Jealaous of that video game library. Fabien has good taste indeed.
Building my childhood dream PC
11–20 of 90 posts
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#12I love this. What a trip down memory lane.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#13My entry was the mentioned 486DX2-66Mhz. Double speed CD-Rom and Sound Blaster. Norton Commander was great, Doom and Pirates Gold where my games of choice.
Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't do with QBasic :)
Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#14My teenage dream machine was a PDP-8 (the original) and a Teletype ASR-33. Fortunately, I never got it.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#15PS/1 seems like an odd choice since it was intended for the home and small business market. It was IBM's answer to beige box clones dominating everyone who wasn't an institutional buyer and paying for the PS/2 premium.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#16I can't say a PS/1 would have been my first choice for a 486 platform; I'd imagine there are faster motherboards out there and a desktop (i.e. ASUS w/ SiS chipsets). That said, I had a 486/66, so... (some Dell). And it looks like the PS/1 is missing VLB, but of course the video card is integrated in this model so that makes sense. I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card and a Sound Blaster AWE64…
> I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card This is exactly what the IBM PS/1 2168 have (see the unboxing section).
The video frame doesn't render; on macOS Firefox it shows "No video with supported format and MIME type found.", so I missed it. But looking at the pictures, it only has ISA slots on the expansion board, unless I'm missing something.
But I missed that part of your post. I haven't seen integrated VLB before, only slotted. Does this board have an expansion to 2MiB? Though that would only matter if you wanted higher resolution/colors.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#17I can't say a PS/1 would have been my first choice for a 486 platform; I'd imagine there are faster motherboards out there and a desktop (i.e. ASUS w/ SiS chipsets). That said, I had a 486/66, so... (some Dell). And it looks like the PS/1 is missing VLB, but of course the video card is integrated in this model so that makes sense. I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card and a Sound Blaster AWE64…
I was always afraid of a lot of the IBM and Compaq computers because of all of the incompatibility notes or issues I'd read about in README.TXT (usually minor workarounds), and then to a greater extent in getting Linux running on them.
Linux wasn't too much of a concern when these machines were in their prime. But yes, I remember those compatibility notes.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#18You never forget your first teenage dream PC. For me, it would be a 8800 GTX SLI build with a QX6850. And now I've revealed how old I am :^)
Too young to remember how to configure an autoexec.bat/config.sys for maximum memory in Falcon Gold, too old to forget what a Folder is.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#19You never forget your first teenage dream PC. For me, it would be a 8800 GTX SLI build with a QX6850. And now I've revealed how old I am :^)
Too young to remember how to configure an autoexec.bat/config.sys for maximum memory in Falcon Gold, too old to forget what a Folder is.
Fire up MEMMAKER.EXE which makes recommendations after two restarts.
Re: Building my childhood dream PC
#20I can't say a PS/1 would have been my first choice for a 486 platform; I'd imagine there are faster motherboards out there and a desktop (i.e. ASUS w/ SiS chipsets). That said, I had a 486/66, so... (some Dell). And it looks like the PS/1 is missing VLB, but of course the video card is integrated in this model so that makes sense. I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card and a Sound Blaster AWE64…
The 486 generation was fraught with bus wars and the motherboard market was rather fragmented.
I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system, and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus. Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to be compatible with stuff.
My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddled him with the MCA Microchannel bus. A likewise superior bit of engineering that was compatible with virtually nothing. Thankfully, Dad never felt a burning need to trick out his system.
Personally, I enjoyed the standard ISA path on my 286 and 386. It was with some regret that I chose VLB for the 486 board, because compared to the above buses, VLB was a hack and a kludge, and you could smell the duct tape and chewing gum on every expansion card.
However, VLB expansion cards were as plentiful as Star Wars action figures, so I was able to absolutely cram cards into a full-size tower until several generations of Pentiums obsoleted everything except PCI.