P3 1GHz Inside a Dynatek external CD-ROM drive

bestjunky

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This machine I used to take in a briefcase to LAN parties. It's about 18 years old at this point. Needs recapping and perhaps a migration into a metal case.



Plastic is pure hell when it comes to thermal management. I lost one mechanical drive on it in the middle of playing Little Big Adventure 2.
 

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Watched your video that's pretty cool

I love small pc's and went the route of thin clients.

I guess your limited to non 3d hardware games, replacing the HDD with a dom possibly fit a 3d card in there ? that would be a challenge :)
 
I guess your limited to non 3d hardware games, replacing the HDD with a dom possibly fit a 3d card in there ? that would be a challenge :)

For accelerated 3D gaming, of course, a normal videocard is a must, but I have other retro builds for such task. With this one the challenge was to make it as small as humanly possible using retro components (which at the time weren't retro yet). Nowdays I have access to SD hard drive adapters, IDE to SATA SSD, pico power supplies. I could reduce the height of this box by half if I were to remake it again, but I'd need to find a smaller enclosure first. Onboard graphics is decent for what it is. Originally when my friend bought it, it was inside a full size Compaq branded desktop running Win98. That's the best OS for it.

With thin client options available online, I don't think it's worth sinking too much time into this retro build. It used to be special, and now it's just a Hermit crab - an old motherboard surviving inside a shell of an even older device.
 
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I think your wrong

I don't think it's worth sinking too much time into this retro build

downgrade to 98, pico psu, angle adaptor and a pci 3d card , hopefully the onboard sound is SB compatible and best of both worlds.

the thin clients I have are Yes small but not 100% x86 compatible, the best one i have is a 1ghz via cpu and S3 D3D video loaded with dos / win98, dvi is bugged ( which is a real shame is it limits my monitor choice drastically ) so its VGA output.

it has 1 PCI with an angle adaptor which in there is an aureal vortex 2 with an S2 midi board sitting on the wavetable header. a brilliant win98 / dos setup.

but...

some games crash, doom works great but Warcraft 2 refuses to work and crashes with a general dos4gw protection error, DOTT is unstable and crashes as the cpu is too fast.

although the vortex sound card has very good dos support, it aint no soundblaster and the adlib is well, not so great ( reason for the midi card ).

I did try an IBM true x86 thin client, managed to put a voodoo 1 in it pentium 1 266 ( yes not a typo ), and it ran everything, but it was heavy quite large, no fdd, a pain to boot, each time it insisted to look for the net server and when you forced it to boot legacy was met with a password you had to clear if you haven't used it a few days. ( not the battery )

frustrating,


tried a Mister FPGA for the A0486 core,, too slow.



I've had a couple of small pc's on my eBay watch list but they just don't come down in price, I have VERY limited space ( corner of the kitchen on a desk ) so small is my friend. the reason I use a mist fpga atm for my Amiga and C64 fix :)

my dream PC is one of either of these.
Unisys CWD-4002 486 DX 2/66 ( will take a DX4 ) pc ( also other brands, like LEO ) with 1 ISA slot for a SB card , FDD and internal HDD, dos dream and smaller than most external cd rom drives

sddefault.jpg




or the Unisys 5xxx range P133 or higher with ISA or PCI slot, depending on the built in sound compatibility it's either a voodoo card or a sb 16


1526075797913374126.jpg




the thing is ,, there not that expensive in the USA and I was about to buy one but sanity kicked in ( not to mention explaining to the Mrs ) why the $150 P&P + another $50 import tax,, Gulp!!
so I've given up atm until either the Mister is fast enough to run quake at a good speed in the A0486 core or someone actually builds a completely separate DOS BOX in hardware. I would buy one for sure!

this look interesting but seems to have stalled and im guessing it's emulation, closed system and not a real x86 in there :(
https://hothardware.com/news/check-out-pc-classic-99-tiny-dos-games-console
 
My main retro build is on Asus P2B-DS motherboard, dual P3-1GHz, 2GB SD-133 RAM, Voodoo 5500 and SB64. I do most of my retro gaming on it. AGP, PCI, ISA, 3 kinds of onboard SCSI, USB, everything. Full driver support for DOS, Linux, Windows, OS2 even. Best board I ever owned. Have a stack of compact flash cards with every OS install and a front mounted reader. Only drawback is that it's on an IDE bus. Would be smarter to get a 50-pin SCSI version instead. USB upgraded to 2.0 with a PCI card. Wireless and wired networking present, but drivers don't work for all OS. Can't be perfect.

I added a GUS to it recently. It sounds nice, but I never had it in the past, so I'm not used to its renditions of music. Grew up with SB and to me it's most dear. The board when I had it originally in 1999 contained a single P2-266. Next I upgraded it to dual socket 370 adapters with P3-800. And the last rendition is on 1GHz CPU's that are over the spec, so there is a custom BIOS and a CPU slot mod, with good ECC ram that doesn't glitch out at 133MHz. Manual implied that running the bus over 112MHz was considered unsafe, but I've had zero issues.

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The mini PC hasn't had much use in comparison, after I got a few laptops from the same era. For DOS exclusive games I'm still upgrading my 486 build that has a separate videocard. So I'm covered on all fronts.
 
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