I'm not sure if I am alone in this, but I have many different cases, PSUs, optical and floppy drives and when a new build springs into my mind all the cases and PSUs and drives are all in the wrong case and I get disillusioned with the whole build before I even start given the amount of drive, PSU and HDD swapping I would have to do to make it a reality. And I only have like 6 cases, 4 PSUs and less than 10 optical drives, so certainly not a "collection"!

So then came about a project to create one multi-purpose chassis that can take a wide range of retro builds so I no longer have to faff around with. To achieve this I wanted to spruce up my least favourite but quite functional case and give it a new lease of life.

Here it is just after I bought it two years ago. I cleaned it up from this grim state and then used it like that for quite a while.

I drilled a whole up top for an AT PSU button, and made a mess of it, and also at some point tried to drill some holes / slidey mounts for plastic motherboard risers you get on AT motherboards, and made a mess of that too. This is a shame as it has some holes for standoffs for AT motherboard but nowhere for the plastic risers you get on boards of this age to sit. Until I realised you could get plastic risers that sit on the chassis rather than go through the chassis. So the case definitely needs a new lease of life; think of it as like LGRs old windows 98 PC that he turned into the Lazy Green Giant or whatever it was.

So anyway I stripped the case back as much as possible and started installing drives for maximum compatibility from, I dunno, 1990 to 2010 PCs. I've got here:

80GB IDE
IDE DVD-ROM
IDE CD-RW or CR-RW+ or something (all the - and + confuse me for CDs)
Gotek floppy emulator
3.5" floppy drive
2.5" 120BG SATAII SSD
proper PC Speaker

Anything newer than 2010-ish (no IDE) can go in my other modern case, or won't need a DVD drive at all (which I do if I pick up more unusual modern hardware and bench mark it, like an AMD 7860K APU I got the other day). 80GB is plenty big enough for a regularly swapping XP PC and older DOS PCs I use CF cards either directly plugged into the motherboard or around the back of the case.

The PSU is fantastic. It is a Seventeam 350Watt model that has many molex connectors and a floppy connector, a couple of SATA connectors, 20+4 pin and 12v ATX connectors. It has a -5v rail and can do a respectable 25a on the 12v rail. It's also silent as it has a 120mm fan. I'm quite happy using this power supply on PCs from a 386 with SB 2.0 to a Socket 775 PC.

By new "lease of life" I mean paint, which generally goes poorly for me. This was no exception... the end result *please squint to avoid blinding by brightness*

So yeah, VOGONS colours. I know it's hard to see because it's so camouflaged with the rest of the webpage colour scheme, but look and it's there 😜

I bought a couple of case stickers on eBay. I had the choice between that old AMD logo, a Windows logo (the Windows 95/98 and maybe ME? one), and a Via EPIA logo. I quite like my VIA EPIA board but not sure it was a good fit for this case given the size of it compared to the ITX via board.

For its first build, I thought I'd try Socket 478 as I haven't used a late 478 PC in ages. I bought a motherboard with AGP x8 and support for 800MHz FSB CPUs and dug out my 3.4GHz Prescott - luckily it's pins were all fine considering it's been in storage for at least 2 years. We'll just pretend that I didn't minutes before stick an AMD sticker on the front...

I've dug out my 7600GS AGP card and the Audigy 2 ZS. I've only put 512MB of RAM in there as to be honest I need to test my collection properly so might well use this board to do that. The next build will probably be my 486 with a SB2.0 and I will only have to swap out the

Anyway I now have a VOGONS coloured PC 😁