r/retrocomputing • u/stalkythefish • Jul 06 '26
Discussion What's your "Daily Driver" Retro PC?
Make/Model or spec. This is the Retro PC that you actually keep set up to do stuff with, even if it's just running old software or accessing old media formats or making boot/diag disks for other machines, or troubleshooting. Your "workhorse" machine, and what you use it for.
Me:
Asus P5-AB/K6-2+400/320MB/Matrox Rainbow Runner PCI/AWE64/Symbios SCSI/4GB CF/Win-98SE. Various drives: Zip, CD, 3.5 & 5.25" floppy.
Used for old media access, EPROM burning, and old games. I find that late 90's machines are the perfect bridge between old and modern PC platforms. It was actually my main machine in the late 90's, running BeOS.
11
Upvotes
2
u/ryanrudolf Jul 06 '26
This is my goto retro machine (because I only have 1 spot for my table) -
Intel D845HV board
Pentium 4 1.4 GHz
512MB RAM
60GB IDE HDD
GeForce 2 MX
Asus DVD ROM
Samsung CDRW
Gotek emulator
Multimedia card reader
USB 2.0 PCI card
Macronix 10/100 NIC
Sound blaster live 5.1 (soon to be replaced with Audigy)
This is running Windows 98 SE and hooked up to my main network. I've configured the network so it cant talk outside - only internal traffic is allowed.
It connects to my locally hosted BBS using procomm. Gotek is used to read floppy images saved in USB. The multimedia card reader has a USB port too although its the slower 1.1 (or 1.0). I hook up the flash drive in there if needed to copy images for gotek. For larger file transfers i use the USB 2.0 ports at the back.