Esoteric (rare) hardware from the past

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Took it down and grabbed a pic. A small collection of some of the many styles of logos on the 486. Got two 386 upgrade chips, the sx, sx2, dx, dx2, dx4, and x5 chips covered.

The one thing I think I'm really missing is that I thought Harris made like a 33mhz 486 chip but haven't found one.
 
cjcox said:
I owned the rarer/nicer iWill Zmax D2. Dual Opteron goodness and SLI (single slot width cards) dual PCIe. Powerhouse (at the time) in a shoebox.
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Nice, I'm still looking for that one. Haven't come across it anywhere yet. Very elusive. :pompous:
 
Few more items I've added over the past few weeks.

Dual 500MHz Powermac G4 w/ Studio CRT, brand new.

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SIIG Suntouch XT/AT switchable keyboard (Alps White Switches)

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IBM 8-bit Floppy Controller for my 8088 Turbo XT

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Cirrus Logic 5428 VLB

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Some office software..

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And today, this scrap lot..

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..which contains an ATI Mach64 VLB -- hopefully I can bring it back to life, unless it still works.

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It is in pretty dang good condition. Very small amount of yellowing, no cracks, no major scuffs/scratches, never been opened with the warranty seal intact.
 
Got the Amiga up and running with a Gotek for external USB boot, and a Commodore 1084S-D2 monitor. Found a tank mouse too.

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Also just recently picked up a DEC Hinote Ultra CT475. Intel 486 DX4-75, 16MB RAM, ESS audio (SB Pro compatible), and TFT screen. Incredibly thin laptop for the era, even thinner than a post 2008 Asus laptop I have. This should make for an epic DOS gaming laptop. Internal 500MB hard drive still works surprisingly, but I think I'm going to do PCMCIA boot with a CF card.

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Finally got a GUS. Paid about half what they go for on eBay.

This will be going in my DX2/66 build, along with a Mach64 VLB, SB Pro2, and IDE cache controller. It should be stacked.


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w1retap said:
It arrived, and it works.. already fired up some Doom on the 486 DX2/66.

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Hunt down Archon Ultra - it is one of the few games with genuine GUS support. Also, the GUS cards were generally best supported by the Demo scene (think Second Reality, for example). * Most * game support tended to be along the lines of treating it just like a SoundBlaster for digital, and maybe preloading a subset of MIDI patches for music (support for more games than officially supported could be hacked in by swapping out AIL drivers - AIL being a common audio library system used by many games back in the day - you'd just copy over one card's AIL drivers with the GUS's AIL drivers and select that original card in the game's config program).

If you have any GUS questions, I have had a GUS card continuously since 1994. It was a fantastic card that was brought to market well before it's time. It's many quirks would have been a lot easier for the average person to deal with had it been released in the Windows 95 era as opposed to DOS. Windows 95 beta drivers were released for it, of course, but the damage to the reputation of the card had already been done. For the programs that natively supported the GUS and it's unique features - nothing else even came close though. Truly amazing.
 
486 is gettin' loaded. SB Pro 2, GUS, and Mach64 VLB installed. Man, baby-AT cases suck for wire management when you have 3 ribbon cables to run from the lower VLB slots all the way to the top of the case lol.

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Firewire was like the USB 3.0 of its day, it was pretty awesome. :cool: Lower CPU overhead, faster data transfer, supplied more power.
 
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w1retap said:
Firewire was like the USB 3.0 of its day, it was pretty awesome. :cool: Lower CPU overhead, faster data transfer, supplied more power.
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Yep, I bought a firewire hub to network my houses PCs together at 400Mb/s when LAN availability was only at 100Mbit.
(or was it 100Mbit 1394 when all we could get was 10Mbit ethernet? Price was a factor too.)
It worked great, I may still have the hub. It will have aged better than my memory.
 
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Fanless Gigabyte HD4850 - for smooth and silent Battlefield Bad Company 2 action back in the day...
 
FragBox is done, with a 6800GT 256MB (Asus v9999) and Crystalfontz display.

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And I got a new toy that I'm starting to refurb at the moment..

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The Abit NF7, 3200+ and Ti4600 (except mine was BFG's) takes me back, that was my favorite gaming set up, upgraded the GPU to the 7800 AGP eventually before moving on.

I also still have a box with the golden orb coolers, those were very popular back in the day. I forget what I had mine on, I just remember them not being very easy to seat on the CPU.
 
Starfalcon said:
Wow, you can even hook up 6 Ipods to it also, that sure was ahead of its time.
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Lol!
I wonder what those ipod 1-6 connectors are actually for though. I am sure if this was made today Apple Computer would sue them into oblivion for patient infringement. I hate Apple I beleive Cisco also had the IOS name first for their enterprise/commercial networking equipment and Apple basically stole that for their phone & tablet OS name
 
Created an account just so I could follow this thread. Man, what a trip down memory lane! I've seen some stuff posted already that I either saw new while working at CompUSA as a teenager or currently have or had myself. I'm gonna have to go take some pics and upload them.

I've been collecting PC stuff since the early 90s, usually other peoples 'garbage' they passed over to me to pass along to anyone that needed it. Sadly, I've had to do several purges, so the list of stuff I've lost is far longer than the list of stuff I've held on to. :(

To anyone reading this, have any good suggestions for a 5.25 front bay? I'm trying to find a Cooler Master Musketeer 3 (Black?) or maybe a Future Power NewQ (the original one with the sliders preferably) but I'm also looking for any other ideas too as those two are HARD to find! I just bought a Cooler Master HAF XB EVO and have a spare spot to play with (really nice case btw for anyone that spends a decent amount of time in and out of their box).
 
AOpen i915Ga-HFS is one of my faves in the "odd hardware" category

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Pentium M on desktop with Socket 479! I ran an Engineering Sample Pentium M in mine with an unlocked multi, at 2.6-2.8Ghz combined with an X1800XT it was a gaming beast. This was also the first board that I did a Hackintosh install on, with leaked OS X Tiger images before Apple released their own x86 systems. The board does have some quirks and interesting features- the 3 RCA type connectors on the back are for Component video which was pretty cool at the time to be able to output to 720P HDTV on the iGPU. Also note the orange PCIe 1x slot which is misaligned. This somehow made it through design, testing, and production and AOpen had to issue a notice about it after reviewers pointed it out. Super cool board and was a tantalizing sneak peak into the kind of performance increases that would come with Dothan evolving into Conroe on desktop a couple years later.


Keeping in a similar theme, the Tyan S5365 was pretty weird too (there were some others with this config but the Tyan is the one I'm most familiar with)

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If one Core Duo is good, two must be even better? Putting laptop chips on server boards because the Netburst Xeons ran uncontrollably hot and they needed a low-power alternative available is peak Intel. I ran one of these as a secondary workstation for awhile (with one of the PCIe 8x slots chopped to accept a GPU) and also as a fileserver. I actually still had one up until last summer when I gave it away because it hadn't been used in years.
 
I have other people on Vogons testing it. I just copied the original, and it appears to be a 1 to 1 copy from someone who has one that provided the trace pictures to me. He confirmed with a multimeter.

I need a K7 motherboard to test it. I bought one last week, but it was completely DoA.
 
w1retap said:
I have other people on Vogons testing it. I just copied the original, and it appears to be a 1 to 1 copy from someone who has one that provided the trace pictures to me. He confirmed with a multimeter.

I need a K7 motherboard to test it. I bought one last week, but it was completely DoA.
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nice!
bad caps?
 
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