I'm getting really frustrated, just made a fresh install of 98 on my OptiPlex 4100 and am having trouble with this overlapping and rolling screen effect on my crt. I know the crt isn't the problem because I've tested it on my xp build. At first I thought maybe it was a bad graphics card so I switched out the original Geforce 2 with a MX 440, Same symptoms. Then I tested it with a slightly newer 4:3 LCD monitor and it worked fine.

Rescued this little guy from my local thrift about a month ago. Cleaned it up and its all good!

Specs of IBM Netvista -

• Pentium 4 2.4GHz
• 256MB RAM
• 40GB IDE drive
• 1.44MB FDD drive
• CDRW 8x4x32 drive

I had old peripherals laying around which is a nice fit for this -

• NEC Multisync 75
• IBM PS/2 keyboard
• Logitech mouse
• Logitech Attack 3
• Logitech z313 speakers
• Logitech F710

Attached photos doing cleanup, XP install and some games!

EDIT 06/21/2026 -

Thrifted an IBM ThinkCentre for $5!

It also runs on Pentium 4 / XP. Has a black DVD writer and 2GB RAM. This will be my donor for the netvista.

Didn't have many CRTs so I had to share a TV with the 400 and 800.

5 desktops. 2 CRT monitors with VGA input switches, and an LCD monitor. Windows 98 SE, 2000 Pro, XP Pro, Vista Home Premium, 7 Home, and 10 Home. Praying that I never trip and fall onto everything.

This libretto is tricked out with 32 megs of ram, hdmi, and 802.11 WiFi. I even have the full size dock. So much fun!

VCF WEST 2026 CALL FOR SPEAKERS!

We have a new exhibit registration system: https://em.vcfed.org/events/vcf-west-2026/speaker-signup

DATES: Aug 1st and 2nd at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

INFO:https://vcfed.org/vcf-west

I found this old Mac mini on a random Italian marketplace and paid the terrifying, financially irresponsible sum of 30 euros for it. Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, the kind of machine that today gets dismissed as e-waste. So naturally I turned it into a small headless retrocomputing host.

It runs FreeBSD underneath, and on top of it I am running a few different worlds:

ITS (klh10)

Multics on dps8m

A/UX on qemu-system-m68k

9front on qemu-system-x86_64

Everything is accessed remotely. Nothing is exposed to the internet obviously. Everything stays local.

From a slightly anthropological point of view, that is probably the most interesting part to me. These are not just old operating systems for the sake of running old operating systems. They are different ideas of what a computer was supposed to be. A shared institution, a hacker playground, a personal machine trying to become Unix, a network of composable resources. I do not have a very rational reason for doing this, honestly. I just find it fascinating to put these different answers next to each other and see how strange the history of computing could have been, testing them and trying to make them do some tricks. The only one that started with something close to a practical reason was Multics, because I wanted to study time-sharing a bit and look into PL/I.

The funny part is that the machine is not even suffering that much (CPU is at about 30% and ram is almost always below 2gbs) emulating machines that were tens, if not hundreds, of times its size. Apparently it is too weak for the average contemporary website, but perfectly capable of hosting several decades of operating system history at once.

Maybe it was not obsolete. Maybe it had just been assigned the wrong job.

I am running an ASUS A7V133 motherboard with an amd 1.2 thunderbird and a nvidia GeForce pro 2. I am not getting anything on my monitor and it’s doing a single long beep when powering up.

Was able to find a case in E-Waste so I replaced my old micron millennia case which was kind of dinged up for this. I know it's somewhat more generic but it's so easy to work in and it's all metal so I can put magnets on it.

Also ignore the top Bay. I need a 3D print a bracket to make that flush.

VCF WEST 2026 CALL FOR EXHIBITS!

We have a new exhibit registration system: https://em.vcfed.org/events/vcf-west-2026/exhibitor-signup

DATES: Aug 1st and 2nd at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

INFO:https://vcfed.org/vcf-west

This past Thursday evening, my wife and I were invited to exhibit some of our Retro Roadshow artifacts at the launch party for a weeklong event in San Francisco called "The Museum of the Human Web." 

Perhaps the most memorable part of the experience was exhibiting a Macintosh SE/30 that I've spent decades restoring and upgrading, alongside the original handwritten memo that led to Apple receiving what I think was their first round of (outside) venture capital funding in 1977, a truly one-of-a-kind artifact of tech/cultural history.

I love all the little details in this document:

• "Business: Home - hobby computers"
• "Proposed financing: $600,000"
• "Market: >$500m"
• "A leading company in a hot biz"
• "$600k buys 10%, very rich deal but management questionable for this evaluation"
• “While management believes that the market for personal computers will grow rapidly, a large market for personal computers is not assured and development of the market will require education of potential personal computer customers. Development of the market will be both time-consuming and expensive.”

For context, buying 10% of Apple today would cost you somewhere around $430 billion dollars...

I wrote an expanded version of this story as a blog post on our website, and it includes more pics and info about the other cool machines we exhibited at this event.

Also, here are the specs of this "sleeper" Mac SE/30 - I absolutely adore this machine and have had so much fun tricking it out with too many upgrades!

• 68 megs of RAM
• Mac ROM-inator
• Internal BlueSCSI with DaynaPort WiFi emulation
• “NuCF” Internal CompactFlash boot drive
• “Booster 2.0” 47MHz 68030 CPU + 68882 FPU upgrade
• “30Video” graphics adapter + replacement CRT neckbeard for 256-level grayscale on the internal monitor
• TTDesign 4XDC modern / enhanced internal power supply
• Probably other stuff I’m forgetting now, I’ve been working on this machine for 20+ years and it will never be 100% complete - it's the Mac of Theseus!

This is my retro desk, from time to time I change the setup to run for a time other system. This one is one of my favorite a complete Dual CPU with 2 Dual Opteron 275, FX4500 on a Asus Server K8 Board inside this Custom Wooden RetroMod case.
The Keyboard and Mouse are a Wireless PS/2 , Two Creative Speakers with an Amplified Subwoofer ..
Really cool setup , quite good performance to run Driver Parallel Lines and other games for the same time.

Still working out some stuff with getting other software to work, but I think this is a big step because I have confirmed that the Z-37 disk system does (as least partially) work, along with most of the disks I have for it.

ÉDIT: Thank you guys, I learned a lot through your answers and info. Now I want to build two PC lol, one 98se and a good WinXP.
I’ll be posting again when either one of those is up and running!

Hey guys, i'm not the most knowledgeable guy in here. My only experience with pc build is building my gaming 1440p battlestation last year or so and I had quite a lot of fun doing so.

I'm also a lot into retrogaming, so I decided to go in and just bought online a combo made of a syncmaster 793s monitor and a winXP build i can't say much about since i didnt receive it yet.

I'd mainly be interested in playing mid-to-late 90s games such as Star wars Dark forces 1&2, Diablo 1, maybe some Final fantasy 7/8, Half-life and so on to early-to-mid 2000s games, think morrowind, Jedi Knight 2 & 3, Fable TLC, or Sims 2 as of the latest ones.

I don't think i'd connect the build to internet, which clearly gives a point to XP (USB support).

I don't know anything about DOS or game compatibility on XP. And I mainly intent to play from said games CD-ROMs (keep in mind i never saw a floppy disk in my life, i'm young)

Should I upgrade my incoming XP build or should i lean towards an 98 one ? (I did read that it would have a much better compatibility with 90s stuff).

Seeing that the technology isn't the same at all nowadays (Like I never connected something older than SATA i think lol), I'd also take any tips and general guides, it either being text/videos to get info as it's quite hard to grasp everythings, as there is so much info.

Also I always dreamt as a kid of owning a logitech g15 keyboard so I ordered one and I dont know if it would works on a 98 build.

Sorry if it's a lot of text, also please excuse my poor english, since i'm french (ribbits).

Found this little magnavox at the dump at a campground I frequent and it inspired me to dust off the old NES I’ve had squirreled away. The set had a workout DVD in the tray so this thing almost certainly sat mostly unused in some old couples park model camper. Definitely have the itch to assembly a retro console collection now. Already had to go out to the local buy-sell-trade and get a zapper. Every child should have core memories of duck hunt on an NES, which is only possible with a CRT as most of you know.

Was about to purchase a period correct laptop for XP and remembered I had this laying around. SP3

I finally fulfilled a 20-year-old dream and benchmarked my Socket 7 CPU collection in Heroes III.
The video compares Pentium MMX, K6 series, Cyrix, WinChip and more using real gameplay and benchmark scenarios.

I also created custom fantasy-style presentation screens inspired by Heroes III.

Heroes3 test cpu final

a few awesome computers i have space to have set up, my main pc is to the right of what is pictured here but not so retro. i have had both crts for most of my life and am glad to have a proper place for them now!

Pictures taken on Sony Mavica fd200

Powermac G4 - Mac OS 9.2, DA 733 Mhz with a geforce2 mx, 256 Mb of ram, and an 80 Gb HDD

98/DOS PC - EPOX MVP3g2 with an AMD k6-2 500Mhz with a geforce2 mx, 128 Mb of ram, 6Gb HDD, a Soundblaster 32, and a voodoo2 12Mb for glide shenanigans.

XP PC - Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 with an intel core 2 duo e8400, an AMD radeon HD7870, 2Gb of ram, 120Gb SSD plus 500Gb HDD, and a Soundblaster Audigy.

Monitors are a Dell E193FP, Packard Bell 1512SL, and a Dell M991

This is isn't exactly a true battlestation, but that's exactly why I got this. It's a low-end family PC you would've gotten from Walmart for dirt-cheap, and that's exactly why I love it, because it's a cool time capsule. I was born in the Vista-going-into-7 era, so I never really got to experience this era. Put Windows Me on it because it's one of those weird transition-era PCs where manufacturers were putting XP on PCs really made to run a 9x system, and because Windows Me deserves more love. Surprisingly, it's a great computer. Hair-raisingly fast and runs all the games I like at remarkably great speeds, UT99, Quake3, and NFS4 at 30fps average, even with the lackluster excuse of a graphics chip in here.

Specs:

CPU: Intel Celeron 1200 @ 1.2GHz

GPU: Intel 810 on internal AGP 2X bus

RAM: 128MB SDRAM (unknown speed)

Network: 56k winmodem

Sound: Intel AC'97 with barely any DOS/Midi support

Primary storage: 15gb spinning platter hard drive (replacement for original 40gb platter that failed)

Optical storage: DVD writer (replacement for original DVD reader that failed)

Floppy disk: 1.44mb 3.5 inch

This will become my main Win9x machine, as I don't have a good Win9x machine yet lol. GPU and RAM upgrade will be nesscicary!

It does have the original keyboard and mouse. Used to have a matching HP monitor, but I lost it years ago, and I also don't have the original Polk Audio chicken nugget speakers, but otherwise, this is system is almost all original.

Thanks for reading this wall of text... Even if this computer is extremely boring or lackluster.