First post, by lvader
Hi,
I’m new here so please be gentle 😀
I’m into retro gaming but so far I’d not done anything PC wise, mainly 8 bit and 16 bit Commodore and Ataris and Sega, Nintendo games consoles. I originally got into PC gaming in the early 90’s and I have very fond memories or playing Lucasfilm adventure games, Wing Commander and my all-time favourite game Ultima 7. One thing that made that era very special for me was the sound of my Roland LAPC-I. I’ve lost count of how many PC builds I’ve gone through over the years but the only thing I kept from the early years is the Roland sound card and it’s been sitting in a draw for nearly 20 years unused.
For the last year I’ve been umming and ahhing about building/buying an old PC to see if the Roland still works and so I can play all my old favourites again. Finally I saw something suitable on Ebay and decided to go for it.
The PC specs are;
80486 VIP motherboard with 4 PCI, 2 VLB/ISA and 2 ISA, 256Kb L2 cache (fake )
Intel 486DX4100-S (16kb L1)
16 MB RAM
2 x 540MB IDE HD
CD Rom
WD VLB Graphics card
Yamaha chip based 16 bit ISA OPL3 sound card
Software wise it has DOS 6.22, Windows 95 and Win 3.11 (workgroups)
By default it boots into Windows 95, 800x600 256 colours, it’s pretty slow to boot. After checking it for a couple of hours I tried the LAPC-I using the Canyon.mid from 3.11 and it works! Great!
I then tried a couple of games, Monkey Island 2 and Ultima 7 and they sound awesome, just as good if not better than I remembered!
One strange thing I noticed is that I accidentally pressed the turbo button and it makes the system run about 5-6 times slower, while I don’t really understand this but it might come in handy as a way to slow it down with really old games.
The video output from the WD card isn’t that great so I’ve now swapped it with an SIS 6326 PCI card and it looks a lot sharper and a video glitch that was visible in Ultima 7 is now gone. I’ve since read that the DOS card of choice here is the S3 Virge, I did find one cheap on Ebay (an S3 Virge DX) but it hasn’t arrived yet, it will be good to compare with the SIS card. Which games should try that will help decide which to keep?
On the storage side I want to add a Promise 100 TX2 IDE controller and an 8GB DOM (to replace the 2 noisy HD’s) and replace the CD rom with something more reliable because it seems to be flaky reading CD-R’s.
That’s it for now. I’ll post some updates as and when I make some changes, try more things. In the meantime if anyone has some advice it will be gratefully appreciated. I’ve already learned a lot by searching through this great forum, I would never have discovered that my cache chips are fake for example.
Jeff
