Hey guys, thought I'd make a thread about another of my computers. This is the Windows 98/Glide gaming PC that I recently assembled. He's named Edgar, and he's got quite a history to go with him. Skip ahead if you just want to know the current hardware setup, as I'm gonna get nostalgic here. Hope you enjoy my rambling 😀

Edgar was our main family PC ever since I can remember. My dad named him after the computer from Electric Dreams, which I've never actually seen. I believe my dad told me that he's technically the second Edgar, and that whatever he replaced was the original Edgar, but this guy will always be the real Edgar to me. I grew up with this computer, and it'll always be very special to me because of that. I learned to use the computer and familiarized myself with Windows on it, played games for hours on it, and did schoolwork on it.

I don't remember what he originally had, but I recall that my dad bought a new motherboard and CPU for Edgar when the old hardware in him couldn't run my copy of Lego Stunt Rally. The new equipment was a 600MHz Slot 1 Pentium 3 Coppermine and an MSI MS-6182 ATX motherboard. That's the hardware Edgar had for most of my life, and still has today. Later, my dad purchased a 64MB PCI Radeon 7000 and a Sound Blaster PCI128, I believe both so that I could run realMyst. Those have stayed in him until very recently, and now the 7000 is in my 1GHz Celery while the PCI128 is in my 450MHz K6-2.

As a child, I enjoyed the Magic School Bus games, Kid Pix, and the Mercer Mayer interactive books on Edgar. I also loved Nascar Racing 2 (just the demo sadly), and recall Sierra's SODA Off-Road Racing being one of the first games I ever got super excited for. I think there was an ad for it with Nascar Racing 2, and after reading about it I had to get it. I finally convinced my parents to order it, waited agonizing years for it to arrive (probably 3 days in reality 🤣), and remember how excited I was to finally see the box. Wish I still had that box. For years I spent so many hours playing the hell out of that game, making custom tracks, doing silly stunts, and so on. Later on, one of my uncles gave my dad a copy of Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator for his birthday or something. My dad never used it (he gets motion sick from 3D games), but it was a staple of mine for years. I loved that game, from the campaign, to quick flights, to importing planes from Flight Simulator 98 and the internet (I had a Gou'ld Death Glider that was impossible to control), to learning how to customize the flight configs and giving myself a Boeing 737 that had like 20 machine guns that would shoot at silly angles. Hard to believe now, but I played it with the keyboard most of my life, which is awful because the joystick position doesnt center when you let off a key like it does when you let go of the joystick, so maneuvering was very slow and annoying.

Years later, my dad let me play Age of Empires. I had watched him play that and one of the Civ games as a young child, but he would never let me try them since they were violent. I played the heck out of AoE even though I wasn't very good at the time (I enjoyed making ridiculous scenarios and playing with the cheat codes more than playing proper games). I also started my playthrough of Myst on Edgar (I recall watching my dad play this game when I was very young, probably 3 or 4), but while I was playing it we got a new PC, and I finished my game on that.

I also liked messing with MS Office, and spent a lot of time doing silly stuff in Publisher. I remember I was working on making an online version of Myst by taking screenshots ingame, making a separate web page for each one, and using invisible hyperlinks that linked to the other pages on top of the image. It was really inefficient... but at the time I thought it was the coolest thing. Never got much of it done of course; just the Library and a bit of the island.

Years later when I was getting into learning about PC hardware but was still pretty inexperienced (this was right around when I initially built Prometheus), I started using Edgar again for experimenting. I rememer I thought it was so cool that I could put old MS-DOS 6.2 on it, and played with that for awhile. Then I decided it'd be a good idea to stuff as much hardware as possible into him, so I filled him with extra floppy drives, hard drives, and 3 ethernet adapters. Later still, I decided to try overclocking him. He ran at 50C idle, so when I bumped the FSB to 133 to achieve 6x133 = 800MHz and saw that the BIOS said he was at 100C, I figured it must just be some OC effect messing with the sensor. Yeah... I was an idiot. I ran it at like 110x6 = 660MHz for a bit until it corrupted the IDE bus and the hard drive. Whoops. Of course now I realize 50C, which it still idles at, is way too high for idle at stock, so I'm gonna disassemble a Slot 1 cooler for the first time ever and give him some much-needed AS5.

***Nostalgic rambling ends here***

That brings us to his current setup. I got hit with the urge to build some retro gaming machines after discovering Vogons, and decided on the ever-faithful Edgar for my primary machine. I went onto ye olde Ebay and purchased a Matrox Mystique 220, a 12MB Voodoo 2 (Diamond Monster 3dII), an ISA Sound Blaster Vibra 16, and later a pair of 2 more 12MB Voodoo2 cards (one Orchid, one brandless). I was going to use the Diamond in another machine and the other 2 V2s in Edgar, but the Orchid is bad and needs to have a few capacitors replaced (I think they're caps... not very familiar with surface mount), so right now I have the Diamond and the brandless one in Edgar. I also built 3 other 3dfx-powered machines at the same time (one of which will get the Orchid V2 when I fix it), for the purposes of Unreal lans and such, but Edgar is my primary Win98 rig. Edgar will be used for any Windows 95/98-era gaming I need to do, along with most Glide games that I may want to play. I actually need to re-install Windows now as I just screwed something up with the drivers, and I need to reapply thermal paste and probably oil the CPU fan as it's probably never been done since he was new, but at any rate, here's the specs:

Edgar:
Intel Pentium III 600E Coppermine 600MHz
MSI MS-6182
3x128MB SDRAM
Matrox Mystique 220 4MB PCI
2x3dfx Voodoo2 12MB PCI in SLI
Creative Sound Blaster Vibra 16 CT2940 ISA
Linksys 10/100 PCI Ethernet Adapter
20GB IDE Maxtor
Acer IDE CD Re-Writer
Generic 3.5" Floppy Drive
Rosewill RV350
Generic Beige ATX Mid-Tower
Windows 98SE

And the pics (I know the wiring sucks; it's almost impossible to make it look good in this case, but I'm gonna try soon):

Edit: I cleaned it up and put fresh thermal paste on, and it's down to about 42C BIOS idle now. It's better but still too high IMO; for now though it's not gonna kill the thing at least. Also got Win98SE reinstalled and now I'm pulling an average 60fps at 1024x768 in Unreal Tournament 😁