I had a box full of older PC cards and bits in my possession for the past decade or so, adding to it as I scavenged form scrapped PCs and items going for recycling from places of work. A few weeks ago, my parents needed to clear all of the items I had in storage there, so I had to go and collect everything and bring to my home. Included in that pile of crap was a Logitech Wingman Extreme that came with my first PC (an AST P133 that eventually got Frankensteined). I realised that I had no machine that this would plug into, looked at the box of bits, and decided to do something about that..
I've built 3 machines over the past week or so:
- P3-600 Dell desktop as a Dos/win3.1 box
- P3S midi tower as a Win98se box
- Athlon box as a WinXP box
The Dell desktop has a BX chipset, and a P3-600 chip onboard. It's a fairly bare board. I sourced an Audician 32 ISA soundcard and added a Dreamblaster Synth S2 daughterboard. There's an AGP Matrox G400Max graphics card - chosen as there are still valid Win3.x drivers available. I had 512Mb of memory in that box before repurposing as a Dos box, so I've taken that out and put in a 64Mb stick instead. There's a basic 10/100 network card in there, and there's a simple CD drive, and the original floppy. FreeDos was tried, but trying to get WfW3.11 on as well was a pain, so I've currently got MSDos 7.1 and WfW 3.11. It's pretty nifty for the old games like Doom, Descent, Quake, Duke3d and the older dos games that I have had to hand. All of the fun with the stuffing of device drivers into high memory.. (623Kb free mem with mouse and cd loaded)
The Win98SE box is based on an Asus TUSL2-C board with that wonderful i815 chipset, with a P3-S 1.13 Tualatin server chip, that happily runs at 1.5Ghz. The 512Mb of ram maxes out the chipset and is more than sufficient for Win9x anyway. There's a Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS soundcard, and a Medion Geforce 4 Ti 4200 that I had a Zalman cooler on since I had it originally. I added an Intel 10/100 netcard and a USB 2.0 pci card, as well as a WinTV pci tv card. I had a zip-250 atapi drive lying around so I added that into the mix. The 8gb harddisk is going to be changed out for a 16gb flash card via an IDE adapter that is en route from the Bay, but it's sufficient for the moment. It's a nifty machine for the Halflife, Q2/Q3, UT2004 era of games.
Last box I built is an XP box. It's a pretty crappy PC-Chips M870v2 motherboard, flashed to the latest ECS bios as Elite bought the manufacturer and sold the same board as an "ECS 755-A2". I've ordered a 3400+ Venice Athlon fromthe Bay, currently there's an 800mhz Sempron that will not clock up to the designed 1800mhz design. There's a 250Gb PATA harddisk in there, as it was just easier to install onto. There's a 6600GT graphics card, and a Soundblaster X-Fi pci soundcard. There's an Asus Tiger PVR card, and a Sata-300 pci card for a future possible expansion. A dvd writer and a cdrom round out the hardware.
I have a handful of spare netcards, a few tv cards, a handful of SCSI cards that I decided not to use in the end. Still, it's been interesting trying to get my Steam games working under pure Dos as well as comparing just how far things have come.. My main desktop is an I7-3930@4.3, 32Gb ram, 512Gb SSD, 4x2Tb disk raid-10 storage, GTX-660 graphics so that gives >999fps in Q3 @1600x1200 with all the shiny switched on. The winxp machine appears to give about 90fps at the moment after a quick test.
I've liked the retro PC stuff for some time - I've got an Amiga 1200HD under the television with a Blizzard accelerator w/fpu and a 30Gb card and a network card. Current webpages are weird on old non-Windows browsers.
It's been a fun start of a journey through the retro PC stuff, and I think I'll have fun getting a decent KVM setup, as I will be picking up a pair of HP 20" 1600x1200@75hz CRTs that will be fantastic for the older games, and the XP machine will be using a Dell 1680x1050 flat panel.
