Received my K7S8X Rev 3 and re-capped the CPU VRM section. All cool, started it.. Pffffftttt..

3 of the 12 caps with 1000uF 6.3V have popped their vents.. More recap incoming..

Ohh and.. That Hercules 9800XT is happy again..

WinSxS wrote on 2026-06-03, 15:06:

Paired with quite good Q9400

Thats not retro you cheater! 😀 OC this cpu to 3GHz, slap 16GB or super cheap ram, graphic card with h.264 decoder and you got current daily web browsing machine.

I finally got a 3Com 3c905B. Just about 20$ including shipping.
Since I build my vumeter thing on as much old Oses as I can, it was mandatory.
86Box help, but it seems too slow for RS232 timing. Even if my main computer is a i5-10400, which is supposed to be quite correct. And my mainboard has physical parallel and serial ports.
Now I can have native network on about all OS I want, and most of them have a ftp server.
So I can write code on my regular Linux PC, mount my ftp retro pc in Thunar and use telnet to compile and run the thing.
Or use wget to get the new version updated before compiling.
It's funny how a network card suddenly makes life easier 😀
I would just need to have access to Grub menu from the network, but not sure it's possible .... 😀

I think the next purchase will be a Matrox G400 ...
It seems it work great on BeOS, and i love BeOS.
My sound card is a ES1370 or 1371, also work on anything.
Now video card a GF 4 MX 440, also works even on QNX, BeOS 4.5, and Quake 2 with OpenGL on BeOS 5 😀

rasz_pl wrote on 2026-06-03, 21:57:

WinSxS wrote on 2026-06-03, 15:06:

Paired with quite good Q9400

Thats not retro you cheater! 😀 OC this cpu to 3GHz, slap 16GB or super cheap ram, graphic card with h.264 decoder and you got current daily web browsing machine.

Maxxing out the RAM unfortunately would be an expensive adventure - even if board supports 16 GB, 4 sticks of DDR2 4 GB are hard to find, especially in pairs. No matter how fast they are, still not cheap. Cheapest single stick I found on a local market was around 12 EUR, take this price and quadruple it 😁
I have now "just" 4x2 GB @800 - amount still considerable as sufficient, as many as I have right now in my daily laptop with Ryzen...

I plan to rebuilt my actual XP machine with mentioned before i5, replace it with older C2Q and use this rig as a bridge between 98/DOS machine (Tualeron 1200) and modern PC, that means for games between circa 2000-2010.

Why not i5 for XP? No FDD controller for example (yeah, ASRock P67 had, I know)... and maybe I might built another machine, this time for Windows 7 reusing my H67 motherboard? Who knows...

My "maxed" XP machine was a dual XP 1800 with a GeForce 6800.
I got enough fps to play Far Cry, or a Tomb Raider.
Maybe we could get a modern cpu and gpu to run XP , but I don't see the point as a retro computer.
Why not install Dos 6.22 on a Ryzen to play Tomb Raider 1 in software mode ?
For me the goal is to get the best of a old computer.
Swap a 350 or 383 stroker Chev into a Citroen 2CV, it's no more a 2CV.
Now how much can you tweak a 2 CH with stock engine as a base ?
I killed many 2 stroke 50 cc engines.
Switching to 80 or 125 easier, but less funny.
That's also why I wanted to mod my 1966 Rambler Ambassador 232 with a Jeep 4.0 head and a Buick supercharger ...

My XP Maxed Machine is :
Win 10/XP Dual Boot
24/3GB RAM
Xeon X5690
Geforce 780TI
Creative Labs SB X-Fi

It serves my purposes but I would still replace it with a 2600K or 4790K with a 980 if I needed a boost.

WinSxS wrote on 2026-06-03, 22:49:

Maxxing out the RAM unfortunately would be an expensive adventure - even if board supports 16 GB, 4 sticks of DDR2 4 GB are hard to find, especially in pairs. No matter how fast they are, still not cheap.

oh right, its DDR3 that is still super cheap with 3-5 Euro 4GB modules

nali wrote on 2026-06-04, 00:18:

For me the goal is to get the best of a old computer.

How do you define "best," and how do you define "computer"?

The first computers were people, and they might have known how to use slide rules. How do you get the best out of people who are using their own tools? When you change their tools, you can't even ask that question!

It's alive!
L386 motherboard (reverse engineered DataExpert 367C with U4800-VLX chipset) just booted DOS for first time.

Finally bit the bullet and started buying parts for my retro build now that I'm on summer break from uni, I found a 3.06 GHz 533MHz Northwood P4 for cheap enough to warrant getting it over a 2.8GHz model, although I guess now I have the problem of finding an adequate cooler. (I'm assuming the CPU won't come with a cooler, at least.)

I'm going to need to find a case that looks era-appropriate enough (and has 5.25" bays of course, doubt this mobo can boot from USB), but I'm feeling hopeful for this retro build! (unless in the last few months since I looked at the board, the caps decided to explode. Hopefully not, though that motherboard has lasted since 2002 so I'm not so sure...), but I'm getting close now to finally building this.

Suspect it could boot from USB, just not using a typical bootable ISO.

I don't know the exact details but IIRC Pentium 4 era BIOS were really picky about USB capacity and logical layout. I bricked one USB stick trying to figure it all out, but the "good news" is that the BIOS on my PERL motherboard did detect the USB device, and the boot sector, and started loading stuff..

And it snagged on Windows OS boot loader step. The "bad news" is I kept trying and the end state was a USB disk that is now completely unreadable in all machines! 🤣

In summary, I was half way to being expert 😉

I think one of my big mistakes was trying to force the use of a new USB stick. Those early BIOS don't like big capacities. They also don't like multiple partitions. So, in preparation to try again I bought several old stock 2GB USB disks - but I haven't yet tried again.

I might just use the Plop boot manager on a CD (or DVD since I don't know if I have any regular CD-Rs), and then boot from my Ventoy USB from that to install Windows.
...okay, I guess I could also probably just use the DVD itself for the Windows XP or Vista installer, but it'd save a whole lot of time and DVDs if I just booted USB.

VanillaFairy wrote on 2026-06-06, 19:41:

I might just use the Plop boot manager on a CD (or DVD since I don't know if I have any regular CD-Rs), and then boot from my Ventoy USB from that to install Windows.
...okay, I guess I could also probably just use the DVD itself for the Windows XP or Vista installer, but it'd save a whole lot of time and DVDs if I just booted USB.

That's very pragmatic.

But I'm not always sensible. I'm still interested in cracking the USB problem because my daily Internet-connected devices do not have optical drives, and I'm incredibly lazy 😉

Scouring S939 parts. I have an itch to build an Athlon 64 machine, in reality I'd use it for playing my 1999-2004 favourites.

Since Socket 754 boards are rare and the Athlon 64 754 even rarer, I'd likely use a 2005 939 board and CPU.

I use all my vintage PCs to play period appropriate games with. Although the games I'll be playing on this system will be mostly from 1999 to 2003.

But tell me straight, is playing these titles on hardware this late "inauthentic"? Am as I well to play my early 2000s games on a 2025 Ryzen system?

Well unless you were shitting a gold nugget daily, regular folks were doing major platform upgrades every 5 years, so the 5 years of stuff that ran crap on the old beater, would want to be experienced on the new machine. So not inauthentic at all to go back a few years.

Tinkerers that some of us have been since days of yore, would have maybe done rolling strategic upgrading, remained averagely more current, and yet spent half what the regular folks who treated it as an appliance spent. But still had to urge to run old favorites.

Lopo wrote on 2026-06-06, 16:02:

It's alive!
L386 motherboard (reverse engineered DataExpert 367C with U4800-VLX chipset) just booted DOS for first time.

Wonderful! Nice to see rev 1 running already!

Lopo wrote on 2026-06-06, 16:02:

It's alive!
L386 motherboard (reverse engineered DataExpert 367C with U4800-VLX chipset) just booted DOS for first time.

Congrats!
Always a great feeling when something selfmade comes to life.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-06-08, 03:50:

Well unless you were shitting a gold nugget daily, regular folks were doing major platform upgrades every 5 years, so the 5 years of stuff that ran crap on the old beater, would want to be experienced on the new machine. So not inauthentic at all to go back a few years.

Tinkerers that some of us have been since days of yore, would have maybe done rolling strategic upgrading, remained averagely more current, and yet spent half what the regular folks who treated it as an appliance spent. But still had to urge to run old favorites.

A good point well made!

classic_cola wrote on 2026-06-08, 02:32:

But tell me straight, is playing these titles on hardware this late "inauthentic"? Am as I well to play my early 2000s games on a 2025 Ryzen system?

There isn't much inherently different to playing an old game on a new system - there's a bit of HDD noise, generally fast response times and some odd quirks of software (but gog / patches etc usually overcome those)

Once you are in the game you're in the game. I like having older systems but in the last few years i no longer connect a need or 'authenticity' regarding system hardware with the experience of playing the game itself. I still enjoy some games on older systems, it just doesn't matter much to me now.

I don't have a Ryzen though, most of my systems for games are bordering on vintage anyway - lga 775 up to 4th gen i series really, everything low budget but well beyond authentic period correct for most games i have. I have older systems mostly unused now

Personally I don't give a crap about period correctness.
Function is far more important.
The reality is that many things in the correct era are badly matched because the software pushed the limits of the hardware.
Sometimes it takes a generation or 2 to hit decent performance.
Quake3 technically ran on an overclocked p166 with a... I think I paired it on that occasion with a 32mb gf2mx but it ran better 5 years later.
There are limits of course. Driver compatibility gets in the way.
My current slowly progressing when I have time attempt at a 9x box is an 1156 I3 that is a minimum of 10x faster than the best available in 98.
Period correct be damned. It works so far.