Alrighty folks... As promised, I threw together another build for your viewing pleasure. A wave of nostalgia smacked me in the face again, so I thought I'd go back to 1997 and share a build very near and dear to me.

First.. a little background..

My parents purchased our first home PC in 1992 - a Packard Bell Legend 386SX-16Mhz with 30MB (!!) hard drive and 2MB of RAM. I couldn't do much on here except dial some BBS's, play Stunts and some other pretty simplistic games (DOOM didn't run on 2MB!!). From there, after seeing my first Pentium 60 system owned by a family for whom I baby-sat, I purchased my own PC in 1995 from Gateway 2000 - a P5-75Mhz Pentium tower. At some point I added a Pentium 75 -> 120Mhz overdrive chip in there to give it a little boost, and then added an Orchid Righteous 3D Voodoo card in there in late 1996. In mid-to-late 1997 during my senior year of high school (dating myself a bit), I got the itch to build my first PC so I could finally retire my OEM box. I knew I would need something with a little more juice for my freshman year of college as well. So I saved up some coin from my job at Milwaukee PC and put my first build together!

I think this is pretty close, but I did change some things here. First, I never had a Roland SCC-1A or the SIMMConn expansion card. I used an Ensoniq SoundScape (Gateway 2000 OEM) for General Midi but this card is in use in my Time Machine right now. I believe I had a massive InWin Q500 full tower back then too, but I couldn't source one of these. I think I had a plextor CD drive and not a DVD drive, but my OS install disc is a DVD so.... Finally, I probably had 64MB instead 128MB and most likely a smaller hard drive, but this is close enough for my purposes.

Case: Enlight EN-7101 Case (3-bay)
Power Supply: Enlight HPC250-G2 250W
Motherboard: Asus SP97-V (SiS 5597 + 5595) Rev. 1.02 with 1.09v-5 Patch J.2 05/27/2002 BIOS
Processor: Intel Pentium 200 w/MMX (P55C)
Cooling: Foxconn Socket 7 CPU Cooler

Storage:
Western Digital 40GB Hard Drive (WD40)
3.5" Floppy Drive
Toshiba SD-M1402 DVD-ROM

Memory:
128MB EDO RAM

Audio:
Roland SCC-1A ISA
Creative CT4540 (AWE64 Gold) ISA with SIMMConn 32MB Expansion Card

Video:
Orchid Righteous 3D 4MB PCI (3DFX Voodoo)
Matrox Millenium II 8MB PCI

Onto the hardware Pr0n! 😊

The case badge adds a few more Mhz, almost like those giant wings you see on the back of crappy cars 😀

I really need an I/O Shield..

AWE64 Golden Goddess

MOAR ROLAND! Don't see too many of the 1"A" varieties around...

Mmmm... VOODOO! I forgot how loud that mechanical relay "CLICK" is!

Good old Matrox for 2D

A few classics..

MDK is still one of my alltime favs. With a little blurry bilinear filtering it's SOO much better! 😀

Monster Truck Madness! I forgot how terrible the music is in this game - thank God the gameplay makes up for it. "He's doing it... in the air!" Dialog gets an F - too.