Texas Instruments TravelMate 4000M laptop from around 1994-1995
- Intel 486DX4 100MHz
- MediaVision Jazz16 16-bit sound card w/ OPL3, SB Pro emulation, MIDI out (tiny connector) and built-in speaker
- 2x PCMCIA slots driven by a Cirrus Logic PD6720 chip
- Active matrix 640x480 64K 10.4" screen
- Cirrus Logic GD6440 graphics chip w/ 1MB video memory
- 2GB CF as HDD w/ disk overlaying so that I can address all 2GB
- 20MB RAM (4MB onboard + 16MB upgrade)
- MS-DOS 6.22 + Windows for Workgroups 3.11
- Docking station (not shown) w/ ultra slow SCSI CD-ROM, stereo speakers and a SCSI internal 2.5" connector for a second HDD

I was given this laptop + a 75MHz model for free. I had to sacrifice the 75MHz to make a fully working 100MHz model. It was worth it, though. Some capacitors, major parts of the chassis and other parts had to be replaced. I have a PS/2 optical mouse connected to it, and I run the sound through a mini-jack into my main PC's sound card, so that I hear the audio with my Sennheiser HD598 headphones. Nice for playing old games on the same desk as my main PC.

That is one nice laptop! I used to have the same but with a black-and-white lcd and simpler components. Sold it to a guy who needed to program a controller in an old electric car.

Here's a picture of my family.

http://www.andrewreader.com/Vogons/DSC05060.JPG

On the bottom is the latest edition.

A Dell Dimension P90t. It is the exact model like my first ever PC.
Pentium I @ 90 Mhz
MSDOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11
Hawkeye #9 PCI GXE 2 MB
80GB IDE HDD
32 MB EDO RAM
Yamaha Audician 32

Above that is my previous work freebie. A Fujitsu Siemens AMD 64 (3500).
Windows XP SP3
Onboard GeForce 6150 LE
250 GB SATA HDD
2 GB RAM
Aureal Vortex 8820

Above that on the right. A Celeron 1.3 Ghz
MSDos 7.1 and Windows 3.11
S3 Virge PCI 2 MB
16 GB CF Storage
512 MB RAM
MMP16 ABO ISA Sound

And finally on the left. A Pentium 3 'Coppermine' running at 1 Ghz
Windows 98 SE
Radeon 9800 Pro AGP
16 GB CF Storage
640 MB RAM
Soundblaster Audigy I with the 'Live Drive front panel and remote control.

All have working network cards and connect to the internet.

There's a VGA KVM to share the monitor, keyboard and mouse.

There's a phono audio switcher too.

The Fujitsu PC seems to be the most stable and the P3 is the sluggish one, although once all the Windows processes have loaded it's fine.

The P90t has the biggest place in my heart, but the Celeron PC allows all the DOS games at full whack and at a great rate of compatibility for my retro needs.

I remember my Dimension P90 (tower model). Also my first personal system. I gave it to my grandmother, but it was given away at some point when she was upgraded.

Grandma was upgraded?

Forgot to say, the P90 now has the Midi S2 and the celeron has the S1 wave blaster card.
My original Dell had the Sound blaster 16, but I'm happy with the Yamaha.

Yeah, she was running a version of Wordperfect for Windows, loved it actually. She'd rock the form fill tools every Christmas when she mailed off 1k letters to the points of the world.

Probably not the best, but this is what I've been putting together out of stuff I've got hold of.
I got a bunch of Socket 370 motherboards for a quid on ebay a while back, complete with CPUs and coolers. This was even better since my first own computer was a Socket 370 Celeron system. At the moment I kinda just call it the P3 Box, but given I have like.. 7 other boards with P3's something else might better eventually 🤣

The rest of it's kinda pieced together out of stuff I could get super duper cheap.

It's got a 1Ghz Pentium III on an AOpen AX3S ATX motherboard. It's meant to have 768MB of RAM but I've been having some issues with the system in general, and the OS (Win 98SE) reports 128MB
Uh, otherwise it's got an ATI Radeon 9200 SE (Though I'm replacing that with an FX 5200 any day now, and upgrading from that later on.), and a Sound Blaster PCI 128.

The case is the cheapest thing in the world, but it cost £4 I think, that'll need swapping at some point. dual 120mm fans might be overkill for this, but they look nice 😀

Amethyst wrote:

Probably not the best, but this is what I've been putting together out of stuff I've got hold of. I got a bunch of Socket 370 m […]
Show full quote

Probably not the best, but this is what I've been putting together out of stuff I've got hold of.
I got a bunch of Socket 370 motherboards for a quid on ebay a while back, complete with CPUs and coolers. This was even better since my first own computer was a Socket 370 Celeron system. At the moment I kinda just call it the P3 Box, but given I have like.. 7 other boards with P3's something else might better eventually 🤣

The rest of it's kinda pieced together out of stuff I could get super duper cheap.

It's got a 1Ghz Pentium III on an AOpen AX3S ATX motherboard. It's meant to have 768MB of RAM but I've been having some issues with the system in general, and the OS (Win 98SE) reports 128MB
Uh, otherwise it's got an ATI Radeon 9200 SE (Though I'm replacing that with an FX 5200 any day now, and upgrading from that later on.), and a Sound Blaster PCI 128.

The case is the cheapest thing in the world, but it cost £4 I think, that'll need swapping at some point. dual 120mm fans might be overkill for this, but they look nice 😀

it looks great, just need to change the ODD and FDD to the appropiate color 😲

Richo wrote:

Amethyst wrote:

Probably not the best, but this is what I've been putting together out of stuff I've got hold of. I got a bunch of Socket 370 m […]
Show full quote

Probably not the best, but this is what I've been putting together out of stuff I've got hold of.
I got a bunch of Socket 370 motherboards for a quid on ebay a while back, complete with CPUs and coolers. This was even better since my first own computer was a Socket 370 Celeron system. At the moment I kinda just call it the P3 Box, but given I have like.. 7 other boards with P3's something else might better eventually 🤣

The rest of it's kinda pieced together out of stuff I could get super duper cheap.

It's got a 1Ghz Pentium III on an AOpen AX3S ATX motherboard. It's meant to have 768MB of RAM but I've been having some issues with the system in general, and the OS (Win 98SE) reports 128MB
Uh, otherwise it's got an ATI Radeon 9200 SE (Though I'm replacing that with an FX 5200 any day now, and upgrading from that later on.), and a Sound Blaster PCI 128.

The case is the cheapest thing in the world, but it cost £4 I think, that'll need swapping at some point. dual 120mm fans might be overkill for this, but they look nice 😀

it looks great, just need to change the ODD and FDD to the appropiate color 😲

Thanks! And yeah, I know, those were literally the only drives I had spare. I will be replacing them when I get the chance... though I also plan to replace the case with something that reminds me a little less of tin foil when trying to screw something in xD

Was upgrading my retro machine and took the opportunity to grab a few pictures. I'm not sure everyone will agree on it being retro... It's retro styled 😜

Like many (?) folks I was trying to recreate a computer from my past - in my case the Gateway PIII-450 I was given for my 21st birthday while I was at university. I found a Gateway machine not too long ago, but it was a slow tower, and I wanted my beastly desktop case back to sit the CRT on top of. Alas I don't have space for too many computers, so I had to build a machine to do as much as I could in one. It's dual-booting Windows 98SE and Windows XP to cover me for games from those eras. I decided not to stick to the Pentium 3 level of performance.

The case is actually brand new but in the correct style, by Evercase. Very roomy inside, overheats easily - it's very retro. The rest of the specs are:

MSI K8T Neo 2 motherboard with Athlon 64 3700+ @ 2.2GHz, 1 GB DDR PC3200
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro AGP
PCI Ensoniq Soundscape (rescued from the Gateway machine) so I have lovely DOS sound.
Modern PSU, new case fan, new-old-stock IDE DVD-ROM
Windows 98 is stuck on a 40GB IDE drive because it won't tollerate the SATA controller being enabled wihout getting into an impossible driver tizzy.
Windows XP is on a 250GB SSD, crippled by SATA 1 speeds but still like lightning =)

WildW wrote:

Was upgrading my retro machine and took the opportunity to grab a few pictures. I'm not sure everyone will agree on it being retro... It's retro styled 😜

I love it, very nice!

Case looks much better in pictures than what that website shows.

8bitbubsy wrote:

Texas Instruments TravelMate 4000M laptop

Did TI even get the point of a TrackPoint? It's supposed to go on the home row...

It's been a while, vogons.
Here's all my beige 1987-2004 stuff. (Not pictured: ACR Power Premium 4/33, a Mac Classic II and SE, a Gateway Celeron 800, an Athlon 64 and finally a Packard Bell 620. They are not pictured because they're in for repairs.)

armankordi wrote:

It's been a while, vogons.
Here's all my beige 1987-2004 stuff. (Not pictured: ACR Power Premium 4/33, a Mac Classic II and SE, a Gateway Celeron 800, an Athlon 64 and finally a Packard Bell 620. They are not pictured because they're in for repairs.)

those 2 computer are so common here in new zealand i would see them everywhere

Main
Motherboard M396F VER2.2 with AMD Am386SX/SXL-33 no FPU 1993
ISA VGA Trident video card TVGA8900CL 1MB 1992
4Mb RAM 199?
WINBOND W83777 ID2-W837787AA I/O CARD 1994

Sound
Roland MT-32 Multi-Timbre Sound Module Ver. 1.0 1987
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Pro 2 CT1600 1992
JUSTer HI-FI Multimedia Series Speakers 1995
Music Quest intelligent-mode MPU-401 ISA 8bit card clone 2016
1m MIDI Cable 5-Pin Male to Male 2016
50cmStereo Audio 3.5mm Aux Jack to 2 RCA M/M Y Cable 2016
3.5mm to 3.5mm audio cable 2016

Input
Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0A (C3KSS1) 1993
Unidentified OEM AT rubber dome keyboard 1995
Advanced Gravis Switch Joystick 1990

Fun
SD SDHC MMC to IDE 3.5" 40 pin Adapter Converter Baffle New 2016
SD Card SanDisk 8GB SDHC SD Card Ultra Class10 40 MB/s 2016
3.5" Floppy Disk Drive to USB emulator 1.44MB 2016
ATX 20 PIN to AT P8/P9 CONVERTER WITH -5V & ON/OFF SWITCH & DUMMY LOAD 2016
Acer All-in-one PSU salvaged from Z5763 2009
Generic early 00s tiny study desk 200x
Generic 4:3 Acer LCD monitor 200x

Benchmarking results
No himem or emm, run off sd card, sound card and midi card not disabled.

Bench Version Result
3DBENCH (v1.0) 10
PCPBENCH (n/a) 1
SPEED600 (v6.00) 42
SYSINFO (n/a) 26.6
TOPBENCH (v0.38) 63

If you are curious this is not a fast machine: DOOM is unplayable even in the smallest window setting, popular Unreal ][ demo by Future Crew from 1993 runs slow and freezes halfway through consistently. I'm mostly interested in 1989-1992 stuff, so this is non issue for me - just providing info for science.

Total cost is $565 USD (all components bought between Spetember 2016 and July 2017). Most expensive parts are MT-32 and the MIDI card. Audio cabling was also unexpectedly expensive.

I had tons of fun matching bits and pieces, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. I want to go below 1993 with all 90s components eventually and find a nice CRT screen as well as case.

Cheers

Some retro gaming

My first PC was a 8086 with HGA and supprisingly a sound blaster clone and 10MB hard drive, but most and best memories came with a decent 486DX2 setup and later a Pentium 2 with Voodoo2 card. All that hardware was lost because back then it was good idea to sell old stuff when upgrading, and I guess as usual, I didn't realize they would be of great nostalgic value some day. I've since then made a few builts with second hand parts and this is the current one in the photos.

It's a 500MHz Pentium 3 in ATX case, with 1MB GUS, one AWE32 (older model with real Yamaha OPL), MU-80 and MT-32 (not in photo), Voodoo 3 PCI, the 360kB floppy drive from my first PC (the only part left! a personal treasure.) It ofcourse has some generic stuff also, like few large IDE disks, 512MB memory, 1.44MB floppy and a dvd burner (with CD audio cable to sound card.) The monitor is Apple Studio Display that is actually a 17" Sony Trinitron. It even has the OSD menu buttons and a standard VGA connector! Found it for 5 euros. Mouse is a Microsoft Optical Whell mouse on PS/2 port. I love it because it works great and the ergonomics makes my today's computer's gaming mouse look like it's copied from that. Really good, even though I loved Logitech mice in the old days and Genius 3 button serial mouse was my first mouse. Always disliked cleaning those balls.

I'm in a dilemma of how to improve the setup. The case is something that I simly found. I could go into something smaller and more basic beige, or I could use some modern case that whould match the weird modern looking design of the Apple display. Or I could replace the apple display with an older beige CRT that would match the year and purpose better, but then again, isn't it cool to have such a weird design monitor on an old PC?

Specs wise I'm supprised how compatible the computer is with everything, just like how I remembered from my Pentium 2 days. I can play even old XT/286/386 year games, like Test Drive 3, because it can be slowed down just about right by disabling caches. Voodoo 3's 2D part does very good job as I can watch all sorts of old demoscene demos and play any old games. And it's fast in 3dfx titles! It's great. I had really poor luck with more modern nvidia and radeon cards (AGP), because many old games were scrambled in DOS. The DVD drive is a bit overkill for CD audio games, but it's my first DVD burner and beige, so that's Ok. And more older drives die often to aging. I've thought of replacing AWE32 with SB16 even though it's AWE32 with real yamaha OPL, because, I really don't like the sound of awe32 wavetable, but neither a fan of the GUS actually. I'm happy hooking up the external Yamaha MU-80 or MT-32 for those purposes, so it'd be good to get rid of the AWE32 and have just plain SB16 with MIDI connected (and GUS for some demos and EPIC games.) My SB16 actually doesn't have the hanging note bug, or rather, I never bumped to that even though I have played hours and hours of Doom engine games and some other games through it to MU-80 in an older PC build.

I like the fact how the computer can run both really old XT/286 games with SB sound as well as modern 3DFX games in windows98. But still, the later is not so big deal for me, so I could downgrade down to first AT case pentium or 486DX4 if I just found an amazing looking case.

Last, the speaker is JBL Charge 3, which has quite high quality sound for it's size. It lasts for a very long time with internal battery and LEFT/RIGHT are in single case. That's all a great thing for a cat owner, less wires to chew on! It's connected with 3.5mm aux cable to the AWE32, whose line-in is connected to line-out of the GUS. Why that way? I like the amplified speaker output of AWE32 when I'm using high impedance head phones that don't hiss much on it, so no need for a separate headphone amp. I've thought of going as far as hiding a bluetooth audio transmitter in the case, so I could connect the JBL speakers wirelessly. A good thing for a cat owner. I'm also interested of finding a retro mouse that is wireless but not horrible for playing Doom. Today's wireless gaming mice are not PS/2 compatible. 🙁

Finally, here's the photo. 😁

This is my other old PC. Compaq LTE5100 laptop, fully working. I had to replace the fan and clean the volume pot. It unfortunately has a 800x600 panel, not 640x480, so VGA games are a bit letterboxed. Another weird thing is that games that use MODEX screen mode run at low FPS, like Doom. Heretic on other hand does not suffer of that because it uses normal 13h mode. When connecting to external monitor, it's full speed though. Anyway, it's a great laptop for DOS games and the ESS sound chip produces some great OPL-like music and is sound blaster pro compatible. I also have a 4x cd-rom drive which can be swapped to the slot where the floppy drive is. It does read only original disks anymore, none of my CD-R's work anymore. I guess it has gotten old. Also, the original 800MB 2.5" pata hard drive is replaced by a 4GB CF, which was the largest I could get to work. I'd love the sound of old hard disk though, it sounds so dead now even though it's turned on. Might buy some second hand still working 2.5" laptop hard disk for it. I used some pcmcia WiFi card in Win98 but it does not seem to work anymore. I also used a 3com 10M PCMCIA ethernet card, but these days I use a wifi virtual modem on serial port. It's more retro to telnet into some BBS or my linux server using old dos terminal program, then download and upload files using zmodem.

perkunas wrote:

maybe my latest $5 recycler rescue is worthy of my first post

Surprisingly good web surfer for what it is, although the lack of browser support on NT makes it hard to get anything done on such a javascript-centric internet. Still need to finish cleaning it, bump the RAM up to 512 MB and find a matching Zip drive, maybe snag a faster CD-ROM drive and a tape drive as well for the full experience. I should probably try some cable management too.

That HP is really a gem. I had one from work (a dual P2) for using old version of SolidWorks on NT4. It's really well built and reliable PC. It was slightly newer and lacked ISA slots, but you appear to have a model which has those.

The last and most up-to-date compatible browser for NT4 is Opera 11.6 AFAIK. It's also working on win98 with KernelEx. Supprisingly many pages look ok with it, much more than with the last working Firefox. On that HP though and with 512MB you wouldn't have any problem running 2000 or even XP.