Retro PC

R

robbiec

Member
I have at this moment in time an AMD K-6iii 400Mhz (that is how long I've been using AMD stuff :)) and i'm seeing a trend for Retro gaming type machines. Simple enough..

Must use my K-6iii
ATX preferable
Sdram and not EDO
I can't be bothered with AT and floppy cables but needs must
Must boot MS-Dos 6, Win 95 and for giggles OS/2 Warp and be able to play Wolfenstein, Doom 2, Quake 2, Privateer 1 & 2 and X-Wing - That's the easy stuff - it must also be able to handle Grand Prix Legends

So K-6iii
Via or Apollo chipset board
256MB Ram?
?? GB HDD presumably non SATA maybe a SCSI drive? :D
Oh and an analog joystick

What do you think? I vaguely remember a Tyan board I lusted after back in the day..
 
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While i do understand the reason for dedicated hardware for that era, I'd just get a VM :)

You might find it tricky to get a good working board that you want, even a friend of mine is a recyler of older PC's he rips them all up for the materials :D
 
Yeah I know VM or DosBox will do the job, it's just for giggles really and the fact that I found my old K-6iii which I have fond memories of. It was a good chip for it's day.
It's a challenge and a project :)
 
Yea the K6 was a rather good chip back then, depending on what you need i'd not always expect it to be cheap, then run into the issues of any 2nd hand hardware.

I did try to get my original PC working years back blew up 2 cheap PSU's GPU just kept overheating, even when replaced the GPU it didn't change things was most likely the mobo but in the end it was just all too old and degraded to bother with it.

So i'm sure your have fun :D
 
I have a DFI Baby AT board on the way with a VIA chipset :) It has headers for serial, parallel and usb so it'll be a case of tracking those down. Can't wait to show my daughter what a 3.5" Floppy drive looks like and how little data it holds.
The Tyan Board I mentioned lusting after was a Tyan S1598 Trinity ATX but these are rocking horse dropping rare.
 
Pics due imminently :)

DFI P5BV3+ vB2 (Via Apollo Chipset, 1 x AGP, 3 x PCI, 4 x ISA, 3 x Pc100 Ram slots, 2 x Serial, 1 x USB Header, 1 x Parallel)
AMD K-6III 400 (2.4V) - cooling by a copper heatsink with 60mm fan
2 x 256MB PC133 (running at 100mhz)
1 x 20GB Maxtor Fireball
1 x IDE to SDCARD Converter
1 x FDD
Creative Labs SB16 ISA

Found an old AT Case at my mums - circa 1999 and there is also a 17" CTX Trinitron (can't remember if it works or not) - A Din type Cherry keyboard and a 3 button mouse..
CDROM will be IDE
GPU probably an ATI 9700 Pro AGP
 
Looking forward to seeing the pics of this. I hope the trinitron works. Those screens are getting harder and harder to come by.
 
Motherboard as arrived from Ukraine :)

Retro PC build by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

Retro PC build by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

Retro PC build by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

Retro PC build by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

Retro PC build by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

A bit of dusting :)

Retro PC build by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

Retro PC build by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

Retro PC build by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

The K-3iii had a fair bit of old heat spreading muck on it

20230420_234121 by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

20230420_234128 by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

Reasonably presentable now

20230421_000328 by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

Storage converter for IDE to SDCard
20230422_165752 by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

CPU Cooling
20230422_165650 by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr
 
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Due in are new serial, usb, ide and parallel cables, ram, floppy drive (<€5) and the Soundblaster 16 (€) card, probably €75 for that lot. MB was €100 once postage and customs factored in. Add €40 for a CWT 500W Psu and I'm in for around €250 without knowing if a single thing works &#55358;&#56611;
I picked up a Graham Slee Voyager portable headphone amp to firm up the sound out - bargain at 50 notes

Plan is to install OS/2 boot manager and create 3 or 4 primary partitions catering for the various OS personalities. I'm aiming for DOS 6, Win 98SE and OS/2 v4. The MB / CPU combo can be set to run at 25mhz to to act like a super 386 or 486 going up to something that would run NT 4.0 / Win 2000 reasonably comfortably so a nice spread covering the whole of the 90s
 
One thing about this retro lark is just how incredibly precise you need to be when ordering - I had two f ups today - I had ordered a new ide cable and went by 40 pin, mistake. Somewhere along the line presumably around the turn of the century the 40 pin / 40 wire morphed into 39 pin / 80 wire with one of the pins blanked out. The motherboard header has all 40 pins but not the cable header :) live and learn. 2nd was the parallel connector, It arrived in a low profile mount, ffs grr - again not the end of the world but silly and annoying - Think the case has a cutout for it and the serial ports.

SB16 and FDD shipped today - luckily it is one of the versions with the Yamaha OPL Chipset - outstanding to decide / choose are the GPU and CDRom - I'm betwixt and between on these last two because if I want joys of a hardcore native install of OS/2 then I need to be a bit careful on the GPU - Nvidia support was pretty crap so it'll be something like an S3 805 (period mid 90s), a Matrox G400 (Rolls Royce 2D quality) or an ATI 9700 (install in VGA, couple of Fixpacks and I'll be good to go) - CDRom wise - Toshiba scsi was the dogs dangly bits back in the day, means a scsi card, maybe scsi drives too.. I just so happen to have a Quantum Fireball scsi drive somewhere about :p

Anyone say scope creep... :D
 
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Went with a Matrox G450 AGP card for €13, not a stellar 3D gamer but if its absolutely awful I can swap it out. Optical drive will be a Sony DVD job that I picked up for a fiver.
Soundblaster 16 arrived - woohoo

90s sound by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr
 
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Retro PC = Retro Gaming, so input devices are all important. Found an unopened, still in plastic wrapping, boxed CH Products Mach 3 - Perfect for X-Wing / Tie Fighter

CH Products Mach 3 by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

CH Products Mach 3 by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

And I have a few more GPUs on the way, an S3 Trio 3D/2X (4MB), Nvidia MX440 (64MB) & Nvidia FX5200 (128MB) - €25 shipped - still waiting on the Matrox.
 
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Have been in a good fight with this. 2 by physical HDDs are dead, one with a clicking noise and another just meh.. 2 out of the 3 GPUs that arrived worked (1 by S3, 1 by Nvidia) so I had a bios screen. I'm unsure if the FDD is funky or the cable. I suspect the cable.
So I have no FDD, no physical HDDs :) but I do have that IDE to SDCard converter.

While I wait for new cables I had an idea to use my VMWare Workstation on my master PC to create a HDD on an SDCard. I then created a VM but used a physical drive (SDCard) and installed OS/2 (might as well go full on :p) onto that. Some arguments over driver ownership and partitions and stuff but I was able to boot into an OS/2 drive on the Retro machine and watch the BIOS run through checks and OS/2 Config.Sys start running. Where I've hit a roadblock is OS/2 is installing to a VMware Graphics card and getting confused with the physical S3 or Nvidia. It did pick up the SB16 card though :)

Interesting thing about the board, I inadvertently ordered 1 x 512MB stick and 2 x 256MB sticks - info for the board suggests that it might run 3 x 256MB with a later bios but does not support 512MB sticks and the 256s must be double sided, where it becomes interesting is that, if I populate, the board will read the 256s as 128s and the 512 as 256s (all single sided) so it will initialise with a max of 512MB ram.

USB works ok with keyboard and mouse so that is a bonus but I have a seriously moldy / dirty Cherry KB with a Din connector that also works, been using that as I might be able to use USB mass storage once I get to a GUI :)

I have an updated goal for this machine, back in the day I ran both X-Wing and Privateer within OS/2 - that is my aim now.
 
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The CH Products Mach III works!

OS/2 in its latest iterations (Arca Noae 5.0) seems to have an issue with older GPUs (circa 200x) so I reverted back to Ecomstation 2.1 and SNAP graphics driver. Away on a hack. Installed at 800x600 in VMWare Workstation, Migrated the SDCard to the Retro PC and booted into a desktop. Quick settings change to 1280x1024 and a reboot and i'm running native.

20230509_180725 by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

Pulled the X-Wing Directory from my GOG install. Opened a DOS Full Screen and Typed Xwing! Started first time, prompted me to calibrate the joystick and I popped into the proving ground.

20230509_175323 by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

20230509_180611 by Robbie Corrigan, on Flickr

Last trick to figure out now is SB Sound within DOS and i'm looking at using a IDE DOM card instead of a SDCard. Then its finding a case and tidying up the power switch (i'm using a screwdriver to bridge a couple of pins)
 
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