First post, by Deczor
My first computer was a Bondwell XT, bought in 1988 I think. We were too poor to upgrade, so it wasn't until 1997 that I managed to upgrade to a PII 450. My parents had left, so I sold their piano to get it. The whole 386, 486 or Pentium-s era I missed completely, except for times spent on kind friends computers.
If you were anything like me in the early 90's you hung out with people who were interested in computers at school and used their machines when you could to play Wolfenstien and Lemmings. Invariably there would be one friend whose dad would have a massive tower that you weren't allowed to use and you'd be relegated to the older 386. That big machine would look something like this
This one came to me after I got a hankering to build an old system to relive some old games. Nothing was available on Trademe, and anything on ebay was insanely expensive with freight. So, I emailed every e-waste or recycling outfit in the country asking if they had anything that would fit the bill, or at least some parts I could build something out of. Of the 30ish places I emailed, only one dude came back to me saying he had what he suspected was an unused 486 machine. He sent me a few pictures, I liked it, $200 later it arrived at my door.
Let's see if it works
Seems that it works. I've chucked in a CF adapter to make sure it'll co-operate.
The guy at the recycling place had put it aside a year or so ago because it was too nice to bin. He also helpfully cut the battery out. It hadn't leaked yet, but he thought it best to get it out of there and replace it with this
It was about this time that I got my first hit of AT case rash. This something I remember without fondness, that special time in history where case manufacturers would go out of their way to leave a razor sharp burr on every edge. This won't do.
Let's strip it down.
Neat!
de-bur all the things! I attacked every edge with a series of files to make harmless rounded edged.
PSU check. Seems quite a beefy one for an AT
Nice and clean
The board seems like a cheaper thing, but I'm not sure what it is exactly. Maybe you guys have a better idea
Now, we've all seen IDE to CF card adapters used in these things. What's always seemed a little dumb is having to go behind the machine, or open it up to swap the cards out. I'm not crawling around under my desk fiddling around with cards. The solution was to gut a busted floppy drive and mount the CF adapter in that. Using only a big pair of pliers and a drill, I made this. It's a bit rough, but it'll do
Let's put it all back together
Power it up
We have RAM
We have disks
We have Dune!
Mission accomplished!
The monitor here is sitting on my Socket7 machine. I suspect the motherboard (Soyo 5TE2) is scunted. Might do some hunting for one.
Quick question; where do you guys get DOS games? I've been doing a lot of hunting, but a lot of them are packaged for DOSbox or SCUMM and I can't figure out how to extract those to use in an actual DOS machine. Cheers!
