Old hardware appreciation thread

[Rod911]

Meeting up with MadMatt tomorrow to give him my old gear.

The XP1700+ was modded with car defroster paint to unlock the multipliers. I will also miss the 9800SE which I modded with an old heatsink to cool down the GPU and the joys of seeing the budget card unlock into a full fledged 9800.

Mind you, I'm just starting to get out using Athon64 hardware as my main PC (see sig) and move onto Intel. The last time I was with the blue team was back with a 486 machine!

[Chewhacca]

Originally Posted by Asteroid

Compaq machines usually used a bios that lacked an inbuilt configuration utility like we're used to. Instead it had to be loaded from a floppy disc or sat in a hidden partition on the HDD. The F10 screen on these things would be software, not firmware.

I think this is what you need (also a floppy, ugh).

Got a Prolinea desktop that has that. Upgrading the HDD while keeping the setup utilities is a new adventure in pain.

[mike-s]

Originally Posted by bYrd

I've a 70CT, which is overclocked to 166Mhz MMX, and you can get around the 8GB limit by formatting 8GB, leaving ~ 100MB free space, then format the rest. The hiberation file sits at the end of the first 8GB partition, so if you format over that data corruption will occur.

Nice tip, cheers.

Originally Posted by bYrd

The RAM is hard to find - a year or so ago there was a seller on eBay with the requisite 16MB module; I held out for the last one and got it cheap, and sold my existing 8MB module for twice as much With this amount of RAM, it runs Win98SE nicely, and any DOS game you can throw at it.

Yeah, i saw that, but idiot that i am didn't put a bid in on it , I am itching to get hold of a PA2056U (16MB module)

Originally Posted by FuzzyKaos

hehe ive got stacks of that ram :P EDO if im not mistaken. !

bastard.

[watto86]

Heh. Last time I went to a computer fair here it was loaded with incredibly old hardware. Haven't been to one for years, though. So no idea if they even still do them, let alone sell all the retro crap.

[callan]

Behold - an antique (25 year old) ISA 3COM network card - made in 1985.
(sorry about the dodgy photo - took it with my blackberry)



Must have been one of the first released.
This started life plugged into a Compaq CAD workstation, connected to a thick ethernet network (a tranceiver was connected to the top AUI connector). When they were being retired, I grabbed it on the way to the scrapheap, and actually USED it in my fileserver (running Netware 2.2) for some years. It pumped out gobs of heat, and would only work when the ISA bus ran at the IBM PC/AT original speed of 6.5Mhz - so when I finally upgraded the server to a 20Mhz 386SX (which wouldn't let the ISA buss run slower than 8mhz) - it had to be retired.
As data transfers were done via DMA, it was actually quite fast for the day, and the card was rock-solid reliable.- But as old farts will remember, DMA was always a fickle beast on the ISA buss, and any problems with DMA would always result in a hard lock of the machine - and everything back then was jumper-configured. Interrupts could not be shared, either.
So I/O addresses, DMA and IRQ channels, and shared memory segment addresses ALL had to be configured not to conflict with other cards, all with jumpers. Add to this the hassle that the Netware 2.2 kernel was STATIC - and drivers (and configurations) were statically linked ON FLOPPY DISKS (27 disk swaps) before being installed on the hard disk.

Ya - I know - snowing, uphill both ways, lived in a shoebox etc..

Still, an interesting old piece of kit. Kinda shows how much integration has come.

Ooroo
Callan

[Life_Essence]

Old hardware appreciation? hell this is right up my alley.

Except photobucket reduces the photo sizes so you can't tell what some things are.




oh and can anyone tell me what model this bloody thing is?


and cause you can't read it the chips on the right hand side say;
the top right chip says

M1209 A3
1382309 0K0

Middle Right says

M1211 A2
JAPAN NEO
9138EX708


and beneath that is an AMD 386-SX/SXL 25 soldered directly to the motherboard

and beneath THAT is an upgrade slot for a 387-SX 25 which BTW I'm willing to buy one if anyone has one....or I'll swap you a 387-DX 25 for it :P

[GrueHunter]

This thread is making me feel old. The Pentium launch (ooh, MechWarrior 2 on a P90! It's like a movie!) feels like a few years ago for me, but you're all talking about it like it was the Dark Ages. I'm only 37 ffs - knock it off!

[oaks101]

found this toshiba 3100e/40 laptop.

[Sonicman]

Originally Posted by FuzzyKaos

Here is that old PC that I used to have.

image image

LOL thats how I used to sleeve my cables back in the day, just electrical tape.

Pentium Pro 200 with 128GB o RAM.

Back in the day, this motherboard/ram/cpu cost an absolute fortune, but that's what you pay for the best!

Still works too, I think the last time I did something with it was a Ubuntu distro, worked great!

I don't know if there is any merit in this, but I believe that the old games work best on old hardware, maybe as time goes by older libraries are re-written or emulated, or that hardware changes so much that the old instructions are translated differently on new hardware etc.

Those fans are very good quality ones, sanyo denki

[jay-stormchaser]

Seeing as I got into building PC's very late (1st PC I built was an A64 3000+ single core for FEAR) I missed out on some really great building/gaming.

I'm looking at going back and sourcing the parts that I need to build a machine that would be suitable to play games like System Shock 2, Mechwarrior 2, Descent, Tie Fighter. I would love to be able to play the early need for speed games too.

What would you recommend hardware wise to get to play most of this stuff? XP Athlon? -Intel which one then? what mobo is the best and why?
I know that most of the games are easily bought from places like steam or GOG but I want to play with the disc on the original hardware.

My 17" LCD monitor max res is 1280x1024 also if that helps.

Jason

[DonutKing]

System Shock 2 came out a few years after the other three games.... I had a 486 that played those three, but I had a Pentium 2 when SS2 came out. SS2 was windows only while the other three were also available for DOS.

Really, an old win 9x box should be fine. A pentium 1 would be great for the earlier games, I'd go at least a pentium 2, preferably 3 for SS2. Any decent intel 440BX chipset board is great for P2/3 or celeron. Stick with 512MB of RAM or under as more can cause various problems.

With TIE fighter the DOS CDROM version has cutscenes and iMUSE soundtrack which are both missing from the windows version. The windows version does have textured models though, the dos version is merely shaded, but the music is just star wars sound track looped from cd - gets very boring after a while. I prefer the DOS version despite the graphics, it's a lot more atmospheric.

With mech warrior 2 there are different 3d accelerated versions floating about. A 3dfx voodoo cardis nice to have for Other glide games particularly unreal engine ones. Id recommend a voodoo 3 if ypu can find one, they work well and have better image quality than earlier voodoos. Voodoo 2s can run in SLI but I wouldnt bother Except for the novelty factor, it isnt better than a V3 usually and its a lot of mucking around.You'll need to patch MW2 to work on voodoo 2, not sure if it works with a voodoo 3.

Other wise any nvidia TNT or GeForce 1/2 should be fine, GeForce 2MX were pretty popular in the day.


For sound card I'd recommend an Aureal Vortex 2 for system shock 2 as the A3D effect is awesome otherwise any sound blaster compatible should be ok preferably with some sort of general MIDI support for high quality music.

[Chewhacca]

Originally Posted by jay-stormchaser

Seeing as I got into building PC's very late (1st PC I built was an A64 3000+ single core for FEAR) I missed out on some really great building/gaming.

I'm looking at going back and sourcing the parts that I need to build a machine that would be suitable to play games like System Shock 2, Mechwarrior 2, Descent, Tie Fighter. I would love to be able to play the early need for speed games too.

What would you recommend hardware wise to get to play most of this stuff? XP Athlon? -Intel which one then? what mobo is the best and why?
I know that most of the games are easily bought from places like steam or GOG but I want to play with the disc on the original hardware.

My 17" LCD monitor max res is 1280x1024 also if that helps.

Jason

The setup I have for that sort of stuff is a Pentium 3 650MHz, 384MB RAM, TNT2-M64 With Voodoo2 SLI for video, Yamaha 724 sound card, 2x 80GB HDDs.

Slot 1 motherboards can take anything from a Celeron 266 to a Pentium 650 or greater so you have a wide range of processors to choose from when sourcing parts. Alternative would be a Super Socket 7 board for an AMD K6-166 to a K6-III 550 but can be a bit of a pain to get working properly. I actually ditched my Super Socket 7 board for a Slot 1 board.

[Cannula]

If you are going Slot 1 go for an Intel 440BX chipset. They are the most compatible, available, and highest performing at stock and have ISA slots.
If you're going SS7 and using the AGP slot; Voodoo 3 cards are the go. They are great as they don't have compatibility issues since they don't use AGP to it's full potential since they are effectively PCI cards.

[DonutKing]

I'd actually avoid Super Socket 7; the chipsets tend to be a bit quirky sometimes, whereas the ol' reliable 440BX 'just works' for the most part. Plus Super Socket 7 CPU's aren't particularly great for 3d gaming since they have a weak FPU. I remember on another forum a bloke had a Pentium 233 that was still slightly faster than a K6-2 400 in Quake timedemo, on the same super socket 7 board...

Plus some games needed patches for non-Intel CPU's back then, and the Intels tended to put out less heat...

really I think a slot 1 440BX system is ideal for this and they shouldn't be hard to track down either.

[jay-stormchaser]

Im looking on ebay (just to get an idea as to what there is) and I cant seem to find much.

What boards in particular should I be looking at in the slot 1 range?