I'll have to post pictures later....but I just refurbished an ORIGINAL GATEWAY 286-16Mhz system. This is such an old Gateway system that it looks like an IBM clone, has the serial number hand written in pen, and the only way to say it is a Gateway system is the little case badge, the infamous "G". I have a few Gateway 2000 486 and Pentium systems, but never seen an original 286 Gateway. Not sure if its a rare collectors item, but its cool to behold Gateway's beginnings.

It had an old EGA/CGA card in it (EGA probably?) but don't have an adapter to check it. But I did plug in an old Cirrus Logic ISA card and the system booted up. There was a massive battery leak all over the mainboard, but after a VERY CAREFUL application of acetic acid and isopropyl alcohol and a THOROUGH drying, it boots up just fine except the clock says it doesn't work. Maybe I need to rework the battery backup I hooked up.

Nice, dogchainx! The case you're describing reminds me of an old 386 Gateway 2000 rig I used to have, which had a case that looked strikingly similar to the IBM AT.

I installed Windows 98SE.

I used my AGP test bench system to test some faulty AGP cards and somehow the HDD got seriously corrupted. It has delayed my benching project becasue I have been to lazy to do the reinstall.

Got back from vacation on Friday and played Lotus with my 2.5 year old yesterday.

Played a lot F-19 Stealth Fighter on FreeDOS (I did not remember it was so difficult to fly at low altitude, and how hard are the enemies setup to "Elite") and Ultima VII on Exult.

I had a Seagate ST-225, and was wondering if it still works. Looking in my ISA card box, I found a WD MFM controller. Plugged it in, and hit the power switch.

Got smoke and sparks. This killed the P3B-F. 🙁

edit: Looks like the single electrolytic cap on the WD card is the killer. It looks popped on one end, and it smells funny when I connect it directly to 12V.
Still don't know how this managed to fry an entire mainboard... I didn't even know ISA cards could do this.

And before anyone asks, nope, I wasn't using my hacked RAM or the ISA backplane or any other weird tricks. Just this WD card.

My ssd died at a week before 2 years from the manufacture date. 3 year warranty so the RMA time! setting up a temp p4 xp machine to use while I wait on that. currently using a pentium thinkpad until the p4 is done. happy holidays!

Yesterday I played a game of Age of Empires II HD - The Conquerors and won. I have not lost a game for weeks now. 🤣 I am hoping to play some more CivNet next week and the week after. I will be on Christmas break.

I have a massive collection of big box software (mostly games) that I'm going through and archiving everything (disk image, manuals, box, inserts, etc). I lot of this work has been done before, but a lot of the scans are of very poor quality and some of the disk images don't work correctly (Vetusware...i'm looking at YOU!).

Also, I finally was able to find a copy of JetFighter: The Adventure that doesn't have the disk copy protection. I've tried it in DosBox and will make a copy on a 3.5" floppy and try it on my 286 soon.

Oh...and my son won an auction for me. DOH! He was playing on my phone and won an auction for $158 for a collection of most of the old D&D PC games. Ugh. Oh well. I didn't have a copy of DarkSun and DragonStrike. The rest will go back on ebay. Kids......

I succeed to make Alone in the Dark 2 working. The setup file was messed up under DOS but it worked under Win98. Back to DOS I have sound and music!
Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition works fine in 800x600 with Roland MIDI Music and 16bits/22Khz stereo effects.

Alone in the Dark 3 is still silent... soundcard is not detected...

Just some gaming.... NFS-2000, Return To Castle Wolfenstein and UT99.

Just refurbished a cpu cooler fan...
Dismateled it and cleaned with some alcohol, then I added a tiny drop of fine oil into the ball-bearing.
I used oil for sewing machine's and I guess that gun-oil can be used too.
Finally I replaced the tiny washer, and closed the fan by replacing the sticker.

Got my old faithful Athlon 3000 board, MSI K7N2 Delta2, fired up with 2gb Ram, 250gb WD Drive, and 3DForce2MX-32 vid card for now. Waiting on my RMA'd Corsair power supply to come back then I will get the Radeon 3850 AGP 8x back in it.

Crysis here I come =)

Received some new proms today.. I will burn new LASER bios chips when i have some round stickers thats matching the window size.. So i can swap the rom for new ones on my 8086 board.

Finally put it together...I mean that P60 I got some time ago. Bought these (retro) hardware today

And it seems to work, going to put in HD today too and install os. Pics later.
Found yesterday nice minitower and used that on this build. There was some leftovers from that case including Voodoo 1 card without loopcable though. Going to test it later. Oh, what a busy day 😀

Started playing Gabriel Knight 1 on my 386 and Broken Sword 1 Director's Cut on a modern PC. In other news, after having it wait for more than 6 months on the shelf, I finally got a MIDI cable and connected the MT-32 to the 386. Busy busy!

Installed a CAT5 cable. I moved my contemporary PC to the dining room since my wife took my dining room table. CAT5 is a requirement for Steam. WIFI is too slow and unreliable.

Picked up an inexpensive Abit BH6 Slot 1 motherboard as backup for my slot 1 retro boxes. I think it will be able to fill in if either the Asus P3B-F or Abit VA6 goes down.

Dug out my '63 Royal Companion Typewriter today if that counts. 😜

Player some unreal. Seems like I've fixed an issue with my montego card eventually producing random crazy sound nonsense after playing half an hour or so. I bumped the frequency range down to 22050 from 44100 and it seems to have corrected the problem. This is incentive to get a diamond mx300, but the montego came with this system and I'm hesitant to change the character of it like that.

Also, I poked around eBay for a radeon agp card in the x1950 flavor. I want one for a directx 9 build I'm planning.