First post, by toastdieb
So at the start of the month I picked up this Pentium III machine from a local reseller, a "TriStar Starstation." I bought with no guarantees outside of it being able to boot, POST, and show a display using the generic drivers. The reseller had, of course, wiped the HDD prior to selling the machine and did not have any accompanying set up discs or anything, so as far as getting it back up to full power goes, I've been going in basically blind. A little bit of research shows that apparently TriStar Computers was a company that used to build workstation PCs, focusing mainly on CAD applications, using off-the-shelf components. The machine, as I received it, as well as the drivers I've found:
-------------------------------------------------------------
Case: Generic beige ATX box with a convex shaped front panel with an oversized, heater shield-shaped blue power button, tiny recessed reset button that requires a tool to press, a big rubberized blue oval badge that reads "Starstation", and the TriStar Computers logo silk-screened on the front. It's both very bleak and somewhat gaudy, and it isn't doing either of those things in a charming way. There are three 5 1/4 bays and three 3 1/2 bays, which are situated in little detachable boxes. The case doesn't support any of the cool features the motherboard offers, like IR or case security.
Motherboard: Tyan Tsunami ATX S1846SLA - This is a Slot 1 mobo using the 440BX chipset with an AGP slot, 5 PCI slots and 2 ISA slots (one shared, seven usable). There are also 2 USB ports. The SL models add support for IR and case security functions, and the A models add onboard ES1371 sound, so that means I've got all that. Tyan's website no longer makes mention of this board, though I did find some stuff related to it in their FTP repository, including the manual, manual addendum, and a driver for the onboard audio. I also found a driver disc on ebay, in case it had different drivers(it did!) and I ended up grabbing the 440BX chipset driver from Intel's website. Installed in the board are a 500Mhz Pentium III (which is faster than the manual thinks the mobo can support) and 384MB of DRAM spread across three 128MB sticks (which is the max the manual says the mobo can support). The old PC mags reviewing this board seem to suggest it's wildly unstable under load, and that that's why there's an odd number of DIMM slots. We will see, I suppose.
Video: Matrox Millenium G400 DualHead AGP - SVGA card in the AGP slot, Direct3D 6.0 acceleration, supports dual monitors. I only have one monitor to spare at the moment, so I dunno how well that works. The old PC mags suggested this card was an under-performer for its time, though some online reviews I found suggested the later drivers helped it out substantially. Found the latest driver easily on Matrox's website. The included configuration tools show there's a bunch of cool options for the dual display capabilities, none of which I can try out right now, haha. Probs gonna replace this card in the future, though it hasn't given me any issues so far.
PCI stuff: There was a modem with microphone and speaker ports in one of the PCI slots(promptly removed, haha) and an Ethernet card which I have left in because reasons. There's also a SCSI card in there - I'm sure someone needed it at some point, but all the drives are connected directly to the mobo.
Drives: There's a 48x Samsung CD-ROM and a Matshita CD-RW/DVD-ROM (generically labelled as "high-speed") in the 5 1/4 bays, a NEC 3 1/2 floppy drive, an IOMEGA ZIP100 and a Seagate 40GB HDD in the 3 1/2 bays. I was surprised by the HDD, as I didn't think it was common for a desktop of this vintage to be using a 3 1/2 HDD. The CD and DVD drives are newer than everything else in the machine by about 4-5 years so I can't imagine they were there from factory.
-------------------------------------------------------------
So all in all it looks like it should be a reasonably promising starting point for a late DOS and Win9x gaming rig, with a bunch of bonus crap inside as well in case I decide to become an architect living in 1999. I've given the machine a decent dusting out and FORMAT /u /s'd it, installed Win98SE and most of the relevant drivers and it seems like it is cruising. So far, the only issue I've not been able to solve is getting the sound working. I've tried half a dozen drivers for the onboard ES1731, then disabled it using the jumpers and tried an outboard SB Live 5.1 and an outboard ES1370 and half a dozen drivers for each of those cards and still nothing. Tried multiple PCI slots and, yes, multiple speakers/headphones too. I'm thinking it must be something in the IRQ settings though I've had a heck of time getting it to assign anything other than IRQ 10 to whatever sound card I'm using. (Editing to add: On a whim, I thought I'd try and track down the old Ensoniq drivers for the outboard ES1370, and I'm pleased to say they "work," at least as well as an ES1370 can, haha) I'm most likely going to be putting an ISA sound card in for the late DOS stuff anyway, so if anyone has experience using ISA sound for regular Win9x stuff I'm all ears.