Retro PC kit

O

oddfellow

Regular
Heh, I love mesin around with retro stuff.

I recently nosed around my dusty old stack of PC relics and made a system out of it just for kicks.

I plucked an old Athlon Thunderbird 1400MHz out of an old KT133 mobo I had, and decided to see how it would perform with some extra memory bandwidth. So I stuck it in a KT600 based MSI KT6V-LSR. I allways remember this board being as fast as the dual channel nForce bords of the time, even though it was only single channel (and it was only stable with 1 stick of ram).
I stuck a 1GB stick of pc3200 in it and ran the Athlon on 133 fsb (266ddr). I also stuck a SATA150 hdd in there for good measure and installed Win2k pro.
I bet the Athlon thought it was christmas (if it could think of course lol)

Unfortunately, the only vid agp cards I could lay my hands on at the time were a 16MB Voodoo3 3000, a 64MB GF2Ti and a 64MB KyroII. I went with the GF2Ti since I could still get hold of decent drivers.

It handles WoW astonishingly well, and it gives pretty much the same 3Dmark 2000 score as my Turion dual core, GF6100 equipped laptop! LOL
I haven't had time to test it with much else though.
I've since dug up my old FX5900XT so I'll be giving that a whirl soon, along with some newer apps.

I was also very tempted to create a K6-2 500 / Voodoo3 system for some proper nostalgia. UT used to run soo good on that rig.....
 
I wish I still had some of my old parts lying around... I've sold or given away everything that I'm not using. I'd love to play some UT on my old K6-2 450 + Voodoo 2 Rig. Or even doom on my old 386 lol.
 
I'd love to rebuild an old system as a retro gaming (DOS) box. I used to have a Dell Dimension XPS R 400 (P2 400, 128MB 100MHz DIMM, Riva 128 ZX 8MB AGP) and that thing was the shiznyte, especially after I swapped out the video card for a Voodoo3 3000. Wooowee was that fun! Quake 2 never ran so smooth and the Unreal flyby in 22-bit Glide was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen rendered in real-time by a PC I'd owned. Eventually I swapped the proc for an 800MHz slot format P3, added another 2x128MB PC100 DIMMs for a total of 384MB RAM, and changed out the V3 for an original Radeon 32MB DDR (LE model) card w/aftermarket cooling and a mild o/c.

Ahh, those were the days. Win9x/DOS gaming was so fun. A bit of a challenge from time to time but when everything ran right it was just seamless. I miss weekends of playing Star Wars games all day. I really am going to have to build an old DOS box now. I've been putting this off for way too long.
 
wowsa! windows 4.0 w/pmmx 256 12m v2 and a soundblaster (and the infamous eitherlink3!) now that would be one hell of a retro gaming box. the stuff I spec'd earlier is overkill, unless you define retro as "older than 5 years" or some such
 
Naw, you want retro how about old ISA video and sound cards with IDE hard drives?

Oh yea, and there's no CD-ROM, you want a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive.

At least that's retro for me. Running windows 3.11 and DOS 6.2

ahh, the good old Wing Commander, King's Quest, and Ultima 7 days.
 
I was given an old office pc to use as a retro rig and it contained a voodoo3 + an aureal vortex 2 sound card - result
 
Proper antique would be the VIC-20 I had donkey's years ago, or maybe the Amiga-500 I have under my bed (still in the original box ;) ), but I digress...

Although I acquired older dinosaurs in my time, what I consider to be my first proper pc, was a desktop Packard Bell with a 14' goldfish bowl monitor.

Cyrix MII 300 (ran at 225MHz)
32MB EDO
2MB onboard 2-D random rubbish video
Onboard rubbish sound
etc

This was also the first PC I ever tooled around with.
The Cyrix was replaced with a K6-2 450
64mb of EDO
a soundblaster 16
A voodoo banshee

This thing would run Unreal beautifully. I was amazed by the visuals on the goldfish bowl!
:LOL:
 
oddfellow said:
Proper antique would be the VIC-20 I had donkey's years ago, or maybe the Amiga-500 I have under my bed (still in the original box ;) ), but I digress...

Although I acquired older dinosaurs in my time, what I consider to be my first proper pc, was a desktop Packard Bell with a 14' goldfish bowl monitor.

Cyrix MII 300 (ran at 225MHz)
32MB EDO
2MB onboard 2-D random rubbish video
Onboard rubbish sound
etc

This was also the first PC I ever tooled around with.
The Cyrix was replaced with a K6-2 450
64mb of EDO
a soundblaster 16
A voodoo banshee

This thing would run Unreal beautifully. I was amazed by the visuals on the goldfish bowl!
:LOL:
Click to expand...

Did either box have the "much loved" turbo button?
 
Davros said:
I was given an old office pc to use as a retro rig and it contained a voodoo3 + an aureal vortex 2 sound card - result
Click to expand...

Well since no one else seems to have caught your joke - LOL. Nice one. Although both were fantastic products back in the day, that most certainly would be your result were you to attempt to play any recent games or use a modern O.S. on a machine thusly equipped.
 
a decently retro machine has to be in the AT form (quite small actually). socket 5 or 7 sporting a P1 class CPU.
8MB ram can do it if all you can use is two 4MB simms, more doesn't hurt.
S3 video card, 1 or 2MB PCI
a hard drive (500MB can do the job, more doesn't hurt)
MSDOS 6.x, or better MSDOS 7.10 (copied from windows 98), freeDOS worth trying.
3COM ISA video card (good stuff and easily available free packet driver)
sound blaster 16 or any equivalent.
CD drive

a high quality older 14" CRT (great geometry, great contrast and good looking in 640x480 60Hz)
a high quality keyboard (with the big DIN plug)
the least worst serial mouse you can find, or try an adapter.

4DOS shell (freeware), with aliases, tab completion and more
.bat menu to launch games, using a bunch of ECHO lines, a CHOICE then IF ERROLEVEL/GOTO
ssh and scp clients to ssh in and copy files from a unix OS (I'm gonna try openssh for windows btw)
mode 80,50 in the autoexec.bat . and other configuration stuff/

that kind of machine boots very fast, is extremely responsive, loads games fast and has great compatibility. costs a grand total of zero using parts that are very plenty and that no use can or want to use.
doom2, war2, arkanoid, duke3D, incredible machines and more!
 
Whoa there Blaz, I think you may have gone a bit too retro. Granted, I've played plenty of fantastic DOS/early Win 9x games on systems similar to what you've described, but that level of hardware really limits your gaming options. At this point one could easily make a case for Win9x-era games and perhaps even some early XP-era games as "retro". I know I wouldn't want to give up the ability to play early command and conquer and warcraft games (as one would using a PC similarly-spec'd).
 
well shaider - I wouldnt try to use that pc for modern games but for games released during the win98 era its an awesome peice of kit - especially for an office machine ;)
 
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