First post, by bifo78
As a quick introduction, I grew up tripping over 386-486-pentium computers, because my parents were happy to brag that their son was really into computers and their friends always seemed to have some old computer in the basement that they wanted to get rid of after having upgraded, but didn't think it was worth anything, so hey, a good home found!
I was bit by the retrocomputing bug when I was very young, back in the 90s, and learned about computers by taking them to pieces and putting them back together again. This was back when internet was terrible so there wasn't much, so I learned about the odd old computer models from old issues of PC World in the local library (they even let me pick through them to grab a lot when they threw them out around 1999, I forget what happened to the ones I took). I've owned and (regrettably) sold a lot of old 90s PCs over the years, but it's been a long time since I've had one and I'm in a situation because of my music equipment and some other projects I've run into problems with, my usual solution of a maxxed out Dell C600 laptop will apparently not write floppy disks properly.
So, why not build the desktop that will write to any media I can throw at it? And maybe that old Soundblaster Live! Pro I kept around might get some use too.
This is a retrospective to bring you up to date over the course of the projects that I started on last September (2020).
Unfortunately, I didn't keep around any of my old graphics cards, but it turns out that's fine because I'm not going to throw a lot of money at this, and AGP motherboards seem to bring a premium when I'm shopping around. I was looking for something around the Pentium MMX level, where I could have some modern features but mostly I was concerned with the floppy disc controller being integrated and trying to minimize cost. I wanted to be able to write or read virtually any media that would have been used from the 80s to the 00s, so I also purchased some other interface cards, and I wanted to be able to archive things, so I purchased some drives.
Initial purchases:
AOPEN AP53 95140-1 Motherboard
Pentium MMX 200
2X 64mb pair 72-pin SIMMs (256mb total)
8.4gb IDE/66 HDD
ADAPTEC 1505 SCSI ISA
EZ-2000 10BT ISA
AOPEN AW744LII
Matrox G200 8mb + 8mb PCI
Startech PCI2IDE ATA133
Generic mid-height ATX case, 4 5.25 bays, 2 3.5 bays
2x 8mm fans
Heatsink and separate fan with motherboard plug
ATX to AT plug converter
Existing components:
Creative Soundblaster Live! Pro
ATX power supply
6x IDE DVDROM (flashed the firmware 20+ years ago for international performance, works with nearly everything that works with IDE)
24x CDRW
1.2mb 5.25" floppy, half height, old system pull
1.44mb 3.5"
1.3gb MO Fujitsu Dynamo (backup? just thought it was cool)
250mb ZIP IDE
250gb ATA/100 IDE
146gb SCA with SCSI to SCA drive converter known to be working from other projects
also various cables for using the built-in serial and parallel, and some IDE cables.
Initial setup with cards intended to be:
Matrox G200 16mb
Soundblaster Live! Pro
AOPEN AW744LII
Startech PCI2IDE ATA133
ADAPTEC 1505 SCSI ISA
EZ-2000 10BT ISA
empty ISA slot
This is the inital post to establish the start of the project which began nearly a year ago, and I'm not going to back-date-code anything because I don't remember when I bought various things, and this is a summation of things purchased over time to get us up to the recent state of the project. Please criticize my choices and explain where I may be wrong in ways that I may not know, referring to this post, after subsequent posts.
Korg AG-10 | Kawai XS-1 | Roland CM-32P | Yamaha FB-01 | Roland D-110 | Roland M-GS64