That Biostar mobo looks amazing. It's got literally everything you could humanly need:
- Chipset that can take some of the top tier LGA775 CPUs
- Dual floppy support, including 5.25'' - everything completely plug and play just like in the old PC's
- 2 IDE tape sockets - for a DVD-RW, a ZIP and a MO drive, all should work like a charm
- SATA support for modern HDDs and possibly also SSD's. I've got a 60GB I could use for a system partition. Then again, that might be too small for Win 11, but picking up a bigger one for peanuts is a non-issue.
- Should be capable of running Win 10 or 11 without too much trouble, so you can do web stuff and watch youtube and whatnot.
- PCI-E for a modern graphics card, and PCI for a nice bespoke PCI soundcard
I think it would indeed be somewhat difficult to fill out all 6 5.25'' panels in front of a full-tower PC. I believe those were made mostly with multiple HDD-caddies in mind, for server builds. I do like the idea of caddies or hot-swap bays, but I don't have any need for them, as my new PC has no bays whatsoever in the first place, so it would just be for decoration, pretty much.
I'm thinking:
- IDE or SATA DVD-RW
- 5.25'' and 3,5'' floppies connected natively using a traditional floppy tape
- Would be nice to have 750 MB Zip and 2,3GB MO, but both would definitely need to be IDE, as SCSI is out of the question for obvious reasons. Going to be very expensive and hard to hunt for internal drives of this variety that also don't happen to have a black front panel.
- White extra USB panel connected to the internal USB would be nice, or perhaps one that combines extra USB slots with a multi-card reader.
So this comes up to three 5.25'' bays and three 3.5'' ones. A rather peculiar config, gotta say - would be great to find something like this for sure. But I suppose it would be much easier to find a 4x 5.25'' and 2x 3.5'' case, then one of the smaller drives could be placed in a holder rail with a front plate. But I think it'd be much cooler to make this in retro beige, so that's the type of case I'd start looking for. With modern ones there is no way in hell colors could be matched successfully with no modifications. Of course spray-painting everything black is always a solution, and there are 5.25'' floppy drives in black in the first place, but those are rare and expensive.