First post, by Boohyaka
- Rank
- Oldbie
As many users around here I do have several builds with a pretty diverse selection of hardware. But there's one I just feel particularly attached to. For those of you that know of old Top Gear, I feel as emotionally involved in it as Hammond and his old Opel Kadett he named Oliver during an Africa road trip. Didn't give my computer a name yet, though 😁
So as I was wondering why I'm so attached to this particular computer, I thought about asking you guys about yours.
My sweetheart is my 486 DX2-66. It's based on a SOYO SY-025K AT VLB motherboard, with 16MB of RAM and 256kb cache. It features a CL GD-5426 1MB VLB gfx card, an ESS1868f (Edison Gold 16 Pro, can't vouch for it enough, very good quality and low noise), a TNDY-3voice from our very own matze79, a Primax Soundwave M16B (excellent quality GUS clone) purchased from another Vogons user, a 19inch CRT and great Roland MA-12C speakers, and for some reason I just *love* that machine. Thinking about it I came up with a few reasons:
- It just works! It's a no drama build. I didn't have too many issues building it, we all know tinkering with the stuff is most of the fun but still I boot it up and boom! Nostalgia
- I'm a huge Sierra and old adventure games fan in general, and it's the perfect build for it
- Thinking about it and comparing what I do with my different computers, I realize it covers the era I have the most fun with and the biggest nostalgia for, and for me it definitely feels like the most satisfying era to run on real hardware compared to modern options
- Lots of sound options, great fun to play older Sierra games with the TNDY-3voice, had a blast toying with the GUS (something I never did back then)
- Also feels the most satisfying to run MIDI devices with and rediscovering games I love in this way, another thing I didn't get to do back in the days
- Very personal but it feels to me this era of games aged very well compared to late 90's... even games I love(d) I sometimes feels like they somewhat lost their magic compared to the earlier games
My only deception is that I've never been able to run the Orpheus on that build as I initially hoped, because of what looks like a weird ISA timing issue that we never managed to fix in spite of amazing efforts from both keropi and JazeFox 🙁 but it found another great home in my P233MMX build! And is still an awesome soundcard I can only recommend.
That's about it! I'd love to hear about your own favorite computer and the reasons why, and what you spend most of your time doing with it!
Here's the beautiful beast (funnily, the case and motherboard I bought off eBay from someone that ended up being another Vogons user as well 😀 )