http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTfxXa6XSeA&li … _eeUW74SzgbVqyX

Information overkill but it's all there 😀

Just finished watching the first video and at the start of Part 1 it occured to me that you're probably Australian. Came back here to check and lo and behold! You are! 😁

Half-Saint wrote:

Just finished watching the first video and at the start of Part 1 it occured to me that you're probably Australian. Came back here to check and lo and behold! You are! 😁

Well, some part of him is from another country, but after a guessing game here on Vogons earlier no one got it correctly so we don't know 😜

This is what gave him away:
http://youtu.be/KpBYnL5fAXE

Half-Saint wrote:

Just finished watching the first video and at the start of Part 1 it occured to me that you're probably Australian. Came back here to check and lo and behold! You are! 😁

Hehe 😀

Yea I live in Western Australia in a country town pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Well not nowhere we do have a post office, schools, one supermarket and other things. But most importantly I have decent broadband.

Across the road is another guy into retro computers. He is much more of a hoarder and must have 30+ desktops and tons of HDDs and other gear. I have focus on the 386-Pentium DOS era and especially all the Roland gear.

To come back to your first question I would recommend a Socket 7 machine. But my videos explain all the why and what exactly you need. They are a bit boring at times but I simply do not have the time to cut, edit and polish them like others do. They are very raw 😁

I have friends in Melbourne and Adelaide 😀

What kind of bothers me in your videos is excessive camera movement and bad lighting. Have you considered getting a tripod? 😁

Since I only got about two useful replies I edited the title and I'm adding some info here. I dislike the Socket 7 platform because it's missing a turbo button and you have to mess with BIOS settings to slow it down. On the other hand, I have a lot of different socket 7 motherboards to choose from so I guess that would be the easiest way.

ASUS SP97-XV: ATX, no AGP, 4x SIMM, 2x DIMM, no FSB 100MHz, boots from CF
PROBLEM: doesn't boot from floppy (?)

MSI MS5172: ATX, AGP, 3x DIMM, has FSB 100MHz support
PROBLEM: stuck at 'Verifying DMI Pool Data....'

ASUS P5A-B: AT, AGP, 3x DIMM, has FSB 100MHz support, probably the fastest board I own
PROBLEM: it's not ATX 😀

I'll be adding a few more motherboards tomorrow when I have time to look at the boards.

I also do not like the socket 7 answer as the most versatile system for older games but Mau1wurf1977 is right. For me personally I find the socket 7 platform not as interesting as socket 3.

if you go with the original platforms you will need too many machines to cover your games.
A 486DX2-66 is a classic machine that will cover a large section of gaming history.

it will certainly cover your early 90's adventure games.

I'll see what I can do with that 386DX-40 I picked up recently and maybe leave the Pentium for Win95/98 3D accelerated games.

Like Mau1wurf1977 I also believe that a ss7 is a great platform to build a DOS/win9x machine... sure 4-5 vga and ancient CGA/EGA games will require tinkering (and tbh cga/ega stuff need a special build for them to get the max out of them) but 95% of everything else will run great and with nice framerates where applicable. L1 cache can be turned ON/OFF via command line and it can bring a p200mmx to 486 speed levels.
I have messed with 386DX/486DX+ mobos and I have found many incompatibilities and weirdness, once you really start using the machine everyday you discover them - from games not running because of BIOS memory remap settings to not being able to create/use UMBs... The only exception that I found was the late 486 mobos that had PCI slots, these are great IMHO.
Being using a HOT-591P based build for several years now, couldn't be more satisfied and trouble-free (at least compared to the stuff I tried...)

Socket 3 with pci is a great option but a 386dx-40 is likely your best bet.