First post, by Macca70
Hi all
I’ve been dying to do a retro PC for a while now (being an oldie I started building my own back PC’s back in the early 90’s)
I have a new (super duper computa” as my wife calls it) , Zen 3 etc and as great as it is I’ve been feeling rather nostalgic about the late 90’s stuff I used to have , right about the age of the first 3d accelerators Veritè , 3dfx , TNT’s , etc and the games that came with it that absolutely blew my mind at the time , looking at GlQuake mouth wide open going “Wow bilinear filtering is soooo cool” , 🤣 😂 (and that was on a 3d Blaster Veritè in Vquake , awesomeness)
Anyway , last week , up in the loft I was and found some old games CMR , Incoming , DKII , NFS HS and 2se , Quake , Freespace , Linksls , etc etc , old PSU’s , hdd’s , a geforce 4 ti 4400 , an SB live , Cd drves/writers , an early Intel ssd , a P4 2.53 and thought , I really don’t need to buy much to do it , so watched a few of Phils Computer Labs excellent retro videos and it seems a good platform as a powerful win98 PC , I wasn’t so sure how compatible the P4 system would be but after watching his videos I was on the right track , so off to ebay I trotted and bought a P4P800 Deluxe in remarkable condition for £29 , 512mb of Micron DDR for pence , a Microsoft Sidewinder Joypad (£6) same as I had at the time and a Sidewinder 3d Pro (£9)for freespace , incoming etc.
The hard bit was finding a suitable case , they were either all knackered or waaaaay overpriced , eventually found one on Gumtree with an old Intel mobo , early P4 , 2 gig DRR , an PCI S3 Virge , a floppy and std CD Drive for £15 , I travelled 30 miles for it , I think the guy thought I was mental tbh 😂.
Threw it all together in no time and found myself a little excited and a little anxious when coming to hit the Power button for the first time as I wasn’t sure that Geforce 4 Ti was going to work and I knew that was going to be the biggest expense should I need to buy one , it’s done two house moves in and out of lofts and things chucked about on top of boxes but holy hell , it worked right off the bat , it even had an aftermarket thermaltake cooler and ram heatsinks on it which I remembered fitting when Isaw it , everything worked great installing win98 se off a USB drive , most of the games work just fine and I’ve had an absolute blast building and installing all the old stuff and getting dgvoodoo to work so I could play the glide versions.
Having a bit of stress with the sb live , it’s probably an oem one , I didnt check and don’t remember the part number but thats an easy fix if it is , it keeps kinda uninstalling itself and coming up with the exclamation mark in Device Manager , I’ll try different drivers first though , oh and the p4 cooler is a bit whiny , though I think I remember those 80mm fans being a bit like that.
Anyway , just wanted to post about the fun I’ve had doing the build and really to thank you all for all the stuff you’ve posted on this rather excellent forum (and community) that I’ve been able to browse through to refresh my memory and help me along the way.
As a lurker , that is 🙄
There are still bits to do and have been done since the pictures , took one ide drive out(noisy) and changed the ide cables for some old black Asus ones I had in the loft but it’s mostly the same , oh and the board surprised me when it came as it had a p4 2.8 800 already sat in the socket (bargain😉) , just got to wait for the sidewinders which are coming this week.
After going through the stuff in the loft , I’m also tempted to do an XP machine as I also found an Athlon 64 3200 , a 64x2 4400 an Asus A8N sli motherboard , a geforce 8800Gtx , 4 gig DDR and an XP era Coolermaster case , another early Intel 80gig ssd , a 550w PSU , , I honestly didn’t remember I still had all that stuff , oooooo more fun. 😁
Quote from wife when she heard that
“Omg how many PC’s do you need ?
My reply
“😁😋😆🤣”
Cheers
Lee 👍👊😁
Build 1
Win98se
Dell Dimension XPS B866r
1.0ghz PIII
512mb 800mhz Rdram
Asus GF2 Ti 64mb
Build 2
XP System
Lian Li PC65 USB
Athlon 64 x2 4800+
Asus A8N SLI Premium
2gb Corsair XMS 2
Asus 6600GT 256mb