I slapped together a Intel Celeron as my “Retro PC”. It works very well and can run all the games and programs I want from back in the day.
Here are the specs of the system.
Intel Celeron 700MHz
512MB RAM
Maxtor 120GB PATA drive
Iomega 250 PATA drive
1.44MB Floppy
Realtek Ethernet
ATI All in Wonder
A-Open desktop case
As I said with this setup I can run almost anything from the old days and even have enough hard drive space to boot different operating systems.
A few snags on the build hasn’t made my day. The Power supply kept shorting out and come to find out it was the Optical drive. So now I need to replace it and the only other PATA/IDE drive I have is a DVD drive. A while back I bought a unopened box of floppies and I finally found my old USB floppy drive. Sadly all of the disks do not work. I get write protection issues on my main system and the Retro PC complains about Sector Zero. So maybe today or Tuesday I’ll swing by the other Thrift store I go to often for old PC hardware and see if they still have some sealed boxes of Memorex floppies. The box that test bad before were some Neon colored floppies from CompUSA.
When I get this system up and running I’ll probably pull out mt Mechanical keyboard and play some DOOM and Duke Nukem. After that hunt down a copy of Railroad Tycoon or build my Parallel protoboard and control some relays or something.
The Wasteland Tinkerer 