dunzdeck wrote on 2022-10-19, 09:18:Oh man, I feel your pain. I've also slowly been moving back into 90s PC gaming nostalgia but pretty much everybody I shared it w […]
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Scythifuge wrote on 2022-10-19, 02:05:
We all drifted apart when the internet took off and people graduated and moved away. That part is sad. I am doing all of this work to recreate the 90's with hardware and furniture, and none of my old friends will ever see it.
Oh man, I feel your pain. I've also slowly been moving back into 90s PC gaming nostalgia but pretty much everybody I shared it with has moved on. I myself have a family and a relatively "normie" gf so I can only take it so far...
I am kinda fascinated by you including furniture in your recreation. Care to tell us more?
PS first post, after lurking for years! Yay!
Back in the early 90's, we bought a Commodore 64 complete with drives, modem, printer, tons of software, and a computer desk. When we got our 486SX/33 in 1993, we used the same desk. When the 486 was upgraded to a tower-based 486DX2/66, I removed the middle shelf on the right side to accommodate the tower. Last year, someone posted a free desk, and it was the SAME make and model of that old desk. It was a little damaged, but not too bad, and I used a bunch of L-brackets to screw all of the parts together and make it solid.
I am buying old white/beige media boxes. I have one for 3.5 floppies (of which 20 just arrived in the mail today, all working and with unused labels,) one for 5.25 floppies (of which I bought 50 a year ago and they were all good, though one or two have gone bad since then,) and I am awaiting a 20 CD box which looks similar to the 5.25 floppy box. I have Creative Labs Cambridge Soundworks 4.1 speakers, and I have the front speakers on their little stands and the rear speakers sit on top with non-slip material, withn the rear speaker jack plugged into the Line-out on my AWE32, and the little speaker stacks are an approximate size of those old Labtec and other brand PC speakers, from back in the day. The media boxes are on top of one shelf, and my MT-32, SC-55, an external LS-120 drives, and my U.S. Robotics External Modem are all stacked on the bottom shelf, just above my beige/off-white horizontal desktop case. That case is bigger than the old 486SX-33 was, because it has three 5.25 bays (top drive is a quad speed, middle drive is a white DVD DL burner for reading burned discs and for transferring files, and bottom drive it the grey-green 5.25 floppy drive which doesn't match anything, color-wise.) The two 3.5 drives are a 1.44mb floppy drive, and a CF-to-IDE adapter drive in white. I am using a Gateway P3-era keyboard until I can replace it with a smaller AT keyboard, and I am using a USB intellimouse using a PS2 adapter, because as much as I love retro computing, I will never miss cleaning out a stuttering roller-ball mouse.
I have Gravis Gamepad Pro/Grip controllers (x4,) an early Sidewinder joystick which works in DOS, and a throttle/rudders which I think are CH. I am lacking a 90s networking switch and a white/beige printer of some sort which needs to be compatible with MS-DOS and Windows 3.x and I need to be able to buy ink for it. I have past threads about those items which I need to reread since things came up in life around then and caused me to put the project on hold.
The Gateway P3 tower I have is to reminisce about the Pentium days. I don't have room for a bunch of computers, or else I would recreate my Pentium 90, which was an upgrade from the DX2, back in the day. I had put a Voodoo1 in that box and played Dark Forces II on it. The Gateway P3 was the very last prebuilt computer I ever had, and it was a big part of my life. It had a Voodoo3 and a Live! card. So when I got my hands on two Gateway P3s, I put a Voodoo5 in one along with a Voodoo1 for DOS and V1-specific games, a Live! card, an AWE32 PnP for DOS and WFW if I decide to put that on there, and bought extra ls-120 disks because these towers came with superdisk drives and my old P3 also came with one. I have a spare external ls-120 and read somewhere that an own was able to use a usb/ide adapter to use their superdisk on Windows 10, including reading and writing. So I will be able to transfer files 120mb or less between all of the systems (though I want to also create a networking/ftp solution as well.) I also bought moslo deluxe which claims to be able to accurately emulate past systems such as a 286, 386, 486, and a Pentium 166 at default. So I will use a KVM and place the P3 tower on the floor under the desk and use it to cover the entire Pentium era of my past PC-using days.