VOGONS


What are builds you want to make someday?

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Reply 100 of 116, by martinot

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OSkar000 wrote on 2020-07-14, 19:54:

Projects to start... some day
Compaq Proliant 1500, It's a Pentium 75 at the moment and the plan is to upgrade it to a Pentium 133. It has 5x18gb scsi hard drives, probably a bit to much for my needs now. A better graphics card would be nice and I have a few ideas what to put in it. I really want to try it with Windows NT 3.51 and se how useful it can be and if any early windows games will run on it. Needs a sound card also.

Many great projects! 😀

Some smaller and simpler games written for Win32 and/or WinG is probably the best bet for 3.51 (as you probably already know it was not until 4.0 that NT got support for DirectX games).

Reply 101 of 116, by creepingnet

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If I ever get to go back to my childhood home in Alabama, I think I saved Creeping Net #1 (1992 Flight 386 SX) second Motherboard (ZEOS 386/486 Upgradable Systems Mainboard per TH99). Sadly I had to dump the case in 2011 because it was rusting and coming apart (crappy apartment would not fix mold problem).

What I'd probably do is use my current electronics skills to bring the motherboard back to full functionality. When I last used it, it had EIGHT add-in cards because the original hard disk controller did not work, the game port would not cooperate with my sound card, and I remember one or two other ports just stopped working. I'm willing to bet those are faulty components or cold solder joints. I ran that PC HARD as it was my first internet connected PC.

Heck knows, I think I may even still have the Radio Shack serial mouse and Addonics MON7C4B 14" CRT Monitor hanging around somewhere.

Actually I have lots of stuff there that I'd love to recover. A 1977 Atari Heavy Sixer casing in dead mint condition, I think I may have an old pre-pentium Laptop or two laying around there and some other PC parts as well from the heyday.

Outside of that, I don't really have any future builds. I've got 9 vintage computers now, I don't really want or need anymore. My nostalgia tends to end with the Pentium, and I kind of enjoy pushing the 486 to insane levels thought impossible currently.

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    Flight 386 SX in 2005, actually a 486 DX2-66 w/ 32MB at the Time
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Reply 102 of 116, by RetroPC_King

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This summer I plan to resurrect my childhood PC (AMD Athlon XP 2600+ 1.917 GHz with 512MB RAM) and to build a retro WIndows XP SP3 machine (with a Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53 GHz and 2GB RAM). Any opinion?

Reply 103 of 116, by RandomStranger

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Today I entertained the thought of building an Athlon XP 3000+ or 3200+ build. I never had an AMD based PC from the early 2000s.
I'm also curious how it would hold it's own against my same era XP build.
The rest would be the same as the previous. I've seen some fairly cheap boards on a local site (MSI KT6 Delta-FISR; Asrock K7VT6-C), but I have to read them up. I remember that AMD boards from this era could be difficult to work with.

I'm also interested in building an AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 based PC with an X1900XT and Ageia PhyX card. Though this one I'll probably never get to build.

And for last, I'm planning to recap an Abit BH6 for close to 2 years now, but never got around. The board doesn't post, but maybe that's all it needs.
I'm planning on using that as the base of a millennium Pentium 3 build. Mostly period correct with a 733MHz Pentium and a Geforce 256 DDR.

And I need a good 486 DX4 PC. Maybe I'll try to trade in my Socket7-AMD K5 components for a VLB board.

sreq.png retrogamer-s.png

Reply 105 of 116, by chrismeyer6

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mrau wrote on 2021-05-31, 12:10:

dual k6 workstation with proper sata or scsi, plentiful ram, some basic GUI accelerator and DOS compatible sound; real floppies and dvd rom are a must too

I don't think the AMD K6 line supports SMP.

Reply 106 of 116, by BitWrangler

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It's the late 90s, you're barely a teenager, you've been saving your paper route money for a year and a half, you're fed up of Keen and Wolf3D on the 386sx20 dad brought home from work, and you wanna build your OWN PC... however, 1.5 years of savings is nothing near a fortune, so you build... The Jankmeister 4000... PCChips board, Cyrix CPU, curbfind case, JTS hard disk drive, 6x CDROM... the cheapest parts it's humanly possible to find... it won't run THIS years games... but you're happy... you're still only pulling in $5 a week, so it's the bargain bin games for you...

For entertainment value, when I've picked out all the best combos from my pile, I'll build this.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 107 of 116, by mrau

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chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-31, 12:56:
mrau wrote on 2021-05-31, 12:10:

dual k6 workstation with proper sata or scsi, plentiful ram, some basic GUI accelerator and DOS compatible sound; real floppies and dvd rom are a must too

I don't think the AMD K6 line supports SMP.

there were dual amd workstations available back in the day - so the minimal support must be there i believe; i understand that would be cache synchronizing signals

Reply 109 of 116, by gerry

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RandomStranger wrote on 2021-05-31, 11:18:

Today I entertained the thought of building an Athlon XP 3000+ or 3200+ build. I never had an AMD based PC from the early 2000s.

I have an XP2400 based system and its good but I do quite like the idea of the ultimate athlon xp, not hust upgrades but an all new system, i have most components except the actual XP3000 and also lacking a really top end agp card, instead i have an XP2000 and XP1600 and budget cards, so there is no rush! 😀

Reply 110 of 116, by PcBytes

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The one build I would love doing someday would be an ABIT based build with a slotket Celeron, just to see how much I can push a Celeron. That, and I've absolutely NEVER EVER had an retro ABIT mobo from the 440BX-815E era.

I have the slotket and two Celerons (466 and 500), but sadly no ABIT mobos that I could find for sale in Romania. It's like I'm searching the needle in a haystack, and it appears as if almost any of my retro boards started rapidly becoming scarce and unobtanium - Epox 7KXA, ECS P6VXA, Soyo 6BA+IV, DTK PRM-27IV E0, Luckytech P5MVP3, PCChips M577, and the list can go on. I've yet to see any of those pop up ever again, except the Luckytech P5MVP3 ocassionally popping up here and there.

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 111 of 116, by BitWrangler

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Unless you're going cryogenic, you can push those celerons on an LX or EX board with FSBs up to 83 Mhz.. Those mendocino cores were well known to top out near 600Mhz. They start getting difficult around 560-570 for me. A bit more core voltage can straighten them out, but only buys another 20 or so. A 366 is the top of the sweet spot for running on 100Mhz FSB, can just pinmod those to 100Mhz bus and drop them in i810s to run at 550. Need a 333 to try for 115 FSB and a 300A to try for 124.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 112 of 116, by PcBytes

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The only LX mobo I have can't even OC a PII 266 🤣 - it's a Zida LX98-AT, and the only BIOS I could even find that is AWARD comes from a Epox that uses DIP-switches to manage the clock, while the Zida does it from the BIOS.

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 113 of 116, by appiah4

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I think the only build that I still want to make some day but never got around to is a fast 386DX and a big vertical box XT or AT. I have done pretty much everything else now.

Oh, and Amiga. I mean, I now have a VERY expanded A500 with an ACA500Plus, RGBtoHDMI as well as an HDMI-520 scan doubler for the RGB port (meaning dual HDMI output) but I would definitely want a bigbox Amiga, a 3000 preferrably..

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 114 of 116, by BitWrangler

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PcBytes wrote on 2021-06-01, 16:28:

The only LX mobo I have can't even OC a PII 266 🤣 - it's a Zida LX98-AT, and the only BIOS I could even find that is AWARD comes from a Epox that uses DIP-switches to manage the clock, while the Zida does it from the BIOS.

That might be the 266, very few of them would hit 300, which is the lowest overclock if you've only got 75Mhz, though some boards had a 68Mhz option, which was hardly thrilling. There always seemed to me to be more chance of getting a 233 to run 3.5x83 for 290. Intel took a few more months after 233/266 release to figure out how to tune the Klamath to behave at 300, and they followed that rapidly with the Deschutes core shrink.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 115 of 116, by Standard Def Steve

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As an HTPC fanatic since the original 2002 version of XP MCE (I even bought one of the earliest MCE PCs, a Viewsonic SFF rig styled to fit in an AV component stack), I'd love to own a Gateway Destination someday. One of the originals running Gateway's clunky multimedia software atop Win95. 😜

P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.
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Reply 116 of 116, by KCompRoom2000

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Recently I've picked up four motherboards from a lot, although most of them are regular no-frills Dell OEM motherboards, there's one interesting LGA775 motherboard (ASUS P5KC) that I think I'll use for a high-end Windows XP gaming rig for games that work better on something faster than my Athlon 64 rig. I just need to buy a full ATX case and some parts to go with it then I'll be ready to work on it. I'm thinking about using a gamer-style case that's similar to the one that my aforementioned Athlon 64 rig is housed in.