Reply 16440 of 27611, by gex85
The other day I came across a µATX Socket 370 board that I received some time ago and put into storage, the AOpen MX3L.
It has AGP, 3x PCI, 1x ISA, and an onboard ESS Solo 1 audio chip that seems to have good DOS compatibility. But unfortunately it uses the crippled 440LX chipset, so it's 66MHz FSB Celerons only. Plus, it doesn't even support the higher clocked Celerons like the 700MHz chip that I have in my collection, but maxes out at 533 MHz. At least it supports some overclocking by raising the FSB to 75 or 83 MHz.
However, I put in a Rage 128, NIC and a 500 MHz Celeron chip (that runs happily at 75 MHz FSB, ~ 568 MHz) and now I am going to do something that I haven't done in many many years: Install Windows ME. Let's see how long it takes until I regret it... 😉 I didn't even have the CDs any more, but Winworldpc came to the rescue. I remember that my brother used to run it on his (Celeron-based) system in 2001 and was quite happy with it, but personally I never got past installing it, cursing a whole lot and then switching over to Win2k.
Edit: Much to my surprise, everything just worked out of the box. Win ME had drivers for the Intel chipset, the Rage 128, the ESS Solo-1 and the RTL8139 - there was not a single unknown device in the Windows device manager right after the installation. Of course I will update some of the drivers to the latest versions, but this was impressive. When I plugged in the Ethernet cable, moving the card a little bit in its PCI slot, the system immediately BSOD'ed, so everything seems to be okay 😄
Check out the Win ME page at Winworldpc, the screenshots say it all 😉