Retro Pc Build!!!

The Cobra

2[H]4U
Joined
Jun 19, 2003
Messages
3,175
Hey everyone, well I decided to build a Retro PC For myself. Well not build, just get a graphics card and sound card for it.

It is an HP Vectra 6 with a Pentium Pro 200 with 2MB of Cache, 64MB of Ram, a massive 20gb HD and a Matrox graphics card with 4MB. I am def swapping out the graphics card and adding an audio card to it.

Tend to play XWing, Hexen/Heretic, Doom and other games of that era.

Advice? Thx!
 

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Retro my arse..

that thing's a CLASSIC, almost antique, office machine from da late 80's-early 90's !

And note those cache/memory/vram numbers, which are in MB's not GB's, hehehehe :D
I use to live in NYC and in my early days of tech support for a clearing house on Wall St, we had a lot of these. These machines were $5k at the time with Windows NT. They were given to buyers and sellers to utilize multiple monitors when the first Bloomberg stuff came up over ethernet.

I def want to bump up the ram on it to 192MB (max).
 
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Yeah always had a soft spot for Pentium pro dualies, think I have 3 or 4 kicking around in the hoard. They were such enormous chips with crazy amounts of cache, unfortunately that cache also prevented them from running very fast. Thats why P2s had the cache seperate on the cpu board.
 
Which Matrox card? Also for a P200 era machine are you sure you shouldn't be looking for a 3DFX card for 3D rather than swapping out the Matrox? Back around that time Matrox Millennium/preferably Millennium 2 was pretty top end for non-3D accelerated stuff, and 3DFX is what you wanted for 3D. In other words don't be so quick to toss that Matrox because what you want for 3D from that era doesn't do 2D.

XWing, Hexen/Heretic, and Doom are pre-P200 era games. I ran those on a 486. Or at least Doom, Hexen, and Heretic. They made way too many Star Wars games and I can't keep track of them all 20+ years later. I know I played some Star Wars games on my 486 back in the day, just not sure which ones anymore except for TIE Fighter.
 
Which Matrox card? Also for a P200 era machine are you sure you shouldn't be looking for a 3DFX card for 3D rather than swapping out the Matrox? Back around that time Matrox Millennium/preferably Millennium 2 was pretty top end for non-3D accelerated stuff, and 3DFX is what you wanted for 3D. In other words don't be so quick to toss that Matrox because what you want for 3D from that era doesn't do 2D.

XWing, Hexen/Heretic, and Doom are pre-P200 era games. I ran those on a 486. Or at least Doom, Hexen, and Heretic. They made way too many Star Wars games and I can't keep track of them all 20+ years later. I know I played some Star Wars games on my 486 back in the day, just not sure which ones anymore except for TIE Fighter.
Im looking at a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI or a Diamond Viper 550 (Nvidia Riva TNT) and pair it up with a Voodoo 3 with 12mb for 3d pass thru.
 
For that era of games, sound card-wise, I'd go with something SB16-compatible, but watch out for the hanging note bug, especially for X-Wing/TIE Fighter and their iMUSE dynamic MIDI soundtracks.

Since you have PCI slots, going for an SB Live! with SB16 emulation for DOS titles could be a more cost-effective choice, given the price of ISA sound cards for gaming builds these days. As a bonus, you'd get EAX 2 in Win9x-native games, but that's starting to get into the era of 500 MHz to 1 GHz CPUs.

Graphics-wise, the ideal thing would be to get a Voodoo1 or Voodoo2 and pair it with the existing Matrox card, but those tend to go for crack pipe prices now. Voodoo3 may be a decent all-in-one choice, but a Voodoo5 5500 will be horrendously bottlenecked on any CPU under 1 GHz, never mind a Pentium Pro running at a fifth of that.

It's too bad you don't have AGP in there; I would've offered up a Voodoo3 2000 for that purpose.
 
What a gorgeous machine. You nailed it! I've been patiently waiting for a beige box to pop up locally for a build. Jealous.
 
For that era of games, sound card-wise, I'd go with something SB16-compatible, but watch out for the hanging note bug, especially for X-Wing/TIE Fighter and their iMUSE dynamic MIDI soundtracks.

Since you have PCI slots, going for an SB Live! with SB16 emulation for DOS titles could be a more cost-effective choice, given the price of ISA sound cards for gaming builds these days. As a bonus, you'd get EAX 2 in Win9x-native games, but that's starting to get into the era of 500 MHz to 1 GHz CPUs.

Graphics-wise, the ideal thing would be to get a Voodoo1 or Voodoo2 and pair it with the existing Matrox card, but those tend to go for crack pipe prices now. Voodoo3 may be a decent all-in-one choice, but a Voodoo5 5500 will be horrendously bottlenecked on any CPU under 1 GHz, never mind a Pentium Pro running at a fifth of that.

It's too bad you don't have AGP in there; I would've offered up a Voodoo3 2000 for that purpose.
I was thinking of a Diamond Stealth Viper V550 (Nvidia TNT) as the main card that I have seen on ebay. I have my old Monster 3dfx Voodoo 2 packed away that I will also use.
 
Well, I got my primary graphics card. I am going with my same build I had 20+ years ago.

The graphics card is an Nvidia TNT 16MB card. I paid $55 on ebay.
Still have much more to purchase.
 

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Man that VGA connector looks terrible, screws are chewed up and looks really corroded. Hopefully it works okay.
 
The full Riva TNT. The M64 came out with the TNT 2 the following year.
And so started my loathing of truncated bus graphics cards. The M64 was *extremely* popular with OEMs though. Cheap and cheerful while you get to claim your piece-o-shit box has a discrete graphics card. *shudders*
 
Update: So I finally got around to booting her up (Been rather busy) and sure as hell, works like a charm. I ordered a keyboard and mouse for the retro pc. Next is what OS to put on? I still have my copy of Win2000 and most of the games that I played in that era worked just fine. I have to bump up the ram to the system max; 192MB. Cheap on ebay. Just not to sure if I should order a copy of Win 95 or 98 as well.

Opinions?
 

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Update: So I finally got around to booting her up (Been rather busy) and sure as hell, works like a charm. I ordered a keyboard and mouse for the retro pc. Next is what OS to put on? I still have my copy of Win2000 and most of the games that I played in that era worked just fine. I have to bump up the ram to the system max; 192MB. Cheap on ebay. Just not to sure if I should order a copy of Win 95 or 98 as well.

Opinions?
Beautiful. :) I would definitely try xp with that much ram. You can get 95 and 98se online at winworld I believe. XP should recognize all the hardware and run pretty decent although win2k will be faster. 95/98se will feel slower than 2k or xp due to the 16-bit code not running as fast on the PPro, but it still is fast by period standards.
 
For that era of games, sound card-wise, I'd go with something SB16-compatible, but watch out for the hanging note bug, especially for X-Wing/TIE Fighter and their iMUSE dynamic MIDI soundtracks.

Since you have PCI slots, going for an SB Live! with SB16 emulation for DOS titles could be a more cost-effective choice, given the price of ISA sound cards for gaming builds these days. As a bonus, you'd get EAX 2 in Win9x-native games, but that's starting to get into the era of 500 MHz to 1 GHz CPUs.

Graphics-wise, the ideal thing would be to get a Voodoo1 or Voodoo2 and pair it with the existing Matrox card, but those tend to go for crack pipe prices now. Voodoo3 may be a decent all-in-one choice, but a Voodoo5 5500 will be horrendously bottlenecked on any CPU under 1 GHz, never mind a Pentium Pro running at a fifth of that.

It's too bad you don't have AGP in there; I would've offered up a Voodoo3 2000 for that purpose.
I def would have taken you up on the voodoo card.
 
Well, I got my primary graphics card. I am going with my same build I had 20+ years ago.

The graphics card is an Nvidia TNT 16MB card. I paid $55 on ebay.
Still have much more to purchase.
Wow, I didn't know nVidia's older cards were creeping up in value too... I remember when this stuff wouldn't even sell for $20, especially non-3dfx stuff of that vintage. How times have changed!

You also mentioned already having a Voodoo2, so that's great to have as well if you have no luck with Glide wrappers. I'm quite fond of their versatility, as they work in PCs, Macs, and possibly other PCI systems with no need to flash them or do anything else beforehand - just install the drivers and go. (Also, Virtual PC 3.0 passthrough!)

SCSI was the best.
Total pain to source cables for, though - so many connectors, SE vs. LVD vs. HVD for the higher speeds, and I lucked out in scoring the last few cables I really need at VCF East last weekend - HD50 to CN-50, and CN-50 to CN-50. (Gotta keep terminators handy for all of those, too!)

I had a lot of DB-25 to CN-50 cables, which is fine for connecting a single device to a Mac or an Amiga (maybe X68000 too?), but old SGI and Sun workstations tend to have HD68 connectors due to their higher-end SCSI standards. Found an HD68 to HD50 adapter somewhere, then HD50 to CN-50 - except I had no CN-50 to CN-50 cable, so I was still unable to connect an external SCSI CD drive to my SGI Octane or my (now sold) Sun Blade 2000.

The protocol is solid stuff, though. SCSI never needed a 48-bit LBA update like IDE/ATA did, SAS is still going strong in the enterprise space for bulk storage on spinning rust, and iSCSI makes networked storage shares just like direct-attached block storage as far as your system's concerned, pretty cool. Then there's ATAPI, which most people don't even know is SCSI adapted to IDE/ATA for removable media...
 
I remember how sexy it was to have all your slots populated. Tnt2, sblive, nic, dvd decoder, I can't remember now what else I had jammed in there
I am trying to resist that path. My old PP200 was fully stocked and every port that could be taken was. I think this one will be as well. I am trying to not getting a 3DFX Voodoo 5 5500 PCI and sticking in there.
 
Well, one more toy. I have a keyboard and mouse ordered (ps2) and I will get my Voodoo2 when I go up to Maryland and visit my family next month.
 

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Ooohh…she’s alive. Will do a full install this weekend. I ordered a W2k cd with key off of eBay for $12. Will arrive next week. NT4 will do in the meantime. I’m surprised I still had my original NT4 buried in a box in my garage.

It's been so long...when installing the service packs, I do have to go in order, right? When I used it, I always did a fresh install with a CD from my old MSDN library that already had the SP slip-streamed in the CD.
 

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Ooohh…she’s alive. Will do a full install this weekend. I ordered a W2k cd with key off of eBay for $12. Will arrive next week. NT4 will do in the meantime. I’m surprised I still had my original NT4 buried in a box in my garage.

It's been so long...when installing the service packs, I do have to go in order, right? When I used it, I always did a fresh install with a CD from my old MSDN library that already had the SP slip-streamed in the CD.
I know it is Windows NT but I'm nostalgic about the blue pre-installation screen from all of the times I had to install and reinstall Windows XP as it had basically the same screen!
 
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