First post, by badmojo
- Rank
- l33t
After years of collecting parts and testing different configurations, I've been finding myself finalising my various retro PC's lately, and after tracking down a decent ATX case for my Pentium III, I'm finally able to call it finished. I lost interest in gaming for a while during the reign of the Pentium II and III, so this era hardware was a bit of a mystery to me, but I'm happy with what I've come up with:
New in the box ATX case - nothing fancy but it came with a new PSU which is nice.
EPoX EP3vca. Nothing fancy here either, VIA apollo chipset. 512MB RAM, 1Ghz Socket 370 CPU. All picked up for next to nothing at a local computer shop that has a lot of this era stuff hanging around.
GeForce2 Ultra:
2 X Voodoo 2's in SLI. I pretty much missed the glide period so am looking forward to having a play around with some glide games. These are not matched cards but that doesn't seem to bother the latest drivers. One card I got off a bloke on Overclockers.net a while back, and the other I found in a socket 7 machine that was dumped on the nature strip by a neighbour!
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1. I have vortex cards hanging around that I'll get around to playing with one day, but for this machine it has to be the Live! I'm a bit of a creative fanboy and this card seems to be about right for the period, with some EAX support coming into play:
Here's the finished product; it all seems to play nice and after a few goes at installing Windows 98SE + the relevant drivers, it's humming along nicely. I'd forgotten the challenges of installing 98 but I got there... eventually:
And here's the rest of the gang, all finished off over the last year or so. I've got plenty of storage space here but at this stage I'm happy with a 386, a 486, a Pentium, and the Pentium III above. Actually that sounds like a lot when I write it down, and that's not counting my modern machine and music server! But I have parts for a 286, and Pentium II, and a Pentium 4 in the shed if I get bored.
Here's the 386, it's a DX40 with 8mb RAM, 90mb HDD, Tseng ET4000AX VGA, Sound Blaster 2.0, and a Roland MPU-IPC-T to drive an MT-32. This beauty - pulled from the scrap heap at a local tip - is for 'floppy disk' era DOS games. (by that I mean late 80's / early 90's).
(More details about this machine here if you're interested: "Hero saves valuable hardware from scrap heap")
Next is a 486SX33. I don't strictly need a 486 - the 386 covers any early 90's DOS stuff I'd want to play, and the Pentium covers the later, mid 90's DOS stuff. But I had a 486SX 33 as a kid so I built this for nostalgia mostly, and some games like Ultima 7 benefit from the extra zip. I've tried all sorts of motherboards and CPU speeds but in the end settled on an OPTi 495SLC VLB motherboard (has some compatibility issues but is nice and simple like my first machine), 8mb RAM, VLB IDE controller, Tseng ET4000AX VGA (can’t be beat for image quality), a Sound Blaster Pro 2, and a Music Quest MQX-32M MPU-401 card to drive an MT-32. This is for early ‘CD-ROM’ era DOS games (I had to justify existence somehow!). Of all my retro PC's this has been the biggest pain in the bum; it seems like there's always a drawback to the various setups I've tried - probably because they've all been vesa local bus!
Not sure if I had a Pentium back in the day, pretty sure I didn’t. A friend bought a Pentium 60 that we were almost hysterical about until it arrived and was pretty ‘meh’ compared to my 486 DX266, but I love this Pentium 166MMX I’ve slowly put together as I've found bits, tested them, and chosen the best. It has an ASUS VX97 motherboard, 16MB RAM, ARK2000MT based VGA card, a Voodoo2 for 3D, a Sound Blaster 16 with an NEC XR385 DB on it, and a Roland SCC1 for General Midi. This is my late DOS games / Windows 95 machine; the Ark Logic card is the fastest I've found for 2D, and the Voodoo is mainly just for Quake.
And that’s it. I've been lucky with a lot of this hardware and found it locally, often for free at the local recycling center. I've been collecting games over the years to play on these so I'm looking forward to working my way through them - a lifetime of fun!
