The official "Brag About Your Computer" thread

[DOSGuy]

Note: This thread was split from this thread.


It's a bit off topic, but I've been asked about the new computer, and it's good enough that I guess I can brag about it.

Athlon 64 3200+
Asus A8N-SLI SE
2 GB OCZ Premium DDR-400
MSI GeForce 8500GT OC 256 MB
SoundBlaster Live! 5.1
Maxtor 200 GB SATA
OCZ PowerStream 520W
Lian Li PC60 (I think)

I'm A+ certified, so I build my own computers. I bought the Lian Li case years ago because it's a light aluminum case with a removable backplane (essential if you ever change the motherboard), four quiet fans and a dust filter. I replaced the fans with SilenX 80 mm 14 db 28 cfm fans. They're still below the threshold for human hearing, but they move more air.

I've also had the RAM, the power supply and the sound card for years. I picked up the hard drive for $100 about 2 years ago. All of that stuff was in my Athlon XP systems (first an MSI board, then the crappy Asus board I replaced it with when I put the MSI in the computer I built for my mother).

My mother found an Abit AV8 motherboard for $2 at Goodwill in December. It's a Socket 939 enthusiast board with SATA, FireWire, four dual channel DDR slots, and AGP 8x. That last part is a bit surprising. It's probably one of the best AGP motherboards ever. Anyway, it was time for an upgrade, so I picked up the last Socket 939 CPU they had at my local computer store, an Athlon 64 3200+. I figured I was getting a whole new computer for less than $100. Unfortunately the board was unstable and died in January. I finally found a scorch mark near one of the capacitors, which explained why it was given to Goodwill.

So, I had already bought the Athlon 64 3200+, so I bought another Socket 939 motherboard, but it's still not a computer without a graphics card, and I have never owned a PCI Express graphics card. Now that I have the card, and the fans, we're ready to roll again.

Another reason why I bought the Lian Li case is because it has four 5.25" bays. I've been filling them with a removable IDE hard drive, one DVD writer and one DVD reader, and a 5.25" floppy drive. As a technician who does a lot of work at a local high school, I had an abundant supply of small, obsolete hard drives available to me, and I could put a different OS on each one. I could swap between Windows 9x and Windows XP, or Linux, or whatever else I might want, just by swapping hard drives. My plan was to get into virtualization and load other operating systems from other hard drives, rather than partitioning an internal drive. The problem is the hard drives aren't easy to swap, they have a high failure rate, they use up a lot of power, and create heat and noise.

The solution is a $25 CF-to-IDE adapter that sits in an expansion slot (you can also get a bracket it to put it in a drive bay). I have a few spare CF cards, and they're pretty cheap to acquire. Swapping them is easy, a stack of them hardly takes up any space, they use almost no power, create no noise or heat, and they're way faster than hard drives. I plan to have a Windows 95 card, Windows 98, ME, XP, etc. That way I can load any OS, either as the host or as a virtual OS, so that I can test compatibility on any OS whenever I want. Oh yeah, one of those cards is going to be just DOS, Windows 3.1, and every game on this site. Sweet!

The CF-to-IDE adapter is also a great way to keep a real DOS gaming computer alive. DOS will only recognize partitions up to 2 GB, and the BIOS from motherboards of that age won't recognize today's massive hard drives. Hard drives that are old enough to work in a Pentium-class computer are at very high risk of getting bad sectors, or failing completely. Anything that moves will eventually fail. 2 GB CF cards are inexpensive, and they have no moving parts. Now, other than your CD-ROM drive and possibly a fan, you've removed the moving parts from your classic computer. Hard drive access will be instantaneous, and your CF card will last for decades. I'll be adding a tutorial on how to build a real DOS gaming computer with a CF card for a hard drive shortly.

[SpellSword]

Nice Machine!


CF (?CompactFlash?) never occurred to me to use one for an O/S. Cool!

I use removable hard-drive bays to quickly swap and mount different hard-drives.
(They’re bulky. But it lets me swap between Win98 & WinXP when needed.)

I’ve been maintaining an old 486 (SX I believe… my DX2 bought it a while back ) swapping the ancient 500M hard-disk out for a 2G Flash-Card would great!

And if I remember correctly, there are different memory management modes/methods for use with Dos that are mutually exclusive that some Dos games require to run: EMS, XMS, etc. (I could be wrong on that, it’s been a while.) That will allow rapid switching between Dos configurations!

If I’ve completely misunderstood and gone off in some crazy direction then nm.
Otherwise COOL!

I’m looking forward to reading your tutorial on this.

[DOSGuy]

Nope, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Replacing your 500 MB hard drive with a CF card is a great idea. It won't develop bad sectors, the motor won't burn out, it will access and transfer data way faster (remember, the card isn't competing with modern hard drive transfer rates), it will be completely silent (hard drives are pretty quiet today, but back in the days of 486s, you could hear them spinning and performing disk access), and it will even produce less heat. Switching to flash may be the only way to keep these old DOS machines running. All of the hard drives I have from that era keep developing bad sectors.

By the way, Windows 98 will fit on a CF card. Because of the registry, Windows does a lot more disk writes than DOS does, and current CF cards can only be rewritten so many times. DOS hardly ever writes anything to your hard drive, so the card should last pretty much forever. If you're only using Win98 occasionally, the card should last far longer than the 5 years that a hard drive is warrantied for. If you were to run a modern Windows OS off of a flash card all day, every day, you might eventually run out of writes.

I'm planning tutorials on how to use DOSBox, how to make your own DOS gaming rig with a CF card for a hard drive, and how to use virtualization to run DOS on modern computers. If anyone has any ideas for other tutorials, please let me know.

And, of course, I haven't forgotten that the site is still about games. I had to watch game 7 of Vancouver vs. Dallas last night, but someday soon I'm going to take a spare hard drive from downstairs and transfer all of the email and files I've collected on this computer since January and move everything onto my new computer. After that, I have three or four games that I was ready to add to the site before the great motherboard failure of 2007.

[jg007]

I'm afraid I don't often get to round to playing many games old or new so for the most part my current dosbox and batch file setup does fine but it will be interesting to read your article.

[DOSGuy]

I know a lot of people like to brag about their computer's specs in online forums, and I feel like bragging about mine! A friend of mine recently had a computer die, so I sold him the guts out of mine and used the opportunity to inexpensively upgrade my own computer. Here's what I have now.

Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 GHz @ 2.6 GHz
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard
2 GB OCZ Reaper DDR2-800 4-4-4-15 RAM
MSI GeForce 8500GT OC 256 MB
SoundBlaster Live! 5.1
Seagate 500GB 16MB SATA II hard drive
Plextor PX-810SA SATA DVD±RW
OCZ GameXStream 600W
Lian Li PC60 (I think)

Of course, I bought the Plextor drive to create the Classic DOS Games DVD. I've been using a generic 32x CD-ROM since 1998 and I had no plans to upgrade.

[jg007]

I really need to upgrade my machine at present

it's not too bad but the grahics card is showing it's age a bit

AMD Athlon 64 3000
1.5 GB PC3200
Geforce 6200 AGP

oh well, guess that is part and parcel of family life lol. I've just spen £279 on a Wii for my son, hmm that could have made for some nice upgrades

[DOSGuy]

Wow, the Wii is £279? It's only $269 Canadian now. I knew that video game prices were higher in Europe, but that's $531.06 at current exchange rates. (Alternatively, we're buying Wiis for £136.26) I plan to get one so that I can play Super Mario Galaxy, if I can find one! They're still flying off the shelves.

[Legalmumbojumbo]

I have 3 hard drives 25, 111, and 127 gigs big. One of the higher dual cores (can't remember off the top of my head), Geforce 8800 GT. I also have a high end MSI motherboard.

Everything else I have are pretty generic, as me and my bro build our own comps. We go for the the cheap stuff on newegg. WE had 1 DVD drive 16x and a CD 8x with one floppy. The speakers are very cheap and old Labtecs, and we own a 18" Acer LCD display. I can run COD 4 on all high settings( including anti aliasing 8x), and Crysis on medium settings.

Me and bro salvage lots of stuff from comps we just see being thrown away or friends we have. WE have severeal cobbled togather comps otherwise.