First post, by totoro
- Rank
- Newbie
Here I am again, building yet another rig. Well, this one won't be a series, just wanted to present it and also log a thought or two for some good pleasure. Although it might take a few posts. I have to say, this hobby can be real addictive! Already my room looks like a computer warehouse 😄 Combine that with that depressive mood from recent dealings with the likes of Compaq, Hp and some DEC's and an itch to build something nice shall soon arise. What though?
Something with green PCB, something silent, something good with Windows 98SE, but also good with many different systems (WinNT, 2k, XP, Linux, OS/2 and maybe Haiku), something musical, something capable, something interesting and something cool! That's some list to cover!
First, I'll need a very good base and, I thought, what better than tried and true Intel 440BX? There is a reason why it still lives on as virtual machine, who knows, maybe good part of current internet is hosted on a 440BX so to speak 😄 And it so happened, that lady luck smiled and while strolling along the local flea market, I found this:
An NMC/Epox motherboard, which has green PCB and features a 440BX Chipset and SB-Link (or PC-PCI) heder. While it's nothing fancy in an on itself, there were certainly far better 440BX motherboards out there, yet I found this one quite appealing. While doing some cleaning and maintenance, I have dumped the BIOS for safe keeping, also patched it to better support of bigger hard drives and it came out fine. It's not as great as the legendary Asus P2B, but it does the job and it is green!
The late HP Brio has kindly donated it's CPU (Pentium3 500Mhz Katmai) to this project and then I've found four sticks of 128MB SD-RAM and here it is, purple and ready for the build.
Then, some parts. I tend to like Matrox video cards, especially when compatible is the theme, there simply is no better than a Matrox G550! Yes, the one that killed the company 😄 While it may not be the greatest choice for games, it may just be the best for retro business! I just love how nice and sharp is image is, no matter the monitor, old, new, big, small, crt, lcd they all look fantastic when hooked to this card. Also, drivers, real king of kings here, it works on anything. Dos to Window 10, and exotic OS'es also tend to like it.
Then some multimedia. I like to listen to the radio, so a good TV Tuner is a must for me. Avermedia is green and works alright.
Then some music. In this case, there really is no other choice, than to go Yamaha. So I've took out a dusty YMF724, this card is pretty useless everywhere, but shines real nice on 440BX! That Sondius Midi synth, then also genuine OPL3 and plus a legacy interface. When being run from MS-DOS prompt, all of my DOS games sound excellent! And it's nice for Windows too.
Penguin Workshop
https://viekelis.lt