First post, by windi
- Rank
- Newbie
I recently got a nice unused Nokia 19" flat crt monitor (supposedly manufactured by Viewsonic), so I wanted to put back together a dos/win3.11/win98 machine from parts I had laying around. Only a case was missing, and I was able to obtain a case with a fitting beige look, from an old Compaq Proliant. It was an ATX server computer and it didn't seem a best choice for my purposes, so I replaced most of the components.
The rear fan seems to keep the relatively huge CPU heat sink cool enough. I just threw in some 100mm fans, but I have been thinking of ordering new Noctua 100mm fans for extra quietness. Also I've been thinking about swapping one of the hard drives to SD memory instead. I don't like CF, because it's difficult to find a card compatible with bios and that is large enough. If you know a well working SD to IDE adapter, please recommend me a manufacturer/model. 😀
- Compaq Proliant ATX tower
- Abit Slot-1 & Socket 370 MB with two ISA slots
- 3com 10/100 ethernet card
- Voodoo 3 PCI card (16MB)
- Sound Blaster AWE32 (with real Yamaha OPL3 chip)
- Gravis Ultrasound (original model with 1MB expansion)
- two 120GB IDE hard drives
- original 1.44MB floppy drive (from Proliant)
- 360kB 5.25" floppy drive from my first PC
- 512MB memory (PC-100)
- 500MHz passively cooled Pentium 3 (from Proliant)
- beige LG dvd-rw drive from my early 2000 computer, with analog cd audio cable
- Nokia 930C 19" flat crt
- Beige Keytronic keyboard
- Microsoft Optical Wheel mouse (with PS/2 adapter, beige)
- External Yamaha MU-80 to AWE32 midi port (when not liking awe32 or gus pats)
- External Roland MT-32 to AWE32 midi port for that era of games (SOFTMPU fixed problems)
It seems great for both 486-Pentium era dos games and late windows 98 3D accelerated games. I have had great success with 8086-286 era games also, because the 2D part of Voodoo 3 is so compatible, and the CPU slows down enough with L1 & L2 disabled. In a pinch, Moslo and Throttle can be also used. It can even run DosBox in win98 with at least up to 3000 cycles, which is funny.
Things to do:
- Connect PC speaker cable from mother board to AWE32
- Find and add a PCMCIA adapter card to use a win98 compatible 54M/WPA2 wi-fi card I've had success with on a win98 laptop
- Replace one or maybe even both hard drives with SD IDE adapters (can anyone recommend a reliable model?)
- Replace all fans with new Noctua fans