First post, by beniwtv
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello fellow vogoners!
I have been reading this awesome forum for quite some time now; and inspired by all this talk and the great retro content on YouTube from the likes of LGR, Nostalgia Nerd, Metal Jesus Rocks, 8-bit guy, .... I decided to get a retro PC build of my own going. I had been emulating old PCs with the software I got, but it just didn't feel nostalgic enough. 😜
I originally envisioned getting my first PC ever, an IBM PS/1 2121 (or I think at least that was the number), but it's very hard to get one in the configuration I want without paying an arm and a leg for it 🤣, so i settled on something more generic, and also more hackable and upgradeable. This is when I saw a lovely small (midi?) tower on Ebay which didn't have much information attached with it, but from the photos had some nice hardware in it. The seller sold it as broken because of the CMOS warning it displayed when booting, so it was a nice deal as well.
These are the specs it arrived at my home with:
- - Pentium 150 MHX MMX
- Abit AB-PX5 motherboard
- 10 whopping MB of RAM (8+2)
- HIPRO power supply (never heard of them)
- A broken 2 GB HDD
- Some kind of TEAC CDROM (NSSI estimates it at 52x)
- ATI 3D RAGE 2+DVD
- An ISDN fax modem card
- A 3Com Etherlink 3 with no RJ45...
- Sound Blaster Vibra 16 XV
Apparently, this PC was once used at one of my countries' TV stations, as I found an inventory sticker with their logo on it. 🤣 The company that put this system together was called SicOs, and there's not much info about them other than their website at the way back machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980702020315/ht … ww.sicos.de:80/
I have since added / upgraded some parts:
- - Replaced old and non-working CMOS battery
- Replaced RAM with two 128 MB sticks (motherboard supports 256 MB max)
- Took out the ISDN card, this is of no use anymore now since ISDN is gone
- Replaced the 3Com with another 3Com Etherlink 3, but which has the RJ45 port 🤣
- Added my old Voodoo 2 card I had back in the days and saved 20 years though multiple house movings, since I was curious if it still worked
- Added an IDE-to-CF adapter + 2GB Transcend CF card
So far I'm pretty happy, and have documented my journey on my Twitch channel.
1st video isn't strictly about the PC, as it was before it arrived. It shows some of the software and games I got, which I wanted to emulate:
https://www.twitch.tv/beniwtv/video/285005644
2nd video is getting some more games, a cable to convert VGA to HDMI for capturing the retro PC, and the retro PC itself:
https://www.twitch.tv/beniwtv/video/295199324
And a live stream with more retro-PC hardware upgrades/swaps and installing DOS + WIN3.1 and trying to play a game:
https://www.twitch.tv/beniwtv/video/295913561
Things still TODO:
- - Replace IDE cable for the CF adapter, since I just noticed the one it cam with has one wire exposed (luckily I have a bunch of cables, as I never throw ANY cables away 🤣)
- Test MIDI under DOS
- Enhance/free some DOS conventional memory
- Figure out why MIDI doesn't work under 3.11; and while at it, figure out why the Creative installer only installed a mixer for 3.11 that doesn't even work
- Get more CF cards so I can install W95, more games, Linux distros, exotic OSes...
- Get a nice mouse (or fix the one it came with)
- Get networking to work at least under WIN 3.11/WIN 95
That's about everything for now, I'll make sure to post here with more progress soon. 😉
Take care and have a great day!
beniwtv