Had to hold off work on my Mega Retro Station project because of various emergencies due to weather and failing hardware in other areas (like phones). At some point this week I hope to 3D print in PETG an adapter I designed to put a Wraith Spire on a socket 1150 board (just because all my 1150 hardware is in use and I have two NIB Wraith Spires). A 4790K doesn't run that hot. So this part isn't retro per se - but it will be soon enough.
The goal is to take a retro Sony flat panel with fairly excellent inputs and image quality (4:3 20"), and hook up a machine with a ton of emulators on it (PCemu, dosbox, I am consolidating emulators for Macs, Atari, X68000 (maybe), C64, Amiga, various consoles, various early Z80 machines... I still haven't found an AS/400 emulator (or for that matter both OSes for my separate planned ASCI RED microclone with 2 mobos and 3 PPros). I don't even know why I want an AS/400 emulator. I can get a VAX tho. I will probably only use more mainstream things. For most purposes that machine with a 98 machine, XP machine, and Win7 machine (possibly in some combination, I have an excellent SFF Win7 machine and a slightly flaxy tiny USFF XP machine) should fit on my shelf next to my desk and give me 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s *software*... I will keep some machines (most of my early machines) for the hardware bench.
I have a KVM but I need a more elegant solution. I built a pfsense router, I wonder if there's something I could do over a gigabit network that would include Win98 and XP machines with relatively high performance remote access? I need to remember to look that up.
It would be nice to be able to run systems like the VAX or PDP or old IBM mainframes in a VM and be able to network into them with a terminal emulator, I admit I haven't tested this so it may work fine. I also admit I probably would not use them much, I'm just feeling completionist.
But even after clearing a few machines and various parts out, I find I still have more than I can manage in my space. Been swamped and tired recently but hoping Spring will be better for projects.
I still intend to do a giveaway in the giveaway thread if I get a first pass done on this cleaning. I do finally have a stock of NOS floppies for PC and C64. I need to make a PSU for the C64, all I have is the original. I need to get parts for a BlueSCSI for the Mac LC as well. Mostly low-end like SBLives and TNTs and if any masochists want things like X300s or X1300s (I bet there's some kind of window where those are useful). I did some work on a list of my GPUs and systems for benchmarking, starting with ISA cards and going up to PCIE, but bottlenecking/cielings are all over and I need to build a late AGP system for testing, but I think my one 4-digit speed P3 is toast (and the Soyo mobo has some bad caps, so maybe not).
So, looking at what I've typed, I've accomplished *almost* nothing. 😀 Star Trek Online is practically retro, though, given it's 13 years old. So I did *something* retro.
Oh - one retro thing and I need to look around to see if we have a section here for this... I have an LG VX9900 phone - the one with the flip-out keyboard with larger screen. Service long gone, servers long gone, but apparently it could play shockwave games if set up properly. There appears to be very little in the way of retro support for these old phones, I'm hoping to find a way to get it running any old (probably version-limited) shockwave games, and there were some apps available as well. I don't have the proprietary USB cable, so the point may be moot.
Anyway, hope everyone else is feeling more productive than I am.
