Old computers

[~Slideways~]

I like old computers (80's / 90's) because I grew up with them I guess, so here's a thread about doing stuff with them.

Yesterday I picked up a few old computers for free from a local guy whos moving, have been looking out for something to build into a DOS gaming thing. 

They were under his house and the cases were a bit rusty, not a good sign. But they were all beige which means they should be at least from the 90's.

Got them home and noticed one has a turbo button, which must be early 90's. Opened it up and found its a 486 DX2 66Mhz which is perfect. and the inside is in good condition. The VGA connector was corroded and the case is too.

It did power on but didn't display anything or make cool old HDD or floppy drive noises, but after remounting and cleaning the video card etc it now displaying the POST check but then fails to read the HDD.

After remounting the expansion card (which is for IDE, FDD etc) it started making clunking noises. Good....good... this is fine. It stopped hammering after the next power cycle.

Opened it up and got it to at least spin and the arm moves but its not doing anything else, the bios doesn't detect it even if I manually put in the info. 

Pretty sure its from 1994, so the HDD is 25 years old. Probably wasn't designed to last this long. But these 486's are known to last for ever so hopefully the rest works.

 

 

It also came with the original monitor with 'General' badging (with the USA flag design) which I know we had as a family computer. I think that was a Pentium 1 though, it could play Duke Nukem 3D at least.

I'd like to see if a Compact Flash card would work as a HDD since IDE drives this small (this was a 426Mb one) aren't going to be easy to find.

Then set it up to finally finish Kings Quest 3 and stuff haha

[~Slideways~]

The monitor must be 13” and has awesome manual knob controls underneath.

32mb of ram, it must have been a beast in its day lol.

66Mhz which will be good for games of the era. I could just use dosbox to emulate but for proper nostalgia I want to have the right CRT display and hopefully a working IBM model M keyboard.

also dosbox just doesn’t emulate the internal speaker noises right for me.

I need to find a working 5 1/4” floppy drive now.

and maybe figure out an lcd display for the cpu speed on the front since it has the window but no lcd stuff.

 

[kyteler]

Poverty spec. Cyrix instead of an Intel, damn yo. 

Get some Carmen Sandiago up in thurr or some Heretic or Doom I, maybe Rise of the Triads. 

[Hemi]

Oh man, heretic. That brings back memories.

[63Ragtop]

Oh yeah, that energy star logo, legit!

[~Slideways~]

37 minutes ago, kyteler said:

Poverty spec. Cyrix instead of an Intel, damn yo. 

Get some Carmen Sandiago up in thurr or some Heretic or Doom I, maybe Rise of the Triads. 

Lol yeah Cyrix got into trouble for reverse engineering intels stuff.

Heretic!

[Toucan]

Had same monitor with our first 386. So much time spent staring at that thing

[Bling]

Hooked Sega (not genuine unit) up to a TV yesterday, Micro Machines FTW. Not a PC, but same sort of era. All the original sega units I have seem to connect via the aerial which is a bit more of a ballache to setup.

[kicker]

Oh the memories and lack of it. 

CF card can be used as an IDE HDD, at least it worked on a newer machine I had setup as a Nas box

[~Slideways~]

2 hours ago, kicker said:

Oh the memories and lack of it. 

CF card can be used as an IDE HDD, at least it worked on a newer machine I had setup as a Nas box

Yeah that’s what I want to do, will have to be a small one or at least partitioned I reckon.

[Bling]

Won't any IDE drive work? Just won't recogonise the whole space. Been a long time since I've even seen IDE stuff.

[~Slideways~]

17 hours ago, Bling said:

Won't any IDE drive work? Just won't recogonise the whole space. Been a long time since I've even seen IDE stuff.

I've had issues with other old computers not recognising big 'modern' IDE drives, I might have something that I could partition and see if it works. Also just want to try compact flash since it'll be like having an SSD in the early 90's.

 

[Bling]

Ah fair enough. On the plus side people are giving away / biffing IDE stuff.

[Muncie]

I had 2x 20 megabyte MFM hard drives in my first computer i built from the inorganic rubbish collection..... thank fuck those days are long gone.

[kyteler]

33 minutes ago, Muncie said:

I had 2x 20 megabyte MFM hard drives in my first computer i built from the inorganic rubbish collection..... thank fuck those days are long gone.

My first computer ran from cassettes or cartridges. 

[Bling]

We get it m9, you're old.

/Still have all my C64 junk in the wardrobe, tape, 5 1/4" discs, probably no suitable screen.

[~Slideways~]

1 hour ago, Bling said:

We get it m9, you're old.

/Still have all my C64 junk in the wardrobe, tape, 5 1/4" discs, probably no suitable screen.

I never had any amiga / commodore stuff only ever had IBM PC stuff growing up. But I do have an old monitor with a scart connection which is probably for an amiga of some sort.

I remember playing on what must have been a c64 or something in form 1 or what ever it’s called now. There was this game kind of like at Arkanoid except it might have been a moving tank at the bottom and you shoot moving things along the top . I beat the teachers score and he wasn’t happy lol. Wonder what the game was...

 

Also I remember our first pc was a 386 which dad said the sales man was adamant you’d never need more than the massive 40mb hard drive lol. Before that I’m pretty sure we had a ZX spectrum but my only memory of that was that squishy feeling buttons.

[Raizer]

2 hours ago, kyteler said:

My first computer ran from punch cards

 

[~Slideways~]

I still have my last save game from 1996 and it works!

[~Slideways~]

Aaannnd I’m dead.