And it's running SLI to boot!

Perhaps, I'll finally get to installing W2K on it, to unleash the power of the second CPU. This is mostly meant for Unreal, Deus Ex and the like, and I was running (and totally loving) W2K at the time. Come to think of it, some of the best games are from that era. Diablo 2, Allods 1/2 (Rage of mages in the west)/3 (Evil Islands), NOLF... too much nostalgia, cannot continue.

EDIT: I'm debating with myself if I should just get a Tseng for the 386. But someone here mentioned that vertical banding is not exclusive to Trident, and ET4000AX specifically is known for it. Wonder if it is so, and if indeed, how bad/good it is compared to Trident's output.

Short update: PSU for the 486 has arrived, and was immediately installed.

Am5x86 is expected to be next, in a couple days at most...

Another short update: Am5x86 has arrived and was immediately installed. BIOS seems to have a problem identifying the chip, but is only too happy to run on it. I don't even have a floppy drive atm to benchmark it, and I am too lazy to remove one from any of my other machines, so that has to wait some more.

A teeny tiny update on Bard, regarding lighting this time. The two of the most "early nineties LED colours"...

(and also to make sure it is of different colour with Sorceress - another green pcb machine I have)

Oh, and I've finally connected a Cybex KVM (PS/2 and converter to Serial as needed), so that I no longer have to reconnect wires every time I'm working on a different machine.

Another minor update (with all this infection stuff packages are much slower to arrive).

I've sniped some curious Tseng 4000AX-based card for the 386 (sorry if someone else here was bidding on it). Would be interesting to see how it works in a 386, considering it was apparently designed for some video work, has multiple inputs and supports genlock.

Another purchase, this time more of an impulse buy, was a socket 462 board by Soltek, a very yellow board indeed. Now I am torn between making it a EDIT:Thunderbird platform and build another P4 system to cover mid-to-late 2000, or make this one Barton, and build a Tualatin instead for early XP stuff. Either way, I need a beefy PSU to run those chips. Of course, as they say in a completely different forum, the answer is to get both... but that is something I'd rather put off for a time.

You see, I've had so far a certain amount of logic to picking my builds (other than pokemon style collect them all):

- [still nameless], 386-25: early games that are speed-sensitive, pretty much anything DOS and some Windows 3.1 stuff

- Bard, Am5x86, VESA: to have a VESA system, to have a 486, and to have something that is fast enough for most dos era games, yet slow enough that I don't experience issues (e.g. Warcraft 1 on P2 is a bit fast at scrolling even on slowest setting, and water is quite literally blinking), etc... plus for some SB Pro and SB 16 compatibility. Among other things, the focus here is on DOS game sound. Also nostalgia, this (although Cyrix DX2-66 oc'd to 80) was my first machine, not counting all those I've had access to, but not really as part of my home.

- [this place was/is still up for debate, I'm not entirely sure I need a P1 system at all, as there is nothing it does that either 486 or a P2 won't do; P Pro might be cool, but, again, it brings nothing to the table that I already don't have. One thing that comes to mind is, if I ever get my hands on a GUS, I'd want it running and not collecting dust, so I'd want a machine for it, and Bard may happen to be unable to run as many sound cards; dream build would be to get GUS Extreme and be done with it, putting it into an MMX of some sort, I'm just not keen on 1k+ price for those red beasts...]

- Shaman, dual P2-450: fastest DOS machine I have, with SB-LINK it works natively for games like Descent, has 2 Voodoos in SLI for any 3dfx-loving games (hence Shaman), and S3 MeTaL for UT from Savage 4. Covers most early Windows games just fine.

- [this is where things begin to be interesting, what I need is a pair of systems: one would be something that is the absolutely fastest (or, at least, fast enough for anything I'd throw at it) non-speedstep system for games that are unhappy about changing CPU frequency on the fly, as well as some beefy AGP GPU with stable XP drivers in ddraw mode for games like Rage of Mages, yet T&L for games like KnightShift...

I also would very much like to have a system that is the fastest single core machine (what I don't mean is the fastest ever, what I do mean is the fastest, or around that, single core machine at the time single core was still the norm. Meaning, I'd prefer a Cedar Mill P4 or some Athlon. And I do have an AMD mobo that could cover the first requirement, with Barton it would be perhaps too close to P4, yet it does fit the description of "no speedstep and fast as hell AGP system"; going the Thunderbird route gets me something slower, but technically does not add anything a faster machine would be unable to do.

P4, on the other hand, among other things, will be running Vista (and also 64 bit). Not just because *cough* P4 *cough* Vista *cough* bad, but actually because I've had Vista on a P4 630 with 2 Gb ram, and it never really was sluggish or unreliable. Quite the opposite, it was like a breath of fresh air after the nightmare of XP (highly subjective, I know). I would also like to have some more or less period appropriate VGA, and am torn between getting an X1900XT (I've had x1300 and liked it, an actual low end accelerator that was accelerating things, especially after gf5200), or going the green camp route with gf7950, which is also a card I used to have at a slightly later time. And, given the next machine in this list, this one isn't strictly speaking necessary, as Windows 7 with a faster GPU and CPU will easily run anything Vista did.]

- Assasin, S771 Xeon on S775, dual GTX285: a SLI setup with probably the highest performing Tesla microarchitecture-based nVidia gpus, same as in legendary 8800. Dx 9 machine with Windows 7. To run anything my current pc won't run because of Windows 10 incompatibility.

- Sorceress, my current dual Xeon machine that still runs pretty much anything, and is only held back in terms of compatibility by Windows 10, which, for example, doesn't want to run Dragon Age Origins among other things. Needless to say, it won't run 16 bit apps either, but that is covered by Shaman.

Now there are a few problems:
- I don't strictly need P4 for anything
- I very much would wish to have a Tualatin build, but its purpose completely overlaps with either Thunderbird or Barton
- I would also like some Rambus build, which, given this list of machines, is even less practical to have.

Ok, let's be honest here, none of the machines above are strictly necessary, but they do, for the most part, play a specific role. However, the ones in the last list are completely pointless other than the fun building them... So I'm not really sure what to do next, and, more specifically, should I pick Barton or EDIT:Thunderbird for s462?

EDIT2: At this stage I'm leaning towards "collect them all" approach, making a Barton build out of Soltek board, and planning on a P4 and P3 Tualatin builds.

Less of an update, more of a question:

I've finally gotten some adequately sized 28 pin EPROMs. I've written 12k XT-IDE BIOS to them, inserted them into NIC sockets. Even fiddled with jumpers. Nothing happens on boot, on either 386 or 486. I am almost beginning to think those particular NICs don't try to load BIOS from sockets...

So, question, am I doing something wrong? To be precise, I've taken the 12k image, EPROMs are 16k, so I padded the last section with zeroes, while keeping the last byte "A0" at the last position of the image (at 16k instead of 12k as in the image). Did I make a mistake? Should it have remained at 12k, and the rest of zeroes?

Anyway, currently a bit at a loss here, since there was no CRC-related error or anything, it's almost as if those ROMs were never read by either PC...

EDIT: 386 also finally got its memory up to 16M.

Well, things are going sloooooow. Vista-on-a-512Mb-Celeron kind of slow. Still I've got mail!

Look what just arrived at the post office...

It is some sort of (semi?)professional video card by AVerMedia with both video input and output (which appears to consist of a pair of s-video ports and one composite connector), as well as genlock and space fluffies(tm) know what else for video editing. It is also a fully capable 1Mb Tseng ET4000, which is fairly nice in and of itself. Now, I'm really happy to have it, since it isn't something I see for sale every day, even as far as retro hardware goes. Plus, it is huge, even next to a Sound Blaster (as will be seen in last image). But the biggest question is: will it be significantly better than what I have installed now, this old Trident:

To remind you, this was Trident's score and video quality:

I've installed it, and it works just fine (though installing wasn't easy: due to its size it actually reached the other end of the somewhat huge Compuadd motherboard, right where IO connectors are). It did boot quite happily, though.

And this is what I got with the new beast of a card:

Not only it is noticeably faster, it is also much cleaner as far as image quality goes. Gone are those obnoxious vertical lines...

Now I just need to get those drives going... speaking of which, I'm going to try an actual HDD some time this week. Perhaps, onboard BIOS will be happy enough with it, and, if so, I'll probably have a couple machines without SSDs for a change. But that is stuff for another post. In the mean time, look at this beauty!

Edit: Here's the link to the board in question on Stason: https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/graphics-cards/A … A-AVER-PRO.html

I've let the 386 have some rest for a while and resumed work on Bard. To be fair, there wasn't much I could have done at the time, as I'm still missing the HDD for it. I did have some semi-working and awfully overkill 120Gb drive at hand, so I tried to connect it just to see if it would get detected. It didn't, but there was a workaround - soft restart during detection will let the BIOS just go ahead next time, skipping detection. The drive would still respond, and, after a long installation process, I had Windows 98 on the machine.

I've also rerun 3dBench now that it has Am5x86-P75 inside, and I've managed to beat the highest scoring VLB card in this here thread (3DBENCH CPU Benchmark Database)!

As a reminder, the card I am using is ATI Mach32, DRAM version (Graphics Wonder VLB).

Unfortunately, take one step ahead and two steps back. The cheap CPU cooler fan became quite noisy hours after installation, making me wish I hadn't spent all that time replacing blue LEDs with orange ones. It is now a prime candidate for replacement. Also, that onboard keyboard and mouse controller seems quite happy with the peripherals connected directly, but all but refuses to work with them through Cybex SwitchView kvm, making this the only machine I have use with additional keyboard on my desk. Even the 386 was fine with the switch.

Last but not least, having a single IDE connector proves to be an issue when connecting a CD ROM, all the while the one onboard CT3670 does not seem to see the drive either. More troubleshooting... In other words, typical 90's experience... except, back then the machine I had was far less finicky, everything actually worked. Then again, unlike this DEC system, it was far from being the performance king.

Anyway, advice on getting the CD-ROM working through CT3670 IDE controller more than welcome! I'll probably go ahead and test it with another CD-ROM to see if it is the drive at fault here, but I won't be holding my breath.

EDIT: To sweeten the current state of affairs, I've also come across a remarkably 90's set of speakers that I'll happily pass along to someone I know will make fine use of them, but for now they did a surprisingly fine job with System Shock soundtrack played by SC-55! Perhaps it IS the way it's meant to be played...

Finally, my dream 2000's PC is also beginning to take shape. Which one? The speculated Tualatin build. Back then I was a student at IUB, and we all had those standard issue Lifebooks with Celeron 1066 and S3 Super Savage, so I'm hoping to recreate the experience, only beefed up a bit, going with a proper P3. And I just got the card I remember dreaming about back then (but let it stay a secret till it arrives; suffice to say it coule be more rare than the Tseng-based monstrosity I've shown earlier)

You do make good looking systems
that pic of the 386 with simple lighting looks really nice with green pcb's and red and yellow "highlights"

re the CD-ROM off the sound card, just to double check your using the correct driver namely SBIDE.SYS

Thanks, will try that. But shouldn't Windows 98 detect the drive regardless? It does see the controller in Device Manager, but not the drive...

Regarding the looks, thanks for the compliment, though it is mostly to the makers of the boards, not to me. That Compuadd board with red resistor arrays... the moment I saw it I wanted to have it. And I knew instantly I wouldn't put it behind metal panels, it just had to be seen.

Generally, I stick with less is more approach. I'm not sure I want anything else added to that 386 lighting wise, I just love the way it is. What I usually try to go for is lighting minimalism, something that would highlight the board, with a secondary color for accents if needed. I don't want to overdo things, since the purpose of lighting is to make the boards stand out, not the lighting itself. That must be why it usually is relatively subtle. I've got a yellow (needs recap, but otherwise should work), red (works, just that with this quarantine it's 100km away and I'm not going there till it's over), and purple (this one might need some fixing and I'm not 100% sure I'll be able to do it) systems coming, along with a blue one (yet to be procured, should I get lucky with the board on eBay or somewhere else).

Hey Tali! Very nice build and I want to thank you for showing us that CD/FDD caddy from Dell! It is the perfect upgrade for my Dell Optiplex GL 5100. I have one bay currently occupied by a CD drive and I removed the floppy drive to install a CF Card reader (it is a pentium 100 that I am using for my dedicated DOS win 3.1 setup). I purchased the same IDE to 40 pin adapter that you listed in your post however it didn't come with any info on the pins. Do you know if you can attach the adapter to sound card for CD audio out? I am thinking it is either J3 or J4 on the board. I am waiting for my IDE slim drive to arrive.

Thanks for your input and for posting!

You're perfectly welcome. You are correct, either J3 or J4 can be used for audio (different standards cables, but essentially the same analog signals). Sadly, I haven't found slim CD drives with digital out, and most of them are rather noisy (or the system as a whole is rather noisy, whichever the case). In other words, you CAN connect audio from CD, but whether you SHOUD depends on how much you miss hearing all the arcane inner workings of your beloved computer 😀

I am yet to find a properly insulated cable, though, odds are, it's not the cable at fault here. Either way, any standard CD audio cable will work.

Success! I've gotten Bard to recognize the HDD in LBA mode, and up to 2 GB capacity, which is totally fine for my purposes. Furthermore, it no longer needs a workaround of restarting during IDE test. It just boots, as it should. Which means high chances of it running smoothly with the actual HDD I've ordered for it, but that one is yet to arrive.

I've also managed to finish a game of FreeCell with IRQ's in Windows, and now I've got a perfectly running ESS at 220h, I5, D1;3, along with AWE32 on 240H, I7, D0;5, while keeping all the IDE controllers, COM ports and even a NIC. And it all just works!

Now, just to get those sound cards working under pure DOS... But something tells me I'll get it done as well.

EDIT: Couldn't wait to run Descent on it... and it rocks! Seems quite playable, as far as what was considered "playable" back then for a 486 system. And that AWE sound! Of course it won't hold a candle to Roland, but still mighty impressive.

EDIT2: And now it works in DOS. Just like that. A very happy day indeed!

EDIT3: However, it is packed with resource use as it is, so, if I ever get a GUS... I'll be sure needing another system for it. Perhaps something based on Cyrix 6x86? 😀

My celebration was a bit premature. Enabling the network card made ESS stop producing any sound, without any evident conflicts in Device Manager. Making the sound card work disrupts the NIC. Anyway, that SMC Ethercard Elite 16 Ultra was committing the ultimate sin of fighting for the eternally sacred and forbidden IRQ 5 (and a couple DMAs that ESS would want). I figured I shouldn't be too insistent on going my way with obscure hardware (sometimes it is obscure for a reason), and jumped on the bandwagon, replacing SMC with a time proven 509. Guess what, it works wherever I tell it to live, and all network and sound problems are now solved.

I've also ordered replacement fans for the CPU on Bard, 10 and 20mm thick ones, to see which fits better (and because shipping would cost more than the single fan otherwise). Other than that, my day consisted of listening to many versions of Descent MIDI, comparing Ensoniq wavetable sound to Creative's AWE. Roland was sitting on top of Shaman and grinning at the whole thing.

Just wanted to say that all of the components came in and everything is working wonderfully! Thanks again Tali! 😀

Glad it worked, and those black components do help each other as far as looks go! Some interesting contrast even: white and green vs black and red... now where have I seen it before? 😀

How is that CD sound? Is it anything decent? I'm wondering if I should do the ananogue connection myself (might have to, since unlike W95, DOS won't give me a digital solution).

CD sound is working great was rocking out to NIN playing a little Quake this morning! However anything I try to install off of the CD has file corruption. Not sure if it is the drive or the board. I ended up buying a few of each off ebay and hope to get those in this week and will try it out again. Tried a new IDE cable to no avail still getting file corruption anytime I try to install off of the CD. Very strange. CF card in the meantime for putting files on there. Floppy emulator is working just fine. I added a Pentium Overdrive 200MMX into her this morning its a socket 5 board so I have taken this thing up to the max in terms of upgrade-ability. Going to use it as a pure dos and win 95 rig has a voodoo1 in there now.

Regarding drive corruption - that would be a first. My experiments usually landed with one of two results: it either works, or it doesn't. Being more specific, CD on a separate IDE channel almost always works if the motherboard "knows" what a CD is, for example, on Shaman it is on a separate channel. It almost never works on a separate channel in the opposite case. For example, FIC 486-VIP-IO could not, for the love of space fluffues, get it working on a separate channel, but it would happily chug along as a second drive (probably set to slave by default) on either that mobo, or both machines mentioned in this thread. Still surprising that the same drive worked as a single drive in its own channel on a P2.

However, if that is the case, it usually works when on the same channel as another drive, but it depends on the drive. It worked with KingSpec PATA SSDs and CF-IDEs, but didn't with an actual seagate HDD. I'm currently waiting for a couple other IDE HDDs, so I'll have more information later. What's interesting, it worked with SSDs on both Bard and the nameless 386, even though SSDs themselves didn't. Well, they did, kind of, just that they wouldn't boot or anything.

Now, the drive I'm using is UJ-850, so with a different drive YMMV. Also, there is a resistor hack (0 Ohm also works) to make it master or slave if you absolutely need to set it explicitly, but that includes soldering. Important note: all laptop drives are not created equal, some firmware may have them set explicitly to master, slave or cs, even among the same models. Here's a link to some info on the procedure how to make a drive master (the surviving description, anyway, as there are lots of dead links or posts with dead pictures): http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/cf30- … problem.506225/ Otherwise flashing could work (which is a totally next level of pita just to make something master or slave).

However, neither seems to apply to your case. I would suggest you try a different drive, and/or a different IDE channel (if the mobo has one), and see what works/what doesn't. Normally, if your drive is detected and cables are ok, it should just work. Must be something serious going on, like, perhaps, the drive isn't up to snuff. Especially, if it is sharing the same channel with a CF card that does work...

EDIT: In the mean time I've procured a board for my future Tualatin build. I also have the CPU and the VGA coming, and RAM shouldn't be a problem. However, I'd love to get my hands on a CoolerMaster Jet 7 heatsink... and that will probably take some time.

I am thinking it is just a bad drive. Did some research and found that to be the case with some others experiencing similar issues. Hopefully a different drive will solve the issue and all will be well. I really like that caddy setup and may throw similar ones in some of my other builds.

Looking forward to seeing your Tualatin build! I love mine have a GeForce 4 Ti4200 with a Voodoo2 and a PCI SB Live 5.1 in there now and is a great combo. Enjoy playing late Win98 titles on it. I have a bid on a 486 dx2 right now that I am going to throw in my 486 board (has a dx4 in it currently want to make it slower for older titles). I also scored a 17' black CRT on ebay for a very reasonable price and will finally have the Black corner setup to contrast the beige setup 😀

Old computers are just too much fun haha

Well, my builds are usually just a tad more exotic 😀

Seriously, I try to have at least one "special item" in them, and that Tualatin won't be an exception. Especially since it is supposed to be a somewhat stronger reincarnation of an old laptop of mine... Anyway, it will be rocking S3 DeltaChrome for VGA. And yes, I know there are faster GeForce cards out there. But I specifically miss my Fujitsu Graphics Twister (which was rebranded Super Savage), so I just want to see what "Savage on steroids" will look like coupled with a strong enough CPU. Furthermore, for later XP stuff I'll be building a Barton-based system with GF 6800 (it is settled now, and CPU, mobo, RAM are ordered, with the PSU is already here waiting), while this system is mostly for earlier stuff, and that's where S3 shines in both oomph and image quality. Basically, P3 will be running exactly what my Celeron 1066 / Super Savage used to run back in the day... only better. I also want a Vortex 2 in it.

I did choose to go with a single P3, which is closer to what 1) I had, and 2) most people had back then. Dual P2 was mostly an exception to the rule (of making relatively sane, plausible stuff), plus there is nothing like a pair of Slot 1 CPUS next to a pair of Voodoo 2's (ok, Sorceress with dual water-cooled s2011 Xeons will disagree here 😀) But not every system has to be crazy and maxed out everywhere (yeah, right, with my track record it's hard to believe me adhering to this statement). Still, P3 is going to be on a Gigabyte board with i815, hardly a powerhouse. What I like about the board is that it has classic, convenient layout, is large enough for my purposes, has an internal USB, 4 RAM slots (though it can, and probably will, turn a PITA because of only 6 banks support) and is blue (awesome!)

What I need is an equally awesome cooler, so my eyes are set on the Jet 7 (not even sure if I need the fully copper version, Jet 7+). It is supposed to cool up to P3 1333, but it is also officially specced for Athlon XP 3200+, which, unless I'm mistaken, is to Tualatin like a AL-41F engine to a hair dryer. In other words, it should have plenty of cooling power for P3. Just getting one could be an issue... But that is probably half the fun of old computers!

I wanted to update the whole list here (again), but that is an exercise in futility. Suffice to say it's grown, there are more systems planned, and about the only one finalized at the moment (besides Sorceress, though even she is waiting for a BD-RE drive), is Shaman (I will eventually replace the 16 meg Savage 4 with a 32 meg one, and all systems Shaman and below will receive HardMPU, but other than that, its specs won't change). Bard is mostly done, but I still haven't installed the actual HDD it is going to work with, plus the video card is yet to receive its own meg of extra RAM, currently "borrowing" chips from Trident).

Assasin is still waiting for the quarantine to be lifted, with most parts sitting next to where it is, aside form a rather hot Corsair RM1000X PSU, which is here, and an SSD which isn't even ordered yet. Barton still needs a mobo recap, plus I don't even have a GPU for it, only RAM and a CPU (will run S3 Trio off PCI for starters). Enough to test the setup, but far from completion. P4 also needs some motherboard love, but I don't even have the CPU for it (I have plenty of temporary ones at hand, e.g. 630, while I've decided to ultimately go for 670, as with P4 all the marketing was about those Megahurtz, and it has that in spades:) It will have to live with a Radeon 9600 Pro for a while (I have this card, and it will have to suffice while I hunt for X1950XTX crossfire edition that doesn't cost an arm and a leg) In other words, these builds are on a slow burn.

Then there is the wish to eventually get a GUS, and build a system just for that. Cyrix 6x86 probably, love exotic stuff (and I did have a Cyrix once). But this is likely not happening until next year, if at all.

Anyway, that sums it all up for now.