First post, by BeginnerGuy
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- Oldbie
EDIT: Oh boy, I'm not sure how to shrink these gigantic pictures down
2 - pictures shrunk to 25%.. Doubt anybody cares for originals
Short version: I have some spare stuff, want to build an early - mid/late 90s DOS gamer w/ Qbasic (or Quick). Win9x not really necessary at all, but I don't care for anything absolutely era perfect right now. I need suggestions on what to buy from ebay or similar.
Hi guys, fresh blood here. I've been lurking this site on and off for a long time but I never really had to time to take an interest in my old joys. I won't be a one time post and vanish guy 😀. I didn't see a new user / rules thread so hopefully I stay in line 😈
Anyway, I've recently moved and have been digging through my old treasures and figure I'd like to build a machine to reflect the heyday of my early computing years. So far I've unearthed Robin Hood: Conquests of the Longbow (dated 1992) disks 1-5 but can't locate the startup disk, fingers are crossed 😊, and a bunch of disks containing Qbasic programs I wrote around 20 years ago I can't wait to see what lives (if anything remains) on them.
That said I'm mostly looking to run MS-DOS 5.0 era + software/games with a budget of whatever the cheapest stuff I can cobble together for starters, a laptop isn't out of the question but it doesn't matter, going on a basement work bench. I have a lot of spare parts I can use for a desktop though, or maybe flip on ebay to fund this project. It's been many years so input on what I should be hunting on eBay and using from my parts bins would be appreciated.
I still have a lot to go through, most of this stuff hasn't seen the light of day for decades. I do know for sure that I never kept motherboards due to space constraints, oldest boards I have on tap are LGA775. I just put together a P4 Northwood + Geforce 5200, but I have zero interest in an XP era machine.
I kept all this stuff vacuum sealed, some of it looks virtually brand new, and oh god the smell the smell.. It smells like the old egghead store, silicon overdose!
CPUs:
Found a little container labeled s5-7 (socket 5-7), don't know how the Athlon ended up in there.
AMD K6-2 300mhz
AMD K6-2 350mhz
Pentium A80502 100mhz
Pentium A80502 133mhz
Pentium MMX BP80503233, guessing this is a 233mhz I would have ran in a socket 7
AMD-K7650MTR51B R 650 mhz (no interest in Slot A)
K6 chips are probably too fast and I see super 7 boards are a little pricey these days, I didn't save any sadly. So I could probably build around the Pentium 100 or 133, or just buy a 486 as I doubt they go for much, whatever works best. The 133 is probably somewhere in between Epic and Overkill for this as is 😈, that would require a regular socket 7 board if my memory is working, is that correct?
Ahhh I found some real treasure close to my heart, SOUND CARDS:
Sound blaster CT1600 Pro 2 (with the YMF262 OPL3 synth chip). This sound card is the music of my youth, I hope it works!
Packard Bell ???? - I know it's an Aztec card and I see another YMF232 on it, does anybody know anything about this card? I think this was pulled from a friends machine.
Assorted Graphics:
Radeon 9800 Pro "All-in-wonder" - far too new to care, I think this one may have had some memory issues before it was pulled.
Geforce FX 5200 - Too much, don't care!
Hercules 3d Prophet 4000XT 32MB(actually works, needs a fan) - Still probably too much for this
Diamon Stealth 3d 2000 pro 4MB - Hmm, I remember buying this around '97. This could be useful maybe?
Radeon 7000? I'm not sure if this is a 32 or 64MB model, but still a much newer card.
Random pci to IDE and winTV tuner card..
I'm not sure what I would want here, won't I be needing a combo 2d and 3d cards? If so what should I be looking at?
Memory lane: (sadly this drive died many years ago, I remember losing a lot of files and being sad)
I've also located a bunch of IDE hard drives ranging from 20 to 80 gigs, all tested and working with that lga775 pc I slapped together. I do not have any drives outside of IDE or SATA so adapters may be needed.
That's about it for today, I think I have a few PCI NIC cards and other misc stuff. I have plenty of fans but no spare case, esp not for AT boards.
So what should I do, is any of this stuff worth my time or should I just dump it on ebay? If you guys can post links maybe show me some boards to look at on ebay or just mention them. I also can't remember which connectors were in use back then for power supplies, 20 pin ATX? I'd need to buy one. I also can't find any disk drives short of a few IDE interface CD-Roms
Lastly, if I go the laptop route, do any come with sound blaster cards? I'd love to use that SB pro II but close will suffice, no sound blaster is no deal for me though 😊
Thanks for reading this mess
Sup. I like computers. Are you a computer?
