First post, by RetroSonicHero
Hey all, first time poster here.
I'm a 20 year old guy with a massive appreciation for all things retro PC hardware - thanks to my dad. I've recently been playing with NT Workstation 4.0 in 86Box, and have had a very pleasant experience. It seems to be an incredibly stable OS, especially for it's time when compared to Windows 9x. I've recently got this idea in my head of recreating a mid 90s workstation environment inside the emulator for no particular reason other than seeing how far I can push the operating system, and cause I reckon it'll make for interesting YouTube content. Since I am very much a "novice" when it comes to a topic such as this, but do consider myself well-versed in PC technology of this era overall, I figured it would be best to consult you fine people before completely taking the plunge.
But first, allow me to set the stage:
The Specs
Socket 8 ASUS P/I-P65Up5 motherboard
A Single Intel Pentium Pro clocked at 180Mhz
1024 MB of RAM
Matrox Millennium II 8 MB
Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold 32 MB
18 GB 5400 RPM HDD
3.5 inch 1.44 MB Floppy Drive
Two 12x 86BOX CD-ROM Drives
I've considered investing in a physical Roland SC-55 MkII and routing that through the MPU-401 86Box provides. It would work nicely with something like Cakewalk Express, so I'd be covered there as far as MIDI goes. Although, I seem to remember the 64 Gold's wavetable synthesis being quite decent for its time, so I think I'll stick with that unless my needs change, and having OPL compatibility is awesome. On the 3D rendering front, I'm thinking AutoCAD, 3DS Max, and Blender 2.04 should serve me well. For video production, I've recently acquired a sealed copy of "Core Lumiere Suite" - a piece of software I've never heard of. Did anyone use this back in the day?
With the exposition out of the way, what are your thoughts? Does this seem like a fun and interesting project? Are there any obvious potholes I'll likely encounter throughout the process? Anything I need to look out for? Any and all thoughts are welcome, and thank you very much for taking the time to read all of this.