First post, by Baleog
- Rank
- Newbie
This is a picture of my main retro PC in its original form. The chassis is a Fujitsu ICL Indiana. Originally it had a Pentium 75 or 90, but because of the Dallas clock battery (and some other reason that I now can't remember) I exchanged the motherboard and PSU for a Fujitsu Ergopro E-series. They are in the same range of computers so the swap was trivial. I had a hard time removing the bios password but I finally found the instructions on Fujitsu's current support page. The bios is unfortunately still very limited. The original CRT, keyboard and mouse was part of the package so it is a complete system.
Specifications:
200 MMX, upgraded from the ergopros P120.
32Mb Ram
Onboard video 2mb Mach64CT (cost reduced) paired with a Voodoo 2 12mb which I know is overkill for this system.
CF-Card and a spinning 4gb drive of some kind.
Orpheus Sound Card with PCMIDI MPU (Thank you for making this Keropi!)
Windows 95c Plus! with usb-support (works fine albeit slow with usb sticks after soldering headers to the mb)
Since this photo was taken i have tried to make my retro computer setup a little more discrete. But since I have a small apartment and don't have an extra room the only place for it is the living room. And some people will disagree but I just don't want visitors to see my setup and learn about my interest for several reasons. So hiding the computer and removing the CRT was necessary. Since I had acquired some rack units I decided to build a midi rack. So after ordering rails i bought some chipboard and caster wheels and Bob's your uncle. I will soon™ add some LED-lights and a smoked glass door but for now i think it looks a little better. And I can roll it out of the way when I need to.
The monitor is just a Samsung TV that i got from a second hand store. But it does have Scart, VGA, composite and more. I'm trying to find a rack that the monitor can stand on and that I can hide the Amiga under but I haven't found anything nice yet.
The Yamaha speakers are REALLY good, with a surprising amount of bass for the size and I haven't seen anyone else using them. They are modern speakers called Yamaha NX-50. They have two 3,5mm inputs and headphone out. I don't remember if they switch inputs automatically or if they get mixed but they work seamlessly with the Amiga/PC. People love the Roland MA-12Cs but if you want an alternative look at the Yamahas if you can find them used for a good price.
Midi Rack:
Midi router: 8+8 MTP Timepiece. Connected over parallel to the pc. Works great in Cubase
Mixer: Behringer RX1602 V1. Honestly not so pleased with this one. I'm getting a lot of hum and sounds bad when overdriven. But it's one of few cheap mixers with 8 stereo inputs.
EMU Proformance /1. Just temporarily fitted. For better Piano sounds when playing keyboard.
Sound canvases: rack mounted SC-55 with sound brush and a separate SC-55 and a SD-35. You all know about SC-55s. The SD-35 is apparently like a SC-55 MKII. I haven't experienced the buffer overflow with it that others have discussed on vogons.
Yamaha MU90R: Honestly my favorite midi unit. In my opinion it sounds much better than the Rolands in almost every case. But it was targeted more for the professional market.
Roland RA-50: A MT-32 in disguise. But sadly i can't get the mod that switches modes to work. I will have to revisit this one someday.
Roland D-110: A fun synthesizer. Cousin to the MT-32 and notoriously hard to program. It doesn't get much use but its nice to have. There are some patches/maps for Sierra games that allow you to use it directly.
Midiman Gman: Just temporarily fitted. Allegedly uses copies of Roland sounds. I will do a comparison some day.
MT32-Pi: I modified a Clumsy MIDI with a larger display and an encoder and 3d-printed case. This was the first midi unit I bought/built (and its possibly the best). But there is something special with vintage hardware.
I also have the Dreamblaster S2 and X2GS that I want to use in a Chill V and rack mount somehow.
Bonus pic of my Roland E-20 synthesizer that also is essentially an MT-32 with keys. I usually use a Roland PC-180 when im (badly) trying to record midi song covers in Cubase.
Thanks for watching my little setup. More computers will be added in this thread. Any feedback is welcome!
