First post, by old school gamer man
- Rank
- Newbie
I'm assuming we allow build logs here, if not sorry.
Right now I'm at a cross road in my life, the wife and I have not been able to have a kid the old fashioned way (not for a lack of trying 🤣) and we been thinking of fostering. I did that when I was younger and still single and loved it and we figured we cold do it together and we will need to free up the room for a kid/s. To add to this computers and I have a very toxic relationship to say the least. Computers, gaming and so on keep me up way to late, I spend way to much money on them, I sit at a desk all day playing on them and the stuff I need to do never gets done that and the lack of exercise is a big problem for me as I age. this last moth alone I spent nearly 2k on parts I'll likely never use and 4k the month before... yeah that's a problem. The main problem is that I love building PCs then I spend days if not weeks trying to get them to work. I'm up until 3 or 4am then off to work at 8. I even ended up with a stress ulcer from the lack of sleep and frantically trying to make things work and looking at my bank account... only to never use the system yeah this has to stop.
So I chose to get rid of all my computers, bench stands, parts and so on and stick to just one retro PC. I may keep a few spare parts but that's it
But I know there will be times I need a modern PC to do stuff like taxes banking and so on. The problem here is if I have two computers I'm going to go right back down the rabbit hole, I'm going to be messing with KVMs , wires and so on. A tablet would work but I know for me I would just sit on it all day watching TV and movies and that's one of the things I'm trying to avoid as there are times when I come home and do nothing but binge watch crap I should not even be watching in the first place.
I'm thinking of getting something like a pico itx motherboard and shoving it into a 5.25 bay or some other part of the case then remoting into it when I need to get on the web. I may rig up a internal KVM inside the PC too but IDK yet. What I do know is that I can't be using anything that fun to use online, anything web related has to be a pain in the butt to use.
I don't have the platform or parts picked yet and having sold most everything off so that would pay for anything I need. But I know what the system will need it to do. I need it to be able to run most very late dos games any games form 95ish to 2000 and a few games from 2000 to 2003 or 4ish.
I still have a handful of parts I will be using for the build, a few vintage water and air cooling parts. A really nice case that is the same case the ALR evolution VQ used but without the ARL branding, its alot like the case the ALR 6x6 used but in ATX and with a more basic front plate.
I have a more modem PSU that fits the case with 4 and 8 pins and agp pro connectors and all the cooling parts I need. I have a DVD drive, the keyboard and mouse, a joy stick and a few other small things. But no hdds or motherboard or video cards as I sold most everything and all I have left to sell are some random newer stuff.
I have not picked out any of the parts i want to buy outside a SB live... ironically I sold 4 of them in the purge and I'm leaning on a gf6800 and a 754 or 939 system, maybe a via chip set 775 board of I can find out they support the SB live's dos drivers and 9x.
for storage I'm going scsi all the way I love the sound of scsi drives, they don't just click the clunk and whine too haha.What scsi card I use will depend on the motherboard I end up with, If I get a PCI only board I would likely be using a Adaptec 2100S as they are cheap and work rather well. But I'm hopping to find a board with PCIx or pcie that would work for what I need.
The os will be 98 lite as I love the 95 shell with ether nt4 or 2k dual boot for a few newer games.
I know I was kinda all over the place here, Gotta love ADHD 🤣. But I hope I made since and you got an idea of what I'll be doing.
