pinesal wrote on 2022-01-31, 01:20:

Hello everyone! I am new here. I discovered this forum after needing to learn about an old computer I acquired. I want to intro […]
Show full quote

Hello everyone! I am new here. I discovered this forum after needing to learn about an old computer I acquired. I want to introduce myself and to say that this forum is AWESOME!

I was born in 1982 (39) and I am a super nostalgic retro geek. I have a whole room dedicated to the 90s and my internet persona is all about the 90s.

As a kid/teen we had a family computer starting with a hand me down 286 computer and I used to play Commander Keen. Later we got a 75mhz Pentium and got an upgraded computer every few years. I eventually got my own computer that was all mine and so on. We always had budget model pre-built computers though.

My friend was the one with the awesome custom gaming rigs. He had the voodoo cards and the huge towers etc. I was always jealous. I was mostly a console gamer in the 90s with some PC games on the side. Still fascinated by computers, I stayed interested and learn to build my own and eventually entered the tech industry for work. But that's boring.

I loved those good old days of discovery from the 90s where everything was new and interesting. And now all I want to do is go back to those days. I spend a lot of time trying to relive my childhood and do the things I couldn't or didn't do as a teen.

One thing I have been trying to find is a retro PC so I can go back and play some of the PC games that I missed out on because my PC, at the time, wasn't good enough to play them. They have been impossible to find locally and shipping for one is expensive and risky so I just waited.

Finally, I struck gold and I have been sitting on this treasure for years without knowing. I live in a condo complex and there is an office that the HOA uses. But the office doesn't get used much and I had never gone in there. Well, I actually had a reason to go in there last week and when I did, I saw this beige beauty just piled up in the corner of the room. I asked the HOA board what was up with it and I was told they plan to recycle it. NO WAY! I said. I asked if I could have it and they agreed and gave it to me!

Pictures:

It has a
FIC VA-503+ Motherboard
AMD K6-2 525mhz CPU
128MB PC100 ram
A Trident TGUI 9680
Creative SoundBlaster 16 ISA soundcard

I went over to my brother's house because he kept a lot of the old family PC stuff. Not everything but parts here and there. He managed to find me another 64GB of ram. Plus he gave me a ATI All in Wonder 9800 to try in it. The 9800 kind of works but any 3D acceleration seems to be broken. I posted about this here on a different board and it was suggested that the 9800 might be too new and have compatibility issues. I ordered an ATI Rage Fury. I know not the "BEST" card for the era but it was $12 and should be a better match to the rest of the hardware. I'll have it on Tuesday.

Funny thing, then I was searching GPUs, I was like "These cards don't have fans, the must be crap budget cards or something." but almost no cards from this time had fans apparently. I wasn't used to that fact, I guess.

I also got so exited to be back in 90s PC land that I went to the Internet Archive to read old issues of PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World. I got wrapped up in the excitement of the arrival of 3D accelerators and the new games that come with it. Its just a fun trip into the past.

As a side note, that old office had a Windows XP computer from the mid 2000s also and that was given to me too so that's in my near future as well.

That's it for now. I look forward to chatting with everyone here.

A bit on the late side, but welcome aboard! 😁

You're correct about a certain era of graphics cards not having any fans anyway regardless of how good they were at the time.
The first mainstream graphics cards that received active cooling were roughly around the TNT2 Ultra and Voodoo banshee era. And not even long before that, graphics cards didn't even have heatsinks! Most Voodoo 2s didn't come with heatsinks and Riva128 sometimes came with really puny ones.

Hardware evolution was so rapid back then. Things could flip around 180 degrees within the blink of an eye! 😜

Tetrium wrote on 2022-03-05, 10:17:

A bit on the late side, but welcome aboard! :D […]
Show full quote

pinesal wrote on 2022-01-31, 01:20:

Hello everyone! I am new here. I discovered this forum after needing to learn about an old computer I acquired. I want to intro […]
Show full quote

Hello everyone! I am new here. I discovered this forum after needing to learn about an old computer I acquired. I want to introduce myself and to say that this forum is AWESOME!

I was born in 1982 (39) and I am a super nostalgic retro geek. I have a whole room dedicated to the 90s and my internet persona is all about the 90s.

As a kid/teen we had a family computer starting with a hand me down 286 computer and I used to play Commander Keen. Later we got a 75mhz Pentium and got an upgraded computer every few years. I eventually got my own computer that was all mine and so on. We always had budget model pre-built computers though.

My friend was the one with the awesome custom gaming rigs. He had the voodoo cards and the huge towers etc. I was always jealous. I was mostly a console gamer in the 90s with some PC games on the side. Still fascinated by computers, I stayed interested and learn to build my own and eventually entered the tech industry for work. But that's boring.

I loved those good old days of discovery from the 90s where everything was new and interesting. And now all I want to do is go back to those days. I spend a lot of time trying to relive my childhood and do the things I couldn't or didn't do as a teen.

One thing I have been trying to find is a retro PC so I can go back and play some of the PC games that I missed out on because my PC, at the time, wasn't good enough to play them. They have been impossible to find locally and shipping for one is expensive and risky so I just waited.

Finally, I struck gold and I have been sitting on this treasure for years without knowing. I live in a condo complex and there is an office that the HOA uses. But the office doesn't get used much and I had never gone in there. Well, I actually had a reason to go in there last week and when I did, I saw this beige beauty just piled up in the corner of the room. I asked the HOA board what was up with it and I was told they plan to recycle it. NO WAY! I said. I asked if I could have it and they agreed and gave it to me!

Pictures:

It has a
FIC VA-503+ Motherboard
AMD K6-2 525mhz CPU
128MB PC100 ram
A Trident TGUI 9680
Creative SoundBlaster 16 ISA soundcard

I went over to my brother's house because he kept a lot of the old family PC stuff. Not everything but parts here and there. He managed to find me another 64GB of ram. Plus he gave me a ATI All in Wonder 9800 to try in it. The 9800 kind of works but any 3D acceleration seems to be broken. I posted about this here on a different board and it was suggested that the 9800 might be too new and have compatibility issues. I ordered an ATI Rage Fury. I know not the "BEST" card for the era but it was $12 and should be a better match to the rest of the hardware. I'll have it on Tuesday.

Funny thing, then I was searching GPUs, I was like "These cards don't have fans, the must be crap budget cards or something." but almost no cards from this time had fans apparently. I wasn't used to that fact, I guess.

I also got so exited to be back in 90s PC land that I went to the Internet Archive to read old issues of PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World. I got wrapped up in the excitement of the arrival of 3D accelerators and the new games that come with it. Its just a fun trip into the past.

As a side note, that old office had a Windows XP computer from the mid 2000s also and that was given to me too so that's in my near future as well.

That's it for now. I look forward to chatting with everyone here.

A bit on the late side, but welcome aboard! 😁

You're correct about a certain era of graphics cards not having any fans anyway regardless of how good they were at the time.
The first mainstream graphics cards that received active cooling were roughly around the TNT2 Ultra and Voodoo banshee era. And not even long before that, graphics cards didn't even have heatsinks! Most Voodoo 2s didn't come with heatsinks and Riva128 sometimes came with really puny ones.

Hardware evolution was so rapid back then. Things could flip around 180 degrees within the blink of an eye! 😜

Thanks for the reply. My next goal is to get Windows 98 online. I have ethernet card that I want to install and I ordered a wifi bridge that should give me an ethernet connection in the room without having to run a cord all the way there. I am excited to browse the internet archive in retro style.

pinesal wrote on 2022-01-31, 01:20:

I was born in 1982 (39) and I am a super nostalgic retro geek. I have a whole room dedicated to the 90s and my internet persona is all about the 90s.

The 90s was to PC gaming/internet culture was like the 60s to music. The pioneering spirit, done for the love of it rather than $$$, the personalities and characters, will never be seen again. The whimsical ramblings of sierra adventure games, the quirky humor of lucasarts games, the frenetic pace of shooters like DOOM and clones...and then the early modding and fan-sites that emerged on the internet as games like Quake started to appear. We missed out on Woodstock, but we got to experience the 90s instead, and I completely understand why someone would want to "live in the 90s" as a choice. Everyone here probably does to some extent.