First post, by SpaceCadet
- Rank
- Newbie
For the longest time I had this idea of having a DOS/Windows 9x PC again that could run all the games and software natively from my formative computing years (1991-2000). Emulation and source ports are nice and all, but I wanted to experience the real thing again with real hardware, as many of you will probably understand. Unfortunately, my parents threw out all my old PC "junk" after I left the house many years ago. That junk included an AWE32, an AWE64 and a Voodoo 2 card 🙁
Looking at what I wanted to do, I decided to go for a PC of the Pentium II/III era. They should be plenty fast for any DOS game you throw at it, and they still have ISA slots, which would allow me to install a DOS compatible soundcard, like an SB16 or AWE32, because I really wanted wanted something with a real OPL3 chip. Additionally, with the right video card, they would also allow me to play early 3D accelerated games.
I had never built a PC from scratch before, and found that prospect a bit daunting, so I first started to look for pre-built brand name PC's to use as a base. On a whim, and without doing much research beforehand, I purchased a 1999 Dell Dimension XPS T500 that I found on ebay. Later that week I found an SB16 CT2230 as well, and I thought that would be the end of it.
SB16 porn:
Unfortunately, the XPS T500 got pretty beaten up during shipping. It arrived like this:
Inside the case I found more broken off bits of plastic from god knows what, several cables that got knocked loose, neither of the optical drives was working anymore either, and I got IO errors and filesystem corruption when trying to install Windows 98. Needless to say I felt quite disappointed. Fortunately, the seller was very cooperative and apologetic about the affair, and I received a full refund and could keep the goods.
I eventually got the thing working properly again, but looking like it did, I realized it would never be something I would want to have on my desk and look at with pride. The fact that all the 20+ year old fans made a godawful racket didn't help either. My first idea was to transplant the contents of this case to a new ATX case, after all it's just ATX right? Well no, it turns out that Dell used a proprietary PSU during this period and you need a specific and hard to find converter to connect it to a regular ATX PSU, or you risk frying the motherboard. Good thing I did my research this time.
Onto plan C then! I decided to put the refund money towards an entirely new build with a regular ATX 440BX motherboard (that seemed to be the chipset to go for).
For the case I picked up a budget friendly but (IMO) quite stylish Fractal Design Focus G. I opted for the white variant, because I find it the most fitting for a retrobuild, and I just like that "stormtrooper" black and white scheme. It comes with two 5.25" bays too, so I could fit an optical drive and a Gotek floppy emulator that I planned to get.
For the powersupply, I happened to have a brand new CoolerMaster 550W MWE Gold modular PSU lying around. Total overkill for this project, but I already had it so I just used it.
For storage, I decided to get an SD-to-IDE adapter from Amazon instead of using real disks. This would allow me to quickly change "identities" just by switching the SD card. I plan to have a DOS 6.22, Windows 9x, NT4 and perhaps even a Linux identity. Zero access times and no hard drive whine are nice to have too.
Soon I stumbled across a relatively cheap Asus P2B-F that came with some extra goodies (PII-400 CPU included, Matrox G450 card, ForteMedia FM801 PCI soundcard, 128MB RAM). I pulled the trigger on it, and a week or two later it arrived. I put everything together on my desk first and it POST-ed just fine. The only thing it complained about was a missing -5V line from my new PSU, which I set to ignore in the BIOS.
Assembling it on the box of its great-grandchild:
Putting everything in the case:
Testing the system for the first time, the only way I know how:
Notice that the SD-to-IDE adapter is still propped up on a cardboard box on top of the drive cage. The mounting holes don't match anything standard, so I couldn't screw it down in a drive bay or anything. I found a solution to that later.
The system worked fine now, but I wasn't happy with the noise that came from the 6000rpm (!) CoolerMaster CPU fan on that PII. First I tried to swap it with the PIII-500 from the Dell. It's sorta passively cooled, it has a sketchy looking heatsink but in the Dell case there's a duct mounted over it that connects to a high rpm exhaust fan to provide sufficient airflow. On its own, inside my new case, it ran finger burning hot even when I underclocked it to 333MHz, so I didn't trust that setup. It sure was nice and quiet though ...
So I decided to replace the fan on the PII-400 with a 50mm fan from Fractal Design. It runs only at 3500rpm, and has about half the CFM rating but given that the processor doesn't even get noticeably warm with the 6000rpm fan, I figured I had some margin there. I added an extra 120mm exhaust fan to be safe though.
Oh, and I found some 4mm PCB standoffs with sticky pad feet so I could fixate the SD-to-IDE adapter on top of the drive cage without drilling extra holes!
Now my system ran a lot quieter, but still not "whisper quiet". That 50mm fan was still the noisiest component of my system. So I went on a quest to find a PIII with a low TDP and a decent passive heatsink. Unfortunately, it turns out that my revision of the P2B-F doesn't have the voltage regulator to support Coppermine CPUs (which run at 1.6V instead of 2V)... so I was stuck with Katmai or Deschutes. So I found another PIII-500 but with a bigass heatsink this time, and mounted an exhaust fan right above it:
The heatsink gets a lot hotter to the touch than the PII with fan, but more like "fresh cup of coffee" hot than "finger blistering hot" with that Dell heatsink. I think I'm good there, but I did order a cheap IR thermometer to get some ballpark figure on the temperature it's running at. If it doesn't work out, next step is to get a slotket with a voltage regulator and mount a passively cooled Coppermine socket 370 variant with low TDP in there.
Final addition to the system is a real CRT monitor. I found a new-old-stock Philips 107T6 17" monitor locally. At €150 I feel like I way overpaid for it, but it was the only decent one I could find locally and I learned my lesson with having large fragile objects shipped from abroad.
Funny story about when that monitor arrived: when I first hooked it up, I thought it was broken. The image was all skewed and the colors (especially red) were all off on one side. I double checked the VGA connector, degaussed, even swapped video cards, all to no effect. Just as my heart sank thinking about having to send it back or living with such a glaring defect, I pushed one of my modern Edifier speakers a bit aside ... and sure enough the image changed as I moved the speaker around. Apparently, modern PC speakers aren't magnetically shielded anymore because well, they don't need it. I swapped it with some older Logitech speakers, and the problem was solved.
It does look glorious for old games:
tl;dr System specs:
- Fractal Design Focus G case
- Cooler Master 550W MWE Gold PSU
- ASUS P2B-F mainboard
Pentium III 500 Mhz CPU (Katmai)
Pentium III 750 Mhz CPU (Coppermine)- 2x256MB 133MHz Infineon SDRAM
Matrox G450 AGP
NVidia Riva TNT2 M64- Realtek-something-something 100Mbit PCI ethernet card
- SD-to-IDE adapter with 32GB SD card
- Soundblaster 16 CT2230
- HL-DT-ST DVD drive
- Philips 107T6 17" CRT
Todo:
- Install Gotek floppy emulator
- Find a proper IO shield, as the MB didn't come with one
- Tidy up cable management a bit
- Find a cdaudio cable to connect the optical drive to the SB16
- Get an optical PS/2 mouse as my usb mouse only work in Windows, and I'm too old to deal with ball mice again
- Get a slotket and add a Coppermine Socket 370 CPU
- Perhaps find a Voodoo3 for it
