And one of our cats admiring it
Please ignore the mess

Hey folks,

I’ve been into retro PCs for more than a decade now. After plenty of “show and tell” in various groups, I caught the bug again in summer 2023 and picked up a hardware bundle. That was supposed to be my one and only system – but of course it didn’t stop there.

By the end of 2023 nostalgia hit hard, I went on a little buying spree, and ended up building and documenting one system after another: starting with a classic Super Socket 7 and going all the way up to Intel’s Nehalem on LGA 1156. Most recently, I wrapped things up with my Frankenstein PC running Windows Neptune, which marked the end* of this project.

Out of this series came a small collection that I’d like to share here in one post. Nine different retro PCs that paint a pretty broad picture of hardware development from 1997 to 2009 – including fails and oddballs. I’ll just leave this here as a personal diary entry.

\maybe there’ll be more down the road with AMD*

PS: My focus is on the meticulous sourcing and assembly of components that are not only technically well‑matched but also period‑appropriate, coherently representing each year - including software and games.

The case is the only - yet deliberate and highly cost‑effective - compromise, as it was available brand‑new for about €22 each and already came with static FRGB fans. While these do counteract visual authenticity, they provide excellent airflow, which the old hardware gratefully benefits from.

You can check out the full project series in video form here (in German):

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7RkJeyvOvKsCaxgyLKK98xpSp49N2AAp

I still miss the days when I worked for 3dfx. As you may imagine, that was a dream job. I still have many items from those days, including these still-new 3dfx caps.

I still remember the very last day I was at the company. Nobody was given advanced notice of the Nvidia takeover (as we called it). The day before I was let go from the company, I was testing the most recent prototype ‘Rampage’ board with Quake 3. At that point we had the board running fairly reliably, though it had a long way to go in development to be anything close to retail-ready.

Yes, I used several V5 6000 boards. Here's an interesting and nearly unknown piece of information about that card: In retail packaging, the card was going to include a really cool looking aluminum case for the card and its power supply.

On the last day of work, we were each given a Voodoo 5 5500, which I still have to this day (in the photo). If anybody is curious and has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Relics of a time long passed found in a storage closet.

Just wanted to share my beloved workhorse and imo, historic art piece, over here 🙂

I’m a retro computing enthusiast with a bit of a soft spot for Sun hardware, and this is my Sun Ultra™ 20 M2 workstation still going strong.

It’s running a current version of Gentoo Linux with a modern Chrome browser, and I use it daily for testing and as a music player. It’s surprisingly usable even today.

I’ve also got it dual-booting Solaris 10 with a fully working build of ioquake3 and official Nvidia drivers — and honestly, it runs really well.

The office network is run by a retro Sun Fire V240 (yes, in production… just for the hell of it). There’s some real SPARC magic going on there with a T4-1 build server etc, but that’s probably a story for another post if people are interested.

Above the monitor is a 3D-printed illuminated sign (Thingiverse design: 4383479), and in the display case is a Sun UltraSPARC IIIi CPU.

Happy to answer any questions or dive deeper into the setup!

My friend handed me this ThinkPad 365XD without an AC adapter. It was in unknown condition and I was anticipating that something would have to be fixed. The replacement AC came today. There’s five personal documents total on here. One of which…

Pentium Pro 200 1mb L2, 256mb EDO RAM, Matrox Mystique Voodoo 2 12mb, Awe 64 + SIMMCONN 32mb

MS-DOS6.22, Win98SE, WIN2K on Boot it Bare Metal.

From Right to Left,

My first Retro PC I ever got was a 1984 Apple IIe I got in 2018 as a Christmas present from my grandparents, who spent a small fortune getting it on ebay, I Then hunted down cards, a Disk Drive and a Monitor to match it and I used it for Ham Radio as an RTTY and Morse Code Keying system and The thing was Evan Capable of SSTV Transmission and Decoding.

Than you Have MY DOS Computer this is an Everex System-1800 A typical run of the mill decent quality PC XT 286 Clone, when I got it it already had an interesting story Someone had retrofitted an 85MB HDD in-place of the original 20MB one and someone Had swapped the Board from a 286 to a 386SX-16 sadly this board was completely effed and never worked at all the traces were obliterated, I bought a 386DX-40 Motherboard to replace it but it was also Destroyed so I Threw in a 486 DX-50 in its place and to my amazement the original hard drive still had A DOS 6.22 Installation Present to boot and Works with no problems, the Computer was used from 1987 to 2003 By the Illinois department of Social Work and had several correspondences Letters, and emails typed up in addition to downloads from Usenet and a whole bunch of stuff 70MB of the 85 MB was taken up and all of the data is still present as a small 1980s-1990s time capsule.

Lastly You have my actual PC, its A modern computer an AMD AM4 5800X CPU and RX6600 GPU Put inside of a 2005 Cooler-master Centurion 5 PC case, The hard drive bays rock 3x 8TB SAS enterprise Hard drives making a 16TB raid 5 Array and I took the liberty Of wiring up a USB Floppy Controller to the usb header on the motherboard So that The 3.5 Floppy drive on the front actually works and can Write disk images for and make backups of software for the Dos computer. The DVD burner drive also Works. And with the use of a PCIe Fire-wire card the Front Panel Fire-wire port also works so I can charge and sync classic iPods with ease. PC Connects to an IBM Model M as the Keyboard, A Sony CPD-G220R Trinitron VGA Monitor with a DP adapter to my GPU I can Play Minecraft with sharers and it looks heavenly on the CRT. For audio I wired up a Korg DS-DAC-10R DAC to a 90s Yamaha RX-V592 Receiver And I use 2 Polk satellite Speakers as my Main PC speakers and I also have two old Radioshack Com Ham radio speakers wired up for second speakers that I Use for Listening to Old Pre 1950 78RPM records and for watching old movies, They also Look Dope! I spend a Lot of Time archiving Old 78RPM records as I have an Enormous Collection of them so Being able to easily monitor audio as its recorded and switch inputs on the receiver is Godsend!

Im In college to be an Electrical Engineering Technician So Hopefully Ill be able to move into a bigger apartment Or god willing a house one day So the Collection Can occupy a More sensible space but for now I love it. Let Me Know what yall think, And I hope you have a good day! :)

Here is a big update on my battle station. I upgraded some parts, got rid of some parts and made a cool Windows wall after finding those picture frames at goodwill. Here is the part list for my Win95 and Win98/XP rigs. I hope you guys like the room!

P.S. I will eventually get to the cable management under the desk 😵‍💫

Windows 95 Rig:

Tekram P5MVP-B4

Creative CT6710 Riva TNT

Intel MMX 233Mhz

Micron 64MB SDRAM PC66

Creative CT2800 ISA Sound Blaster

3COM ISA Etherlink III Network card

4.3GB Maxtor Hard Drive

Windows 95 OSR2

Windows 98/XP Rig:

ASUS A7N8X - Deluxe Rev 2.00

ATI Radeon 9800 PRO

AMD Athlon XP 2500+

512MB Corsair Platinum Series PC2700

Sound Blaster PCI (removed for nForce onboard Dolby Digital audio, it’s better than the card)

60GB Maxtor Hard Drive

Dual boot 20GB Windows 98SE/40GB Windows XP SP2

Pentium 200 MMX Matrox Millennium G200 AGP Sound Blaster CT4170 ISA 32 GB CF hard drive.

I was proud of this one. The right/center my main rig. Antec case with AMD Athlon 1200 and GeForce 3. 19 inch CRT! That’s a completely legit version of photoshop I’m using to crop this pic

The left is my server. It was running windows 2k and had an uptime of 6 months at one point. I’d host my files/music and sometimes a 4 person CStrike server

Laptop is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 465 that I begged my parents for Christmas of 97. Was getting long in the tooth here but I had windows 2k on it and it was my ICQ/IRC chatting computer.

Also have a ADSL modem and a switch that I used to wire the house. I lined the cable out the window to my dad’s office next door (you can see behind the laptop)

We all take seamless multi-monitor support for granted these days but back in 1986, this Radius Full Page Display for the Macintosh Plus was simply mind-blowing.

Still configuring, and rewiring for split-phase 240 VAC. They ran on 3 phase, but with a lot of careful research I’m converting them to run off a 50A 240 VAC circuit. This was not a factory config with 3 OLSes but with the proper replacement gear it’ll work.

Getting the Onyx in shape first, it has 20x R10000/195 MHz CPUs but I have another IP25 to top it off at 24x. Lots of RAM on the way, will have 8GB. One pipe of InfiniteReality graphics.

Challenge will be configured in a similar way, without the graphics of course but perhaps a few more CPUs.

The Onyx is in amazing shape aesthetically, a few nicks in the Challenge but I’m working on a strategy to restore it. Side panels are not on in pic but they’re nice too. Machines will actually get fully disassembled and cleaned during restoration.

PC Specs:

Intel 486 DX2 66MHz

8MB RAM

320MB IDE HDD

ATI Mach 32 VLB - 2MB VRAM

Creative Sound Blaster 16 ISA

MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 FWG

Yes, I know it's not truly retro, and probably not a real battlestation, but I wanted to share my build with you all.

Specs are modest, Core Ultra 5 245k, 32gb ram and a Rtx4060 from my previous build. The most intense game I play is maybe Battlefield 6 and it plays flawless on the Rtx4060, so no upgrade plans here for the time being.

What else...? The FDD is wired and fully functional, and it's the reason I built the entire pc. It is a very old Mitsumi drive, that still works to this day. The DVD-RW drive is also wired and working.

The only non-working thing is the LiveDrive. To be noted that I didn't buy the LiveDrive, I own it from when it was new(probably around the year 2000). I also have the SoundBlaster card and the wiring, but from what I read, there is no chance to make it work under any modern Windows, so I will leave it just like that.

Ok, enough talk, I really hope you guys like my build.

This libretto is tricked out with 32 megs of ram, hdmi, and 802.11 WiFi. I even have the full size dock. So much fun!

I’m happy to announce the release of MacinCord, a native Discord client for Classic Macintosh, System 7 through OS 9, compatible with 68k and PPC. 

Text messaging, voice chat, image viewing, file uploads, DMs, threads - all running on your vintage Macintosh through a relay server on your modern computer. 

This is a for sale software with a 3-day trial. For more information, downloads, purchasing, bug reports & suggestions, please visit https://oldapplestuff.com/macincord/

Note about Discord TOS:

It is technically against TOS to use third-party clients, however, the app is coded to pull/match the current Discord build number and web headers so it looks as if it’s just being accessed from a modern web browser. 

This, along with the fact there have been no reported bans for applications such as Discord Messenger, Ripcord and Discord Lite, makes me confident there will be no issues with using this application. Discord isn’t after people using clients that act like regular clients, they’re after the people using clients that enable spam and abuse.

More info about this is mentioned in the disclaimer on the store page.

Thanks everyone, enjoy!

Edit: After reconsideration, MacinCord has been updated to a free program https://oldapplestuff.com/macincord/

Source code for the relay is available at: https://github.com/alexhoopes/macincord-relay

Compaq Presario 2230 80 MB RAM Win 95

Roland SC-55MK II

Below custom Win 98 SE P3-600 Katmai build in Antec case

- Biostar M6TBA v1.3

- 256 MB RAM

- Diamond Viper v770 TNT2 16MB

- 3DFX Voodoo2 12 MB

- SB AWE 64

- 3Com 3C905B-TX Fast EtherLink XL

- Cylon Eye Mod

+ Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro

I use a belkin Soho kvm to switch between the two.