The 'new' retro PC project

The-Plethora · 12 Apr 2017 at 22:25

This seemed to start off by looking at some old pictures I had saved over the years. Whenever I got a new piece of hardware or upgraded things I generally took pictures of stuff to do with my PC setups partly because it was amazing at the time and partly to be able to look back on as technology progresses.
Anyway, I found this picture of my (then) great PC, a rhapsody in beige!

I think this would have been taken around 2001 / 2002, a great time in the world of PCs, Quake 3 was out, Unreal tournament and my personal favorite team fortress classic would have been the order of the day and maybe even the first Battlefield 1942 wasn't too far off. There were amazing single player games around that time like Red Alert 2 and Clive Barker's Undying, Deus Ex, Half-Life.

So that was my awesome PC, note on the right side of the desk is a tiny branded scanner my dad would have gotten with his Tiny PC at the time, these days they are probably a quarter of the height.
On the front of the PC were 2 hard disk caddies that I bought because they looked cool, a CD drive and even an early DVD drive.

The monitor if I remember was a 19" Hansol model, gave a great picture at 1600*1200 before HD was even a thing, lucky I got it as my original 14 inch samsung samtron monitor put out a maximum resolution of 1024*768 at an eye destroying 60Hz!

At the back of the desk would have been my Diamond 56K modem which I upgraded to from the US Robotics 14.4 model that would not let me play a game on quake.demon.co.uk back in the day.
The other monitor would have been hooked up to that PC under the desk but I can't remember too much about that, possibly my old AMD K62-400MHz or a Pentium 166.

Feeling a little nostalgic I have decided to put something together to relive the old days, true you can just emulate and even a lot of the old games will run just fine even now but it's not quite the same.

Thankfully I had saved a picture of the inside of the PC back then. I can't be 100% on the motherboard but I am fairly sure it would have been an AMD Duron 700MHz processor but possibly twined with only 96mb of SDRAM, I seem to remember having 64mb and paying a huge amount for the extra 32mb but it did make a big difference.
From right to left the cards would have been a Kyro Prophet 4500 from Power VR, an Appian Jeronimo pro which I bought because it had 2 outputs and using 2 monitors was properly amazing, an analogue WIN TV card, and soundblaster live value

Thankfully I had saved lots of stuff over the years so have some parts already I can use and a few I will need to get from auction sites (jeez do I have to call it that?).
First rule though, NO BEIGE!, no faded yellow plastic cases, it must look modern and if I can use more modern parts as well to improve performance or reliability then it's all good

The-Plethora · 12 Apr 2017 at 22:37

As I say I already have several parts saved that I had been planning to use for this. Up in the loft I had several socket A processors but they were all too fast! An Athlon XP 2500-XPM, Semprons, much too new for this. I had a couple of motherboards but they were micro ATX ones and I really wanted a full ATX one that I could eventually mount in a modern case, so off to the auction site I go.

I think I did rather well and better than expected!

Someone had incorrectly listed this motherboard and CPU as socket A.

That is a slot A AMD Athlon running at 800MHz on a gigabyte GA-71X motherboard. The slot A CPUs if I remember were only available for around 9 months or so and even the CPUs alone seem to go for reasonable money now. I paid a total of £20 delivered, what a steal, it even came with the backplate.

The board and CPU arrived only a few days later, I quickly rigged something together out in the open to check it worked and all was fine. Thankfully I had a spare 128mb module of SDRAM in the loft to test with.

We take a lot for granted these days, this board has no on board video, no on board sound, no on board networking and only 2 USB ports, I suspect they are USB1.1.
However, it does have plenty of expansion slots, and if they are there I plan to use all of them if I can

LewisRaz · 12 Apr 2017 at 23:21

Love a retro build mate look forward to seeing it go

paradigm · 13 Apr 2017 at 07:23

Watching this one with interest as I'm just about to embark on similar, only mine WILL BE BEIGE, but it's going to have some modern twists...

orbitalwalsh · 13 Apr 2017 at 08:15

Tiny PC , damn brings back some memories

The-Plethora · 13 Apr 2017 at 10:14

OK, so I have 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP Slot and 2 ISA slots to play with. Here are my current card plans

3DFX Voodoo 3 2000 PCI

I mean, it had to have something 3DFX based didn't it? I actually got this from an old office PC at work they were throwing out. Seemed odd to have it in an office PC but I am glad I rescued it.
This was actually the first graphics card I bought from PC world back in the day. I was given a 3DFX Voodoo Rush when I got my first PC which was not compatible with very much and I spent my Christmas money on one of these which was a great upgrade and lasted me several years.
This is the same PCI Voodoo 3 PCI 2000 model I had, 16mb of memory and 143MHz I believe at stock clocks.

Soundblaster Live Value

I was given this by a friend who was having a clear out. I also had this exact model at the time. It was a great card. I particularly remember playing around in the EAX control panel selecting the concert hall preset to make music sound great. When I first got this card I had it in a Pentium 166 machine and I remember reading that the main chip on the card had the equivalent power of a Pentium 166 itself, Impressive stuff.
The board has no on board sound so I had to use something. I had a spare SB Audigy 2 and Audigy 4 but they were too new.

USB Card

The motherboard itself only had 2 USB ports on the back which I suspect were USB 1.1 compliant, one would be taken up likely with a keyboard and mouse dongle leaving just one port free for copying files from USB at a slow rate. I managed to find this USB 2 card for just £5 delivered on an auction site and in a fetching blue colour as well, lets hope it auto installs in the OS I decide to use.

SATA Raid card

Obviously the board doesn't come with many modern connectors we take for granted. I bought this card around 2 years ago to use for another project but I ended up not using it. At the moment I am not sure if I will use IDE hard disks and maybe a compact flash boot drive or the abundance of SATA hard disks and DVD drives I have stashed in the loft that I rescued for old office PCs. Adding this card will give me the option though and a lot more flexibility for connectivity.

3Com Ethernet 100mbps

Another old PC rescue. The board has no on board LAN at all. I am not sure how wise it will be hooking an old PC up to the Internet but I could at lest use it to transfer files from local PCs. This would take up the last of the 5 PCI slots the board has and at the moment this is option B

Ricoh PCMCIA card and CISCO PCMCIA

I am tempted to go with this. I already had the PCI PCMCIA adapter card in one of my box of bits and I always thought that old PCMCIA cards were cool

After looking on an auction site I found the CISCO wireless G 54mbps card hardly used from an old project for just £10 delivered, boxed and with drivers, very cool.
Hopefully I could still connect this to my current wireless N router as it has support for G but I am not 100% sure about the security options it supports yet.

Kyro 2 Prophet 4500 64mb Power VR

One thing the PC would be missing was the graphics card I had on that PC, a Kyro 2 prophet 4500 AGP card. This would allow me to switch between the PCI Voodoo 3 and AGP Kyro 2 by changing primary graphics adapters in Windows. A little messy but I could potentially use them to run 2 monitors or simply switch back and forth for glide games.
This was the card that I updated to from that PCI Voodoo 3. I remember spending a lot of time looking at benchmarks and power VR released this card that was actually faster than the Geforce 2 MX 200 and MX400 and in some cases even beat the Geforce 2 GTS thanks to it's memory efficient tile based rendering technique.
I had a bit of trouble getting hold of this from an auction site at a decent price but eventually found one over in Italy for about £23 delivered. It was the exact 64mb model I had back then with the same cooler, 64mb RAM and TV out.

That leaves the 2 ISA slots. Really I would only have access to the end one due to the spacing of the slots as you can use either a PCI or ISA slot in that one place. Looking at ISA cards I could get a network card but that would probably be fairly slow due to the bus speed or an AWE64 sound card and I already have sound covered so for now I will leave these.

paradigm · 13 Apr 2017 at 14:22

I've got an ISA video card somewhere, would make a great 2D card to pair with some nice voodoo2 sli cards, now i just need to find the Voodoo 2s!

The-Plethora · 13 Apr 2017 at 14:59

I did look into voodoo 2s initially but they have shot up in price, even the Voodoo 3s seem to go for about 40 quid plus postage. A couple of years back I saw one of those Obsidian boards on the bay, 2 voodoo 2 cards in SLI on one board, it was going for something like £30, kicking myself for not buying it.

The-Plethora · 14 Apr 2017 at 12:08

I ordered a case this morning so hopefully that should be here on the Tuesday after the easter holiday. However for now there are plenty of things I can get on with.

First job

It actually still had the correct time and date in the BIOS but for a few pounds it will be good for years to come.

I had a delivery of memory also. I had that 128mb stick of SDRAM which would have been fine but I thought I would see what else I could buy at auction. The board itself reports it will support a total of 768mb of RAM. Thinking about it that would be extreme overkill for what I had planned. I eventually settled on this, 2 matching 128MB sticks giving me a total of 256mb, more than enough. I could use this with the existing stick but my OCD of different RAM won't let me

I paid a total of £6 delivered and they even came in the original packaging with instructions.

Checking the various expansion cards for fit. All good

The-Plethora · 14 Apr 2017 at 17:05

Ok, first issue. No BIOS access, I had to go up to the loft and pull out this old PS2 keyboard with PS2 track pad I had in the old days, from there since removing the battery I should be able to enable USB keyboard support in the BIOS.

Now to set the time and date and set optimized defaults, USB keyboard support and a boot sequence.

In the loft 'o' plenty I found 2 matching 80GB SATA hard disks, this should be ample space. I chose this so I can potentially install an OS on each drive and choose between them by simply changing the hard disk boot sequence, that way i don't have to mess around with boot managers, i'm not a big fan of those as if you need to swap out hard disks it can leave things non functional or in the worst case you are left with 2 operating systems that don't load.

I also choose 2 matching DVD ROM drives, both HP models, this will use all 4 ports of the PCI SATA card

I had a spare corsair 430w power supply I can use, it's quite over specced, 250 - 300W would have been fine back around 2000. This also has molex connectors on it which is quite handy and a mainboard connector that can split to handle the old ATX 1.1 specification.

I did seem to find that on the motherboard this cap is a bit close to the connector but just about fits in.

This seemed to be where I ran into a few problems. I set up the PC to boot from CD Rom but when ever the SATA card correctly detected the 2 80GB hard disks during the boot up sequence it would hard lock. I tried loads of times, changed several BIOS settings but it just would not get past it.

In the end I just wanted first to see if all this stuff I had thrown together actually works and so I rigged up a basic out of the box setup but this time using an IDE DVD drive and 60GB IDE hard disk and disconnected all the SATA drives from the SATA card.

No luck, then I cast my mind back and remembered drive jumpers! I set the hard disk to master and the DVD drive to slave and set the DVD drive as the first bootable device to begin the install.

So what is my OS of choice?

For me it had to be. In my opinion it's the best OS Microsoft ever released, it was a huge boost in stability after using Windows 98, no unnecessary bells and whistles like you get with XP and would also have been what I was running back on the original PC.
Remember I still have a second hard drive to use, I might go with XP but I am tempted to install windows ME, could be a pain installing stuff though.

paradigm · 14 Apr 2017 at 19:33

Good lad, I'm also going Windows 2000 on my build

Oddly i was also going to dual boot ME, I know most people don't agree, but I liked ME.

The-Plethora · 14 Apr 2017 at 20:46

Progress seems to be good! At first I didn't get a picture and then I realised you can set your primary graphics adaptor in the BIOS and mine was set to PCI (Voodoo 3) and not the Kyro 2 AGP card, although you can simply switch the VGA cable around to whichever card is active easily enough.

We have an install of Windows 2000, the PCMCIA wireless hooked up to my home network although it does seem quite flaky signal wise at the moment.

A blistering 800MHz (Almost) of computing power

Looks like it doesn't compare too favorably with a single core from a more modern CPU

I now have the drivers installed so I can get the configuration options for both the Kyro 2 and 3DFX tools for the Voodoo 3.

A quick hunt on the web and I got the drivers for the RAID card, remember at the moment I am using the old IDE just to test things.

At this point I decided I would just plug in my 2 80GB Samsung drives just to see if the card would crash. They both detected fine.

However at the point they did detect, something popped up on the screen. HP drive recovery software....ah! The disks were from old office PCs so they could have some funny partitions on them which caused the freeze on bootup.
I went into disk management and removed all partitions and formatted as NTFS. I also took my usual precaution of naming the drives Drive C and Drive D on the volume label. If you have 2 identical drives then you need to be pretty sure which one you are backing up etc so this helps things. I then rebooted the PC but left the SATA drives plugged in this time and it booted into Win 2K so crash resolved!

From here I was ready to run the Windows 2000 install again on the SATA disks but I realised I would have to deal with the whole "Press F6 to install a 3rd party SCSI or RAID driver" nonsense when I started the install of Windows again.
I didn't have the drivers on a disk but potentially could have copied them to the IDE drive and browsed to it.

At this point I thought I would take a punt. I have a copy of Acronis 2016 which comes with a boot disk so I set the PC to boot from the IDE DVD ROM drive and Acronis must have drivers for the Silicon image PCI SATA card as the IDE 60GB hard disk and the 2 80GB hard disks detected fine.
I figured I had nothing to lose a hopefully a bit of time to gain and so I simply used Acronis to clone the contents of the IDE drive to one of the SATA drives. I didn't hold out much hope though as the IDE drive install probably didn't have the boot up arrangement for the PCI SATA card.

It worked!

Very happy with that, I was not sure it would. So now I can do away with the IDE hard disk and DVD drive and boot from the SATA card which has the 2 80GB drives installed along with the 2 DVD drives.

As a quick test I played a little bit of Clive Barker's Undying both on the Kyro 2 and then on the Voodoo 3 by just changing the primary graphics adaptor. I was able to set the Kyro 2 to 1280*1024 at 32 bit and the Voodoo 3 at the same resolution but only the 16bit colour pallete it is limited to but in it's native glide API.

All looks good so far, but the case hasn't even arrived yet!

Flibster · 17 Apr 2017 at 19:09

No beige? So no vintage coolermaster aluminium cases then.

Sorry, they were officially champagne weren't they.

I just picked up a LianLi PC60 for pennies for a similar idea. Lucky that still got a buttload of old parts in storage. Not sure what's going inside it yet. P2, P4 or Athlon AXIA.

The-Plethora · 18 Apr 2017 at 13:38

Aha, great minds

The case has arrived, have to wait till later till I can work on it but it should come together pretty quickly now, but I can foresee some issues getting the front panel USB and audio connectors working but will cross that bridge when I come to it.

I have tried quite a few different cases over the years (most recently Rajintek) but I always find they lack the quality of Lian Li even at similar prices, the outsides might be aluminum but the interior I find is usually cheap steel. I actually already own one of these cases for my main PC and found it great to work with, good expansion options. The price has certainly changed though! I got the first for about £65, now it's £95!

The-Plethora · 19 Apr 2017 at 09:38

Couple of updates...

Few things in the post. First I found a VGA to HDMI converter. This will be very handy, when I looked back on the web a few years back you would be paying about £40 for a big breakout box, now you can get one for just a couple of quid, power is taken from USB power which is handy that I got that USB card for the extra power, it also has a pass through for a 3.5mm audio jack. I only have a 3 foot long lead so I have bought a short 15cm one that should be here soon.
I also picked up that short VGA cable, I am hoping that will allow me to easily mount the HDMI converter on the back of the case and then just swap the lead onto whatever graphics card I want to use.

Having HDMI does make things a lot easier connectivity wise, I wont have to bother with VGA and separate speakers but I haven't written off the idea of getting a 4:3 monitor for the correct aspect ratio and resolution support although I would go for a TFT rather than a bulky CRT personally, I only have so much space!

I have tried it out and it seems to work with a great picture although I think there are some resolutions it cannot support but I will have to get the VGA cable down from the loft again to test if that is the case or if something is crashing.

I also found a cheap USB to Ethernet adapter, unfortunately this does not seem to auto install on Windows 2000 and the drivers that are built in to the device (like a CDRom) do not work. I know it uses a Realtek chipset but I don't know which one as it is not written on, it was only a cheap thing from the auction site but it would allow me to plug it in to the USB 2.0 card for decent speed and it has a flat base on it which means I could easily mount it to the back of the case if I ever need it.

To be fair the ad did say it only worked on XP and above so I can't complain, I have tested it works fine on Windows 10. I am leaning towards XP for that second hard drive just because how many extra devices are supported due to it's huge staying power.

It's slowly starting to come together now, the back plate really didn't want to fit very easily but eventually it saw sense.

The hard drives are mounted with the vibration dampening screws with rubber gromets, the top drive has the Windows 2K install, not much on the other one at the moment

At the moment it looks a bit of a mess inside as I am putting things together, there isn't a huge amount of options to hide cables but I haven't really done any of that yet. The case fan on the left was originally an intake but I have swapped it round to be an exhaust. The PSU annoyingly has the cables coming out the 'wrong' side of the PSU so I can't easily hide them behind the motherboard tray.

YUCK! Don't worry, front bezels for the DVD drives are on the way, I thought I had some in the loft but they are for a black case.

I have a couple of other small but very important bits coming in the post but this is where it stands for now.

The-Plethora · 20 Apr 2017 at 18:15

The 2 new front drive Bezels are now installed which makes things look a lot better.

It wasn't pure coincidence that I bought a case with a 3.5 front panel

I know I know, what on earth can you store on that? Not much and I am not 100% set on using it just yet.

Part of the reason I am thinking of using it is that I have been buying Lian Li stuff for years and up in the loft I managed to find a silver Lian Li floppy drive bezel! Probably not easy to find these days.

I'll have to adjust the fit a little but the floppy drive sits behind it just fine.

A guy in Romania makes PC case badges, it was all about case badges back in the day right? right? Whats the point of having blazingly fast 3DFX hardware if your case doesn't shout about it! Also got a gigabyte badge for the motherboard.

Not sure about with floppy drive or without at the moment

Looks a bit neater and less case clutter without the drive though. Maybe I will get a fan controller there instead.

I 'may' get a big 3DFX decal made for one of the side panels of the case at some point, black on a silver background would look pretty cool. The case pretty much looks as I want it now, modern looking but with a couple of retro throwbacks

ExoMale · 20 Apr 2017 at 19:49

awesome bud.

tiny was the first computer brand i ever had when i was in primary school, brilliant computer for what it was. while i have a pi zero im going to do the retropi on, i had always thought about getting an old pc like for the old games, but the issue i would face is getting the games, im using dos game packages thats already setup with dosbox so all you do is unzip and launch and ones like Syndicate wars(most favored pc when i was a kid) looks and plays like crap, certainly disappointed me with the memories lol.

on another night, i had an old penitum 3 or something intel of old that only supported 128mb ram and pci only couple years ago and was surprised it would run windows 7 32bit, obviously with the age the graphics looked crap with all the florescent edgings as there were no drivers.

johnny sublime · 21 Apr 2017 at 01:28

Have a look for the sd card floppy disk mod would fit very well here.

The-Plethora · 23 Apr 2017 at 16:45

Hmm, this is starting to be a pain now! First a couple of updates...

A small thing but I don't think i will ever use water cooling on this PC so I swapped the water cooling grommets for end caps to make it a bit neater.

I have swapped the Cisco PCMCIA card and PCMCIA to PCI card for a normal PCI card. The signal was just not good enough. Bit of a pain to install, I had to use the drivers from an older release and the wireless client from a newer driver that would work with 2000 still (probably not intended to but it works!)

The back of the case now has the VGA to HDMI convert on the back. I am waiting on a shorter audio cable to turn up and need to look for a shorter USB to USB power supply cable for this to neaten it up.

One 'good' problem I ran into was that I quickly ran out of disk space and so I replaced to the 2 80GB drives with a 160 and a 250 Samsung, it was easy enough to clone the drives.

Now the pain...
The PC case has front mounted USB ports on it. I'd really like to hook these up to the PC, it would annoy me off if they were there and did not work. I wanted to connect them to the USB 2 PCI card but unfortunately that didn't have any pin headers (although does have an Internal USB port). I tried to look for a USB port to case front panel connector but I haven't found anything as yet.
That left me with the motherboards own on board connector, true it would likely be USB 1.1 speeds but that wouldn't bother me as long as it was functional.

Here is the issue.

So it is one of the old school 8 pin USB headers, more modern PCs use a 10 pin connector and it is keyed so you can only insert it one way.

The case however came with this rather basic looking USB 2 to 3 connector which would let you attach a USB2 motherboard connector to the USB 3 plug the case comes with for backwards compatability.

The USB 2 end of the plug only has 8 wires but the plug itself is too big to fit as it allows for 10 pins. The empty holes would be a ground pin that I don't think gets used and the blanked off connector hole that lets you insert it only one way into a USB 2 port. 8 wires, 8 pins. Note the order of the colours here on both sides, identical and black green white red.

I downloaded the motherboard manual and found the pin out for the USB port. Rather unhelpfully it shows you what pin 1 is but not any others, the manual itself seems to change for numbering pins horizontally to vertically, however I had the pin names and knew which pin one was.

From the layout of the USB 2 connector itself and checking pin outs online I labelled the pins.

Using a craft knife...(ok a cheap pair of tweezers) I was able to remove the USB 2 'key' hole and the ground hole that won't get used anyway.

I measured twice and cut once several times and plugged it in to the PC and turned it on, all good and I plugged a flash drive in that I could sacrifice if things went up in a puff of smoke. Success! all looks good and I can read and write files.

This is where it gets a bit confusing. the USB stick is plugged into the cases front mount blue USB 3 connector and is working. Plugging it in to the other port (black USB 2) detects an unknown USB device and the USB drive starts to get hot! that is not good (the drive does still work though). So something is wrong.

So I check my USB 2 plug again, I unplug one side, this shows the 4 wires on the side that works just fine (USB 3 connector on the front). Other USB 2 diagrams show the same colors next to each other on the other side (black green white and red) and I haven't changed anything. I also know the 4 pins here must be correctly wired as I have removed the other side, plugged it in and the USB drive works fine, so logically the issue can only be with the wires that side...or something else...

I am fairly sure I haven't wired it incorrectly on the USB 2 plug side, but it does then connect to the cases own USB 3 style connector as shown.

There is a bit of card between the wires. The wires behind the card are the side that work from the USB 2 connector. But I haven't made changes at this point to the connector but then I don't know if wiring standards have changed over the years or what is different on the front case panel for having both a USB 2 and 3 connector.

I checked colours and pin outs on USB 3 and they all look fine as well so I am confused. The black wire is the ground pin and there are a couple of other ground pin 'holes' on the plug you can use, I swapped the wire in those 2 to try a different ground but no luck. Any ideas?
I think I am just going to try and find another USB 2 card that has header pins, I don't want to toast anything but don't know why it doesn't work.

The-Plethora · 23 Apr 2017 at 17:02

I also decided to drop the idea of Windows ME for now. Trying to get stuff to work under 2000 still with the age of hardware I am using is a pain and I know ME which did not have much success would be even harder and as it was an OS I didn't do much with I decided to install XP onto the second disk due to it's much better support, I should be able to use that USB network adaptor from earlier as well if I dual booted XP.

The 160GB drive would run Windows 2000
The 250 GB drive would run XP

Somewhat painfully,everything is hooked up to this SATA raid PCI controller, so the first thing I needed to do was to fish out a floppy drive and the IDE DVD drive again so I could install the RAID drivers.
This is a different floppy drive I had lying around, never seen one like this before, the whole round disk bit spins! mesmerising!

For old times sake lets share the wonder of floppy disks! I think I had these back in my college days, they still work just fine, purchased from Argos I believe

The drivers were installed from floppy for Windows XP

This was painful though, time after time it would just crash on installing. I tried removing cards, memory, everything but it would always crash at the same point with the same error, very annoying.

Pure trial and error sorted it. When the SATA cards BIOS would detect the drives at start up, unplug the DVD drives, wait for it to continue past it, plug them in...it works. No idea, don't care, it worked eventually

I decided to add in that extra 128mb stick of memory to the PC also so it now has 384mb RAM. I realise not all of this is 'a PC build' as such but I think worth covering some of the frustration when dealing with old hardware and how far things have come.

So really the issues now seem to be...

1. Get a USB card with front headers so I can use front USB (I hope)
2. Get a soundcard that has front pin outs for front case audio. Soundblaster X-Fi PCI has this but doesn't seem to be supported under windows 2000, look for other cards I guess.
3. Do I stick with this SATA card which is a bit of a pain or go with IDE to SATA drive converters, I'd also have to get some sata to molex power adapters for the converters.
4 At least attempt to tidy the case wiring.