This was my first full-on, ground-up vintage build. Mistakes have been made, lessons have been learned.

I've been wanting a beefy circa-97 build machine for a while now. My main Win98 rig is essentially an untouched Dell Inspiron XPS T500, though the gpu was swapped for a Voodoo 3300. I have a decent 486 build traded to me by a friend, but no real in-betweener. Sure, I have several Socket 7 pre-builts, but they're a pain to work on and are just overall rather boring.

Enter, The Bastard.

The entire idea for this was originally to stick to components from 1997 or earlier, if money was no object back then. Late Win95 poweruser territory, the kinda stuff I'd drool over while reading old issues of PC Gamer. In the end, I maaay have drifted a little away from this goal, but I'm still pleased with my choices. Onto the build.

The motherboard is...just whatever the cheapest Slot 1 motherboard I could find with at least 2 ISA slots, haha. Ended landing on an Intel AL440LX. Apparently this came from a Sony system as their logo is the splash screen. Not bad.

CPU: 233mhz Klamath Pentium II. Would've rather a 266mhz, but it's what I had on-hand.

GPU: Intergraph INTENSE 3D Voodoo Rush PCI- Would've much rather either a Voodoo 1/2 and a Matrox or a AGP Banshee, but this was the only spare Voodoo I had besides a 5500 which for this would be...haha, no.

Sound: Sound Blaster AWE 64 and SB Live! with front panel Live drive - I would've just stuck with the AWE 64, but the case I bought for the build already had the Live drive installed, so I couldn't resist.

Memory: 64MB - good nuff

Network card - generic plug n play, can't remember

Iomega SCSI ISA card

Storage: 6.4GB Samsung hard disk, 1.44mb floppy, 2x CD-ROM. Room for expansion

Case: This is where the name is derived. I initially wanted a full-height horizontal case, but after finding this...thing, my plans immediately changed. Massive 2'2" tower with seven 5.25" bays, space for 5 external fans (not all installed because this beast is loud enough as-is), 3 hard disks, and a AT or ATX PSU. Beige all the way down, just as God intended. Custom 3DFx badge, PII and Win95 stickers from ebay just to round the whole thing off.

Runs Windows 95b, OSR 2.1. Aside from an occasional hang during boot, she works like a dream. Everything from Half-Life to Need for Speed 2 SE all run flawlessly. Surprisingly, both sound cards work in tandem without any conflicts or hiccups, so I can swap between a whole swath of sound banks on the fly. There's still plenty of room for expansion as well, with 4 front bays left unoccupied. One will be a 5.25" floppy drive if I can ever get my hands on one for cheap, the rest will probably just be whatever I can cram in there for show as I've nearly completely ran out of power cables from the psu.

I unfortunately don't have any pictures of the build right now, but it'll be on display at the VCFSE in Atlanta this weekend so I'll be sure to update this with some decent pics then.