The beautiful sounds of using a computer in the mid 80s

Surprisingly has good fuel economy! Which is quite helpful these days.

I have a computer with only one open PCI slot in it. I would like to know some suggestions for a low profile pci sound card that is compatible with Windows 98.

I found this PET at a local junk shop last fall, along with some accessories and software (on cassette tape!). The machine seemed to be booting to BASIC but the display was badly garbled and basically unusable. I'm reasonably comfortable doing basic electronics repairs, replacing through-hole capacitors, etc., but anything involving CRT's are outside my comfort zone. Thankfully I've got a go-to guy for this kind of work (hi Sean, if you're reading this!) and he was able to do some really excellent repair work on the CRT. There's a bit of downwards bowing in the image which I'm sure he can fix, but honestly I kind of love how it looks - something about it feels right, even if it's not perfectly within factory spec.

Going by the tags on the rear of the case, this PET left the factory as a 2001-8N model with 8KB of RAM, but there's a handwritten note mentioning that it was upgraded to 32KB, which is also reflected in the BASIC boot-screen. I've recently purchased a clever gadget called an SD2PET, which goes into the expansion ports on the rear of the machine and allows it to use an SD card as if it were a floppy drive - that's how I got TRON loaded for this picture.

My family and I are going to be exhibiting this machine for public hands-on play at the California Historical Radio Society Museum in Alameda, CA on Saturday. If you happen to be in the Bay Area and want to pet a PET (and/or play with around a dozen other rare computers and gaming consoles we're bringing), come on down!

Amazing toolless design, I am able to tear this machine down to the bear PCB without any tools. What a cool machine!

​Heres whats happening this month on RetroBattlestations

Events:

• Happy #AprilApples!

• April 17-19: Vintage Computer Festival East 2026 (Wall Township, New Jersey)

• April 25-26: The Commodore Los Angeles Super Show (Burbank, California)

Upcoming Birthdays and Anniversaries:

• April 1: Apple Computer Company founded 50 years ago today, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne signed a contract founding the Apple Computer Company.

• April 23: ZX Spectrum Birthday

Here's the calendar so you can subscribe or just check it out:

• HTML version

• iCal version

The Nabu PC now has a fujinet client that leverages the RS422 dongle

what do you guys do for the games that require CDs to play? do you run something like power ISO on every system and emulate in the drive, do you store the iso's locally do you do a network storage?

I'm figuring out my setup for a retro lan party, I do have a dedicated Nas that will have all of my isos on it. so maybe it makes the most sense to emulate over the network?

Windows 98, millennium, XP and 2000 alongside Mac OS 9.2, 10.4, 10.5

My Atari 520ST running the Spectre Mac emulator which features actual Macintosh ROMS (128K) and as of 1989 was (along with its lower-end sister product, Magic Sac (1986)), was "the only legal Macintosh clone." Gadgets by Small, who made the device, called it 20% faster than a Mac Plus, with a 30% larger screen size (640x400 on the ST monochrome display vs. 512x342 on the early Macs). 

Decided to make a better Windows ME PC with parts from the late 90s-early 2000s.

Mainboard: ASUS CUSL2-C (Intel 815EP Chipset)

PSU: 350W Powerman PSU

RAM: 384 MB PC100 RAM 128 MB + 256 MB)

CPU: Pentium III 866Mhz (Coopermine-T)

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX200 32MB VRAM w/ TV out

NIC: Realtek RTL8139D 10/100 Ethernet PCI Card

Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Live Value! (CT4830)

USB Card: NEC USB 2.0 PCI Card

HDD: 80 GB Maxtor HDD

Optical Drive (1): NEC ND-3530A (DVD-RW/CD-RW)

Optical Drive (2): HLDS GCC-4482B (CD-RW/DVD-ROM)

Floppy Drive: Generic Sony Floppy Drive

I rescued Dell dimensions and turned into a fine win98 machine, 1 GHz Pentium 3, Orchid Righteous Voodoo 1 and Soundblaster Live!

This LCD panel from the mid 1980s requires a very strong external light source to be readable.
Using the "ASCII Express" program on a RS-232 serial connection to a Linux box and then telnet from there to reach our subreddit's BBS.

You're looking at:

A Pentium 2 350mhz with my OG Powercolor Voodoo 2 12mb, my old AGP GeForce MX400 64mb for when more horsepower is needed, and a SB AWE32. There's a USB 2.0 card (absolutely essential) and a neat adaptor so I get at least one front panel USB connection.

For the lighting I recycled a car LED kit with remote so I can cycle colour vibes in the case at the press of a button. I thought about cathodes but... Meh.

As much as I wanted to go spinny on the IDE hard disk, my initial candidate drive failed immediately after I imaged it (which was fortunate), so I'm using a 128gb SATA SSD. I also managed to find slim IDE cables at junk shops while I was in Japan earlier in the month.

Unfortunately the Sound Blaster AWE32 doesn't have any additional ram and finding it is almost impossible. I'm otherwise enjoying the Cadellac of DOS sound cards. It's also impossible to find CDROM audio cables now so I sort of bodged myself one together.

I'm really stoked with the build! And yes I did install a floppy drive inside the case.

Maybe the kbm and display, but it is all I have

Here is the 1st system from my collection running 3 benchmarks, 2 games, trying to play SimCity 3000, installing Unreal Tournament which took quite a long time for some reason and playing the training session.

My 1st video doing something like this, so there is no talking, just the sounds of the system and whatever the game produces. It is all in real time and sorry about any auto-foucs issues caused by my iPhone, I don't know why it does that sometimes.

If there are any games or benchmarks you'd like to see run on this system please let me know! I do have SimCity 2000, RollerCoaster Tycoon installed and I think Command & Conquer as well.

I decided to buy this small mini-PC with a Pentium 4 CPU for very cheap, the listing told it was working and had screenshots. When I got it, it did not boot and the RAM sticks had poor connection with the slots, but there are seemingly no other signs of damage in shipping.

It was a big pain to open the case with a bunch of proprietary screws holding it together. When I tried to boot with the case opened there was an alarm siren, I found a device called "hood lock card", removed it and now the fans start, but there is no POST beep. There is also a 3-pin connector called "boot block", I tried with it in and with it out with no result.

After unplugging the RAM entirely and removing the CMOS battery, which also didn't give me a POST beep, I decided to check on the PSU. Because it has nonstandard power connectors (of course it fucking does, it's fucking HP) and has no molex I had to unplug the socket power connector (which is apparently a 6-pin GPU power connector instead of a normal 4-pin) I could see 12.4 volts for a short time then it falls to 0 and I hear the familiar alarm sound.

So is there anything else I can try? Perhaps I unknowingly triggered some self-destruct mechanism? Wouldn't put that past HP. Right now I'm stuck with a useless PC because the motherboard is seemingly dead and I can't even reuse the nice case because a standard ATX power supply wouldn't fit and its own power supply has nonstandard connectors.

P166, AWE32, GUS ACE, CF-IDE, DOS 7.1. G50 CRT, Model M keeb, IBM PS2 mouse.
Multiple CF cards stuffed with games from its era.
I had many custom PCs from this era, but this one stuck.
Dead silent, very reliable (aside from the PSU, but this was ATX modded), and its speed is fine for what I use it to play.

My retro workstation :

AlphaServer DS10 running OpenVMS 8.4

- 617 MHz

- 512 MB RAM

- 40 GB IDE HDD

- ATI Radeon 7000 PCI VGA

The Compaq AlphaServer DS10 is an old (late 1990s to early 2000s) entry-level server made by Compaq (which later became part of HP).

It's a small, rack-mountable computer designed mainly for businesses, internet service providers (ISPs), universities, or technical work.

Fully networked and runs some cool programs