Hello to everyone, I'm Damiano from Italy. I didn't find any specific area for a new member presentation...so I decided for open a new topic here.
I'm from Italy and I was born in 1978, I grew up in the golden era of Amiga and I fall in love with all my Amigas...and from the mid 90s I started messing around with my friends' PCs. In the late 90s, I built my first PC, and afterward, I started working as an IT technician...which I still do today.
I've been anonymously reading this wonderful forum for a long time, you are a true community of enthusiasts...congratulations! Some time ago I decided to join, and now I've decided to introduce myself to all of you, sharing the retro machines I'm trying to assemble to create a small collection of retro PC memorabilia from the past. I'm trying to combine my youthful memories with your more or less recent advice and experiences, to create a small collection of machines capable of reviving the glories of the fantastic and fascinating world of PCs of the past.
Specifically, I'm trying to gather together 3 or 4 PCs in total, to best cover what I believe to be some of the cornerstones of this fantastic retro PC world.
I'll connect these PCs using a traditional Belkin KVM + audio switch, so I can use everything connected to a single monitor/keyboard/mouse.
I'll use an external Roland SC-55MK2 module connected to a MIDI switch, and the Roland's analog audio line input will always be connected to the KVM switch's audio output, so each PC can use the Roland's hardware mixer and thus benefit from a true Roland General MIDI. The Roland's audio output will go directly to my monitor's built-in speakers or, in the future, to an external sound system.
I don't want to go into too much detail about my pc configurations in this thread so as not to bore you, but I'll simply outline my performance targets and preferences (DOS and Windows 9x, Sound Blaster and others, API Glide in DOS and Windows 9x, API SGL Power VR in Windows 9x).
Generally speaking, I'm not terribly concerned with the philosophy of period-correct hardware, but I base my choices on the concept of equivalent performance.
Another key concept for me is low power consumption and a preference for passively cooled systems, either completely fanless or, at most, with a huge, slow-spinning fan that allows for constant, but slow, and quiet airflow.
For the hard drive section, I have some Promise FastTrak S150 TX4 cards, to which I'll connect a RAID 0 array of four WD Velociraptor SATA 3 drives, convertible to SATA 1 via jumper. I also have some standard, non-RAID SATA 150 cards from Promise (the Maxtor-branded SATA/150 PCI cards).
I should point out that at this stage, everything is still a work in progress, even though I already have many of the components I want.
I'm therefore oriented towards multi boot systems, for which I purchased the BootIt Bare Metal Collection. I'd like to achieve the core concept of equivalent performance with two of the main Via C3 processors I have: the Via C3 Ezra 933 MHz and the Via C3 Nehemiah 1.2 GHz, which I will install on Gigabyte GA-6BXC rev 2.0 motherboards. I will obviously use Slot-1 to Socket 370 adapters.
One of these two PCs will have Creative sound cards capable of allowing me to obtain digital sound effects and speech, both 8 and 16 bit, and true OPL3 FM music I've got a Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold and a Guillemot Maxi Sound Fortissimo YMF744 with SB-Link and the Gigabyte GA-6BXC rev 2.o has got the SB-Link connector too). The other of these two PCs will have sound cards that do not have a true OPL3 audio synthesizer.
One of these two PCs will have the Music Quest IH9MQ9 PC MIDI clone card to manage the MPU-401 in Intelligent Mode, and I'm considering purchasing an external MT-32 emulation module.
For graphics cards, I have a Gateway OEM Voodoo3 3000 and a Matrox M3D, which I'll install in the PC with the Via C3 Nehemiah 1.2 GHz CPU (this PC will be a fast DOS/slow Windows 9x system), and a Number Nine SR9 SGRAM S3 Savage4 Xtreme 16MB, which I plan to dedicate to the PC with the Via C3 Ezra 933 MHz (this PC will be more oriented towards pure DOS and 2D).
I'm also building a third PC, oriented towards fast Windows 98 and DOS Glide, which will be on an Asus TUSL2-C motherboard, Pentium III-S CPU, and will have a GeForce 3 200Ti paired with two Voodoo2s in SLi as the primary graphics card. This latest PC, being based on an i815 and lacking an ISA slot, forces me to use Legacy emulation under DOS, which I'll do with an Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (not ZS because under Windows I want to use VXD drivers and connect the SPDIF digital audio from my NEC ND-4551A DVD burner). I'll also install an original Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500 to get the best of EAX audio and A3D audio, respectively.

These are roughly my configurations/preferences; I sincerely hope you enjoy and appreciate my choices.
I'm counting on the help of this fantastic community of enthusiasts to set everything up in the cleanest, most organized, high-performance and most satisfying way possible!
Thank you all for reading this presentation...indeed, it's perhaps a little too long and packed with key concepts...

Best Regards
Damiano