Building the Ultimate Oddware Tower! Twelve 5.25" Drive Bays Full of Weirdness 

What about putting the burger mouse on this bad boy? :-)

Wow, you unlocked a neural pathway right there with that toolbar thing

Customer: I can't see the webpage any more! Tech: To many IE browser toolbars... LOL Been there seen that as a tech in the 90's LLAP 🖖

Dear god, the memories... Most people had a few, but once had to service a malware ridden one that had over a dozen bars. The customer said it had become progressively slower (...), and now it took 30m to get to the desktop. I s**t you not... 30m later i was looking at the desktop finally stabilizing, with a couple IE's, popup's and overall malware madness :D

@@ErazerPT I remember! Awesome times! Being a tech back then meant a bunch of head banging on the wall... 🤪 LLAP 🖖

IIRC there was a plugin that let you scroll through all the installed toolbars to give you more usable screenspace

I remember seeing photos of builds like this on Tom’s Hardware back then! I think they used a Cooler Master Stacker case

@@LGR So as of 7:19 you're basically building the "Ultimate" audio PC?

@@mattparker9726 the musketeer III doesn’t really do much with the audio

MAXIMUM PC cover build

And those magazines are all out of business now.

"let's search google for 'cool toolbars very nice'" - Vinesauce Joel

That's a good point! I didn't even click on he didn't actually put an optical drive in it! Cassettes only!

It's like a ZX Spectrum, with its .. uh.. CC-RAM(?) drive. It would actually be pretty cool to see something like that in an IBM 5150, seeing as it has a cassette interface.

I would probably have put a zip drive in here.

@@jonathanellis6097 Dual layer DVD with LightScribe.

- I just load ISOs from cassettes.

I'm still yearning for a aftermarket stereo unit :) As a teenager, I were looking forward to my first car and to get some really cool stereo unit. But it's too late sadly. You can barely swap the modern ones out now :(

@AndreasElf you wanna check out "aftermarket surrounds". It replaces a lot of your dashboard so you can put single and double din stereos in. I have a few different cars. I have a 1977 MGB GT and it's got a beautiful radio head unit in it from the early 80s. It's all analogue and crisp!

You can still do that in 2023...

@@AndreasElf You are 100% wrong, just get a dash kit and wiring harness for your car. Everything else has been the same for many decades.... I've installed stereos in every vehicle I've owned since the 80s.....

@@PanekPL Yep. Walmart, best buy, audio stores, flea markets.....

I think a PC Chips Motherboard with fake cache or maybe a Celeron without any would be most appropriate for this. Add to the madness 🙂

​@@MrDuncluh yesss Celeron!!!

Cyrix!!

ME is unstable and better known as the Mistake Edition ware as XP or 2000 are stable with the NT Kernal would do justice for this build.

@@rogermeyer5695 That's EXACTLY WHY Me is a great option! Don't you get it? 😂😂

Even a rear view mirror lol

Great now it needs some fuzzy dice hanging off the side.

Install a PC and run a drive sim!

I would love to see that too!

tbh I thought he'd do that in this episode.. kinda upset I didnt get to see it here

It looks soul-less without everything working. you must give it life!!!!

WORKING ALL THE THINGS! There is no limit to how stupid this should be, the dumber the better. And XP is perfect for this because every experience using it is another set of reminders that every programme manager behind the scenes won every fight to stick their stupid, stupid feature in your face with a million popups and dialogue boxes and "are you sure"s and and and and that's why I moved to OS X. So it's a perfect match. _Definitely_ XP.

​@@shant-oHe says exactly why it wasn't in the video at the end

I had one with 6 drive bays and ended up filling them all.

Didn't even know they had a newsletter! Neat!

@@LGR I didn't even know they still existed. lol

Self contained... did they ever make a drive bay keypad???

I have looked in the past. Best I could ever do it fit a 4 inch TV could fit in a double slot. Even then I had to take part of the bezel off and make a spacer/blocker for the sides. Going smaller would be possible but that would be old camcorder CRTs, that would take some work, not to bad but it would be too small for much use.

@@krisreddish3066 I find those old mini B/W TV sets at the flea market all the time, generally 5 USD or less. Would be a good use for one (although I think those are 5")

@@gabotron94 If you can power it 5 inch may fit. Some older PC cases have dual slot optical bays that are about 5.25inch. Things like flash and bezels may get into the way and may take some rework to make them look nice.

Agreed!! I Still have my antec from 2010-ish, which looks like a (believe it or not) larger version of the 1200. That Beast has got two 200mm fans on top and a freaking TURBINE fan on the side. Alas, i had to remove the turbine cowl (it literally had a cowl) because of the ever expanding size of GPUs. The case with absolutely nothing in it is a solid 40-50lbs of aircraft aluminum and plastic. I'm glad to see some love for them here - their air flow and modding capabilities are still unbeatable.

@@thecaffeinequeen From what you described this sounds a lot like my Sunbeamtech tower I just got. It maybe was trying to knockoff Antec. For being a low end cheapo knockoff supplier, damn that case is a monster. It is nearly as big as if not bigger than my iBuyPower Chimera tower I had built in 2016! It's so heavy empty it's unreal. It is super well made for being china pride stuff.

I’d love to do more, I’m open to ideas!

@@LGR I recently did a build for my dad where I took his old gateway tower from 98, and put new hardware inside with win10 (while keeping the floppy drive, and beige exterior aesthetic). I would LOVE to see your take on a "sleeper" machine like that. Especially a SFF desktop like an old IBM or something. RTX IBM SFF?!

I wonder if anyone's made a folding keyboard that fits in a drive bay.

​@@LGR find some way to wire up all the usb oddware you have, I know they make multi-port USB dongles

@@LGR I know as a collector there is a dilemma between wanting stuff and having stuff. Doing some Oddware builds for charity auction could be a fun way to get some of this never used oddball items out in the world.

i was thinking that too. he may have to have a signal repeater in there. idk how well audio signal will hold up after being processed by 4 different devices lol

Ideally integrated with Clint's modular synth rig!

You’re starting to convince me

@@LGR This was my thought, too! Building a Vista-era machine also ensures you'll have solid choices for a CPU with integrated graphics.

Vista was well known for its gadgets! does the silverstone have sideshow support? 😄

@@succulent951 Oh man I was just thinking about Sideshow. Did they ever make any 5.25" Sideshow displays? That would be amazing.

Media Center Edition?

@@kshadehyaena Of course. LOL.

front panel gamecube ports for PCs are a thing??

@@SuperFromND You basically take Nintendo's official Gamecube to USB adapter and remove it from its case, then insert it into a 3D printed case that's designed to mount it into a 5 1/4 inch drive bay on a desktop PC. (Several different printable models are floating around online.) Then you hook it up to a USB header on your motherboard and you're good to go.

Vista would be good and look flashy like all the oddware. Someone also said XP with the Zune theme, which I think would also look good

OS2/Warp? Edit: ah, but yeah, that likely won't work driver-wise.

And the hardware needs to be something unusual, but still cool, like a Phenom first generation (X4 9950 BE would be interesting) and a controversy ATI Radeon HD 2900XT.

Vista might be a crapshoot with driver compatibility for the few components in here that require software for full functionality, so XP with a wacky theme like Zune would probably be a better bet. Or maybe even XP Media Center Edition since that whole OS itself is pretty much Oddware in its own way! LOL.

Widgets! ALL THE WIDGETS!!

Only fans?

@@DForce26 Don't go there.

@@DForce26 ONLY FANS

Built like the proverbial brick dunny. At least my 300 is. Weighs a ton, but it's quality. Compared to the ones equivalent in that era, and even modern ones, ... honestly i think i could crush them with the Antec and it wouldn't even care.

Never had a 900, but I’ve got an old video capture system built in a P180. It’s huge and weighs a ton.

Cyrix is good, but what if he could cram a Transmeta chip in there somehow? :D Gotta find out whether the fan's blowing cool air in or hot air out; maybe it can keep some gaming tea warm with the heat from the computer itself :'D

I expect yearly shuffles

They copied the idea from the 1950s SAGE Air Defense System.

I bet Samuel L Jackson's pc in jurassic park had one!

Big time. "Let's add some more heat into something that's already running far too hot!"

THIS! A case where the front was JUST 5.25" drive bays would be great from a customisation perspective. Put the buttons and lights on a module that goes in one of the bays (with space for a hard drive behind it). Put the ports on a module. Put any front fans you might want on modules. Put your status displays on modules. And of course, put your _drives_ on more modules. You could put 5x 3.5" hard drives across 3x 5.25" bays vertically. Or 3x across 2x 5.25" bays horizontally, with a couple of 2.5" SSDs on the side (I've spent a lot of time thinking about space in 5.25" drive bays). Get a 9-bay tower and fit it with a button/port module, two 5x drive modules, and a 3x drive module for a beefy NAS with 13 externally-accessible, hot-swappable hard drives in some exotic RAID configuration with 3 drives being used for parity, plus a few internal-only SSDs for cache.

*raises hand Win2k user here 😅 Only switched to XP because my 2k install got corrupted during a LAN with friends. 😂

me and pretty much all the other nerds in my high school class ran Win2K, but a lot of games didn't work on it, so we had to have a dual-boot with Windows 98. The lack of proper game and media support was incidentially why MS felt a need to release WinME. It was never supposed to exist - 2K was supposed to be the only Windows, but it didn't work out. XP was really just a minor upgrade to 2K, with the media support fixed, which is also why 2K is NT 5 and XP is NT 5.1

The reason it's great is because it's edited down to just the good stuff.

Or mix the pattern up so it looks like a piano.

make a custom fan bracket. Hire a kid with a new fangled 3d printer.

agree, also there is something about the black case, maybe it should be neon / LGR green or purple or something?

Also, some units would fit better together, like having the circle fire right on top of the musketeer 2, since they have very similar esthetics.

i sUpPoRT tHe cUrReNT tHiNg