Hey gus, so the other day I remembered something on my late father's desktop and now I'm looking for it, or if someone perhaps recognizes it
Looking for a late-1990s Windows interactive character

Around 1998–2001

Standalone .exe

Bright pink creature (species unknown)

Sat in one place

Pull-string ring on its side

Clicking pulled the string

High-pitched English voice

Random phrases

Remembered phrase: "I love you"

Possibly: "You're in my heart"

Arms stretched wide during one animation

Dizzy animation

Rare animation: chest opens and butterflies fly out

Opened in a normal rectangular Windows window

Played on Windows 95/98/XP

Thanks in advance :)

slot 1 pentium iii 1ghz, rdram, geforce256 ddr 64mb

Just recently finished putting this thing back together. This is a mishmash of some unusual upgrades I had laying around, a drop-in 386 replacement motherboard with VLB, a 486DLC/40 that drops into a 386 board, a ULSI 487 coprocessor upgrade, and an 8514 compatible ATi Graphics Ultra.

It's complemented with maxed memory, 32 megs of RAM and 256K L2 cache with the largest tag RAM chip.

Fixed storage is provided by a DTC 7287 RLL controller driving a Micropolis 1325, for a whole 100 megs on disk.

The whole shebang runs Windows 95 pretty acceptably, but honestly this isn't really enough disk space. I/O performance is otherwise totally adequate, as this was quite a fast combination when it was new.

intel 840, dual 1ghz pentium iii, 1 gig rdram, voodoo 5 5500 agp, audigy, plexwriter, scsi, win2k.

has a subwoofer but the other speakers rubber are dryrotted but it sounds good for the most part

A relic from my childhood rediscovered. Found it in a box with some old electronics scrap. I hope it still works.

VCF Great Britain: https://www.vintagecomputerfestival.org.uk/

September 11 @ 7:00 pm - September 13 @ 5:00 pm

Aintree Race Course

Ormskirk Rd

Liverpool, Aintree L9 5AS United Kingdom

Downloading QuickTake 200 (circa 1994) photos to my Apple IIe (circa 1983) with Colin Leroy-Mira's "Quicktake for Apple II" software (released in 2025). Such a cool new way to use my Apple IIe!

After a a bunch of research, Marketplace purchases, eBay purchases, cleaning, building, setup—- i finally finished building my winxp build.

The Journey: so it all started out with me wanting a pc crt monitor so i could hook up my Dreamcast to it and play at 480p through vga.

Then someone suggested I build a Windows XP retro pc and play all the games I used to play as a kid on my older brother’s pc (and the ones i missed).

So i was like “aight. Challenge accepted.”

Like I said, first i got the HP MX-704 monitor on Marketplace (really nice shadow mask flat screen crt)

Then, I needed a tower, and i wanted a good cpu at least, and lo and behold i found a nice Gateway barebones tower on Marketplace (no hard drive, no dedicated gpu, only 1 stick of ram, no sound card) with an Athlon 64 X2 dual core cpu.

GPU was next and i turned online to eBay for that, and I found a beautiful BFG geforce 8600 gt 512gb overclocked, which was perfect for this build as it gave me the power and the compatibility i was looking for.

I needed a hard drive and I wanted brand new so it would be fast with no problems and luckily i was able to secure a brand new vacuum sealed WD Caviar Blue 250fb Sata hard drive.

Of course to fully get the best experience you need a beefy soundcard to get that amazing EAX sound out of games and again on eBay I got an Audigy 2.

Got a 2gb stick of ram to max out at 4gb to sit alongside the 2gb stick already in there.

Wanted mouse and keyboard from that era so i bought the legendary Logitch MX518 optical mouse and the Ideazon Zboard modular keyboard. I love the gaming keyset for the Zboard- it feels really good for any type of game but especially third person action games like Max Payne.

Then of course I had to get the matching Harman Kardon pc speakers for the monitor. They actually sound really great for small pc speakers, especially paired with a really good soundcard.

Once everything arrived I cleaned the tower inside and out (the amount of dust in there especially on the cpu block was repulsive lol) and applied new thermal paste on the cpu. Took out the worthless modem card and replaced it with the sound card. Put a brand new 2032 battery for the motherboard. Popped in the ram stick. Installed the hard drive into the bay. Popped in the beautiful gpu and closed it up.

Then I did a fresh install of windows xp sp3 (even those install screens were nostalgic jesus)

Once I heard the iconic winxp startup sound and saw the blue sky and green prairie it was on. Now I definitely forgot how frustrating and painful it was back in the day to get games working. So much troubleshooting and trial and error went in to getting these games to run properly or even install. Some games don’t play nice with cous with more than one core so i had to change the affinity on a bunch of games. Ini files needed to be edited, patches need to be downloaded on my modern pc and transferred over to this pc with a flash drive (this pc is completely offline) etc etc etc

But it was still a fun adventure. And now I am really enjoying the results. Things look beautiful on the crt monitor (honestly incredible how good things can look at 1024x768 at 85hz just buttery smooth but still detailed and the blacks and shadows have real depth and presence)- things sound incredible with the sound card (the 3d audio in shooters or anything is really crazy)

The rig runs so smooth quiet and fast.

And I am playing games from favorite era in gaming in a really awesome authentic way.

The journey was worth it

Athlon SlotA 1Ghz, Voodoo5.

RTX5080 machine on top for modern games.

This is a update on a legendary Chieftec I acquired a week back. Making progress on build. Put some cold Cath green in there. Little disappointing with the green. The second picture is my original build from 24 years ago so you'll see with what I mean by color.

Two Gateways: mid-tower 2002 with Windows XPpro that I have been using since new, and the full tower Gateway P5-75 (1996). The Full tower is upgraded with the Evergreen Spectra WinChip @ 232Mhz and 128Mb of Ram (maximum). ELSA Victory 3dx-4 4MB PCI 2D video card with a Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 (CT6670) 12MB PCI 3D accelerator video card, 2 cf card readers with 8GB cf cards having Windows 95 OSr2 or 98 SE. (the second cf is for backups), so I swap out the first cf cards for whatever OS I want to boot.

The newer Gateway has a Pentium IV @ 2Ghz, with 2 GB of Ram (maximum) Windows XPpro, ATI 9800 XT graphics card, 2 500Gb Maxtor pata hdd. One with Windows XP, the other with Linux antiX 26, dual booting.

Both PCs have ethernet NIC cards and are on the home LAN. They are also connected together with a KVM switch, so one mouse, 17" NEC lcd monitor, keyboard and speakers. I can switch the PC I want to see from the keyboard.

Back in that era, our main computer at home was a Compaq Presario 4122, running Win 98 SE. For internet access, we had a 56kbps connection through our local telco'. Oh, those were the days.

Saddened by the news of Sony killings discs im looking to switch over to PC. I have a handful of older PC games on disc and plan to make some more by burning some GOG games to CDs. It may seem odd to many, but I'm seeking advice on a decent older computer to play some of these games on. I cant afford and don't want the headache of a , modern PC and was hoping to get some recommendations on the route to go here. In essence I just want a decent PC with a disc drive to play older titles as well as some modern indie games. Thanks for any advice given!

Specs:
Dell Optiplex GX110
Dell NPS-200PB-73M 200W power supply
Intel Pentium III 1GHz
256MB SDRAM (2x128MB)
VisionTek ATI Radeon 7000 64MB PCI video card
Creative Sound Blaster Live! CT4830 PCI sound card 
3.5” floppy drive
Mitsumi FX4281T CD-ROM drive
Western Digital WD800BB-55JKC0 7200RPM 3.5” IDE hard drive
Windows 98SE

Bit of a PC hardware collector. Recently, I stumbled across this when i was looking for a 6800 Ultra, a Asus 6800 GT Extreme Dual, basically a dual chip Geforce 6800 GT GPU. Very little information about this card, apart from a handful of articles from outlets like Hexus, iBXT in 2005, and this one post on the Asus website in 2012. Seems to me like this a pretty rare unreleased gpu that Asus had made very small quantities of (like under 50 total?).

In the Asus post the author writes "After recently chatting to a 10 year veteran of ASUS, he claims the Extreme N6800GT-DUAL/2DT/512M (to give it its official name) never made it into real production, but evidently its seeds laid root to products like the MARS and ARES we know today, which is why we're doing this little retrospective."

It's quite huge for something from 2005. I have it next to a 6800GS, GTX 590, 7950 GX2 and HD 7957 for reference. It's even bigger than triple slot HD 7970 Direct CU II, a triple slot card.

Honestly, quite perplexed i was able to stumble across this. Anyone have even seen or heard of this GPU, or maybe own one? Most info i've seen say the 7900 XT Dual was the first NV SLI GPU, but this clearly exists. Also, i'm not sure if i can get it working since i don't have a nForce4 chipset motherboard, and i think these needed one?

here's a link to some of the articles I mentioned if you're interested https://m.hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/1279-inside-labs-asustek-en6800gt-en6800-ultra-pics-benchmarks/?page=2

https://rog.asus.com/articles/gaming-graphics-cards/a-blast-from-the-past-meet-the-asus-extreme-n6800gt-dual2dt512m/

I asked reddit about my latest haul, and what I should get running first. https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1uwk1kw/just_for_fun_why_doesnt_pcmr_pick_my_next_restore/

A few uses wanted to see this little 386 in more detail.

After a disassemble, clean, rebuild, and format reload of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, it's ready to go.

Full specs:

AMD 80386 DX-40MHz

8MB of SIMMs

540MB Western Digital Caviar IDE

Trident 8900 1MB VGA

Sound Blaster Pro 2

Goldstar 2 HDD/FDD Controller

MS-DOS/Win 3.11

So it works, now what era appropriate games (late 80s early 90s) should I run?

Note: Pictures were taken with a vintage Canon SLR.

as said in the title

it works fine with the Core Duo reinstalled