liqmat wrote:

Well, I spent $1200.00 on a 200MHz model back in 1996 so I am sure you spent less. They were VERY expensive when they came out and that's 1996 dollars which would be about $1900.00 today.

The price of being an early adopter.
I paid a little less... 😉

Akai SG01K, finally! 😀

Well, contrary to my own informal policy of not buying more hardware and just using hardware I already have (and am not using) for builds, I just bought an nVidia TNT2 and ATI Radeon 9250 for $5 each...

blurks wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Well, I spent $1200.00 on a 200MHz model back in 1996 so I am sure you spent less. They were VERY expensive when they came out and that's 1996 dollars which would be about $1900.00 today.

The price of being an early adopter.
I paid a little less... 😉

I look back in those PC Mag back issues on google books and I think "How in the holy hell did I ever manage to afford a computer as a broke student." ... well the answer is partly that just a few months were an eternity in the PC biz and you see a CPU for 100s one month and 50 the next. I remember actually that the lead times in magazines of a month or two for their ads were significant, prices 2 months out of date when the glossy mags were fresh on the newsstands. There were some more newspaper like weeklies that were only a week behind, and had used parts listing in. The other part of the answer was scrimping and hustling, getting parts from fairs and putting it together myself out of part new, part used parts, and hence getting a $1500 system for about $400. It was fairly possible to do the "one piece at a time" rolling upgrade.

I look back and think I was freaking stupid not to be building systems on the side for profit, but I assumed that everyone at college was smart enough to figure it out themselves. Also a "problem" was a surplus dealer a block away from the campus, with flashy ads for "IBM Aptiva Blue lightning DLC50, off lease!!!" cheap, now those were trashy systems, but "IBM" and having this dealer behind them for a 90 day warranty, so if people knew little enough about PCs not to be able to put one together, it would be difficult to sell them the difference between that IBM and a custom built, faster, upgradable machine.

Things were getting cheaper all the time... and as someone on here has said, "The era of cheap PCs is over"... yah, they're just not mass market enough now... for a long time you could take $200 and get a mid-high CPU/Mobo/RAM combo to swap into your machine for an upgrade... These days that barely buys low end. However it may mean the era of building PCs on the side in your basement is coming back.

Just got one of these NOS from ebay. I love it! 😊

I didn't technically buy this yet, but someone locally has some old computers they want to sell\get rid of. Most of what they had was pretty basic (a Pentium 133 system, a Pentium MMX 200, a Sempron) but this system has a Cyrix M2 266 and a sound card that I can't seem to identify from the very limited pictures.

The card is about the length of the ISA slot, no longer. It is green, and appears to be full height, and I see some electrolytic caps on it, but the interior image of the system shows absolutely no other details of the sound card.

But what's with the volume dial? I've seen very very few cards with a volume dial at that end of the card? Usually they are in the middle. Only very old cards like Adlibs and Thunderboards have the volume control as the thing closest to the mounting screw (presumably because it can be hard to reach depending on the case). And no game\midi port? Crazy!

Anyone have any ideas as to what this might be?

EDIT: Aha! Right after I posted it, I found this:
https://www.recycledgoods.com/compaq-isa-soun … 868-247428-001/

Its an ESS1868 from a Compaq. 😉

Ozzuneoj wrote:

... but this system has a Cyrix M2 266 ...

ATX socket 7 systems and boards are getting increasingly rare, so I'd pick this up if you haven't already (and hopefully post internals photos later? 😀).

ATX and Cyrix, especially, seems like an unusual pairing.

I've just "secured" a Iomega 250 ZIP SCSI/Parallel drive (minus the cable, wonder if a normal parallel cable will do the trick) for €5

SW-SSG wrote:

Ozzuneoj wrote:

... but this system has a Cyrix M2 266 ...

ATX socket 7 systems and boards are getting increasingly rare, so I'd pick this up if you haven't already (and hopefully post internals photos later? 😀).

ATX and Cyrix, especially, seems like an unusual pairing.

Even more unusual, it seems to be running Windows 2000, has an Intel 430TX chipset, and is equipped with 196MB of SDRAM! I see unpopulated SIMM slots as well. What an odd board. 😀 It looks a lot like an ASUS TX97-XE or some variant, but I'm not sure.

They have four custom build computers (and an old Packard Bell that I'm really interested in that they haven't dug out of storage yet).

One of the other systems they have has an MSI K8T Neo Socket 754 VIA K8T800 board, an FX 5600XT (neutered model but probably good for 9x games), running Windows 98 and appears to have a PCI sound card and a (for some reason non functional) essolo.com line executing in the autoexec. Strange combination, as the board has integrated HD audio.

Wow... now that you mention it, one of the other systems is a custom "Micron Electronics" system running Win2K Pro with an Intel AN430TX ATX board and a Pentium 200MMX with all the cards removed (except the modem!). But it has Integrated ATI graphics and sound which is *OH HOLY CRAP*... I can't make out the details in the photos, but pictures of this board online show this as one of those Yamaha OPL3 + OPL4 wavetable motherboards, and I can see chips in both those locations in the blurry photo I have. SWEET. This is getting more interesting now. 😉

The other system is an AT system, Intel chipset, Pentium 133 (P54C), ESS 1868 ISA, PCI video, 48MB RAM in SIMMs, and a rather neat looking mid sized "Quantex" tower. Fairly modern looking front and back (with a built in PS2 mouse port), but has the big one-piece cover like most AT towers. Looks like it had Windows 95 but doesn't seem to boot.

This person took a TON of pictures, which is awesome. I just wish I had room and time to deal with all of this stuff. I need to sell some computers. 😮

Ozzuneoj wrote:

SW-SSG wrote:

Wow... now that you mention it, one of the other systems is a custom "Micron Electronics" system running Win2K Pro with an Intel AN430TX ATX board and a Pentium 200MMX with all the cards removed (except the modem!). But it has Integrated ATI graphics and sound which is *OH HOLY CRAP*... I can't make out the details in the photos, but pictures of this board online show this as one of those Yamaha OPL3 + OPL4 wavetable motherboards, and I can see chips in both those locations in the blurry photo I have. SWEET. This is getting more interesting now. 😉

Got something quite similar sounding, Micron system, in a funny upright clamshell opening plastic tower.

Picking up a free Gateway 2000 dx33 this week. My first ever actual full 486 machine 😮 bad HDD but I have a 540mb Conner drive in good condition to swap in.

BitWrangler wrote:

Ozzuneoj wrote:

SW-SSG wrote:

Wow... now that you mention it, one of the other systems is a custom "Micron Electronics" system running Win2K Pro with an Intel AN430TX ATX board and a Pentium 200MMX with all the cards removed (except the modem!). But it has Integrated ATI graphics and sound which is *OH HOLY CRAP*... I can't make out the details in the photos, but pictures of this board online show this as one of those Yamaha OPL3 + OPL4 wavetable motherboards, and I can see chips in both those locations in the blurry photo I have. SWEET. This is getting more interesting now. 😉

Got something quite similar sounding, Micron system, in a funny upright clamshell opening plastic tower.

Yep that sounds similar. The case reminds me a lot of late 90s Dell XPS towers (I have two of those I need to sell to make room for this new stuff). Here are the systems this person is selling.

From left to right: K8T Sempron, Micron P200 ATX, M2 266 ATX, and Quantex P133 AT.

Also attached the picture of the board from the Micron, with the two larger chips by the edge of the board probably being the Yamaha SAx + GM chips.

Front panel is different on mine, but recognise that plastic "foot" and general proportions seem about the same. I'm sure it's got onboard ATI graphics but will have to take a look see if it's got the yamaha chips.

Bought this lovely little system form Amibay as a birthday present to myself! Can't wait to get it!
Specs are:
- Intel 386DX 25 MHz
- IIT 3C87-40
- TAM/25-O0 motherboard w/ external battery!
- 8MB RAM (8x 1MB)
- Trident 8900B VGA card
- disk controller 2x HDD, 2x FDD
- I/O card (no game port)
- Seagate ST-1144A 130MB HDD
- Panasonic JU-475-4AK0 5.25" 1.2MB FDD
- 3.5" 1.44 FDD
- AT desktop case w/ 200W power supply

BSA Starfire wrote:

Bought this lovely little system form Amibay as a birthday present to myself! Can't wait to get it! Specs are: - Intel 386DX 25 […]
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Bought this lovely little system form Amibay as a birthday present to myself! Can't wait to get it!
Specs are:
- Intel 386DX 25 MHz
- IIT 3C87-40
- TAM/25-O0 motherboard w/ external battery!
- 8MB RAM (8x 1MB)
- Trident 8900B VGA card
- disk controller 2x HDD, 2x FDD
- I/O card (no game port)
- Seagate ST-1144A 130MB HDD
- Panasonic JU-475-4AK0 5.25" 1.2MB FDD
- 3.5" 1.44 FDD
- AT desktop case w/ 200W power supply

Wow so pretty and clean. The case looks exactly like the one our neighbor had for their 285 with VGA back when we had just an 8086 with Hercules graphics..

Did get all those just like that for free, just good people that did not need them, but did not trow them on the trash as well....

Great dual 370 mobo, even have rubycon capacitors

Great slot 1 mobo very happy i did get it, just need recapping, left to find BE6-II V2

Here are all of them...

https://imgur.com/a/YSlRm

Did get that for 10 euros..

Radical Vision wrote:

Did get all those just like that for free, just good people that did not need them, but did not trow them on the trash as well....

https://imgur.com/a/YSlRm

Holy crap, that is a monster haul. Some ppl would be glad to get all that for a few hundred bucks, never mind free... can I rub my lottery ticket on you?

Well i did just get lucky i guess...
I show off all of my parts gallery, and seems some people understand my work and they help me + all that parts on the pictures they did not have use of them, so they did give them for free to me.. I can get even more things from the first guy, because he have more, but things are slow there.. All on the pictures are in 80-85% working condition the rest is scrap, but best thing here is all nice stuff are working, only the LanParty is given as broken, don`t have LGA 1366 CPU and DDR3 memory for now to test it out to see if i can fix it...
I did get in the start of the year my very first IBM Model M, but just for 5 euros, i type now on it, did need 8 caps and the metal part of the space button, because when i get the keyboard did miss them...

Some idiot even did write with pencil on the caps no comment........

But today it looks like that (well not like that i have all the missing caps), while the picture is a bit old but whatever...

I did get also from some scrap guy 7 working 3Dfx Voodoo cards (the Voodoo 1 is from trade) for only not sure what was the deal i think the price he did ask from me was about 11 euros that is the scrap cost, but i did have old 486 CPUs i did give him x2 processors they did cost even little more and the total cost for me was something like 5 euros including the shipping money....

Well from all the 7 scrap Voodoo cards all of them are working, but one of the Voodoo 2 cards have broken pins on x2 of the 3Dfx chipsets, and one Voodoo 3 3000 seems to have damaged memory and shows artifacts all over the place, the rest are all working fine....
I expect soon to add all the rest 3Dfx series, such as Voodoo 5 5500 and 6000, at least x2 Voodoo 2 in way better condition, maybe Voodoo 4, and Voodoo 3 3500...

The first picture looked like it lost Control. I have the same exact keyboard without the SDL to PS2 cable (now have one thanks to the magic of eBay), and the arrow keys were incorrectly placed, but luckily, they pop right off to easily swap or replace instead of the whole 9 yards.