First post, by barleyguy
Greetings,
Hi. I'm new to the board, but have been building computers since 1990. I did it as a full time job for 5 years, 1990-1993 and 1997-1998. I averaged about 3 a week during that time, and a few a year other years. So I'm probably in the 800 machines range as far as builds.
I've normally built new machines, or "new at the time" at this point. But lately I was feeling like building a machine, but don't really need a better one or have any friends looking for one. And I've been watching too much Phil's Computer Lab and LGR. So I was thinking I'd start building retro machines.
I've got two projects in flight right now. One is a machine I'm building from scratch, mostly from parts I already have. That will be an Athlon XP 3000+ with a Radeon 9600.
The other thing that's going is that I pulled a machine I built in 1997 out of the top shelf of a closet. Amazingly, it passed POST on the first try, except for a dead battery. Also, it looks physically fine, including the caps looking good. The specs on it are:
Shuttle HOT-557 Socket 7 Motherboard (Intel VX chipset)
IBM Cyrix 6x86 PR200 (currently set to PR166 because this board wasn't stable at 75 Mhz)
64 MB EDO DRAM
ATI 3D Rage Pro 8MB (XPert@Work retail)
Opti OPL3 Surround Sound card
NEC 252 4-Disc CD changer
AT Mini Tower and 230 watt AT power supply
I don't know if the CMOS battery is permadead or whether it's chargable. It's a Dallas CMOS chip soldered to the board, so that may be a challenge. If the machine will run though, I don't really mind going into the BIOS each time I boot.
I'm thinking about throwing an 8.4 GB hard drive in it, and a floppy emulator, and putting DOS 7.1 on it. Just for fun.
Anyhow, might be hanging out here a bit.
Cheers,
Harley.