What game is this?!

Awesome job. Fantastic retro battlestation!

henryVK wrote:

Thanks, m'dudes! […]
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Thanks, m'dudes!

I'm really pleased that I didn't resort to something expensive like 3d-printing that would have blown this project way outta proportion. TFT makes a big difference, definitely, and it's sorta in keeping period-wise, since this is a Pentium 133 after all. It's like the better version of my first very own setup, which was a 120 MHz Cyrix 5x86 paired with a 1 Mb Trident video card.

A couple notes on the screen:

• native resolution is 800x600 which had me worried about VGA/SVGA scaling! SVGA in DOS looks decent enough. VGA I'm pleased with; however, there are oddities: in Prince of Persia I noticed that the image is a little larger than the screen, so a tiny bit on the right hand side is, in fact, missing (you'll notice if you look at the arabesque column at the right edge of the PoP title screen in my above post).. sorta inconsequential but still niggly. I haven't noticed this in other VGA Games but will do some testing.
• aligning screen and bezel is... trying. It's just a little off to the left, and I'm a closet perfectionist, so I'll redo it sometime
• the controller board gets awfully hot which is something I didn't anticipate. I'll redo the way it's mounted on the back of the screen RF-shield to give it more room to "breathe", as well as do a much larger cutout in the wall seperating the screen compartment from the mainboard to improve air circulation.

This last point has me worried, though. Worst case I'll have to work in a little 40mm fan.. next to the board? It can't mount it on top because there's just not enough room.

Anyway, here's some SVGA graphics:

Hi there, you showed two pictures of this game, what is name of this game that featured Venus, a point and click game?

henryVK wrote:

Thanks, m'dudes! […]
Show full quote

Thanks, m'dudes!

I'm really pleased that I didn't resort to something expensive like 3d-printing that would have blown this project way outta proportion. TFT makes a big difference, definitely, and it's sorta in keeping period-wise, since this is a Pentium 133 after all. It's like the better version of my first very own setup, which was a 120 MHz Cyrix 5x86 paired with a 1 Mb Trident video card.

A couple notes on the screen:

• native resolution is 800x600 which had me worried about VGA/SVGA scaling! SVGA in DOS looks decent enough. VGA I'm pleased with; however, there are oddities: in Prince of Persia I noticed that the image is a little larger than the screen, so a tiny bit on the right hand side is, in fact, missing (you'll notice if you look at the arabesque column at the right edge of the PoP title screen in my above post).. sorta inconsequential but still niggly. I haven't noticed this in other VGA Games but will do some testing.
• aligning screen and bezel is... trying. It's just a little off to the left, and I'm a closet perfectionist, so I'll redo it sometime
• the controller board gets awfully hot which is something I didn't anticipate. I'll redo the way it's mounted on the back of the screen RF-shield to give it more room to "breathe", as well as do a much larger cutout in the wall seperating the screen compartment from the mainboard to improve air circulation.

This last point has me worried, though. Worst case I'll have to work in a little 40mm fan.. next to the board? It can't mount it on top because there's just not enough room.

Anyway, here's some SVGA graphics:

My dudes... I'm sorry I didn't notice people asking about the game! It's Legend Entertainment's Gateway. Not a point and click, but a text adventure where you also can point and click afair.

Anywho, the project's done for now and I'm pretty happy with the outcome. The main takeaway is that I should have looked more into the specs of LCD panels before picking a screen. I didn't really know anything about brightness and viewing angles etc. so I chose the panel mainly for it's small footprint, seeing as I only had around 20 cm of height to work with in the display recess, and because I could get it for cheap. Long story short, it's okay for now but I'll eventually replace it for something with better brightness.

Okay, here's some pics:

This was the whole point, really. Sitting on my couch on Sunday morning, playing dos games while the squirrels and birds play in the garden.

Side view

The 5.25" bay speakers are not half bad.

I experimented with different ways of holding the screen assembly in place but eventually I settled for this. I superglued these little sheet metal tabs to the case. It's not too slick looking but it eliminates all wobbliness and I can pop the bezel out by pushing down on the top of it with a metal slide ruler.

'nother side view

Screen in.

The display control pcb is mounted underneath those little holes and you can press the tactile buttons with a toothpick, which is handy when you want to turn the screen off when the computer is connected to a CRT. It didn't occur to me until later that what I really should have done was extend the wires and mount the pcb in a slot bracket.

Screen out.

The big ugly hole is to give the LCD driver board some room to breathe.

The panel is held in place by the those tabs but also with double sided tape. Initially it refused to stay in place and kept sliding down bit by bit, until I realised that instead of more double sided tape it needed those extra tabs on the bottom to hold it up.

Nice big pot for PC speaker volume control

I switched the original PC speaker for a nice 5W one. The Dallas mod across form it was actually the first thing I did with this machine, back in February. There is not a whole lot of room in this type of case, so cable management is mostly tying-things-down-whereever-there's-room. Due to the fact that everything is a bit cramped and heat does build up, I put a 40x20 mm Noctua fan in there to make sure the air keeps moving.

So that's it. Final specs are:

• MSI MS 5129 mainboard
• 133 MHz Pentium 1
• 10.1" Torisan colour TFT
• 16 Mb of RAM
• Miro Crystal 22SD (S3 Trio64V+), 2MB, PCI graphics
• OPTI 82C930A, OPL3-compatible SB Pro PCI sound
• 3.5" floppy drive
• 16 Gb bracket-mounted CF-IDE HDD-adapter
• AT-style keyboard, orange (cherry?) switches

Any, this was my first build, really, and it was a lot of fun. I (re)learned a bunch of things about how to put your basic setup together. And here's a video of the computer playing the Monkey Island theme and Doom 2 😀

Very cool project.