I think there's a official mod for early xt boards to install 640KB

My Dream 286

-TI486SXL-40 on 10MHz system bus w/Cyrix 83D87 (Buffalo upgrade kit)
-IBM AT 5170 with "type 4" XT286 planar (0WS)
-AMI BIOS upgrade
-640KB onboard + 12MB on PS/2 Model 30 SIMM card + 8MB on BocaRAM AT Plus
-IBM VGA (for PS/2 model 30)
-AHA-1542C + 1GB HP SCSI
-Sound Blaster Pro CT1600
-IBM 5175 PGA converted to VGA using an adapter
-IBM 1.2MB & 1.44MB floppies (official grey IBM drive kits)
-84 key model F AT keyboard

This system is in pristine condition. A lot of ATs were pretty badly abused, so it's not easy to find a clean one. I've been working on this one for 20 years. It's always been hard to get good AT stuff, so it took me a long time to find what the parts I really wanted. In the past I thought it would be cool to have a 20MHz 286, but I really wanted to keep the IBM board with the IBM case, so I found a middle route and went with an XT286 board, which can easily overclock to 10MHz (normally 6). I have the 5154 and fully expanded EGA card for this system, but I thought it would be cooler to have VGA with a 5175 to have better graphics but keep the classic look. Also, IBM never released a 1.44mb upgrade for ATs as far as I know, but they did have an official 720kb drive, so I reused the faceplate and bay adapter and dropped in a PS/2 1.44MB drive. Sadly, there are several items in this machine that need servicing, so until I get around to it, it's somewhat non functional in this configuration.
Upgrades I'd like to have include the IBM AT tower kit, the swivel tilt accessory for the 515x type displays, an original PS/2 mouse on a converter, a Pro Audio Spectrum or a CT1330A and I thought it would be cool to move my MT-32 to this machine to enjoy all the great EGA games. Not sure about the CPU. I might drop back to the original 286, or try an IBM 486SLC2 upgrade, but I haven't had good luck with those upgrades in general.

In all honesty, aside from a couple of individual parts to perfect my builds, I probably have more systems than I need.
In fact, I am thinking of trying to sell a couple of systems... We shall see.

My current lineup is as follows:
Acer 1120SX - 386SX 20MHz, 8MB ram, 1.6GB HD, vga card, ESS1868 sound card.
486DX4 100MHz, 64MB ram, 1.6GB HD, S3 Vision 864 2MB, GUS and SB16, Creative CD-ROM drive.
Pentium 233mmx, 64MB ram, 4GB CF to ide, Matrox Millennium 4MB, Diamond Monster Voodoo 2 8MB, 40X CD-ROM drive, AWE64 Gold.
K6-3 500MHz, 256MB ram, 80GB hd, Matrox Millennium G400 Max, Voodoo 2 12MB, Yamaha Waveforce 192XG, DVD-RW.
Compaq Deskpro EN, Pentium III 1.4GHz, 512MB ram, Seagate Cheetah 73GB USCSI320 @ USCSI160, Matrox Parhelia, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS, DVD-RW.
I also have an Amiga 1200 with a GVP A1230 Turbo+ Series II accelerator card and a 60GB hd, hooked up to a 1084S-D2 monitor. I am in the process of upgrading this a bit, faster 68030, fpu, more ram, new kickstarts. This is probably going to be stealing a lot of my attention for a while.

I should probably try to sell the Pentium mmx and the Pentium III. Those are systems I don't really need. The former overlaps too much with the 486 and the K6-3 and the Pentium III covers an era of games and software which I can mostly run better on my main system.

It is hard to see something go though.

Deksor wrote:

I think there's a official mod for early xt boards to install 640KB

It requires both finding the memory chips and soldering a jumper onto the board. The chips I could probably find given time, but I wouldn't dare let loose my crap soldering skills on such a precious motherboard. 🤣

I have some reasonably specced PCs, from a 286 up to a skt 2011 i7, a few Amigas and an Atari STe. Only two of the PCs really get used for my retro PC gaming needs, a Pentium 233 MMX and P3 Tualatin 1.4GHz. The Pentium is by far the most used, I disable the caches for the odd game that is speed sensitive. I don't really play CGA era PC games, I'd rather play those on the Amiga or ST, Defender of the Crown and Who framed Roger Rabbit are good examples, they were just sooo much better on the Amiga than a CGA PC. I use the Tualatin for late era DOS games such as Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior, Quake etc.

The Pentium 233 probably comes closest to my dream retro PC. By fiddling with the caches, you can cover a wide era of games, spares are still relatively easy to come by and (generally) isn't as finicky to set up and get running stably as 486s and below. It has a Gigabyte 430TX motherboard, 2x32MB PC100 SDRAM, Geforce2-MX400 PCI, 80GB HDD, 3Com 3C905TX NIC, a Turtle Beach Tropez Plus sound card and a Roland MT-100.

On the Amiga side, I use my expanded A500 more than anything else. I hardly ever touch my A1200, the A500 just feels so much more "Amiga" to me, even though the A1200 is a much better machine. The STe gets switched on every now and again.

I like these threads. I'm in downsize mode too and moving completed retro rigs into storage. The two I decided to keep on hand are:

(1)
W95c
P677 @ 500 (Longbow 2 can get squirly over 500)
BH6
256mb SD
QDI Legend Rendition 2200/8mb
Voodoo 2/12mb (I orginally had a second V2 in SLI but prefer the image quality of a single board)
Vortex2 audio with Adwave32 daughterboard

This rig handles all the early-to-mid 3D and Glide stuff I'll ever want to run. It is also the only way to run Indycar Racing 2 in glorious 3D (Rendition mode). I'm partial to W95, especially with the USB and desktop updates.

(2)
W98se/XPsp2 (BIOS dual boot)
Core 2 Duo 2.66ghz E6700
BIOSTAR P4M890-M7-TE
2gb PC2-4300 533ghz (RLoew's memory patch for W98)
EVGA 7900GTX 512mb (RLoew's memory patch gets this working too)
SBLive!

This one doubles as a capable XP era rig which can also run late Glide games maxed-out via glide wrapper, and a fallback W98se rig in cases native W9x is either necessary or preferable, also with a W98 supported glide wrapper. RLoew's patch solves the W98 "V8 in a VW Bug" issues.

If I was keeping one more box it would probably be the 486/DX2-66 (with a hard drive caddy dual boot DOS/W95a) for butter-smooth early "almost 3D" cpu-limited simulators like Red Baron and Aces Of The Pacific. Dosbox doesn't run these 100% to my satisfaction - but as they don't honestly see much play the box can be put into storage for another day.

The other full-function rigs being mothballed:
P233/Diamond 3D-2000-4mb/Voodoo1 (this is an up-gunned dream rebuild of the first PC I bought new)
P933/Voodoo5-64mb/Vortex2 (this was originally setup as a pin-mod Tualatin/slotket but was a tad too unstable; P933 handles what it needs to fine)

I have a couple of inexpensive Coolermaster Elite 360 cases for on-the-fly prototype builds. These often incorporate some combination of Slot 1 cpu, P4s, Tualatin, Duron, Athlon, Voodoo3, Voodoo5, GF7900, or the great little ATI 9700 Pro.

The computers I use the most :
1998 gaming PC
Pentium 2 450
Abit BH6
128MB RAM
10gb HDD
Creative Dxr2 DVD drive
Zip 100 drive
Riva TNT
Voodoo 2 sli
Aureal vortex1
Yamaha ymf 744
Sound blaster awe 64
3com etherlink xl

Yes all the possible slots are filled 🤣

The other one is much more simple :
Cheap early 90's pc :
386SX 25
Unknown AT motherboard with VLSI SCAMP chipset (very good board with awesome bios by the way)
8MB ram
320MB HDD
5"1/4 floppy disk drive 1.2MB, 3"1/2 floppy disk drive 1.44MB
Cirrus Logic 5422 ISA
And last but not least : Sound blaster 2.0 with CMS upgrade

I also have a 5x86 on a Aopen ap43 with a sb16 and a long wavetable and a intel DX4 on a full yes tech motherboard with a gravis ultrasound but I don't have the room to really use them currently. The DX4 is more or less finished, but the 5x86 needs some work.

My dream setups...

XT/8088/286 era

• 80286 20 or 25 MHz
• good VGA card
• SB-compatible
• Classic hard drive
• Mechanical keyboard
• Ethernet card
• 2-4 megs of RAM

This is pretty much fulfilled with my current 286 setup, except for the CPU speed (12 MHz, ET3000, YMF card, 110 MB RLL drive, Alps switch keyboard, 3C509, 2MB RAM)

DOS/Win95 era
Pretty much fulfilled with my Pentium MMX machine...

• MMX/233
• S3 Trio64V2/DX
• SB16
• 3C905 100 megabit card
• Sweet crisp 18 inch CRT
• Windows 95
• 64 MB RAM

My only complaint being that the motherboard is a 430TX which cannot cache more than 64 megs of RAM, but 64MB is period-correct nonetheless.

Win98 era
This one needs some work. I have a pretty standard 440BX PIII Coppermine 800 MHz with 512 MB RAM and Voodoo 3, which is awesome and pretty much works for everything, but I really want to build a totally tricked-out Win98 machine at some point, still fully legacy-compatible, with a Tualatin 1.4 GHz.

🤣 95 systems but that includes modernish stuff. I have a lot to get rid of this year, consolidation is my project this year. After I finish cataloging it all!

I have tons of holes to fill in my collection, I desire much from the 80s and really just have the Kaypro and Commodore (the Apple II+ is probably 80s too). I used to have 2 from the 70s and miss them sorely (but honestly it's not like I ever used them for anything when I had them).

I probably will not get most of what I want but I hit upon the idea of retromod systems in scratch-built cases like the IMSAI desktop (not the switchbox 88, the VDP-80) or a Canon AS-100 (the former looks a lot like a 70s terminal, but bright blue, and the latter is part of a series of early 80s AIO desktop PCs that looked like those purpose-built work processors from later years).

If I'm lucky I will build 2-3 like that, but the rest will just be what I keep from my 2018-2019 MegaHaul.

Most of my interests are too far back to be cheap. If you love P3's and P4's your life is mostly pretty good (except for the Voodoo cards and the like).

I don't think I have a 'dream' system. I'm nostalgic for the hardware I used to own, and desire to try all the alternatives that I couldn't afford to then.

Wouldn't mind getting a hold of a 286/20 or generic 286/20 mobo.

I have almost everything i wanted, but i still want a IBM Music Feature Card and any AdLib Gold. I started programming in ASM so i want to program a game for CGA/Tandy, and i would like to have Sound support for several Sound cards, including the Innovation Card and the IMFC Card.

I'm planning to sell some duplicate Sound cards i have, but still finding a IMFC is almost Impossible. I also can't pay the 600$ they used to go, although i think the last one went for a little less.

I would also like a very fast VLB video Card, so i could complete my 486.

I built pretty much everything I set out to except a 486 based PC. I always wanted to buy or put together a DX2-66 or DX2-80 machine for DOS gaming circa 1994. Titles like "The Legacy", "Alone In The Dark" etc. That was similar to the first real gaming PC that I played around with. Sadly I never got the chance to make it happen, but at least DOSBox saved me to some extent.

What I tended to do with my other retro gaming rigs was follow closely to Falcon Northwests dream builds back in the day. Made a few of those, with some minor adjustments.

Sadly though no 486! 🤣