First post, by badmojo
- Rank
- l33t
Can a grown man - mid 30’s, 2 kids, mortgage - recapture a moment from his youth? Specifically, would it be possible to experience the thrill I’d felt 20 years ago sitting in front of my 486, tracking Tie Fighters through the pixelated voids of space, or fighting back the insidious Ordos of Dune?
I intend to find out.
My interest in computer games began during the late 80’s with Double Dragon on an arcade machine in the local milk bar, and space invaders at home on an ill-fated MicroBee (an Australian made PC which was discontinued in 1990). Later, my brother and I obsessed over Stunts 4D driving and ‘Ironman’ off road racing on my father’s 386 CAD machine.
But my real love affair with computing began when my father, always keen to encourage an interest in something practical, bought me a beautiful, brand new, 486sx33. Wow.
It was officially a ‘family computer’, intended for educational purposes. But we all knew that it was mine, and that I wouldn’t be doing any homework on it.
I didn’t take much interest in the hardware initially, it was just a means to an end, but I think the specs were something like:
CPU: 486sx33.
RAM: 4mb, 30 pin.
HDD: 270mb.
FDD: 3 ½ inch.
Motherboard: Unknown brand or chipset, but it was VLB with a VLB IDE controller (probably winbond).
VGA Card: Trident perhaps? VLB or ISA, not sure.
Monitor: 14” no-name.
Sounds card: None.
CD-ROM: None.
I have no idea how we did anything before the internet (books?), but somehow I learnt DOS memory management, created different boot options via the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files, and generally did whatever was needed to do to get the games to run.
That lovely beige box became a magical portal to other worlds; exotic, dangerous, colourful worlds where the goals were clear and where you could load a saved game if you messed up. But sadly, I have no idea what happened to it. Dumped with the hard rubbish I suppose; an insignificant ripple in the looming tidal-wave of e-waste.
It’s long gone, but the following is my attempt to recreate both the computer, and the magic.
The first thing I needed was the desktop case, but of course it couldn’t just be any old case. The original was a unique (in my experience) tin box with a flip top lid. It wasn’t stylish, or particularly well built for that matter, but it had charm in it’s simplicity that no other case could match.
I looked on and off for nearly a year then finally, to my amazement, I found this in the “to be scrapped” pile at the local recycling center:
This one’s a bit fancier than mine was. The original didn’t have the turbo LED display or the luxurious front mounted power button that this one’s sporting, just a rocker switch on the side. Cheaper to manufacture I guess but also much safer than running 240 volts through the middle of the case.
Otherwise though it’s identical, and after a cleanup and PSU test, it was ready to go.
Motherboard: an ASUS VL/I-486SV2GX4. Again, this is a bit fancier than the original. It has a nice thick PCB, ZIF socket, button style battery, and 72 pin RAM.
CPU: I’m cheating here a bit. I want to play DOOM on this thing and although I happily played it on a 33Mhz machine back in the day, it did chug a bit in hindsight. So I’ve decided to go with the classic 486DX2 66 overdrive - a chip I did actually replace the SX33 with after a couple of years.
RAM: More cheating. I’m going with 8mb instead of 4, again, because DOOM prefers it.
IDE Controller: Nothing special here, just a Winbond VLB card.
Hard drive: Western Digital Caviar 1270 (270MB).
VGA: I don’t remember what card I had originally, I’d guess a VLB Trident. Instead I have a Tseng Labs ET4000AX VLB, which - regardless of speed - pumps out the most vivid DOS 2D colours I’ve ever seen. The Wiki states that the ‘AX’ means it’s using the ‘old ISA chipset’; I don’t know what that means in terms of speed, but I can’t imagine it makes much different in DOS at 300x200.
Sound Card: Although my PC didn’t have one originally, a Sound Blaster (probably a 2.0) was the first upgrade I bought with my meager funds, and I can’t go back to PC speaker. For this system I’m going with a Sounds Blaster Pro 2; very compatible and not plug and play, so less drivers required.
At last, after carefully putting it all together (black wires to the middle!), here it is up and running:
The front panels have yellowed so I’m working on them with my half arsed version of ‘retr0bright’ (mine won’t melt your face off). And notice the mitsumi FX400 CD-ROM - another find at the recycling center. That place is a goldmine! This was the second CD drive I owned after a fancy SCSI 1X one that was more trouble than it was worth. The mitsumi was cheap and came bundled with a crappy sound card (a Vibra I’d guess), but I was the first kid on the block with a 4 speed, and it’s the closest I’ve ever come to being a celebrity.
And so, after spending some quality time with Dune2, Street Rod, Wolf3d, Keen, Doom, Mortal Kombat, X-Wing, Syndicate, etc - was it possible to recapture the excitement I’d felt 20 years ago? No, of course not, too much has changed - not least of all becoming a parent, to which nothing else compares.
But messing around with this old hardware has been great (I’m addicted), and the games still look fantastic.
Now I’m wondering what my kids will think of this beige beauty when they’re 15.
