So what is my Fat Bstd project ?
Well I know many folk use emulation these days to run retro operating systems.
My personal preference is for actual hardware..but I wanted a single PC that would run a copy of any of these OS simply by swapping out the hard drive.
Win95
WinNT4
Win98se
WinME
Win2000pro
WinXP
I would like to try Win3.11 but as yet I haven't
So
the requirements.
Choosing a motherboard and CPU
best to aim in the middle I thought so cose a Titan 667 GA-8GE667 all pci/AGP mobo and Pentium 4 cpu
Restricted myself to a single strip of memory ...512 mb
This motherboard has on board Sound and graphics ....but chose an AGP ASUS V7700 graphics card.
Using this setup in a mini tower case worked fine and I built an IDE pull out caddy system with Win98se ...Win2000pro...and WinXPpro
thus FatBstd was born..
But I wasn't happy ..I wanted more hardware in it.
I recently aquired a SCSI mini tower ...but wanted to add a pull out scsi hard drive to the main PC as well ...
So the project moved to Phase 2 ..
...and Son of Fat Bstd was born...
Using the same motherboard in a lager 4 x 5 1/4 bay case ...and added an Adaptec 29160N scsi card ..plus a Network card as this mobo had none on board
A 3com 3C595TX was added..
a) because I could find drivers
B) this card is natively supported by NT4
I'd never built an NT4 OS before and figured it about time I tried.
I aso added an internal hard drive where I could back up the various operating systems as I built them...
File transfer being possible by booting into a PE build of XP on a bootable CD.
Eventually I had working operating systems for all 6 OS ..on seperate IDE hard drives ..and all backed up to the internal hard drive...a switch was then fitted to the case rear which disconnected the drives supply rails ..
a) to isolate the backup drive so no corruption could happen accidentally
b) to prevent false booting as Scsi was now present as well.
I can also boot from any hard drive in the scsi pull out bay ..OR the scsi pull out bay in the scsi mini tower if it is powered up.
Thus it was important that the pull out caddy drive sleeves had key switches ..that way I could choose which hard drive(s) were present at boot time.
Son of Fat Bstd is alive...hereby referred to as SOFB.
I will be adding some pics of this beast soon but for now the description is interesting I think.
rgds
VS