My 1997 "dream machine"

Hi there!

Having been tied to my room for a week due to a Corona infection (not serious...), I surfed voodooalert.de for the first time in ages, and was happily surprised by the fact it is still alive! Actually, it seems to be more busy around here than last time I visited, seemingly because of the recent V5 6000 rebuilds. Great to see!

As I had some time to kill, I fired up my only remaining Voodoo PC, which is actually sitting below my daily-use TFT for the past 15 years or so. Still works like a charm, so I thought I would introduce it here...

Greets,

Snuggles

A first teaser :

Actually, not every component might be a perfect fit for a "1997 dream machine", but the PC has actually been built using many components that I bought new back in the days, so I did not care too much about +/- 2 year deviations....

It's based on a Siemens Nixdorf PCD-6H desktop, which I got hold of in 2002. I has a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro processor in it, and is quite "exotic" all by itself...

The other main components in it:

- Siemens-Nixdorf mainboard D931

- 64 MB of RAM

- 2.5 GB Western Digital Caviar 22500 hard drive (1997)

- Matrox Millennium 2 MB PCI main graphics card (launched 1995, owned by me since 1998)

- Diamond Monster 3D 4 MB (bought one new in 1998, this one I got in 2004 as the other one died in 2000...)

- Creative Soundblaster 16 PnP ISA (bought new in 1997)

- Yamaha DB50-XG Wavetable daughter board (bought new in 1997)

- TEAC CD-532E 32x CD-ROM drive (bought new in 1999)

All very nice technology back in the days...

Thanks! And yes, a DOS machine indeed (plus Win95b)...

I am glad I configured the machine 15 years back, when I still remembered all the boot configuration tricks to optimize the first 640 KB of RAM...

All manual optimization. And still using the same good old "original" driver stuff I was using backin then...

P.S. And yes, Deutsch geht auch, but maybe there is many international readers meanwhile??

Now it's getting somewhat dusty:

Big CPU (Socket 8 Pentium Pro) below the fan. All the cards in risers.

On the left: Matrox Millennium (above) and Monster 3D (below)

On the right: Soundblaster 16 with the Wavetable board attached to it (not visible)

And here the graphics cards. Monster 3D with some added coolers. My first one died after two years, presumably from heat?

And here the SB16 with the Yamaha MIDI board sitting on it. Great for musicians and many games that did not feature sampled music yet, but proper MIDI output. Just as expensive as a Voodoo1 when it was new , and with the same amount of memory (4 MB).

Still an experience to listen to the music of X-Wing (iMuse), Descent2, Doom2, Warcraft 2 and many others.

Last but not least, the network card with both 10BASE-T and 10BASE2 connectors.

Readily waiting with plugged-in "Terminator" for the next old school BNC-lan party... Have not been on one for a loooong time though...

So that's about it from the hardware side. Maybe I will post some nice old school screenshots some time.

Expect some eye-cancer resolutions as low as 320x200...

Some of the games already installed:

- Bleifuss
- X-Wing

- Tie Figher CD-Edition

- Worms

- Descent 2 3Dfx

- Schleichfahrt 3Dfx

- P.O.D. Gold 3Dfx

- Warcraft 2

- Doom II (also in 640x480 using Doom95)

- Sam&Max

For sure good old stuff still worth being played once in a while!

Thanks for hanging in with me until here...

Greets,

Snuggles

P.S. Forgot one thing:

This is no modding. This is what you got in the 90s when you were buying a premium desktop PC from Siemens-Nixdorf...

Zitat von Tweakstone

Feine Maschine ist das! Ich habe einen technisch extrem ähnlichen PC ebenfalls als DOS Maschine laufen:

We are the Fleet - Tweakstones PC Armada [Inhaltsverzeichnis im ersten Post!]

Danke! Dein Rechner ist ja tatsächlich ganz ähnlich "ausgerichtet", mit Matrox-Karte, V1 und feinem Sound, sehr cool!

Pentium Pro ist in der Tat schon was Besonderes, wenn auch sicherlich nicht optimal in Punkto DOS-Performance. Aber für das Allermeiste, was man unter DOS machen kann, natürlich mehr als ausreichend...

Zitat von Obi Wan Kenobi

This is lovely looking man thanks for sharing this!

But please for the love of Master Yoda clean out that dirt and grime man, the dust that being, not really healthy for such a build... make it shine like new again, just give it the TLC it deserves.

As the CPU goes is it the Black Beauty aka Pentium Pro 200Mhz with 1MB L2 Cache?
As flight sims go, give DiD's F22 Air Dominance Fighter a go, it loves the 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics an other good sim is SSI's Su-27 Flanker, and a good sim from the 486 days was Micro Prose F-117 2.0 Stealth Fighter.

There are quite a few good ones I can remember and the epic Wing Commander games as well, these systesm are froma time when havinga choice was a reality.

Alles anzeigen

Ok, I promise to clean it up a little...

No black beauty, "just" a golden 256K version . However, from the prices being paid, black is the new gold, it seems...

From a performance perspective, I assume it does not matter too much under DOS anyways.

I will for sure give the Wing Commander series a try! By coincidence, I just took a look at the ingame movies of WC3 yesterday, and immediately remembered playing that with a friend who was one of the lucky ones to already have a CD-ROM drive at the time !

I think I still have an original floppy version of WC1 somewhere, but that rather was something for a 386. I remember it already became unplayably fast on a Pentium 100.