Exploring a Mystery Retro PC! 

Agreed. I like these kinds of machines. The powerhouses are cool, but the low-to-mid range machines have their charm.

Yeah, this would have been a $600 bargain basement system back in the day. The Sony VAIO that I had at the time would have totally curb stomped it.

@Lurch Based

@Lurch Video games these days require more storage space to contain the directory entries for the assets than MS-DOS games took for the entirety of the software. So, as much as I can sympathize with the sentiment (and dislike day-one patches and physical media that is little more than an entitlement key), that's not really fair.

There's a bit of a trend in retro computing circles to focus on benchmarks and performance tuning -- which is fine. Some people really get a kick out of squeezing performance out of a particular hardware config. But, I had a Cyrix 6x86 CPU back in the day, and I have one again now. It's interesting. It's definitely not a speed demon, but who cares? If I need speed, I can move from Super Socket 7 to Slot 1, or to S370, or S478, or . . . . My in-the-day Cyrix was a total dog's breakfast. Unstable, not that performant, and overall just the worst mobo / CPU combo I ever owned. But, it was a part of my history, so I built another with the same (almost) CPU. This time, I got the lower power version of the chip, so the mobo linear voltage regulator isn't running beyond its means. I remember being able to instantly shrink heat-shrink tubing on the tiny fins of the regulator back in the 90s. I have no doubt that was part of the problem. For what it is, it's a fun little system. Being SS7, I can't use an Intel chipset, and I've always had issues with VIA chipsets -- this one was no exception. Problems with compatibility with a Matrox Mystique on the first build, and a mobo swap to a later chipset fixed that, but did not pair well with Win 98 and the 4-in-1 drivers I used. Typical VIA stuff. With Win 95 OSR2, it's running well, and I have the satisfaction of knowing I tamed the beast, breaking it like a young horse, and now we're getting on just fine.

Yeah, I remember that my mum had a couple of pc's, the old one ran on Windows 98 and the cool one (the one I used most of the time) was a high end compaq running windows XP. You rarely saw anything that wasn't Compaq, Packard Bell, Gateway or e machines in the wild. Only the boss or the creatives at their studios had the vaios, macs qosmios or thinkpads. Heck, even then those computers were owned by the companies, not by the employees.

Hey man, if you're right, I commend you for a design in any case. I would love a 3D printer down the line for things exactly like this.

So cool you saw your own design 😁

I too miss the intro. And the outro.

Agree

It might be that simple. I had this case with a pentium 166, and I drilled the hole.

They were likely punched with a tab you bent back and forth until it snapped off.

I think this was only done on request.

The old socket looks machine made but the ps2 if you pause on 1:50 looks man made 100%. The top right of the ps2 is scuffed and the bottom right offers 3MM of metal ha.

This was intended to be a home PC. Most likely a local computer store that would sell generic pre-built systems. They buy whatever is cheapest and if that means drilling a hole in the case, then a hole is getting drilled.

The track is called Passport Please by Passport Designs. Shazammed it.

I think this part of the video made me realize what this type of music was that I have a fondness for in the recesses of my mind. Now I kinda want to dig around for musicians that still make this particular type of music, lol

@@PrimeRibb69 The problem with Shazam is that it might recognise a MIDI file with one soundfont, but not another. You're better off finding the MIDI file itself from Win95 / the web so you can hear what your device(s) make it sound like.

very true, no one did get the top of the line back then, and we all had our fun. but today they all act like the highest AMD/Intel is the bare minimum.

I remember back in the day where certain overpriced games would require a certain overpriced video and/or sound card in order for the game to work....I had neither the games, nor the video and sound cards to play that stuff with....I had an old NEC Ready 9012 with a 90mhz processor, and something like 16mb of RAM, and a 1GB hard drive that at the time seemed huge, yeah I filled it up within a year HAHA!!! Ended up with a 2.5GB. That computer though is what got me hooked on the game Descent. I have the original that came with that computer which was actually just a demo full 1st version but originally was shipped out as a demo game....I then ended up with the 2nd and 3rd versions of that game...and none of them work on today's computers LOL.

I feel like a year of my life was spent staring at progress bars in Cool Edit back then, while the hard drive thrashed to bits in the background. The biggest deficit I always had was exactly what nearly everyone else dealt with back then: Not enough RAM. It was expensive, so we made-do. For the rest of my builds, I never went top-of-the-line, but usually, I scraped together what I had to, to buy what I considered the best parts -- if not the fastest. E.g., 440BX, genuine Sound Blaster cards (except for a short fling with a Media Vision PAS 16), Creative CD-ROMs (OEM'd by Matsushita, or the Hex Speed variant of the Philips drive in this build), WD hard drives, etc. So a lot of the run-of-the-mill parts in builds like this are kinda "meh" to me, since I would've milked an older computer longer, rather than buying low-cost stuff like a Virge video card, or ESS sound card. There's nothing wrong with that stuff, of course, it's just that I was an enthusiast, and so I planned my upgrades meticulously. It's not my kink now either, but I do think it's interesting to see builds like this, which were mainstays of the mainstream. I have a few low-end parts in my spares for bench testing or comparison or whatever, but mostly build replicas of what I used back then.

Despite that it would have still been cracking at Rollercoaster Tycoon and Red Alert.

Yeah. But that's also because PC gaming was an extremely small niche for middle class (and in many countries, upper middle class) people and in comparison to consoles, there weren't that many games on PC worth playing and paying for, contrary to the PC gaming nerds from back then that say otherwise only because it's what they grew up with, but it wasn't common. You also REALLY had to be into the stuff, and had to had a family member or friends that would introduce you into this world, buy magazines where it would show the latest parts or PC's, AND had to live near an area where computer parts are sold AND that they sold high-end enthusiast parts. In most cases, these were more afluent areas. Also, most people would build/buy high end only for heavy workloads requiring such power, such as professional video editing, maybe early 3D modeling, or people that worked in the film industry. In the 90's, standards changed every 4 or 5 months, APIs for video cards were sometimes exclusive to ONE card and ONE BRAND and some games were exclusive to that (and many of them were expensive). On top of that, gamepads did not have a proper standard for a long time and a lot of games that were not supposed to be played with keyboard and mouse had awful or no controller support. Then, PC peripherals were also harder to come by. Everyone played on consoles, cheaper, easy to use and often were a little ahead even. PC gaming became truly viable in the mid to late 2000's, the 2010's, stutters and all, started to become the golden decade for it, and it keeps going. Only nowadays can we say "PC is king". People who say "the PC was always king" (for gaming) are fooling themselves or never truly went outside much and interacted with the rest of humanity.

I took Computer Network Technologies classes in high school back in the late 90's, and one of my friends from that class had a socket 7 250Mhz Cyrix CPU system he brought in for repair(bad RAM if I remember correctly), and it was about like having a low powered Celeron in your system, as even a 200Mhz AMD chip would outpace it on the same motherboard, which is part of why they became a footnote in PC history. So really you did not miss very much of anything when it comes to Cyrix.

I had that same case growing up, must have been cheap and popular

I feel ya. This was the case I used to build my first PC.

It also was the case of my first PC as a kid in 1997!

I remember that time period. I always wondered about the Cyrix but I didn't know anyone who had it.

My first build was made possible due to a Cyrix MII... I remember seeing all the expensive CPU's in the parts catalog and mailing away for what was simply labeled "Cyrix 233" when my parts came in I was all excited that it was an MII, I was thinking I scored the equivalent of a Pentium 2 for whatever cheap price I paid, like $50 or something... 😆 Then I learned later that it was super weak... But I kept it for a year or so, overclocking it and finally killing it trying to force over 300mhz (really 250, or whatever the true frequency was that equaled pr300 in their calculation. I learned a lot from that computer.

My best friend got a pentium 100 in a case just like that! I was envious because I only had a 486 😭

found pc from 2005-2006 in the exact same case fo 10$ in early 2020

XP on a system like that? Yikes. I know the pain, I attempted to install XP on my first PC which had a Celeron 400 with 64 MB of RAM. "the box says I can do it" I said. Let's just say it wasn't on there for long.

I had the same one too. I would play gameboy roms on it in the late 90’s. A gameboy rom would barely fit on a floppy drive but thats how my friend gave them to me.

But that also made it really stressful 😅

@@d34dbolt20 considering how cheap the rest of the machine is, I doubt it would have been something that interesting

Did the Cyrix processors just stop working?

@@dave4shmups Yes. Some sort of electrical bug if I remember correctly.

Do you remember if your PC case included blue LEDs? I lost the trace when they started to appear.