The 'new' retro PC project

I 'think' I have done it. Had to google what a trust account was to start with though.

In PC news I put one of the new cards in which detected and seems fine, however when I restore the image it gets to the XP loading screen and crashes out, looks like i'm down for a re-install, shouldn't be too bad.
 
I have been battling this a bit lately. I have one of the new SATA cards in now so I can boot up again but for whatever reason it seems to get stuck in a boot loop if I attach / clone different hard disks.

If I run with the original 2 80GBs its fine but if I attatch a larger drive as well, boot loop. I'm not sure if it's related to disks larger than 137GB as this is using the SATA card and not the onboard IDE and Win XP SP3 supports drives up to 2TB I believe. I am just trying to clone an 80 to a 160 or 250GB. You go through a mix of loving the nostalgia to wanting to chuck it out of the windows.
If I attach the larger disk to the SATA card within windows it's just fine, formatted it but no dice.
Not sure if it is the size that's causing it or something else. I'd like to get 2 120GB SSDs at some point but not sure weather to risk it if they wont work, might have to borrow one out of another machine.

I am tempted to ditch Win 2000 for the time being, it's just such a pain to patch it and get applications to run, maybe I will revisit it later.

Anyway. As an alternative to the often crackly audio through the HDMI connector I found a small compact Logitech soundbar. My internal USB card also has an internal USB port so I can attach it to this and have an internal speaker. The quality is actually not bad :)



I have mounted it inside at the bottom of the case.



Switched power supplies back and had a vague attempt at tidying. Still got to get that USB 2 extension.


Hopefully something quite special will be making it's way into the case this week.
 
Anyway, to more fun stuff, after all, hardware is only part of this project. I have managed to get quite a few old games back and running, some of them put up a bit of a battle with direct X errors, missing files etc.
Here are a few screen shots from the games taken with the Kyro 2 card, you might see some games from yesteryear or even a few lower spec more recent titles :)

Another World Anniversary edition


Commandos 3 Destination Berlin


Blitzkrieg Burning Horizon


Blair Witch - The Rustin Parr investigation


House of the Dead 2


Deus Ex (Came out a bit dark for some reason)


American McGees Alice


Evil Dead


Hitman Codename 47


Legacy Dark Shadows (point and click game)


IGI2- Covert Strike


Homeworld - Still looks and plays amazing :)
 
Red Alert 2


Nosferatu - The Wrath of Malachi


Quake 2


Silent Hill 2


GL Quake - Was this the first game to get the open GL minidriver?


Streets of Rage remake - A modern remake of the SEGA MD games, works well.


The Black Mirror - Point and click with oodles of atmosphere, pick this one up!


Turok the dinosaur hunter


Syberia


Soldier of Fortune


Simon the Sorcerer


Undying


Unreal Gold


Unreal Tournament


Wizardry 8 - Looking forward to playing this, looks like my sort of game
 
The postman has been!

I got hold of a replacement 60mm CPU fan. The one that is on from stock is quite noisy and being so old probably on it's way out anyway. I replaced it with a 60mm noiseblocker fan with nice sleeved cable, the USB 2 extension also arrived so I can tidy up the case.




The 3rd SATA card turned up, this one supports 2 SATA, 1 IDE and has a HD activity LED, not sure if I will need it but might try it out for larger disk support at some point. This is a Rocket RAID chipset and not any of the Silicon Image ones I have tried previously.


I managed to find Morrowind an it's expansion packs from 3 separate auctions, thought it looked a bit nicer than the all in one version so quite happy with that.


A now legit version of Clive Barkers Undying


The most expensive thing however has just turned up! Time for the Kyro 2 to be replaced.







Not cheap! About £60 to buy all in with postage but I really wanted to try it out.
For anyone who isn't familiar Matrox are a company who these days specialise mainly in graphics cards that support multiple monitors (think for stock brokers, airport arrivals screens that sort of thing).
Back in the day though they had some great graphics cards for gamers, particularly the G400 series. Unfortunately they could not keep up with ATI (Now AMD) and Nvidia and the Matrox Parhelia was the last gaming focused graphics card they released.
It supports several Direct X 9 features but is not fully compatible with it and performance wise is pitched somewhere between a Geforce 3 and Geforce 4 4200.

However it supports pixel shaders (handy for Morrowind) and triple monitor support allowing you to run supported games over 3 monitors and I kinda wanted to replace the fairly rare Kyro 2 with something also uncommon.
This should give a pretty decent speed boost over the Kyro 2 which lets not forget will ultimately be limited by the fairly lowly clocked 800MHz processor I am running in this build.
It supports widescreen resolutions apparently which will resolved those stretched 4:3 resolutions of 1280*1024 when I am using a widescreen display.
Best of all though it has 2 DVI connectors so I can keep the HDMI converter dedicated to the Voodoo 3 without having to swap cables around and it will support those awkward resolutions the converter couldn't such as BIOS access and running Doom and Doom 2 in 320*200 software mode (black screen). Fingers crossed it works when I get it installed and it works as I hope.

Specs for the card are below, I bought the 128mb version, the cheapest 256mb one was about £90!
  • Matrox TripleHead to use three* analog monitors at a time (in "independent" or "stretched" mode)
  • Matrox DualHead to use two digital or analog monitors at a time (in "independent" or "stretched" mode)
  • Joined graphics card mode enables an additional Matrox DualHead** or TripleHead† graphics solution to work in tandem in one system to drive up to four displays‡
  • AGP 8x card compatible with all compliant AGP 4x and 8x systems
  • 128 MB graphics memory
  • Matrox UltraSharp Display Output Technology
  • TV-output support (composite video and S-video, NTSC or PAL)
  • Multi-display 2D/3D OpenGL and Microsoft DirectX acceleration
  • Unified Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista XDDM display driver for Matrox Parhelia series and Millennium P-series graphics cards
  • Matrox-certified display drivers available for leading CAD and GIS software
  • Easy-to-use Matrox PowerDesk driver interface
  • Display pivoting (rotation) support
  • Matrox Clone to view a copy of one display on another display
  • Matrox Multi-Display Zoom to view a portion of one display full-screen on another display
  • Matrox PureVideo to view hardware-accelerated video playback in a video window on one display and full-screen on another display
  • Matrox Glyph Anti-Aliasing for the hardware-accelerated smoothing of text edges
  • Support for customizable unattended installation for rapid multi-system setup
  • Widescreen resolution support and additional functionality via Matrox PowerRes
  • 3-year warranty
 
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I think I am pretty much finished with this PC now, quite happy with how it turned out but was a lot more work than I expected. The Matrox Parhelia works just fine in games. I installed and grabbed some screen shots from the Matrox Reef demo that came bundled with the card. Initially you could only run this on the Matrox card but I think using a program like 3D analyze you can run it on other brands of card, looks pretty nice for the time though.





I found 4 sticks of RAM for just a fiver. This is all ECC RAM, there are 3 sticks of 256mb and one 512mb. The board only supports 768mb but I thought I would try the 512 anyway but it only detects it as 256 so I have put all 3 256 sticks in for the maximum 768 so I that is maxed out now.



I bought 2 new keyboards and mice, one for use with this PC. I have always liked the Lenovo stuff, build quality always seems quite nice for the price.




Couldn't find my USB to PS2 converters in the loft so I could use it in the PS2 ports to keep those USB ports free so wanted to order 2. Think I may have found a few too many :), a quid plus postage!



Thanks for watching, if I make any significant changes or get some screens then I'll update the thread but I think that is it for now.
I might look at another project with socket AM1 and SLI geforce 8800s in the future.

Final desktop screenshot
I managed to recreate something similar to the desktop statistics I used to have after finding an old copy of the coolmon software which displays hard disk space, proc usage, memory etc.
 
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