New vintage PC build. - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2017, 05:24:35 am
content: I have a hobby of not only collecting older/legacy/retro/vintage machines, but constructing them from their core components.In the past I have done a 120mhz 486 machine, and a Slot 1 Pentium 3 450mhz, but now I am going to tackle another machine, and one a bit stranger.This will be the Intel Pentium Pro platform, a quite short lived platform that saw limited success.About 6 months ago I attempted this machine, but due to a near perfect stream of stuff going wrong, one that hasn't let up to date, but I can only hope that changes, I have postponed it now.So here are the raw specs.The CPU, of course, is a Pentium Pro clocked at 200mhz. I do not know how much cache, but I will guess 256k (I don't have the chip with me at the moment).The motherboard is a very stock OEM Intel board. It looks like this:https://goo.gl/k34cN4.It will have 128MB of SIMM-72 EDO RAM spread across 4 sticks.Now this is where it gets interesting.For my graphics card I will be utilizing a 1995 ATI Mach64GX 2MB, which is capable of resolutions of up to 1200x1600@8bpp, with 1024x768@16bpp, and 800x600@32bpp possible. This is actually a card that I have shown here before, and it features a very bodgy dodgy repair by me and my father, but it is fully working, and read to be used in this machine.For my 3D accelerator I will be using a 4MB Diamond Multimedia (Yes, somewhat funny having an ATI and Diamond card in the same system) Monster 3D, which is in actuality a Voodoo 1. Originally this was going to be a slightly different card, but through my infinite wisdom and ham fistedness I have turned a simple repair consisting of separating two QFP pins into a case of one completely snapped pin, and no good way to solder on a new one (Trust me, I even sanded down the chip's resin to try to solder directly to a via, it's too advanced for my cheapie EE skills and soldering iron.). Nevertheless, I have a cooler Diamond card to match up perfectly with my ATI card.For my sound card I will be using the Creative Sound Blaster AWE32 CT:3670 which depend on where you look or who you believe could be considered an AWE32, an SB32, or an AWE64 on an AWE32 board. Either way it's an amazing card. There is no expanded RAM for soundfonts as the retention arms for one of the SIMM30 slots is broken, and I don't readily have a replacement for it. I also do not have RAM for it. This is my favourite late DOS, early Windows sound card. It's good for almost anything with a 16-bit ISA slot, and has decent DOS support and nearly flawless Windows support.This is where it gets REALLY interesting.You see, I don't want a boring IDE drive setup with boring drives, and boring everything. My next part will be a PCI Ultra160 SCSI controller. This in practice can't be faster than IDE133, which this board does not, I believe it's a souped up EIDE because of the 32-bitx33mhz PCI bus speed limitation, but it will be faster than the onboard controller. This board could take advantage of a 66mhz bus speed, but that isn't possible on my board.Now I do have other machines with SCSI support, but all my drives are SCA-80 which was a hybridized connector that combined both the data and power pins into one. There exists pretty much no on-card support as almost all of these drives were intended for hotswap backplanes (indeed, SCA-80 is hotswap compatible, not that I will be using it). So a 10 dollar 68 pin to 80 pin SCSI converter board is needed.The drive in question is a 15,000 RPM 147GB hard drive. This is WAY overkill for this build, but it's my best chance to use a cool drive like that (they otherwise just sit there in a cold sever too slow to do a whole lot). This is actually an Ultra320 drive, so there will likely be bottlenecking, but this also means I will likely (if my un-researched assumptions are correct) saturate whatever max controller speed I will have.This is about it for my build. I plan to use Windows 95C if I can. The main concern is the LBA limitations. Windows 95C only supports drives up to I think 137GB in size, but I am unsure if it refuses to use drives, or if it will cap it at 137 (I believe the latter). I will try all I can using whatever tools I can find to use that drive. If anybody knows of a free fix for the LBA limitations in Windows 95C, would love to hear about it. If it is truly impossible to us Windows 95C in an acceptable manner I will use Windows 98.I do understand a machine of this caliber would have likely used something like NT4 (especially if this was a multi CPU config), but the goal is for DOS and Windows support, something that NTVDM doesn't do well enough.I will post updates, and if I do get to it, a video detailing the assembly. All the parts are in the post (This entire machine cost around 300 USD in parts total, possibly even more). I have guesstimated the worth of this machine when brand new to be anywhere from 3000USD to 4000USD in 1997's dollars, meaning it is anywhere from 4,600USD to 6000 USD in today's US dollars. This is one of the most interesting and capable (for it's time) machines I have ever built. I hope that my bad luck streak including two dead motherboards (this includes a Z97 board that somehow managed to include itself into the casually list), a DOA 2D card, a dead 3D card, and even a mysteriously cracked LCD on my keyboard piano (this happened around the same time everything else blew up).Thanks for reading my rant. I imagine that I have more fun typing these than people do reading, but this machine is largely for my enjoyment anyways.