Sometimes you plan stuff long in advance and make lovely builds you wanted. Other times you plain mess up, think "What the hell now?", chuck some stuff together and think "Yeah, that sort of works". This is clearly the latter category.

This build was supposed to be about an early 486 EISA system in an XT clone case. All very well until I put it together and saw this:

These cards weren't going to fit into this case, period 😵

So what now? I could stick the original 286 board back into the case, but I never really liked the 286 and anyway, most of the stuff I actually like doing in software needs at least a late era 486. Now, I have a few of those, but they were already in systems so I dug around for some other stuff and it all sort of fell into place.

First, some pics. Here's the front:

The beige 3.5"/5.25" combo drive sticks out like a sore thumb, but until I find an original '1980s bumpy black' version this is the best I can do. The CDRom drive is also a bit of a giveaway that all is not as you would assume with a case like this, even if it is bumpy black. And then the HDD- this is a huge 666MB SCSI drive, which work, but tbh is purely in there for the looks as I prefer being able to play without ear protection.

Then the side:

Nice hinge-open XT Clone goodness with original Big Switch PSU.

The back starts to give stuff away:

All ports & buttons are functional, but I'm missing a little cable for that second VGA connector.

So, open the hood:

Massive PSU, equally huge (unused) HDD, CDRom and by comparison miniscule motherboard.

Closer:

What we have here:
- Epox EP55-VX motherboard (i430VX, only 72p SIMM slots)
- P200MMX CPU
- 2x 16MB 60ns EDO
- 2MB IDE Disk-On-Module
- Seagate ST4767N 666MB SCSI (not connected, no SCSI adapter in there at present either)
- Hitachi-LG GCE-8481B CDRW
- External IDE-CF adapter for easy file transfer.
- AudioExcel AV310 ISA SBPro2+SB16 clone (CMI8330 chip)
- 3Com 3C509B-C ISA 10MbE NIC
- Orchid Righteous3D PCI (Voodoo1), currently not hooked up due to lack of cable.
- Diamond Stealth3D S220 PCI (Verite Rendition V2100)

This is hooked up to my general retro area with Iiyama Diamondtron 17" monitor, SGI Granite 'Bigfoot' keyboard and (temporarily) crappy IBM PS/2 ball mouse via KVM. MIDI goes to MT-32 and MU50XG in pic and a Roland GM/GS piano elsewhere in the room.

So far I'm very happy with the setup. When I game it's almost always things - mainly DOS things - from my late teens, i.e. mid 1990s. This setup beautifully covers that era. 200MMX seems to be about the sweet spot. I was able to get a K6-2 450 to run on this system and it neatly doubled performance - but it ran very hot (can't get voltage below 2.4V and even then the regulators are glowing) and the extra speed just caused problems.

Apart from getting the Voodoo passthrough cable (on its way as I write), the system is pretty much complete. Tbh I might even remove the Voodoo entirely - I'm more into (4X) strategy than FPS, and I don't think there's a single DOS Voodoo game I actually like. Then again, I have a couple of V3s for Windows gaming, so there's no better system for that card. I'm not happy with the mess of cables, but that's pretty inherent to AT form factor, particularly if you want an IDE-CF adaptor in the back...