First post, by bjt
- Rank
- Oldbie
So, how's your 2015 been for retro activities? Whether you've been playing with new systems, improving existing builds, expanding your software collection or playing games, we want to know. Pictures always preferred 😎
So, how's your 2015 been for retro activities? Whether you've been playing with new systems, improving existing builds, expanding your software collection or playing games, we want to know. Pictures always preferred 😎
I'll kick off with a few new systems that have come my way this year. Before and after I've finished with them 😀
First off I picked up this nice AT desktop case with a socket 7 board & K6, which became a 233MMX with 64MB/Voodoo1/AWE32/XR385 and was sold on eBay.
Then I came across this 5160 in decent condition, only needed a good clean and some caps in the monitor replaced. It got an V20/8087/XTIDE/UMB board/Gotek and Sound Blaster. Thinking about selling this one too as I don't think I will use it.
My favourite this year though is this Tandy TL/2. Not too common in the UK and I've had a blast trying out games on it. It got a 287/2MB EMS/Gotek/EGA and Sound Blaster.
Been a great year on the retro front, in 2016 I plan to concentrate more on playing games and improving my PC games collection.
Not much happened here retro-wise, lately I've been doing more writing and thinking about hardware than actually using said hardware 😊
Dust layers added to computers.
wrote:Dust layers added to computers.
Those are just computer tree/growth rings 😉
2015 was a bittersweet year for me. Just like a roller coaster ride, with many ups and downs.............................................
I managed to acquire a small collection of PC hardware from a private seller in February - 2 motherboards, 5 CPUs, a Voodoo 3 3000, a Slot 1 to S370 adapter, 1.6gb WD and 41gb IBM hard drives, and other small items.
The Asus CUSL2-C, Pentium III 800EB and Voodoo 3 were used in The Understudy project which was unfortunately cancelled due to real life issues 😢 . I still have hopes of bringing it back to life again.
The Asus P3B-F and Pentium III 600 Katmai were used in this build; it was intended as a test run only, but everything worked so well that I ended up keeping it assembled. It still runs great to this day 😀
My long suffering, much maligned Soyo P4I-845PE Pentium 4 board finally got repaired in March; it had a terminal case of bad caps rot.
Now in good working order, I set out to rebuild my old 2011 main PC with Windows XP SP3. Once again, everything worked great.
I know P4s are not liked by many here, but that doesn't matter. This was my replacement for the Athlon XP 2000+ I had back then and intend to keep it no matter what 😜 . It's also my test bed for Linux Mint.
I documented some updates to my Asus TX97-XE/Pentium 166MMX PC in October, my oldest, longest running retro build to date.
At this point I'm willing to say that my Socket 7 project is just about done. Playing old favorites like Doom/Doom 2, Descent/Descent II, Duke Nukem/Duke Nukem 2/Duke Nukem 3D, X-COM, Quake, Warcraft 2, Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit and others is gives me great joy and happiness 😁 😊
As for the coming year, I only have two things in mind right now. I'll try to bring The Understudy project back from limbo after the CUSL2-C gets recapped and continue to plan my move to Linux Mint - Microsoft's arrogant attitude with Windows 10 has soured me greatly 😠 . Nothing definite after that. I also hope to get out of the legal issues that have been pestering me since July - and regain much of the time and energy taken from me so far 😐 . Fingers crossed.
Ooohh, the pain......
2015 was (still is 😁) a good year. I managed to get many interesting PC components, some of them could be considered retro, others not so much. Other than hoarding stuff I also spent quite a lot of time benchmarking CPUs. 😀
Every year I count how much stuff hardware arrived that year... here is a list for 2015:
HW..........................+2015..............total
3dfx.......................... 1 .................. 84
ATi/AMD..................... 15 ................. 92
Nvidia........................ 9 .................. 117
Matrox, s3, etc............ 0 .................. 26
MB........................... 19 .................. 93
CPU......................... 42 .................. 270
__________________________________
total....................... 86 .................. 682
HW museum.cz - my collection of PC hardware
JayCeeBee64 that last beige ATX case is superb.
I acquired too many things this year to list them all, but I'll try to summarize:
- various voodoo 1 cards - Aopen, Biostar, Gullemot, Gainward, etc
- various voodoo 2 cards - some exotic brands like Skywell and Provideo (blue pcb) and many others
- variouse voodoo 3 cards - 2xV3 3000, 1xV3 3500TV, 3xV3 2000
- one A-trend voodoo Rush (my first one)
- one PowerColor EvilKing IV - Voodoo 4 4500
- diamond monster fusion (banshee AGP)
- Abit ST6 i815 tualatin compatible board
- Abit BE6 II i440bx
- MSI 649D PRO (dual 370 board)
- Chaintech GF4 TI4600
- Cyrix 686 PR233
- AMD K6-III+ 400ATZ 1.6v
Less retro:
- pair of identical 7950GT 512MB cards by XFX
- Dual 6600GT on a single board by gigabyte
I do not know what exactly, that I have gotten this year. One thing that I can say. Is that I have nearly managed to get a complete collection of working machines that represent the evolution from mid 80's to the millenia. (286, 5x86-133, P1-166, P2-266, P3-500, P3-933, K6-2-500, K6-3-400) All machines with mixed stuff like G400, V2, V3, GF2-GTS, GF4-ti4200 and such. All well balanced.
I do not have any pictures to post, so I will just write a short list of stuff I for shure know that I got this year.
MotherBoards:
FIC 486 VIP-IO.
Asus P2B-S
Intel SE440BX-2
Shuttle HOT 555a Rev 3.2
Intel D815-EEA2
Asus A7V266-E
ECS K7-SEM Rev 1.0
GFX Cards:
2 x Creative Voodoo2 8mb with SLI Cable
Asus V2740 VIVO (i740 card)
Asus V7700 Deluxe
Powercolor Voodoo2 12mb
Medion Geforce4 ti4200
Medion Radeon 9800XXL
Orchid Voodoo1
Number-9 S3 PCI
CL-5420 VL-Bus
ET-3000 ISA
Various PCI cards that I can not remember
Mem:
Some 72-Pin FPM and EDO in a mix
Some other mem that I can not remember.
Sound Cards:
Anchor 8-bit SB Clone
2 x AWE64 Gold
Yamaha YMF-724
Creative SB-Pci128
CPU:
Pentium-II 266
Pentium-1 166
Then a lot of stuff like 4 AOpen late-90's cases, lots of other things that are gone into the box and then forgotten.
Mostly HDD's and cables.
Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....
My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen
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@brostenen
The Shuttle HOT 555A is a great board! My very first one 😀
Never crashed!!
As for me 2015 had been a great year retro-wise.
-P3B-F, Coppermine 1100MHz, 1000MHz for the 370...
-Matrox M3D!!!
-various Voodoos
and more!
personal-life-wise it was the most horrible year of all time... But 2016 is around the corner and things are looking up 😀
Last year I decided to get things from my wish list and after almost a year I'm nearly there. But it's always hard to get the last parts 😐
The good:
- bigger ISA graphic card collection (missing only Tseng ET4000/w32i 2MB from my wish list)
- bigger VLB graphic card collection (missing just S3 Vision964/968, Trio64)
- bigger CPU collection (missing Cyrix Fasmath 287)
- bigger boxed graphic cards collection (AGP, PCI-Express)
- started collection of selected old boxed games/apps/os's
- too much of everything 🤣
The bad:
- even less space now 😊
- way too much money spent 😦
Requests are also possible... /msg kixs
wrote:JayCeeBee64 that last beige ATX case is superb.
The Antec KS-288 Value Line was one of my better finds. Felt good to rescue it and give it a new lease in life 😎
wrote:The bad:
- even less space now 😊
Try being confined to a 24' x 24' bedroom with a small closet and you'll know what lack of space really means 😵 . At least I can use part of the garage for storage, but even this is not enough (tries not to trip over the two large boxes in front of the closet door 😅 ).
Ooohh, the pain......
wrote:@brostenen
The Shuttle HOT 555A is a great board! My very first one 😀
Never crashed!!
Well... I like it too. Nice board 😜
Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....
My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen
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Well this year i started collecting pc hardware again. Collected this year:
2 voodoo 2 12mb
Sb awe 32
Bunch of agp graphics cards
Box full of memorysticks
Complete systems
Ibm ps/2 model 30 286
Commodore pc-1
Amd 386 40mhz system
Pentium 166mmx system
Pentium II 350mhz system
I started collecting retro hardware at the very end of 2014, and I only had my now-stored Deskpro 5200MMX. I also had my trusty Athlon 64 and Pentium M laptop, but those were bought new back in the day (not really retro purchases). So, here is my review;
Systems I built/acquired this year:
And a few notable parts not mentioned above:
Overall, a very nice retro-year for me.
Tualatin Celeron 1.4 + Powerleap PL-IP3/T, ASUS P2B, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 4 Ti 4200, Voodoo2 SLI, AWE64, 32GB IDE SSD, Dell 2001FP