AlbaScot1995 wrote on 2025-11-02, 20:57:

I've lurked here for a few years, but now that I have a semi-permanent setup, I thought it was time to sign up and share a pictu […]
Show full quote

I've lurked here for a few years, but now that I have a semi-permanent setup, I thought it was time to sign up and share a picture of what I've got:

From left to right:

An LGA775 system with Windows XP.

An Athlon XP system for Win98.

A Pentium 200 for MS-DOS (currently active).

The unappealing bundle of wires on top of the Win98 PC is the KVM that makes this setup possible. Need to manage those cables better.

i like it, simple straightforward access to 3 systems.

what are the specs of those machines out of interest? I tend to go lower down for a given windows, eg windows XP and athlon XP. I like 775 though, seems to go with anything 😀 And the screen spec?

gerry wrote on 2025-11-03, 17:01:

AlbaScot1995 wrote on 2025-11-02, 20:57:

I've lurked here for a few years, but now that I have a semi-permanent setup, I thought it was time to sign up and share a pictu […]
Show full quote

I've lurked here for a few years, but now that I have a semi-permanent setup, I thought it was time to sign up and share a picture of what I've got:

From left to right:

An LGA775 system with Windows XP.

An Athlon XP system for Win98.

A Pentium 200 for MS-DOS (currently active).

The unappealing bundle of wires on top of the Win98 PC is the KVM that makes this setup possible. Need to manage those cables better.

i like it, simple straightforward access to 3 systems.

what are the specs of those machines out of interest? I tend to go lower down for a given windows, eg windows XP and athlon XP. I like 775 though, seems to go with anything 😀 And the screen spec?

All of these systems are high end for what they are!

The DOS machine is a Pentium 200 with 32mb of ram, and an ATI Rage IIC (not the best for DOS, I know, but it's what I have!). 2GB CF card is the storage solution. Toyed with a 16gb CF card for win95 just to dabble with win95, an OS I've never actually used in my life! Also of note, it has a 5.25" 360k floppy drive - this is for writing floppies for my Amstrad PC1640.

The Windows 98 machine is based on an Athlon XP 3000+ (A barton core, IIRC), with a single stick of 512mb DDR memory. I actually bought a pair of 128mb sticks to replace but I fear one might be dead. GPU is a Ti4200, rather a nice one if I say so myself, with SK Hynix memory chips rather than the much less reliable Samsung ones! 80gb Seagate Barracuda IDE HDD. Sound card is a basic CMI8738 - I'd liked to have used a Live! or Audigy 2, but this motherboard will just not work with Creative sound cards - one reason why I plan to eventually replace the win98 setup with a Socket 578/Pentium 4 machine. The XP+ may offer better performance, but I think compatibility and stability will be better with an intel platform.

The XP machine is an E8400 with 2gb (will soon be 4gb) of memory, an Audigy 2 ZS for sound and a 9800GT - I plan to get a second 9800GT to make this an SLI build, as the board is an ASUS P5N-E SLI. Plus a 500gb HDD for storage!

The screen itself is a Samsung Syncmaster 700P. It is a fairly decent CRT I suppose, does up to 1280x1024, though tends to look a little strange at that res, for win98 I tend to run it at 800x600, at which resolution it looks great. In XP 1024x768 is my go-to resolution.

Unfortunately the Syncmaster seems to have some sort of issue with Radeons, and struggles to display images from Radeon cards at 800x600 and below. Otherwise I'd consider swapping that Ti4200 for a 9600XT.

The speakers are... not amazing. I'd like to replace them at some point.

AlbaScot1995 wrote on 2025-11-03, 20:24:

The DOS machine is a Pentium 200 with 32mb of ram, and an ATI Rage IIC (not the best for DOS, I know, but it's what I have!).

For Rage and DOS i have this package
Re: ATi RagePro drivers and software
download/file.php?id=230038

The Pentium MMX machine is pretty much done now so I did some arranging today.

I'm not sure how I feel about stacking the "Two Towers" as I think it looks a little excessive, but I need room on the right side of the desk for an upcoming computer. Maybe it'll grow on me.

AlbaScot1995 wrote on 2025-11-03, 06:45:

The black CF card also annoys me, I've considered changing to a rear pci slot cover reader that I have, but the convenience of the front panel reader is too good. If I can find a sufficiently good colour match I may spray paint it.

I ended out 3d printing one of these: Re: What is your preferred way to mount a CF in a DOS / Win build?

And then just handpainted it with some model paint I got from one of those warhammer stores, using some foam to roll it on for a textured look. End result attached, not a perfect colour match but close enough for my liking...

Martli wrote on 2025-11-08, 23:01:

AlbaScot1995 wrote on 2025-11-03, 06:45:

The black CF card also annoys me, I've considered changing to a rear pci slot cover reader that I have, but the convenience of the front panel reader is too good. If I can find a sufficiently good colour match I may spray paint it.

I ended out 3d printing one of these: Re: What is your preferred way to mount a CF in a DOS / Win build?

And then just handpainted it with some model paint I got from one of those warhammer stores, using some foam to roll it on for a textured look. End result attached, not a perfect colour match but close enough for my liking...

Yeah, that's perfect! If i painted the metal part of the reader I'm pretty sure it'd blend in perfectly. Its already got the right sort of texture.

I also need to replace the case badge, as Pentium III Tualatin is no longer appropriate for this case!

Here was my computer desk in 1996 and here it is (with the same computer and monitor) in 2025!

The funny thing is that my mom still has the same desk, chair, curtain and wall hanging etc from the 96 picture at their house, which they haven't moved this entire time, so I could probably bring the computer back over there, clear off all the current stuff on the old desk and -really- recreate the 1996 shot...

Well, some people really do that, with a lot of attention to detail too...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JfTU38O7YV4&pp= … gGHKiGM7w%3D%3D

Hi! There are both positive and negative sides of it, though.
Recreating same atmosphere is either making someone really happy or very depressed, I think.
There's little inbetween from an emotionally stand-point, I think. Because emotions are so strong.
I for one am not sure if I would do it to that extent, thus.
While I do still, for example, enjoy the original 1989 Gameboy with the green-screen as I always did, I'm not certain about feeling same for my old bedroom.
Having pictures and some physical mementos of the time is good enough, maybe.
Being in that same room again, exactly as it was once, makes me remember very hard how I changed and how the outside world has changed.
It has that feel of visiting an museum, maybe. It can be very overwhelming.
On other hand, creating a smaller "retro corner" of a given era or part of life might be not hitting that hard.
Because it rather feels as if a part of the past has arrived in the future, the old room basically visits me/you rather than other way round.

I think that is the double edged sword of nostalgia in general. If you are revisiting something from your past, maybe your observing or recreating the physical form of it, but it's probably impossible to fully replicate what the old event meant and how it felt, and that brings with it a little bit of loss realizing you can't fully recreate the past, if that was the goal.

I can load Doom on my 386 from the same disks I had at the time, and it will be executed by the PC in exactly the same (slow) manner since it is exactly the same PC that it was. But playing it in 1994 when I come home from school and it is one of the most impressive games ever running on my modern PC and I can't wait to show my friends, versus playing it in 2025 as an adult, revisiting it as a historical item on an antique computer after I put my kid to bed, is different.

That's true, but finding yourself in your former childhood bedroom
can feel like you're staying in the abandoned house of your deceased grandparents, so to speak.
It's maybe on another level in terms of immersion of the past, I mean.
That's why I mentioned it, so that others won't step into a sudden mental breakdown or something.
It's perhaps better to start in small steps and see how it goes..
In the past, when I rediscovered some small, barely important stuff from ages ago
it sometimes made me cry all of a sudden and I totally wasn't prepared for it.

Edit: About the second part.. I understand, I think.
That's maybe because playing Doom used to be an "event" or ritual, but isn't anymore.
But don't let yourself put you down. Please remember that you're not alone and that there are other fans of Doom who can relate to you
or who you can exchange memories with.
So it's possible that you can get that magic back eventually, maybe when you're together with others, so things won't feel so "empty".
Maybe there are retro LAN parties where you can bring your own PC..

Nah what I was getting at is that playing doom when it was new was full of excitement and joy of seeing something the likes of which you've never experienced before and that represents the cutting edge of computer game graphics, whereas in 2025 the experience doesn't have that because technology has progressed and I've experienced so much games and tech that goes well beyond what the original doom experience on this old computer did.

These days I'm increasingly focused on trying new things with my old PCs that I never got around to doing when the machines were contemporary, like trying software or hardware that I wanted at the time but never got around to buying, or modding dos games and sharing with the online community of people that might still have interest in that sort of thing. In that way, I've gotten my experience to be a bit more novel than just repeating experiences I had long ago.

It has been emotional, happy but also a little sad to do things like retrieve the remnants of my decades old PC game collection from my parents house, or trawl through the dozens of old floppies at my parents to see if there's anything interesting, especially when stuff doesn't work or you find out stuff you thought still existed no longer does (certain of my families 90s era PCs and monitors were taken to be recycled only as recently as 2018 or so, so I missed out on not getting interested and retrieving this stuff a little sooner, but luckily not my first and oldest one, the 386 pictured). I managed to recover 100+ custom racing tracks my brother and I made in the game Stunts from a moldy malfunctioning floppy, the sole surviving source for that custom game data from 30+ years ago. That was very gratifying. I shared it with the Stunts online community, which was also nice, though that community is very very small in 2025.

dukeofurl wrote on 2025-11-10, 23:19:

Nah what I was getting at is that playing doom when it was new was full of excitement and joy of seeing something the likes of which you've never experienced before and that represents the cutting edge of computer game graphics, whereas in 2025 the experience doesn't have that because technology has progressed and I've experienced so much games and tech that goes well beyond what the original doom experience on this old computer did.

It's a good point to make, now someone can see HD graphics in games for free in the browser or even relatively cheap tablet or phone. A 20 year old, who would have started finding games around age 5+ (year 2010) would have known nothing other than a vast readily accessed library of games throughout their life - always there in the background, spoiled for choice. something like playing Doom for the first time back when it was new is just not going to happen now