First post, by quackgyver
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi,
I'm a retro game designer, and I'm in the process of putting together my first retro PC build for the purpose of retro game design inspiration.
I'm mainly aiming for a 90-99-era build which would use MS-DOS and either Windows 95 or Windows 98 Second Edition.
So far I've gotten ahold of the following:
- A Socket 7 430TX motherboard including 64 MB of SDRAM and a 233 MHz MMX processor.
- An ATX case from Evercase.
- A Sound Blaster AWE 32 sound card.
- An S3 ViRGE video card with 4 MB of memory.
My questions are:
- If possible I'd prefer to be able to regularly switch out the storage device without having to open the case, so instead of having an internal HDD, could I instead use one of the optical drive bays for a hot swap drive? Would an item like this or this work for my purposes and with my hardware? If I bought one of these hot swap drives, could I plug a regular 3.5" HDD into the optical bay and use it as my primary HDD?
- If the above mentioned option isn't viable, could I instead have some sort of front-facing USB/flash drive or SD drive in the optical bay or floppy bay? If so, what product should I get more specifically that would work with my hardware?
- Instead of a floppy drive, could I have a USB/flash drive in the floppy bay that uses FAT-formatted USB/flash drives instead of floppy disks? I know that Gotek has produced floppy emulators that can read disk images from USB/flash drives, but I would prefer to read the data straight from the USB/flash drive rather than from an image file located on the USB/flash drive. Does anyone know if this is possible, and what product I should get?
- My specific motherboard only seems to have a DIM keyboard port, which means that I need an I/O shield that is completely solid except for a single DIM keyboard port hole. I've been looking on eBay, Aliexpress, Discord chats, forums and Facebook groups, but I haven't been able to find one yet. 3D printing or drilling isn't an option due to lack of hardware and the amount of back and forth/trial and error that it'd require if I got help from someone else, and I'd prefer not to put a piece of paper or tape over it. Does anyone know where I could find such an I/O shield?
I think that's more or less it. Thanks a lot in advance!
Game design studio: http://astrojone.com
Personal site: http://quackgyver.com