celeron – vswitchzero

Welcome to the third installment of my Building a Retro Gaming Rig series. Today, I’ll be taking a look at another motherboard and CPU combo that I picked up from eBay on a bit of a whim.

In Part 1 of this series, I took an in-depth look at some Slot-1 gear, including the popular Asus P2B and some CPU options. As I was thinking ahead in the build, I got frustrated with the lack of simple and classic-looking ATX tower cases available these days. Everything looks far too modern, has too much bling or is just plain gigantic. Used tower cases from twenty years ago are all yellowed pretty badly and just look bad. On the other hand, there are lots of small, simple and affordable micro ATX cases available.

Micro ATX – or mATX – motherboards were actually pretty uncommon twenty-odd years ago. PC tower cases were pretty large and in those days people really did use lots of expansion cards and needed the extra space. Only very compact systems and OEMs seemed to use the mATX form factor at that time. Many of these boards were heavily integrated, lacked expansion slots and stuck you with some pretty weak onboard video solutions.

MSI MS-6160 Motherboard

In an interesting twist, I came across an MSI MS-6160 mATX board based on the Intel 440LX chipset that seemed to tick many of the right boxes. The combo included a Celeron 400MHz processor and 512MB of SDRAM for only $35 CDN.

Continue reading “Building a Retro Gaming Rig – Part 3”

Welcome to a new hardware build series where I’ll be sharing my experiences building a retro Intel gaming system. In part 1, I’ll be going over some of the hardware I picked out for this build and doing a bit of a photo shoot. I apologize in advance for the copious amounts of trivial history and nostalgic rambling in this post, so please feel free to skip the first few sections if you’d like to get straight to the gear. For those who appreciate the trip down memory lane, please read on! 🙂

Introduction

Twenty seventeen has been a real year of nostalgia for me when it comes to PC hardware. It all started earlier this summer when my Brother in-law was cleaning out his basement and gave me a couple of classic PC systems. One was a 1993 era DEC 486 and the other, a 1995 era NEC Pentium 90 system. These systems brought back so many good memories and were a real joy to use and restore. Although the first PC we had in my house growing up was a much older clone from the late 80s – possibly an 8088 or 286, I was really too young to appreciate it and preferred my NES/SNES at the time. I remember teaching myself how to use DOS with it but it wasn’t until 1994 that I could convince my parents that I needed a new computer – you know, for ~~gaming~~ educational purposes. After doing some research and shopping around, I got a shiny new 486 DX2/66. It may not have been state of the art at the time, but with 8MB of RAM, a CDROM, 430MB Hard drive and a real Soundblaster 16, it ran like a dream. I spent hours upon hours on that machine and it wasn’t long before I had added a 14.4 modem and really got into the BBS scene as well. About a year later, my parents surprised me with a top of the line NEC Pentium 100 system with 16MB of RAM and the 486 replaced the old monochrome 8088 in the basement. Coincidentally it was almost identical to the Pentium 90 given to me by my brother in-law.

The Goal

Although these two retro rigs were a lot of fun to restore and use, I wanted to build a machine that was a bit more flexible, could be customized and used for not only demanding DOS/Windows 9x games but also most of the classics as well. The main issue with these two older machines is that they are both proprietary AT based systems with many BIOS quirks, compatibility issues and other limitations. Even the Pentium 90 with 24MB of RAM just wasn’t fast enough for newer DOS games like Quake. In short, I wanted a custom retro build that was fast, reliable and compatible – something with some nostalgic value and some pizzazz but also well suited for daily use.

Continue reading “Building a Retro Gaming Rig – Part 1”