First post, by badmojo
- Rank
- l33t
I'm not 100% sure what my motivation was for this project - I suspect that I just like building PCs. I do consider my existing PIII to be my most versatile and useful retro PC so it's good to have a backup I suppose. I had all of the parts on hand except for a motherboard, so I put the word out and was kindly gifted 2 DFI CA-64TC's by the most excellent BuuBox from OCAU. The CA-64TC is a VIA Apollo Pro 133A based board that a) can handle a 133MHz FSB and b) has an ISA slot.
One of the boards had bad caps so it was a good opportunity to dive in and practice my re-capping skills:
I've done a fair bit of entry level soldering in my time and I have a decent soldering iron to work with, but desoldering ~20 caps (using braid) wasn't much fun at all and it would have been easy to burn a trace. Replacing the caps in my other systems is probably inevitable as they age so I think it's time I invested in a desoldering station - soldering caps back into this board was relatively quick and easy when I finally had clean holes to work with. Anyway, I got there in the end, and after a good wash and sporting nice new Rubycons the motherboard was ready to rock.
The CPU is a PIII Tualatin 1400-S with a FCPGA mod, bought from this Korean dude a couple of years ago. He seemed to have an unlimited supply but only has 10 left at the time of writing, and he's jacked up the price accordingly. I think it was more like $30AUD delivered when I bought mine. It's very neat work and has worked like a charm for me:
For a GPU I went with a Geforce 2 Ultra, which is a lovely card for this era IMHO. The VGA / SVGA output is beautiful and it's of course an impressive 3D card too. I have 2 of these and ended up using the other one - I switched them when I was trying to track down the source of a buzzing noise when moving the mouse (via PS2 only, serial was OK). It turned out that having the mouse cord run over my little SRS processor (which sits b/w the PC and the speakers) was introducing the noise, so I just moved the mouse cable 😀
For sound I went with a NOS Live! "X-Gamer" that I've had sitting around for years. It's a nice card and installed relatively easily (for a Live!), but I must admit that I find them as dull as dishwater. I use a Vortex2 based "SuperQuad" in my other PIII and I really dig that card - maybe I just prefer an underdog. Anyway the Live! sounds great and having EAX is nice for late Windows 98 games so it can stay there for now - its SB16 emulation is pretty aweful but I'm not planning on using this machine for DOS games anyway.
Windows 98 SE installed without a hitch - I'm sticking with 512MB of RAM to keep it happy - and it's proving to be a quiet, quick, and very stable machine so far. The only instability I've seen was during the Live! installation process but of course a Live! can lock up a PC from the other side of the room. Plans for the future are some benchmarking, and maybe finding an ISA sound card to fill that slot.
Life? Don't talk to me about life.