First post, by Chekaway
I was introduced to personal computing back in the early ‘80s when my parents bought a Commodore 64, monochrome monitor, and tape drive. Several years later that was replaced by a commodore 128 and 1541 disk drive. Mom and dad were a teacher and school system administrator respectively. Mom would bring an apple 2c or 2e home from school during the summer months. In 1990 in 10th grade I was lucky enough to receive a hand me down sharp 8086 notebook when my dad upgraded to a 286 compared notebook. It had a non backlit lcd monochrome screen that would output cga on an external crt. I was introduced to the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy text game. (One of my fav series of books) and police quest 2 and have quite a fondness and nostalgia for dos games. I had a several year period in the mid to late 2000s when I picked up the pc bug again and bought a bunch of vintage notebooks on eBay and experimented with repairing and refurbing. Set up my own email server, recapped an old amd machine I got out of the trash. The hp hdx 20” screen multimedia laptop I owned was a high point, as well as figuring out how to quad boot xp,vista,Ubuntu, and osx on an old pentium4ht vaio desktop. By 2011 I lost interest, smartphones began to replace my computer needs, finally last year I got the computer bug again, bought a bunch of old systems I thought were cool on eBay again, and started experimenting with old hardware. I refurbed a compaq lte 5400, compaq contura aero, finally played and beat leisure suit Larry 30 years later. Found an extremely clean and undesirable dell Inspiron 1721 with discrete graphics for next to nothing, upgraded the screen to a 1080x1920, the fastest processor supported, upgraded the graphics card to a 512mb model, even changed to black keyboard and plastics from a vostro. That one runs xp for my fav 2000s era game “gangland”beginning last year I have been experimenting with via based itx motherboards for dos/windows 98. gigabyte ga6vle, ecs c7vcm2 to begin with. After messing around with hardware and software I settled on the epia m2-12000 itx mobo. One of the few epia boards with floppy drive support. Built my 98 machine with said mobo, fx5500 pci, 512mb ram, 64gb cf card for os and storage, a nos Sony 52x cd-rw, gotek floppy, 3.5 floppy, dual cf to ide and Sd to ide in a 5.25 carrier. It works beautifully for a lot of games with sound via sbemu, but mainly as a support system for my other machines. It is extremely useful. I never thought I would be so enamored with a machine that runs windows 98 😆. Lastly I also present to you what I regard as an extremely good bargain, someone’s 486 gaming computer circa 1994. Pcchips m912 v1.7 with figures chipset and 256kb of real socketed cache, intel 486dx2, ess sound card, and cirrus logic video card. Original hdd is a maxtor 3.5gb that still functions. Replaced that and the cd rom with a Dual cf to IDE. All in a graphite gray full tower case and extremely clean inside and out. For $209 🤣 I realize none of this is groundbreaking for people in this forum, but I am greatly appreciative for the collective knowledge here and I thank you all! Ps. I successfully modified a nos ibm joystick to fit the game port and it works flawlessly
