First post, by Epifire
- Rank
- Newbie
Hey all! Been a while since I'd stopped in here. I had been asking around about retro PC builds earlier this year and after moving and a bunch of other hullabaloo I hadn't any time to work on putting it together. Well as it turns out a friend at work had an old emachine he was gonna get rid of and I thought maybe it was worth a shot to look at so I took it off his hands. Now bare in mind I've never used any emachine products but it is a 433i, which while small I think may suit my needs.
Quick reference here that looks to be accurate with what I saw when opening it up, earlier today... http://www.cnet.com/products/emachines-etower … b-4-3-gb/specs/
Basically I'm wanting to target mid to late 90s games to be able to run on it. However I'm not all certain what all is in usable condition yet in terms of parts. It's nice however that there is a game midi jack right on the front of the thing, so I may still be able to use my old Sidewinder Joystick yet. 😲
It is missing a power supply and the original HDD which is somewhat regrettable, but as far as I can tell everything else is there. Just to start on though, I think it might be just the little machine I'm looking for but I'm no expert when it comes to old hardware.
What I'm seeing on the buy list so far would be...
HDD: What kind I really don't know? I've heard of people putting much newer drives in older machines but I honestly don't know what type will work on this unit. I mean it would be cool to throw an SSD in there, but I'm sure it's highly unlikely that it would function. Not to mention the off/on writing of data I heard tears through drives much quicker with older OS' so it's a toss up for me right now.
Windows 98: The primary thing I wanted this whole time has been the ability to go back and play old games on their original intended format and system. My first PC (and gaming experience) was through 98 so I'm very nostalgic over the thing and that's sorta been my drive for this whole project.
Power Supply: The guy before me who was taking a couple things outta this, pulled the HDD and the PSU, (the PSU apparently for some weird stereo project). I just ran a search on Ebay I think this should work as a replacement... http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Power-Supply-Upgr … =item4ab6cd77dc
Video Card: I feel like a Voodoo card would be awesome for the sake of the legacy, but I guess I'm willing to get an opinion first (since I didn't actually use anything from 3DFX myself). Otherwise some of the other Nvidia AGP stuff looks pretty good too. Not a must to get a video card right away, I mean I wanna make sure the thing can run first before getting additional performance upgrades.
Moving forward I still have to clean the thing up and check the internals thoroughly for any kind of damage or dislodged cables. This thing has jumpers too, (which I'm not really used to seeing anymore) and I'm hoping I wont have to mess with those too much. Part of me is wondering how all this is going to work since I basically need to get all new drivers and OS installed (since the original HDD is gone). I found this Drivers Disc fairly quickly for this line of emachines, so I thought maybe that would work in acquiring the correct drivers... http://www.ebay.com/itm/Drivers-Recovery-Rest … =item5d43007f4f
I'm usually pretty wary of stuff designed to automate drivers for a machine unless it's what originally came with the system when it shipped. For $6.00 I thought it might be worth a shot. Besides that, first impressions are that it's a very small unit and I'm not sure if it's going to all work even if I get the other parts. I sorta wanted to get something that was at least a mid tower but this seems to still have enough room for what I wanted. I guess my other thoughts is, can I tack on enough to make this a decent gaming rig (within late 90s that is)? The thing is I'm just so used to modern game specs, so I'm not near as certain as to what would make for solid hardware in this situation. GPU is a little easier to gauge but I'm not all as certain about the CPU, or for that matter what all can fit in this type of board were I to upgrade it. I know it's 90s but I just wanna make sure I'm not skimping on any of the essentials.