KCompRoom2000 wrote:I second the suggestion for a P2 build, an ATX Slot 1 board with ISA is probably the easiest to find for a beginner who wants to […]
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I second the suggestion for a P2 build, an ATX Slot 1 board with ISA is probably the easiest to find for a beginner who wants to do both high-performance DOS gaming and reasonable 9x gaming, the best part about ATX boards is that they'll most likely fit in nearly any half-modern full tower case which means you won't have to be tortured by trying to find affordable AT cases, but do make sure the case has external 5.25" (and possibly 3.5") drive bays because I've noticed a lot of modern cases are stripping those away.
What model is your Sound Blaster card? there should be a model number starting with CT or SB (example: CT4800) that can help us identify the card you have so we know for sure if it would be useful for your project.
Staticblast wrote:Yeah, no kidding. Old motherboards can be fussy. Mine won't take a USB keyboard during boot. It also refuses to acknowledge any graphics cards at all if I have both an AGP and a PCI card installed.
Most motherboards have a BIOS setting to use a certain video adapter for POST, usually it's in a column labeled "Default Video Adapter" and the settings are usually "AGP only" or "PCI only", maybe set it to AGP only if you have multiple PCI adapters and one AGP adapter?
Heh, no need to worry too much over my build, It was just to slap together the hardware I already had laying around. I'll be improving it as I go along. (Would have used my Slot 1 board, but it died.) Just for interest's sake, my current sound card is an SB Prelude.
I figured this thread could be used more as a general guideline for people just starting off, and I know a lot of people here have more experience with older hardware than me.
w.r.t. the cases, yeah, I noticed that the budget cases are more likely to still have the bays.
w.r.t. the graphics cards, that's certainly a possibility. Mine had (unknown to me at the time) a corrupt BIOS, so maybe that's why.
4-in-1 build (thanks Phil!): AMD K6-III+ 450 / SOYO 5EMA+ / 128MB SDRAM / 80GB Seagate HDD / Voodoo 3 3000 / Orchid Righteous 3D / Sound Blaster CT2960 / MPU-401 PCMIDI Clone / HxC Floppy Emulator / 15" CRT monitor