First post, by Tetrium
- Rank
- l33t++
Occasionally new members appear here on Vogons that are interested in doing something with old hardware, often fueled by nostalgia.
However, like myself, when I started fiddling around with old hardware, I hardly knew what I was doing!
So I started reading on the internet and in time, found some very entertaining, good and easy to read articles
The purpose of this thread is to put the links to many of those good reads all in 1 place, with all the links in the very first post so it's easy to find.
A good way for any retro 'newb' ( sorry LoL 😜 ) to start is by reading the redhill guide:
http://www.redhill.net.au/ig.html
This website features the 1st hand experience in a computer repair shop somewhere in Australia I think.
It has some nice information about motherboards, processors and harddrives and also has some good info as to why PC-Chips and it's 20-odd clone names are to be avoided.
An absolutely recommended entry level read! 😉
Another fun read was the following article:
http://accelenation.com/wp-content/uploads/20 … of_graphics.pdf
Related article (basically a rewrite of the above linked article):
http://forum.overclock3d.net/index.php?/topic … -history-guide/
It's a nicely written story about early graphics cards, starting from when PCI was very new to around 2002.
Very nice about this article is that it also features the beginning of computergame graphics from just before 3DFX entered the scene (must remember the 3DFX Voodoo 😉 )the rise and fall of 3DFX and the start of the rivalry between NVidia and ATI (later becoming AMD)
Now on to Windows!
Windows is (along with pure DOS) the preferred OS for retro gaming.
The best site I've found is in German, but it's very nice as it has a lot of articles all in 1 bunch and the website is very easy to navigate through.
If you can't read German then I'd suggest to use google translate:
German: http://www.winhistory.de/index.php
Translated:
http://translate.google.nl/translate?js=n&pre … .de%2Findex.php
Theres also an interesting thread right here on Vogons where we mention what we consider the minimum system requirements for running any particular version of Windows:
What are your minimum Windows system requirements?
Another good source of info happens to be wikipedia . It has quite detailed info about all kinds of hardware and it's generally well written. A good way to start exploring retro hardware and a good place for a leap towards more specialized websites.
Now on to part 2:
In this section I'll supply some links that have a LOT of basic info all bunched up together for easy reference.
The 1st one is about CPU's. More specifically, about how much heat they produce.
If you lived in the early/mid 90's you might have heard about the very first Pentium and about how much heat they produced!
But...how much heat do they produce?
And why was the Pentium 4 considered a hothead?
Was the AMD K6-III really that hot? And how cool did the Pentium 3 really run at?
This webpage provides a list of almost all relevant CPU's and the heat they produced. It's very comprehensive!
It's also a personal favorite of mine 😀
Old site http://mysite.verizon.net/pchardwarelinks/elec_pentium.htm
http://pclinks.xtreemhost.com/
The rest of the webpage has some more interesting articles, including graphics cards and older chipsets (specifically their cacheable area).
The next is a German website that has 1 very interesting page!
It lists all graphics cards all the way from 4MB to the most recent ones in order of slow to fast. Really handy if you want to quickly compare 2 very different cards to eachother!
http://www.pc-erfahrung.de/grafikkarte/vga-gr … krangliste.html
Info about very old graphics cards is very hard to come by these days. I'm talking about ISA, VLB and the very earliest PCI graphics cards.
Ever heard of Oak? Trident? Cirrus Logic?
Heck, even Western Digital (known these days for their harddrives) used to make graphics chips!
It's not very detailed, but it's nice to have info about cards of this age all on 1 page.
http://www.uni-giessen.de/faq/archiv/pc-hardw … s/msg00000.html
Now, for building a computer, you'll obviously need a motherboard!
For the newer ones you can usually find manuals on the manufacturers website. But the very old ones are often deleted (or the company itself seized to exist). Luckily someone made one single VERY large website which contains all the jumper settings of those very old and long forgotten motherboards. It's called "Total Hardware 99"!
http://www.ccs-a.com/th99/
This isn't the only webpage. If this one ever disappears (others have come and gone in the past) then do a google search for "th99" or "Total Hardware 99".
If you're looking for pictures of CPU's (and a bit of info + a very active forum full of helpful people 😉 )then http://www.cpu-world.com is a very good place to start.
It also has a nice benchmark database which is a good start to compare the performance of these old CPU's.
Have a good read!
Tetrium
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Added links go under here:
Old computers (or "old harddrive controllers" to be more specific) are plagued by limitations to the size of the harddrive that it can recognize. For people new to retro computing this may come as a surprise (though there being limits in itself doesn't have to come as a surprise, theres always some limits left or right) and it's handy to know these beforehand before one tries in vain to connect a 200GB IDE drive to a 40p ISA IDE controller.
A couple good reads are here:
http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/har … ze_barriers.htm
Edit: Found something interesting the other day. Apparently someone made a large image with pictures of all the relevant sockets, memory slots etc.
It's quite complete, link:
http://sonic840.deviantart.com/art/Computer-h … r-1-7-111402099
Edit2:Link added to Vogons thread about Win min sys req's.
Edit3:Link updated to processor electrical specification
Edit4:Attached a txt file with a list of Creative Soundblaster part numbers.
The txt file includes the original link
Edit5:Added a link about harddrive limitations. Silly how I could've missed that 😳
