Retro PC Builds in 2024 - Part 2

I had planned to do this next part much earlier, but I had to travel to Prague again for work in late September and much of October. 

As an aside I did see an interesting train bbq on a walk to a local castle called Karlstejn on a weekend I had off while there - and what a cool idea for a train! I want it in the backyard of my house for bbq's in summer! :-)

Very interesting castle too:

Since returning, I have also been working on a new office setup in Türkiye and rollout of a global phone system in South America this month. Been very busy indeed, working late nights most weeknights, and little time for anything fun outside it. 

Anyway, enough of my excuses - my apologies for the delay between posts.

Continuing on from Part 1, as promised I will look next at the build of the Compaq LTE Elite laptop I picked up this year. 

With OS/2 Warp 3 installation failing multiple times reading the floppy disks at the same point, I was forced to change my plans to make this computer a Windows 3.1 based machine instead.

I ran fdisk from a MS-DOS boot disk floppy and then blew away the OS/2 partitions and setup the IDE to CF drive as a single FAT16 hard disk. 

After the mandatory reboot, I booted from MSDOS floppy disk again and formatted the drive with the /s parameter, which transfers the command.com system file to make the system bootable from the new empty hard disk.

Drive formatted now:

I booted from the newly formatted hard disk to make sure it worked fine on this laptop. All good.

I then downloaded a Compaq Windows 3.1 system image file from archive.org for this model of laptop. I mounted it on my Alienware Aurora PC, which runs Windows 11. 

I removed the CF card from the Compaq laptop, mounted it on the Windows 11 PC using a USB to CF adapter, and copied all the files from the mounted Compaq laptop image to the CF card partition, making sure to not overwrite the command.com I put there when I prepped the partition on the Compaq system.

I tried it once letting it overwrite it, and it wouldn't boot afterwards!

With that done, I also copied my dos games and demos onto the CF card from my backup of my MS-DOS Pentium 200 IBM system. 

I then put the CF card back into the Compaq Elite laptop and fired it up - it booted up into Windows 3.1 environment with all the Compaq utilities included on the standard image - excellent!

Here is a closer look at the included Compaq utilities - such as the Diagnostics software:

Feels strange to use Windows 3.1 again after such a long time. I used to run it back in the 1990's, but not since then, other than under OS/2. Solitaire and File Manager work well:

I then installed Win32s, which enables running (some) 32 bit applications under Windows 3.1:

Freecell is installed as part of this, which is a native 32 bit application, to show it works on the new installed Win32s.

I then set to work installing other Windows 3.1 applications, like Microsoft Video codecs, Windows Media Player, etc:

One limitation of the Compaq Elite laptop is sound - PC speaker only. Fortunately in recent years retro enthusiasts have solved this by developing OPL3 Ad-lib compatible sound chips accessible via the parallel port! I picked up the OPL3LPT to try it out on the Compaq laptop:

The unit is very compact, with a volume knob audio phono jack output and USB power to run it:

I downloaded the support files for OPL3LPT from Github, copied them to the CF card (which I removed and re-installed in the Compaq laptop), and then set to work:

I need to use a command adlipt OPL3 BLASTER=220 to initialise and set the BLASTER environment variable so music drivers for games/demos can find it as a SoundBlaster device.

The width of the volume knob on the OPL3LPT means it pushes the PS/2 to USB converter for my external mouse more than I would like, but it does work fine.

With the command mentioned previously run with the card installed into the parallel port, the initialisation of the OPL3LPT works, and shows the device is ready:

I run the OPL2test command to make sure the sound and left/right channels works correctly - and it works great:

I added the adlipt init command into the autoexec.bat file so it will initialise on boot everytime. I also removed the command to run Windows automatically, so it finishes booting in MS-DOS.

This means I can test demos and games without the additional memory overhead of Windows 3.1. I tested with Commander Keen first, since I know it supports older ADLIB and Soundblaster cards. It works perfectly with the OPL3LPT.

I tested Doom next, and that also worked well:

I should mention that there is a MIDI parallel port audio device you can buy also, which I expect would help to bring the amazing Doom music to life more than an ADLIB device will...

There are patches for the OPL3LPT for some non-compatible games to work with this device also, if it doesn't work out of the box.

Satisfied for now, I moved onto Windows 3.1, and added sound driver support into Windows too. This unfortunately I still needed to use the PC Speaker for.

I hope there will be support for the parallel port device under Windows 3.1 someday too. 

I moved on to install Word and Excel for Windows 3.1 on my Compaq laptop to finish off the installation work:

I even installed Microsoft Arcade to enjoy some Windows 3.1 games besides the usual card games, Mine sweeper, etc:

Having built this system to a point I was happy with it, I moved on to the next project.

The next project is my IBM Aptiva AMDk6-500 PC I picked up from Ebay this year. I also picked up a Sony Clie UX60 PalmOS PDA this year to use with it, but more on that in a bit.

The system arrived very dirty indeed from its previous owner. It needed a thorough cleaning before I could even start to use it:

Here is the view of the inside of the system - 3 PCI slots, no ISA and no AGP:

Lite-on CD drive is installed, and it sits behind the front door on the case - the tray opens without opening the front door:

This machine was built with Windows 98 in mind - no NT4 here...

Turning to the back of the system, the usual PS/2, parallel, serial, onboard VGA port, audio ports and joystick/MIDI port are present, along with 2 USB ports. 

Also a generic Ethernet PCI card is installed in one of the slots. In this era network cards were optional.

After a thorough cleaning, I turned my attention to the onboard VGA, which clearly would not be what I wanted for this machine. I wanted a 3DFX system, which with the absence of a AGP slot means I have to use a PCI based 3DFX solution.

Luckily for me given the current ridiculous pricing of 3DFX cards these days, I still have a Voodoo 3 PCI card, owned from new.

I had used this card on my Amiga 4000T for many years with the Mediator PCI bustard add-on. I replaced it last year with the amazing ZZ9000 graphics card. You can read more about that build on my blog here.

Voodoo3 cards don't have a pass through like Voodoo 2 cards, as they include a 2D and 3D card in the same card.

This also means I don't need to use the crappy motherboard vga included in this system.

I installed the Voodoo 3 PCI card into the top PCI slot.

I booted up the system, and the display worked through the Voodoo 3 card straight away, so I didn't need to change anything in the BIOS to use it.

I checked the BIOS anyway:

I put this IBM Aptiva system next to my MSDOS and OS/2 Warp 4 installed Pentium 200MMX IBM 300GL - they looks nice together, and since they need to share the same PS/2 keyboard, mouse and screen using a switch box due to space constraints, that was another reason. 

Looks like the previous owner installed Windows 2000 Professional onto the old 5GB mechanical IDE hard disk in this system.

I didn't bother trying to setup Windows 2000, or install the Voodoo 3 Driver CD I also downloaded and burnt to CD, as I didn't plan to keep this operating system on it. 

I wanted to use Windows 98SE, and specifically the official IBM Windows 98SE image that it originally shipped with this IBM Aptiva, since it would have all the drivers needed for the system also.

I downloaded the specific ISO for this machine (2199-200) from archive.org and burnt it to a CD, ready to install onto the old hard disk. 

I am so grateful to those Retro system owners who uploaded these recovery discs, as it saves a lot of work for those of us who buy old ones without any CD's included, like in my case.

I also plan to replace the included 5GB hard disk with a IDE to CF card, but since that is on order and not arrived yet, I started work on this old hard disk, and would transfer the data to the new CF card when I get it. Windows 98 doesn't care about copying the files from one hard disk to another, unlike newer operating systems.

The system booted from the recovery cd, and I got started with the restoration:

I accepted the warnings about losing data etc.

It then stopped and said the partition table was not acceptable, and I needed two use fdisk to delete the existing partition first.

Seems the recovery cd has no ability to prep the existing hard disk, even though it was the one the system originally shipped with.

Sigh.

I booted from Windows 98 boot disk, and ran fdisk:

I removed the NTFS partition:

I then created a FAT32 5GB partition, which I knew would be compatible with Windows 98.

I then rebooted and booted from the recovery cd again - this time it was happy to proceed with the recovery process:

It then go on with the job, and I went for a coffee.

Eventually the recovery was successfully completed:

On reboot, the system now started a new install of Windows 98, using the drivers and other software IBM included in the recovery image:

The setup completed, and Windows 98 SE booted up as you would expect.

I forgot how OEM companies liked to add lots of rubbish software on their images, and IBM was no exception to this, with plenty of bloatware out of the box...

You would say I should have done a vanilla install, but I was too lazy to locate all the drivers...I did however need to install the Voodoo 3 drivers from the official CD image I got from archive.org and burnt earlier.

With the Voodoo 3 graphics drivers installed, I now had a true colour 1280x1024 Windows 98 desktop, and it looked great.

Next, I downloaded the firmware updates for the BIOS on the system, as the last firmware update IBM released for the system allowed it to use larger hard disk sizes above 64GB, which I hoped to take full advantage of later! 

I wrote the BIOS update floppy disk image file to a real floppy using my Compaq Elite laptop I set up earlier. Newer windows version don't allow image writing that was included in the self extracting files IBM issued back then, but running in MS-DOS of course works fine.

Actually, it was relatively uncommon to update firmware regularly in those days, but IBM did release a number of updates for their systems, which was great to see.

The firmware update went smoothly:

After the reboot, I went into the BIOS to confirm the new BIOS version - I guess this one is Y2K compliant since it is after 2000... :-)

I also changed the boot order to put the CD-ROM first.

With this done, I turned my attention to important matters - installing and running 3DFX games and demos.

One great thing right now is no one wants older 3dfx era pc games, especially ones released in the cheaper DVD case form in the later 2000's. So I started buying up these games cheaply, usually $1-$10 maximum.

Seeing the 3DFX splash screen again on the IBM Aptiva was so awesome - it has been long time since I saw it last, as the A4000T didn't have many games that used hardware 3D and the 3dfx screens didn't display on the Amiga even when I did play games that used the 3dfx 3d hardware.

I never had Nuclear strike back in the day - I played Desert Strike and Jungle Strike on the Amiga, but never got the later games on PC. It is quite fun and I am glad I got it:

I also tried out Windows 3dfx demos from my collection - I kept all my demos I downloaded from that era, so trying them out was easy:

I remember how mindblown I was when I first saw the amazing Final Reality 3DFX demo...

This demo had a benchmarking tool included, and ultimately turned into 3D Mark series of benchmark software a few years after this demo.

I was still waiting for the CF to Ide adapter to arrive, which was getting seriously annoying as I wanted to make more progress with the hard disk setup.

I decided to drop in a 40GB IDE hard disk temporarily so I could keep working on it.

Of course this meant running through the recovery disc process again. Since I intended to use a 32GB CF card, I decided to format only 30GB of the capacity at this point, to make it easier to transfer the data to a image file on my Alienware Windows 11 PC later on. I can then write it to the new CF card and put into the adapter when I get it.

I booted the Windows 98 boot disk floppy and prepped the drive accordingly.

I then booted from the IBM recovery Windows 98 SE CD and recovered it to the new 30GB drive, and then installed the 3DFX drivers again.

Since this is identical to what I did on the 5GB drive earlier, I won't bother showing that part again!

With the 30GB hard disk now in place, I could go crazy with loading all the games, demos, music that I wanted to have on this computer.

My focus naturally is on 3dfx titles, as I want to make full use of the Voodoo 3 PCI card.

Quake 2 works well on this system also, as you would expect.

To make data transfers easier, I installed USB drivers for Windows 98 SE as these are not in the recovery cd for some reason.

This allowed me to then plug in USB drives to make larger data transfers much easier. I started installing 3dfx tools and updates, patches, and more.

I still have many of my favourite games from this era, like the original Trackmania. 

With the Cd protection schemes used on this era CD's, they don't work on more modern computers without no-cd patches and other hacks. I want to keep the system pure and period correct, so I need to use the cd's to play the games.

I am ok with that - it was part of the experience at the time.

I also installed Directory Opus 8, which I bought for Windows back in the day, as I also used Directory Opus 5 on my Amiga systems, and still use it on my Amiga system today too! 

On Windows this is a explorer replacement, and offers so many features.

I feel a twinge of local pride since this software is made in Australia by GP Soft - I met the Directory Opus authors at an Adelaide Retro computer event a few years ago. 

You can still purchase Directory Opus 13 today, with the latest version working on Windows 11 also. You can find out more about it here if you are interested in buying or trying it out on your modern computer. 

I tried out some more period 3DFX demos on the IBM Aptiva, and they work fantastic:

Finally, the IDE to CF adapter arrived, and just in time as I really wanted to backup the physical hard disk before I put too much more software and configuration on it. This adapter comes with a bracket so I can mount it to a rear empty slot.

The adapter needs a floppy power connector from the PSU to power it. There is also a jumper next to it to choose if the drive is Master or Slave in the IDE chain.

I plan to put a 64GB CF card in the system.

Here is the CF to IDE adapter now installed in the IBM Aptiva - I used the bottom slot to keep the IDE cable as far from the Voodoo 3 card as possible since it gets quite warm when used for 3dfx gaming or demos:

Here is the view of the back of the IBM aptiva slots, showing the CF adapter at the bottom to allow for easy insertion and removal of the CF card, the Ethernet card above it, and the Voodoo 3 PCI card with VGA port above that. 

Next step is the removal of the 30GB hard disk. IBM thoughtfully included a rotating pull function to easily seperate the hard disk/floppy drive cage from the rest of the system without having to remove the drives or screws.

I connected it to my USB to SATA/IDE converter, and supplied molex power from a power supply included with the USB converter.

I then could use Win32imager to capture the 30GB drive to a file on my Alienware PC under Windows 11.

I then connected a separate USB to CF adapter to the same PC to write out the image I just captured to the 64GB CF card.

With the image written out to the CF card, I then inserted it into the IBM Aptiva and went into the BIOS to make sure it was detected ok, which it was detected correctly based on the original source image size of 30GB.

The remaining capacity of the CF card is in effect wasted at this point, so using a 32GB CF card would have been better. However, I hadn't planned this delivery of the adapter to take so long and being keen to make progress was willing to use a lower sized physical drive to do it.

Well, sometimes you have to just take the pain.

I realise I could probably feed it into Linux and "fix" it using the partition software on there - I might do that later.

For now I added another internal CF to IDE adapter and formatted another 64GB CF card to FAT32 to get the additional space I wanted in this system, mainly for MP3's....Who has a machine from this era without WinAmp to play their MP3's? It really does whip the llama's ass. :-)

I got a little distracted at this point, as I got given an old parallel port 250MB zip drive from my brother. Actually, I never owned a parallel port zip drive, only SCSI ones.

That is because Amiga systems only used SCSI ones and didn't work with the parallel port models that only worked on PC. And, let's face it, parallel port for disk access is slow. really slow.

But, it was free, I have lots of zip disks laying around, and this was the right era machine to use it in. So I connected it up.

I downloaded the Iomega driver cd iso from Archive.org and burnt it off - seriously, this website is so helpful for retro pc builders in 2024...I then started the installation:

I could select the Parallel port version of the driver during the install process:

As my Amiga uses SCSI 100MB zip drives with 100MB disks, that is all I have on hand to use with this 250MB drive. I understand this means performance is slower than if I used 250MB zip disks with it, but I use what I have.

I am pleased to say it worked first time. This particular zip disk's previous owner had classic racing cars photos stored on this disk from a book presumably - it has the author name, book title, ISBN number and publisher listed on the disk label. 

By the way, if the original zip disk owner is reading this blog post by some miracle, you really should of wiped these disks before selling them on...I wiped it for you after seeing the contents were on it still, so no worries.

Clearly the zip disk was used on a Mac in a previous life, with FINDER.DAT file in evidence.

Zip disks are bigger than floppy disks and so they had their own special zip disk containers you could get for them - luckily I have some of these.

Iomegaware CD has lots of applications on it, including a backup program for backing up your system to zip disk. Nice. 

So I got to work installing Iomegaware next:

Iomegaware adds lots of functions to the context menus in Windows also, allowing easy formatting, disk protection, eject, disk copy and other functions:

I just include the format screenshots to show I did actually delete the contents of the disk...

The backup utility program works well too, backing up selections of files to zip disk, although the format used for the backups requires you to use the same program to restore later...

With the Zip drive working well, I moved onto the next thing I wanted to get working, a Sony Clie palm device which I picked up on Ebay from a local seller in Australia.

I have a long history setting up Palm PDA devices for work in the late 1990's and early 2000's with the original Palm Pilot Professional and later Tungsten T. I long wanted one of these Sony clie palm devices, which introduced some cool multimedia functions to the standard PalmOS offering on their own handhelds.

This particular Clie is one of the later ones, running PalmOS 5, with colour screen, MP3 playback, WiFi support and flip open screen which can be rotated 180 degrees to be used like a normal pda, or just opened out like a older mobile flip phone style and used with the tiny physical keyboard. 

I thought they looked so cool, and they were at the time. They were also insanely expensive compared to all the other PalmOS based PDA's on the market at the time.

Now though, in 2024, I can get one, and very cheaply.

It really does look like mobile phone.

At the top there is a Memory stick slot and a CF card slot. The CF card is intended for the sony CF accessories like the WiFi CF card expansion, but there is a patch which "fixes" it so you can put in normal cf cards for additional storage too.

Here is the clie with the screen rotated so it can be used like a traditional PDA from the era.

I downloaded the Sony Clie CD from archive.org so I could load up the Palm Desktop onto the IBM Aptiva. This also installed the Hotsync software needed to sync the Clie with the PC - for installing software, and copying data to/from it using the PC.

The Clie comes with a USB Hotsync and charging cradle, and a place to put the stylus. Actually, the stylus fits in a slot in the Clie unit, but having a second stylus in the cradle makes it easier to use the touchscreen on the Clie while it is docked without fiddling around trying to remove the stylus in the Clie itself.

I got the first Hotsync underway:

Normally a Palm device has the Graffiti touch input related buttons at the bottom of the screen, and the Clie also has this - but it also had physical buttons and keyboard on the unit itself when the screen is rotated and opened like a flip phone.

Hotsync initial setup is now completed.

You will see you can also use a modem (if attached) to dial to a sync server - I setup exactly this configuration with Palm Pilots when working for a company in the late 1990's. It allowed staff Australia-wide to sync address book and company data from anywhere with a phone line to a central Windows NT4 server in our headquarters. Here is the Palm Pilot plus modem setup we used back then - I took a picture of it at the time!

It was cutting edge at the time, and I enjoyed learning about this technology, as I still enjoy learning new technology today too. But I digress.

Using the Clie PalmOS interface is very different to a normal Palm device like the one above. Sony created their own custom interface overlay that used the Clie navigation scroll wheel (which you push in to select) to make navigating and running programs possible without a stylus.

I needed to put some mp3's on it, as Sony made a big deal of this functionality at the time and wrote their own special media player for it and another one for photos and videos too:

The sticking point is the tiny memory stick capacity - 128MB.

I put a couple of MP3's on it, but not many as I needed the space for applications and games I wanted to try also.

With the capacity limitations of memory stick, you definitely are not going to put all your mp3 collection on it - but you could put enough songs for a daily commute to work for example.

Photos look nice too. Here is a photo of me when I was ...umm. much younger.

You fill up the memory stick really fast....

This was the biggest issue with the Palm devices. The storage limits. Even though bigger capacity memory stick and CF cards are available, these devices couldn't actually use them.

I decided to load some Palm games and applications onto my Clie. I went crazy with it, buying a lot of them as they were quite cheap to get and I was interested to try lots of different kinds! Some are dual format, supporting PalmOS and Pocket PC. More on the PocketPC stuff later though as I have a project to do for that too.

Back in the day, I didn't have many games for Palm as I used them for work mostly, but it is interesting to see how many games were available.

I tried some of them out on the Clie, and some others from the internet also (I couldn't buy them on eBay)  and was impressed. They work great.

For internet ones I needed a keygen application also that generates the key to use based on the name you use to sync the Palm device via HotSync.

More modern games like Wordle are also available for Palm, so I had fun playing that during ad breaks on TV...

Video playback is limited to low resolution due to the processor power, but if you keep to the limitations it is fine. The main problem is space to store videos on the memory stick anyway.

Rotating the clie changes the screen layout to landscape - we expect that these days with iPhones and iPads, but back then it was not that common. For card games this is great:

For card games like solitaire, using portrait mode is better:

I have to say, I really like the Sony Clie and wish I could have had one back in the day. These days the memory stick capacity limits it's usefulness.

Perhaps sir would like to play some breakout while getting to work?

I installed the patch to allow me to connect a CF storage card into the Clie's CF slot on the back:

I connected a 1GB CF card, which is the maximum size supported, and the smallest one I had! It worked, but I found it wouldn't work unless you inserted a memory stick first, removed it, and then put in the cf card after.

Some applications didn't see the CF card storage either, which made it too flakey to use all the time - shame.

At this point I was pretty happy with the IBM Aptiva setup - I had the 3DFX games and demos I wanted to run on it, a parallel zip drive and even a period correct Sony Clie UX60 setup to sync with it.

I will continue Part 3 soon (hopefully) to finish this series - I hope you are enjoying it so far!