I used to think that only old ISA based systems like 286, 386, 486... etc were retro computers, but building this system has changed my mind a bit even if I still have bit difficulty calling it a retro pc.

It always starts with a motherboard. Early last year I was visiting a friend who has basically his whole house full of all kinds of junk and I saw a motherboard there with a cpu and some ram. I was looking at it and he said that I can have it if I want. I was bit unsure if I would use it but it does have an ISA slot after all, so I took it

I didn't do anything with it for about half a year. I think it had 600Mhz celeron cpu on it, so I thought if I am going to build something using it, it needs to have pentium 3. I saw someone selling untested pentium 3 cpus on ebay for just couple of euros, so I bought 3 of them hoping that at least one of them would work and since they were so cheap.

I was lucky because they all worked fine. Now I would have even spares if I would ever try overclocking one.
Next on the list were sound card and video card. I had decided to put my awe64 in the isa slot and I wanted nvidia card as video card for better dos compatibility. Unfortunately I didn't have many nvidia cards and I did put my Geforce 2 MX card in the agp slot temporarily hoping that later I would find something better. I installed dos and dos games seemed to work fine and I didn't do anything about the system for couple months.

I decided I would want to see how well my 2 voodoo2 cards would work in this system. I think the main reason was that I wanted to play lands of lore 2 again with 3dfx patch. One of the voodoo2 cards was my old diamond monster card I had in my Pentium 2 system in late 90s and other one looked was exact copy of it that I had bought couple years earlier and it had some more corrosion than my old one. I didn't have SLI cable so I ordered 2 cheap ones from ebay and waited 2 weeks until they arrived. It took some time for me to get voodoo 2 cards to work in dos games. I also installed tomb raider and archimedean dynasty that I also wanted to play. It was rather difficult to find a glide2x.ovl file that would not be speed sensitive and would work in my pentium 3 system. In the end I managed to find driver that worked with tomb raider and lands of lore 2, but archimedean dynasty required old version of driver that only worked when I reduced fsb to 66Mhz in bios.

After one more month or so, I happened to get lucky with a video card. A friend had an old geforce card that was agp and he had no use for it. He wasn't even sure what geforce card it was because it was not written on the card. It was a Gainward Geforce 4 TI 4600, so I thought it would be good enough to run even some early 2000s directX games in win98se. On next days after I had tested the card I sent him a message asking if he knew if the thermal paste on the video card had ever been replaces and what he replied to me surprised me. He said that the card used to belong to his father and the card has never been used and it has just been stored ever since 2003. I was bit suspicious about it at first, but the card didn't really have any marks that would indicate that it had been used. Even the agp connector was pristine.

Since I had decent video card for win98 gaming, I decided I wanted to install a sound card to the system that would allow EAX support and also I wanted the system to be able to do DVD playback in windows and with awe64 48Khz -> 44Khz conversion was causing some issues. First I tried an old audigy 2zs, but I could not get it to work. It was detected in win98se, but when installing any driver the driver installation always said that it does not detect any audigy in the system. The pci connector of the card was bit corroded and even if I had gotten system sounds in winXP working when I had tested the card previous year, it seemed to have some problems.

I decided to go with sound blaster live instead. It could also do both EAX and 48Khz playback. Perhaps later I can switch to audigy card if I find a good one.