Miphee wrote on 2021-03-02, 09:59:

The active community.
Most retro forums I visited are either dead or dying.

it's by far the best in many ways, and makes me think of starting a thread on the signs of dying forums, a sadness for those of us who like vintage tech

I came for the sound card info, and stayed... for the sound card info. Seriously, there's a wealth of information here about sound cards! I'm thankful for all the people who've done the tough stuff: in-depth research, compatibility testing, not to mention fixing old drivers and / or writing new ones. Ditto the info about video cards, CPU upgrades... it's saved me a lot of time and money!

mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-02-21, 22:09:

I wanted to meet girls.

Ha! How's that working out for you? 😁

Miphee wrote on 2021-03-02, 09:59:

The active community.
Most retro forums I visited are either dead or dying.

A sad sign of the times. Thankfully not everyone has completely disappeared into the mist of the generic, mainstream social platforms... yet.

I found it Googling for random advice. I bought a PII 400MHz PC off ebay from a guy in Hungary. It turned out to have a really odd motherboard and nailing the drivers down was a chore. It was also in terrible condition - every single screw stripped out etc - so I broke it for a parts and put them on eBay. A couple of weeks later I noticed an old PC in my office on the recycling pile so I had a look. It was a Pentium 166MHz MMX with 256MB of EDO ram and a GeForce2 MX200 in a very solid mid-tower. I obtained a LOT of people's permissions and took it home. I've upgraded it to a P200MHz MMX and installed Win 98SE and it's running with no issues, no unexplained hardware in device manager etc. I'm just waiting on a sound card (again from eBay) and I have a Gravis joystick so it's going to be a retro gaming machine very soon!