bofh.fromhell wrote:

Yes they do*. Some systems require a lot of current on the +5v rail, wich moderns PSU's dont really provide that well. But thats […]
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RetroLizard wrote:

Alright. One question I have, since there doesn't seem to be any reliable answers online:

Do modern power supplies work on older motherboards?

Yes they do*.
Some systems require a lot of current on the +5v rail, wich moderns PSU's dont really provide that well.
But thats not an issue with the relativly low power P2's and P3's.

Tho you might wanna pay attention to the ATX connector.
Modern MB's and PSU's have 24 pin connectors and older usually have 20 pin.
The extra 4 pins are just added to the end of the connector and on most PSU's you can detach them and just use 20 pins.
But in some case thats not possible and you will get 4 extra pins hanging over the MB connector.
Wich also would be fine, but theres gotta be room for them on the MB =)

Cheap and not modular, but they have 3 of the the (nowadays rare) 4 pin molex connectors, and a FDD one.
Not sure if they are available in all regions tho.

*I suspect theres probably some rare exeptions to this.

Some recent (low end) power supplies with group balance regulation might not work, which is what I have discovered last week with a COMPAQ i440BX board.The power supply might reset or shut down when it decides that voltages and/or loads get out of control. It does depend on your configuration, because I have a socket 370 Voodoo2 system with a Seasonic S12-II (group regulated PSU) that does not have stability issues (the +12V is a little over 5% off though).

You need to look up the +5V load specification, in a regular slot 1 setup 20A (or more) is fine.

You can buy a 24-pin to 20-pin ATX plug converter pretty much anywhere, but if you have a board with some free space around the ATX connector, then you don't need one.

dionb wrote:

However your ambition to go back to the late 1980s means that a generic Slot1 motherboard / P2/P3 CPU combo just won't hack it - you simply can't clock it low enough.

Not even a PII 233MHz with the cache disabled (haven't tried, but I assume that it would be 386/486 slow)?

bofh.fromhell wrote:

Memory isn't a problem either, PC100/133 SDRAM is plentiful and very cheap. […]
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Memory isn't a problem either, PC100/133 SDRAM is plentiful and very cheap.

BAD CAPS !, the BX era is right when this was a big thing.
Pretty much all brands were affected, but some more then others (RIP ABIT..)
Find a recapped board or do it yourself, its not hard with some patience and planning.
Also note that bad caps dont always bulge or leak, they can just dry up and make the system unstable.

Accessories !, you want to get as many of the original accessories as possible.
Original box, manual and media is a huge bonus.
It's not strictly needed since most information is available online.
But its the retro factor =)

RAM actually can be a little problem if the manual of your board is unclear about the exact specifications of the memory that's required (such as its internal organization). My Asus P3B-F for example (which isn't that picky) doesn't accept just any PC100 or PC133 module that I install in it.

Mwah, the i440BX era was not that bad yet for elco's, but Abit, Gigabyte and MSI were certainly part of the bad caps boards. The better i440BX boards from Asus, AOpen and OEM's like COMPAQ did still use good elco's. The real trouble started in the year 2000 with S370 boards and lasted till ca. 2005 for the low end boards when even they got polymer capacitors.

SpectriaForce wrote:

dionb wrote:

However your ambition to go back to the late 1980s means that a generic Slot1 motherboard / P2/P3 CPU combo just won't hack it - you simply can't clock it low enough.

Not even a PII 233MHz with the cache disabled (haven't tried, but I assume that it would be 386/486 slow)?

Fast 386/slow 486 slow, yes. But TS wants to go back to 1985, and that's XT 8088 or very early 286 era...

Additionally, you can't mess with the multiplier on a P3, so anything over 333MHz means locked, high multiplier. You can mitigate that by choosing a P3-533 (as only 4x), but then you get stuck on no 133MHz support of the BX chipset (and yes, of course you can OC, but going down that path loses the simplicity you want in choosing BX in the first place).

AMD K6-3 and Via C3 allow multiplier, internal caches and a lot of other stuff to be set via SETMUL, so you can not only clock really far back, but you can do it on the fly too.

Even then, 1985-level 8088 might be out of range, but the ways to reach that low while keeping P3-ish performance levels for late 1990s games get a bit arcane, things like rare So7 motherboards that can clock FSB back to 16.7MHz...

Front panel of the case(inside):

Front panel (closed):

Inside of case:

Memory:

Video Cards:

Motherboard:

Sound Card:

As for the games, I plan on playing some of the Commander Keen games, Leiro, Doom/Heretic/Hexen, Frogger 1/2, Sims, UT99, King's Quest, and other various titles.

dionb wrote:

Even then, 1985-level 8088 might be out of range, but the ways to reach that low while keeping P3-ish performance levels for late 1990s games get a bit arcane, things like rare So7 motherboards that can clock FSB back to 16.7MHz...

Exactly. Some motherboards can achieve more extreme slowdown by allowing deturbo, extreme FSB downclocking, or very performance adverse memory configurations, but the typical lower limit for a Pentium MMX or K6-2 time machine is a slow 386-DX/fast 386-SX. C3 Ezra machines can typically achieve a little lower.

Update: Added images in a previous post, for anybody who's curious.

That sound card is going to be pain in the ass if you want to play DOS games.

This perspective is from someone who doesn't own an MT32/SC55 external MIDI synthesizer, and probably never will:

* Vortex cards are nice, but expensive, and poor OPL3 emulation and no DOS wavetable support.
* SB Live/Audigy do reasonable DOS emulation, but require EMM386 running, so have more DOS compatibility problems than an ISA card would. DOS wavetable support is OKish.
* Yamaha YMF7xx cards have good DOS emulation, but tend to be more picky about which motherboards they do the 100% emulation on, and no wavetable in pure dos mode.
* ESS1939 Solo-1 cards are inexpensive, good OPL3 support, reasonably good DOS support, but no DOS wavetable.

Given your list of games, and the requirement for a PCI sound card, I'd think maybe a the Yamaha might be a good match, as long as your motherboard co-operates, but you will have to run the games that use General MIDI from within windows (which should work, only crazy people like me insist on running every DOS game in Pure DOS). Some of the very older games might dislike running in Windows, hopefully most of these games won't support General MIDI.

After a bit of searching, I've come across this https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gigabyte-GA686BX-Slo … cYKpg:rk:2:pf:0

Anybody know if it's a good board?

Looks ok for me. It even has the SB_link connector that helps some YMF7x4 to improve their DOS compatibility to the absolute maximum (some because some YMF7X4 are missing that port for some reasons). It's a common thing on slot 1 boards

After a bit of thought, I've decided to build a secondary Win98SE computer at some point in the near future, and hopefully set up a little retro gaming network. (I do not intend on actually connecting the computer(s) to the internet, but rather directly to each other.)