First post, by johnyept
I recently replaced a Pentium 3 1000 Mhz that had been running XP 24/7 for the last 10 years on a Matsonic board. Uptime record without rebooting was 7 months!! Unfortunately the fan connectors no longer work but I can use molex adaptors to replace them.
I've been watching some videos from PhilsComputerLab and it sparked a retro bug in my head, so I decided to build a computer around a 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 AGP (I have 2 of them) to enjoy those nice Glide games from my childwood, and in the process some MS-DOS games too. This is what I got so far:
- Matsonic motherboard (1x AGP, 5x PCI, 1x ISA)
- Pentium 3 1000 Mhz
- 2x128MB RAM (possibly 2x256MB)
- 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 AGP
- Seagate 40GB 7200rpm (2GB FAT16 for MS-DOS 6.22+WFW3.11, 30GB for Win98SE, the rest for WinXP)
- 10/100 PCI Network card (do realtek PCI work in DOS?)
- 3.5" floppy drive
- CD/DVD-ROM drive
- 100MB Iomega ZIP IDE drive (because why not?)
For the sound card, I have a bunch of ISA and PCI cards either lying in a shelf or inside very old computers. I've been reading several topics and got kinda overloaded with too much information. So, with your kind help and insight, which of these cards would be best for DOS games and Windows 98 games?
- Sound Blaster 16 (CT2290) ISA
- Sound Blaster 16 (CT2940) ISA
- AWE64 (CT4500) ISA x2
- AWE64 (CT4520) ISA x2
- ESS1868F ISA
- ESS1869F ISA x2 (one is compaq)
- BTC1817DS (Opti 82C931) ISA
- Zoltrix CMI8330A ISA
- CMI8330C/C3D ISA
- EPC-SYMINI01 (Yamaha OPLYM719B-S) ISA
- AudioPCI 3000 (Creative ES1370) PCI x2
- Creative Labs ES1371 PCI
- Creative Labs CT4750 PCI x2
- CT4810 PCI x4
- Sound Blaster Live! (CT4830) PCI x4
- Turtle Beach Santa Cruz CS4630-CM EP) PCI
I also have 3 ECS K7S5A v3.1 motherboards (no ISA slots) + Athlon XP CPUs, I'll probably try to make a small retro gaming LAN with them, and use the 3 CT4830 if they can be used in MS-DOS too.
EDIT: found 6 more cards, added to the list.
RETRO-W95/NT4: ASUS P3B-F, P3 550, 192MB, GF2+VD2 PCI, AWE64+VIBRA128, 80GB IDE
RETRO-W98/2K: ASUS A7N8X-E, Sempron 2.8+, 512MB, FX 5700LE 256MB, SB Live! CT4830, 320GB IDE
RETRO-WXP/7: ASUS P5KPL-AM EPU, XEON E5450, 4GB, GTS 450 1GB, 120GB SSD, 1TB sATA