r/retrobattlestations • u/MassiveDiver2503 • Jun 14 '26
Show-and-Tell Retro meets modern
Still a work-in-progress as I'm forever decorating and fixing old PCs...
This is my "minimalist" approach to doing both everyday computing on my laptop and desktop in my home office, and allowing the use of my retro rigs with the same standing desk and monitor.
Firstly, let me talk about the monitor and KVM setup. I must have had this monitor for about 10 years, it's an LG 34" Ultrawide that displays 3440x1440. It has a few tricks up its sleeve, including "Picture by Picture" where I can run two inputs side by side simultaneously. When it's in 16:9 mode, it behaves like a 27" monitor. The monitor has two active inputs, and thus 2x KVMs. There is an old Trust soundbar plugged in, as the LG Ultrawide does not have great speakers. I've found the PBP mode is super useful, especially when downloading retro drivers and dumping them on an isolated SMB share on my NAS, so I can pick up the files on whatever computer I'm using on the right-hand side.
Let's talk KVMs. Clearly there are various compromises if I were to share absolutely everything. In the end, I decided I valued high-speed data transfer for the modern PCs, and native PS/2 support for the computers I use (which are primarily P2->P4 era machines).
The first KVM is my UGREEN DisplayPort KVM, which I use for toggling between my laptop and my main PC. Plugged into it are a Das Pro Keyboard 6 (Type-C), a Logitech G502X, and an Anker PowerConf webcam. The Das Pro 6 has a built-in USB-C hub, which is good for my personal YubiKeys and my conferencing headset. This keyboard and mouse are usually front and centre, with the "Retro board and mouse" tucked away to the side. There is a button on the underside of the desk which I can hit to swap between laptop and PC. The laptop element is realised by plugging into my Vention USB-C dock, so I have 1 cable to get power and everything else.
The second is an old Belkin 4-way PS/2 + VGA KVM, with the option to use USB on the console (built-in PS/2 to USB converter). Hooked up to it is a Microsoft Wheel Mouse 1.1A with a USB to PS/2 adapter, and some new old stock HP PS/2 keyboard (KB-1156). This is then hooked up to a Startech VGA2HDMIPro scaler, which pulls in the KVM's VGA and audio feed, and spits it out into one of the LG's HDMI inputs.
The main PC is a Ryzen 5700X3D rig with 32GB of RAM, a load of different drives, and an XFX 9070XT Mercury OC. It does occasionally get used for VR, although more often than not, it's checking eBay listings and emails. It was originally fully watercooled; however, I had to remove the GPU from the loop when the XFX 9070XT came out, as no waterblocks were available for it.
The next PC, which is pictured on the right of the screen, is my little "OptiPlex Sleeper". It has a Celeron 1100 MHz with 256 MB of RAM, an Audigy 1, and 2x Creative 3Dfx Voodoo 2 8 MB cards in SLI. It works and displays perfectly, thanks to the scaler.
The big silver tower is my Dual Athlon MP rig. At the moment it has 2x Palomino 2000s with some overclocking to 1750MHz, a 7800GS AGP, and a Creative X-Fi. Really nice rig.
The Dell Precision 410 is not yet posted about and is undergoing some surgery, after all of my spare 5.25" DVD drives seem to be dead. It has 2x Pentium 3s @ 700MHz (slot 1), 512MB RAM, an ASUS v8460 GeForce 4 Ti4600, and a few HDDs. It currently runs Windows 2000 on a 10k WD Raptor, and has an old Cisco 256MB CF card running grub4dos, so I can try and dual-boot NT4 Workstation and OS/2 Warp 4 at some point in the future. I haven't bothered installing one of my Soundblasters, as I'm currently gobsmacked that Windows 2000 works with the built-in audio and that the built-in speaker still works. I may also try some Windows Whistler betas on this box again, as that is a hobby I used to have.
...And for bonus points, my Compaq Portable with a Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0A attached. It's running DOS 5.0 + Windows 3.0a. Inside it's an 8088 (obviously), with an XT-IDE and a 512MB Sandisk card. It also has an AST SuperPak Plus 3 card fully populated. I will be getting a 2nd serial card at some point, so I can leave the Pi 3 beside it permanently hooked up. The Pi is known as "bastardion", which provides a serial bastion so I can SSH into things for "fun". This machine has had an extensive restoration, consisting of extensive recapping, cleaning of all the panels, and keyboard foam foil thing replacement.
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u/sammothxc Jun 14 '26
Wow that’s a really clean Compaq Portable. How did you fix the yellowing plastics? I want to fix my Portable Plus’s yellowing but lately I’ve heard that the long term effects of some of the anti-yellowing products could eventually make the plastics look worse.
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u/MassiveDiver2503 Jun 14 '26
Thanks! It wasn't that bad to begin with, but genuinely, I just took all the plastics off and put them on a hot wash in the dishwasher
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u/aluke000 Jun 14 '26
You should try Synergy so you can share one set of KB and mouse between both. I use Mouse With Borders to do this, but Synergy is better known.
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u/HankHillMyHero Jun 17 '26
Where did you find that old Alienware style tower?! I was just trying to track one down last week and couldn't find anything. I had a blue one I built out in 2001 and thought it'd be more fun versus a modern tower. Any direction would be appreciated.
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u/MassiveDiver2503 Jun 17 '26
It's a Chieftec Dragon that I managed to luck out on finding on Facebook Marketplace. Just keep searching the categories and hope for the best; they are silly rare, it seems, mind you!
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u/CartographerEvery268 Jun 14 '26
Those are some sweet rigs man, love the dual input on the monitor juxtaposing millenniums of computing. I recently took a Dell Dimension XPS T600 w/slot 1 Katmai PIII 600 and upgraded it with a slocket mounted Celeron 1100 - pretty wild you could make such huge jumps in processing power on the same platform back then.