Wanted to get back into the DOS era of software and games (it’s what I grew up on.) I would have preferred something older, but I ended up with a Slot 1 Pentium III/500. Fortunately it has an ISA slot so all the truly DOS friendly sound cards.
Specs: Gateway 4W4 Something Pentium III/500 384MB Yamaha YMF715 ISA sound card (SoundBlaster Pro and OPL3) S3 Trio 3D/2X AGP mt32-pi (Roland MT-32 and General MIDI) Generic Compact Flash-IDE adapter Gravis Gamepad that still has that little joystick you screw in. 20” Dell Trinitron (forgot the model)
Testing it with Tyrian here, but my plan is to play through Ultima Underworld soon on it.
What’s everybody else’s vintage computer of choice?
I grew up in an Apple household. This was way before it was cool. We had an LCIII (one of the ‘pizza’ box 68k Macs). I could only dream of having a 486 or Pentium machine like some of my friends had.
That said there were a couple old 68k Mac games I remember enjoying. Movod II comes to mind… I also remember some of my first experiences on the internet on those 68k Macs. Connecting to AOL with a USRobotics 28.8kbps modem… takes me back.
Sort of only half-vintage, but I built one of the homebrew8088.com PCB sets. Ended up filling up all ten slots:
- 20MHz-rated NEC V40, downclocked to 8MHz for compatibility (new build). The crystal is socketed and you can actually get it to limp through to a DOS prompt at 20MHz with enough wait states and a curated choice of cards.
- DMA controller addon card (new build)
- CH375 ISA-to-USB card (new but modified to support faster reads)
- Serial/HD floppy controller (new, kit-built)
- XT-IDE (new, kit-built)
- Combo I/O for parallel/game/two more serial (vintage)
- Clock Card (new, kit-built)
- RTL8109 NIC (NOS)
- RTL3106 SVGA card (vintage, got it used in like 1997)
- Custom SRAM memory card supporting 64k of ROM and filling any holes in the high memory space with UMBs. (new build, actually working on a new revision of the design)
It’s not 1000% IBM compatible, but the recent board revisions are pretty compatible with the most important features.