. The AT power supply fan was going out, so I cracked that open and soldered in a fresh one. Sounds good now. Also, the CD drive was dead, so I swapped it out for a working 6x CD rom drive.

For the hard drive, I'm using a Startech IDE to Compact Flash adapter. Now you'll recall my original intention was to replicate the 486 of my childhood, so I ordered a 4GB CF card, with the intention of having 2, 2GB partitions under DOS 6.22 with Windows 3.11. Well, now that my build is more of a high-end 1996 machine, I'm running Windows 95 with large disk support enabled.

The motherboard had a BIOS update, which I bit the bullet and went for it, luckily successfully. The most recent update is from 1998, and I think enables support for larger hard drives. Previously, I was messing around with a Dell 80GB IDE drive, and this board recognized it as an 8GB drive, and installed and ran like this just fine. After the update, it recognizes the 4GB CF card just fine, but just hangs when it attempts to recognize that 80GB drive. I have no intention of using that 80GB drive in this system, but what's the largest CF card I could reasonably use running Windows 95 OSR2 that my motherboard will recognize? 16? 32? (One bonus of the BIOS update is my CPU is now recognized correctly as a Pentium 233 MMX. Hurray.)

Finally, a benefit of using CF as my primary storage is the fact that I can remove the card, plug it into a modern PC, and transfer files back and forth, but there's some weirdness going on there. The drive is formatted FAT32. (Win95 large disk support.) I can read the files just fine on my modern Windows 10 PC, and I can copy files over just fine as well. If I try to delete anything, it crashes Windows Explorer. If I try to rename any folders, it crashes Windows explorer. Under DOS or Windows 95 on the Pentium, I can rename and delete to my heart's content with no issues. I've sort of gotten around this by just renaming folders BEFORE copying them to the CF card, but it's still irritating.

I plan to post this build once some things arrive in the mail, like a period accurate keyboard and a few other things. I'm taking an entire corner of a room and turning it into the mid-90's, with this computer as the centerpiece.