DaveDDS wrote on 2026-05-27, 20:50:

The first PC CD-ROM I ever got was one that connected to a SoundBlaster (Pro or 16) - IIRC it was a 2x! - I don't think it was I […]
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Cuttoon wrote on 2026-05-27, 15:59:

Oh, 4x did indeed exist.

The first PC CD-ROM I ever got was one that connected to a SoundBlaster (Pro or 16) - IIRC it was a 2x!
- I don't think it was IDE - but the connector looked like it.

I think I had one at one time that took caddies that was 1x (but they were rare)

It actually started with one, IIRC. 1x refers to the original speed of music CDs which translates to roughly 150 kB per second. But even the oldest I've ever seen were 2x.

These really old pre-IDE drives have become rare AF. Maybe due to the fact that optical drives do indeed age with time and usage, much more than solid state electronics.
Many early to mid 90s sound cards had two or three different connectors, two of those were the same 40 pin ones as IDE uses.
My budged SB 32 from 1997 had an IDE interface, that was one of the earlier ones.

I did a dive on these really old CD-ROMs for proprietary interfaces.
Gathered a dozen model designations, ran an automated search on ebay for months. Very few, only at three figure prices.
Sadly, most privately owned relics will be thrown away or listed without designation...

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2026-05-28, 17:51:

I have planned these three areas: […]
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I have planned these three areas:

CRT Retro - 8 machines spanning from 4.77Mhz 8088 up to Athlon XP 3200+, covering DOS, Win9X and early XP

1600x1200 LCD - 3 machines.
Ultimate Win98, WinXP and Vista

Triple 2560x1440 - 4 machines. Covering modern gaming (With Ryzen 5800X3d and RTX 3080 Ti), home lab (Ryzen 5950), Ultimate XP (With i7 3770K and GTX 980 Ti), Windows 7.

Nothing is finished!

that sounds awesome... covers like everything and in a relatively small space! speaking of ultimate XP, I need to build something like that! I somehow still haven't gotten around to running XP on anything more powerful than a C2D, so sounds like fun 😀

I'm doing the same type setup in my basement once we redo it. I want an entire wall for a HUGE LONG desk. I'm going to do 4 stations with 4 chairs. first will be the HP Vectra 486DX/66XM specs unknown yet but will have my test 17" Viewsonic probably and a pair of HK195's for sure! I still have my original HK's from 99, they are beat up but still sound great i use them everyday. second station will be the MicronPC PII 350 I posted above with probably a Dell 19" Pro LCD and another pait of HK195's ? Haven't decided yet. Third will be my HP SR1000z setup with a Asus A7V8X-LA, Barton 2800+ 2GB RAM 160GB IDE Win XP 32bit Radeon 9700 pro and a Hercules GamerSound Fortissimo III the HP LA1907g matching silver and black HP Mouse/kb and the Creative i-triege 3200. then the fourth station will be the socket 939 I talked about above with xp 64 bit and the Altec Lansing ATP3's and Samsung 23". I'll stop there because I could go CRAZY 🤣. I'll have laptops between with my unopened sealed collection on shelves... Soon hopefully!

BadFox_1 wrote on 2026-05-30, 00:30:

I'm doing the same type setup in my basement once we redo it. I want an entire wall for a HUGE LONG desk. I'm going to do 4 stations with 4 chairs.

Sounds great. Unusual to see a Radeon 9700 Pro in a build. Partly because a high percentage of them have died, and partly because the owners of the few remaining working ones don't want to risk using them in case they die.

I still have mine, which I have owned since new. I have great memories of running the ATI demos on it. Especially the Animusic Pipedreams demo. I plan to put a Copper Zalman Cooler on it before using it. I purchased a 9800 Pro last year that already has one.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2026-05-30, 11:17:

BadFox_1 wrote on 2026-05-30, 00:30:

I'm doing the same type setup in my basement once we redo it. I want an entire wall for a HUGE LONG desk. I'm going to do 4 stations with 4 chairs.

Sounds great. Unusual to see a Radeon 9700 Pro in a build. Partly because a high percentage of them have died, and partly because the owners of the few remaining working ones don't want to risk using them in case they die.

I still have mine, which I have owned since new. I have great memories of running the ATI demos on it. Especially the Animusic Pipedreams demo. I plan to put a Copper Zalman Cooler on it before using it. I purchased a 9800 Pro last year that already has one.

I hear ya, it works EXCELLENT has been recapped and repasted. I'd like to pull it but finding Decently priced AGP Card especially the Grails are TOUGH and EXPENSIVE! Seriously I don't want to pay $600 for a 20 year old card 🤣. But if I find something equally as powerful, I'll probably pull it and display it. Until then it's going to run like it's supposed to!

2Buck wrote on 2026-05-28, 15:37:

Hi, I'm new to vogons! I've lurked until now but I'll start posting now I guess, because I want to make an effort to spend less […]
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Hi, I'm new to vogons! I've lurked until now but I'll start posting now I guess, because I want to make an effort to spend less time on social media and more time on places like this! Anyways, I'll post specific rigs/specs some other time but for now here's my retro wall!

I'll elaborate on a couple for now, my personal treasures:

Right: My Windows 95 presario (specs in sig) which was my mom's computer from 97-2003. I was born around the time she got the PC, so this was the first computer I ever knew. The sounds of it's Quantum bigfoot HDD are some of the first sounds I knew. 😀
It's such a fun machine, I absolutely love the ESS 1887f chip, playing midis on it is my favorite thing to do. I also sometimes work on midis via cakewalk 6.0 on this. Sadly, it's limited to 48mb of RAM (16 on board, expandable by 32mb), so my early memories with this computer were my mom cussing it for being obsolete junk... It is crazy how useless this thing was next to computers that were only a few years newer, and especially next to PCs from 03. Also note the kitty stickers, which were put on there for me because I was obsessed with cats when I was 3. 😀 I WILL NEVER REMOVE THEM!

Left: My first computer, bought for me from a goodwill in early 2006. An IBM NetVista that ran Windows ME, and still does, the same installation/HDD it had when I got it!
Specs:
Coppermine Celeron @ 566mhz
128MB PC133 (originally 64 but I upgraded it with a second identical stick)
Riva TNT 2 64 PCI (added later, originally it just had integrated graphics which actually played some 3D games very smoothly, like moto racer)
Sound: integrated, bleh
Extra PCI: parallel tasking ii ethernet, some USB 2.0 controller, I've had an aureal vortex 2 installed before but given it only has 3 PCI slots, choices have to be made.

Despite the reputation, WinME never let me down as a kid on this machine, and actually, its improved USB support was great for dumb lil me. I was able to use flash drives, a USB mic and USB webcam all without even knowing what a driver was. I even installed the graphics card in it as a lil kid, and it just worked! I even used the included version of movie maker to make cringe videos, and the included version of media player was very enjoyable to use too. Nothing but fond memories with this machine. By the end of this computer's life as my main system, I was emulating NES, SNES and gameboy games on it quite well and poorly playing some N64 via PJ64 1.6. I asked a lot from this poor computer 😀)

I'll post some of my actual retro rigs some other time. They're mostly 2000s rigs, I'm more into XP era hardware!

Beautiful Setup hope mine turns out just as good! I wish i had the fist PC I remember buying new as a kid. It was a Sony Vaio Digital Studio series or PCV-T series in Japan. I remember it was one of the first models Sony released in the USA. It was the classic Purple/Grey and had the sliding front panel. We had the matching CRT with built in speakers, KB and mouse. Sadly I still had the PC around 2018 and scrapped it because I thought it was worthless and it was in my way... SAD. I could kick myself today and i will ALWAYS hunt for another one but I'm not paying 1k plus. I also at the same time scrapped my first 500is never obsolete eMachines. I will find another one. I also scrapped my first eMachines Athlon XP. SAD DAYS! I kept them forever and to then just throw them out idk what i was thinking?

Did some more upgrades to my retro rig:

After some tinkering I've managed to move the CRT to the front, which is far more comfortable than having it to the side. I've also changed the keyboard to a period accurate Cherry MX Blue one, and got myself a genuine MS IntelliMouse.

As far as the PC specs go, I went back to trying out a 98/XP dual boot concept, this time downgraded from Sempron 3000+ (s939) to an Athlon XP 2400+ (s462), because the s939 board really didn't like running under 98 for some reason. There was some headscratching figuring out how to get 3D acceleration to work - apparently, I had to install graphics drivers and DirectX in a specific order - but so far, it seems to be spot on for what I wanted. The 98 drivers for the GF4 feel a bit iffy though, but it works well enough.

I've also hooked up all the 4 PCs to a KVM switch, and a matrix VGA/audio switcher. With just a few clicks I cany use any of these computers, no fuss. They're also all hooked up to my network, so that they can access my 4TB NAS (and yeah, it works even on Windows 95), it's soooo convenient for transferring games. I even got myself a 1Gbps network card for the 98 PC, works like a charm.

The four PCs in question are:
- Athlon XP 2400+, GeForce 4 Ti 4600, 512MB RAM, Yamaha DS-XG sound card, Windows 98/XP (shown off in the acrylic case)
- Celeron 433MHz, Riva TNT, 190MB RAM, Windows 95/2000, ALS100+ ISA sound card
- Pentium 4 2.5GHz, Radeon X1650Pro, 1.5GB RAM, Windows XP (no dual boot because X1650Pro is too new for 98)
- Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, GeForce GTX560, 4GB RAM, Windows Vista (is it even retro? 🤣)

The Athlon XP PC is my project box where I try out various parts for fun, the remaining three PCs are my actual computers from back in the day, I just never got rid of them. I also have a trash picked 486 PC laying around, but it was destroyed by a leaking battery unfortunately.

yojc wrote on Yesterday, 10:21:

The four PCs in question are: - Athlon XP 2400+, GeForce 4 Ti 4600, 512MB RAM, Yamaha DS-XG sound card, Windows 98/XP (shown off […]
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The four PCs in question are:
- Athlon XP 2400+, GeForce 4 Ti 4600, 512MB RAM, Yamaha DS-XG sound card, Windows 98/XP (shown off in the acrylic case)
- Celeron 433MHz, Riva TNT, 190MB RAM, Windows 95/2000, ALS100+ ISA sound card
- Pentium 4 2.5GHz, Radeon X1650Pro, 1.5GB RAM, Windows XP (no dual boot because X1650Pro is too new for 98)
- Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, GeForce GTX560, 4GB RAM, Windows Vista (is it even retro? 🤣)

The Athlon XP PC is my project box where I try out various parts for fun, the remaining three PCs are my actual computers from back in the day, I just never got rid of them. I also have a trash picked 486 PC laying around, but it was destroyed by a leaking battery unfortunately.

very nice indeed! 😀 the Athlon XP 2400 is great, i have one myself. i like the OS to machine matching on these machines too. I think Vista is kinda retro now 😀

Vista is very nearly 20 years old... so yeah.

Cool setup and nice coverdisk collection.