First post, by athlon-power
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I don't know if this belongs here, but I felt like it wouldn't really fit in general hardware because that's more "halp mi my thri ait six di ex thurti thri megihurtz d i e d" sort of stuff. At least, that's what I end up using it for 🤣
However, for some odd reason when I started my obsession and hoarding of computers, in which I recently moved to an apartment and had to shed 20-30 computers and even more parts, I always was on the quest to make a "time-accurate," machine- "THIS FEBURARY 1999 PC HAS A FEBRUARY 1999 PROCESSOR AND A FEBRUARY 1999 VIDEO CARD AND A FEBUR-" sort of thing. And while I've come to realize that it makes no sense for things to be that way, I still have a knack for wanting time-accurate everything- an OEM motherboard in a custom build wouldn't make sense for somebody building a rig back in the day (my Gateway 440BX), that processor was released in late '99 and would've been so expensive people couldn't have really afforded it (my PIII Coppermine 600MHz), that video card was made in 2000 and not 1999 (my RIVA TNT2 32MB), and that CD/DVD/CD-RW drive wasn't made in 1999 (currently all of my available drives)- you get the idea.
If you notice- all of these gripes pertain specifically to my "HL1," build, which originally started out as a very late 1998/early 1999 system. I really kicked off this build in the summer of 2018, when I got the Gateway 440BX motherboard, and it's still unfinished, it's still never good enough, even though it plays HL1 at 1024x768 via OpenGL quite well, not to mention that it blasts it at lower resolutions, with hardware no newer than 2000, and all of the architectures and designs being made in 1999, if not earlier. Yet, it's never good enough. I never can consider it complete. My 486 uses a totally different, hard-modded case, a sound card from 1997, and it makes no sense for what somebody would've had in 1994, yet I'm sort of ok with it, even though it still has legitimate problems.
My P200 build is slowly starting to suffer the same fate as my HL1 build, and I don't know why I do this. The CD drive I have in the HL1 build has always been a point of aggressive debate, does it even make sense anymore to not just throw in a CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive from early 2001 in there and call it a day? Leave the 600MHz CPU, the video card, alone, because they do what I want and with a decent compromise of "too fast," and "too little performance"?
This drives me insane anymore. Is it worth it to have a ~1999 system with parts all genuinely made in 1999 or prior? To spend upwards of US$60 online just so that I have a non-OEM board instead of my Gateway 440BX board, that, knock on wood, does just fine? Hell, the board itself was even made in 1999, the bios that came with it stated as such! (I later updated the BIOS for obvious reasons)
This would be okay if I did it with newer things, like my 2008 build, which legitimately had all its parts made during or before the summer of 2008. But when I start doing this with '90s systems, I have PCs that I won't fully accept and use for years because it's not exactly what I want it to be. It's obsessive, and it results in me hoarding parts that I bought prior for whatever it was, just to realize that it's not fast enough or that it's not old enough. AGH, it's maddening at best.
Is all of this worth it? Why not just be ok with parts that do the trick and are a good compromise between too new and too old? Like a 20GB IDE drive made in 2003 that I have, I could use it in this system, and it wouldn't even be that far off from what a high-end '99 system would have, yet I use a 6.4GB drive from '99- I'm fairly happy with the 6.4GB of storage, but I've looked at 10-18GB drives made in '98 and '99, because it has to be made around that time, there's absolutely no other way.
sorry for the rant but im not sure what im doing anymore with this stuff. unchecked, i hoard, i hoard so much i end up losing space in my room to move around other than to key locations like my main desk, old pc desks and bed. luckily, i just moved, and now have a normal room again that i'm really trying to keep clean and neat, but its a problem and i know it. i normally wouldnt get this serious but i feel like im not the only one here who has this sort of problem.
Where am I?
