foil_fresh wrote on 2020-02-26, 07:23:
i'd love to have a 486dx33 with turbo button/led display, SB16 and any suitable video card. Only thing that bothers me these days are ball mice/serial mice. Was having a PS/2 mouse port rare as heck with these old socket 3 systems?
PS/2 uptake in 486 and 586 era was... weird...
Basically all OEM systems were PS/2, both for keyboard and mouse - but virtually no AT-style systems had PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse via riser was rare too.
i have a serial optical mouse and it is... terrible. 2 separate sensors that NEEDS the mousepad it ships with. someone decided to jam 2 barcode scanners together and called it a mouse. if you've thought about getting one, dont.
Ooh, Mouse Systems optical mice! Loved them. Got one after getting sick and tired of cleaning my balls and - far worse - rollers all the time. It was like having ascended into paradise (so long as my wrist wasn't too sweaty...). Come to think of it< I have one of these. Only reason I don't use it is that I've become something of a trackball fetishist and have a very nice serial Kensington Orbit for my old builds.
As for my dream builds:
- Olivetti M24, upgraded to NEC V30 and at least 640kB RAM, also an AdLib clone I made myself and a MusicQuest MIDI card. Have most of the bits required, but PSU is dead in a sparking, smoking way. I have a working M240 though and they supposedly share the same PSU...
- a 486DX33 system completely engineered to run Ultima 7, with Soundblaster clone I made myself and another MusicQuest MIDI card. Can do this now, just haven't gotten round to it.
- Alaris Leopard IBM 486SLC2 VLB board. Have this, working on it now. Maxed RAM to 16Mb, pairing it with PAS16 and Aztech WaveRider 32+ and a 512MB DOM. Hope to get it running this weekend 😀
- All UMC build, with UMC CPU, UMC chipset, UMC I/O, UMC VLB VGA, UMC NIC and if possible UMC cache and soundcard with UMC chips too. Have most of this, just struggling with the motherboard's battery.
- NexGen 5x86, preferably with NxVL VLB board. Unobtainium, at least, in working condition. But maybe I'll luck out, or decide to pay the going price for one one day...
- Any ALi Aladdin 7 system. Seems almost as unobtainium as the NexGen.
- MS-6168 system (i440BX with onboard Voodoo3), completely maxxed out, so 512MB RAM, Tualatin via compatible slocket, SLC SSD etc. Actually had this, but the video memory on the V3 died on me. Have a second board, but it refuses any Coppermine, let alone Tualatin :'(
- i820 or i840 system. Sounds easy, but these things just keep dying on me. I have both 40ns RDRAM and an MTH-on-a-stick, but a long line of Asus P3C-D and P3C-E boards are completely unresponsive. One day I'll get a working example.
- Tualatin 1400S on SiS635T board. Have this, my ultimate Win98SE system. 512MB DDR, GeForce3Ti200 (which I might upgrade to Gf4 one day), Voodoo2 and a nice SSD 😀
Of course, before I get all of this done I'll run out of ports on my KVM and I'm already out of ports on my mixer (2 sound cards per build does that...)