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TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

MIRTAZAPINE said:
@Trekkie4

Those boxes are like huge blocks! It look like a big dictionary or a book! It is so thick! All the pc stuff there look...erm how can I put it, "educational" like books :p . PC was known as educational tools and we can see how that turned out now lmao. Far to different from what is intended. I miss the ms-dos icon there. What is that spec sheet for? The pc tower spec?

Is that a game "Broken sword"?
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Few more from my retro collection... :)

Sim City 2000, Network Edition (and a handheld Genius scanner in the background)


Windows 98 Second Edition & empty WaveBlaster box, complete with the original floppy disk & installation manual (both inside the box). The actual Wave addon has been installed into one other system, on a Diamond Monster MX400, Aureal Vortex2 sound card :) I also have yet another copy of Windows 98 AND 98 Second Edition, both with instruction manuals & original stuff. These ones are duplicates, for none other than display purpose :)


My "secret" retro stash :D


My own Pentium 2 from back in a day (September, October 1998). Of course, this thing has been rebuilt several times, upgraded to better specs & then eventually restored to original configuration, except for the case & CD-ROM drive.



And last but not least, a bunch of VCRs... Call me crazy, but I seem to have a "thing" for collecting and restoring these :D


@STIG_ZA Nice collection man, but this thing would look way cooler if you had used black ODDs ;) I was never really a fan of Athlons up until recently, when I got into this retro collecting thing. I do have to say that I find Socket A (and the actual CPU design) terrible, probably the worst CPU design in the history, ever! If I'd had a $ for every crushed Athlon & Duron (or at least for snapped-off plastic tab on the Socket itself), I'd be a millionaire!
 
Got round to taking pics of the most recent AMD system that i have, picked it up online almost a year ago. Previous owner lived down by the sea so there is some bad corrosion anywhere that dust sat. Cleaned the worst of it off luckily everything still works(besides the onboard audio)

Specs:
AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ 3.0Ghz
Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 motherboard
2Gb DDR2 800
Nvidia GTS450(1gb gddr5)
Creative sound blaster audigy 2 value
160gb sata hdd(for now)
500W psu
windows 7 pro
IMG_4400.JPG IMG_4402.JPG IMG_4399.JPG IMG_4401.JPG
 
Very nice & tidy, gotta love the cable management inside this thing! :respect: Though I'm not sure I would consider this build to be retro... Anything that has SATA inside is to be considered modern if you ask me ;)
 
Toshiba D-R1. Work.
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Trekkie4 said:
Very nice & tidy, gotta love the cable management inside this thing! :respect: Though I'm not sure I would consider this build to be retro... Anything that has SATA inside is to be considered modern if you ask me ;)
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lol, not really happy with the cables. Case doesn't have much room to hide the millions of long cables this psu has. But the thermaltake logo lights up, which is cool:clap:
 
Trekkie4 said:
Cool! Does it work? See, this is why I'm into VCRs - they look so much better inside, and there's tons of moving parts to tweak and play with, while these things are just a PSU, DVD encoder & standard IDE drive :p
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Work. Sound and picture perfect! Such will not do ((
 
I don't know... For the case with top-mounted PSU, this thing is looking awesome! Maybe those couple of cables, on top of the PSU itself... Otherwise you've done a great job with everything else, especially bulky IDE ribbons. Not showing off, but if anyone should know, I know how annoying these things can get, especially when trying to do a nice & clean build. Which is why I usually wrap these things together in knots, maybe you've noticed in several of my builds & then tie them together with cable ties.

@Kirill2000 You mean the VCRs? Yeah, I know... Ppl nowdays, even some of the folks I know personally often say how VCRs have a terrible picture quality. I honestly don't know what are they expecting, I mean seriously ... these things are 35+ years old! Back in the old days, those same ppl used to consider the VCR picture quality as something awesome, especially when you didn't have a good signal on your aerial antenna for example :D
 
DVD-RAM
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In addition to previously uploaded pics, totally forgot about these...



Last but not least... Yup, you got it! Another VCR :)

 
Another PC i have been putting together. Not really retro, was trying my own sort of scrapyard wars pc. All of it excluding the gpu cost in total around R1300(south African monopoly money). Gpu is my spare card, overkill in this system but will look into something more period correct like maybe some 8800GTX in SLI

Specs:
core 2 quad q6600(OC to 3.0ghz)
deepcool gammaxx 200 cooler(not bad for being so cheap)
Jetway HI04 motherboard(p45 chipset)
6Gb DDR2 800(2x 2gb 2x 1gb)
AMD Radeon R9-270x(msi gaming 2Gb OC TF4 cooler)
Aerocool E85m-550W psu
Aerocool vs4 case
500Gb Samsung sata drive
IMG_4403.JPG IMG_4404.JPG IMG_4408.JPG
 
quadro 4 wow nice card !!
 
Trekkie4 said:
I already did! :) Way, way back... But for the sake of searching & dealing with ImageBam once again, I'm just going to take another pic.

Windows 95 (floppy version), in the original, sealed up box... I also got several OEM, CD-ROM versions also in the sealed-up bags with all the instruction manuals & paperwork


On a side note, you can actually see the original box of that Samsung CD-ROM in the background :) It's empty though, but it looks nice...

Office came to me bundled with Windows 95 and sadly it's been opened at some point, by the former owner. But still, it looks kinda cool... :D
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Somewhere around here, I've got the Windows 95 Baseball.... I threw away the bobble head doll....
 
MediaForte Quad X-Treme SF256-PCP-04
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Ahhzz said:
Somewhere around here, I've got the Windows 95 Baseball.... I threw away the bobble head doll....
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Too bad, these things are becoming more & more expensive every day! Not that I would ever sell my Windows 95, I'm keeping all my collectibles exclusively for myself :D (maybe some day, eventually... in 10, 20 years from now)

The question I seem to be getting quite often, mostly from the ppl who actually got to see all the stuff in person is "Does it all work?" - obviously referring to all the computer rigs, components and/or devices laying around. The short answer is yes, it DOES work! However, some items may have certain issues, and/or are not complete. Amstrad CPC464 gaming console (tape-drive computer) is one of them, as I don't have the PSU, appropriate monitor and/or ANY tape games to test this thing. So I can only assume that it's working, otherwise it's just a nice decorative item in my retro collection :) Similar thing with some of the PC rigs. Although all of them will most likely boot up, some of them are showing serious PSU issues, have depleted CMOS battery and/or have bulged caps. The reason why I didn't address these issues is simply because I didn't want to invest any time and money into something that's never going to be used. Let's be honest, most of these rigs were set up for the 1st time, tested & left alone, so that I could pay attention to another project ahead. So yeah, some of these things could use some TLC, but apart from that, all the rigs SHOULD be able to boot up eventually :D
As for the HiFi & VCR collection, all the items are indeed fully functional & working.

@Kirill2000 You got me thinking with that MediaForte soundcard of yours... I knew MediaForte sounds familiar and I remembered why - I got one of these laying around. Not as fancy as this one, mine is just a basic, stereo model with single output but otherwise it's very similar to what you have here.






When I got the card, I was told it doesn't work. Apparently the former owner couldn't get the sound output from this thing, at least not under XP. However, when I tested the card on W98 & found appropriate drivers everything was working perfectly fine except for one small detail - joystick (MIDI) port didn't work. So yeah, it may even really be damaged but since it DOES seem to be working, I've kept it. Even had it mounted inside one of the old systems, that is until I got the better model, so this one ended up being a spare part.
 
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Now for something different from my collection. My vintage audio setup, previously belonged to a family member and was going to be tossed out. Amp had a few issues, 2 new diodes and a clean fixed it right up. The rest of it needed few things done here and there but all good and working. Imo you cant beat sound of retro, and i enjoy listening to cassette and vinyl

AMP: kenwood ka-70
Tuner: kenwood kt-413
Cassette deck: kenwood kx-400
Turntable: Pioneer pl-512(audio technica AT91 cartridge)

//Pink Floyd the dark side of the moon vinyl on there:D
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Here's something you probably don't get to see every day - a benchmark results between the pair of 2x Voodoo2 in SLI (12MB) and a single GeForce4 Ti4200 (128MB). Both tests were performed under 3DMark 99, running on Athlon 1800+ machine with 512Mb of DDR1 RAM and Windows 98 Second Edition. More details on screen resolution, refresh rate & color depth are in the pic, enjoy! :)



@STIG_ZA Wow, never thought I would say this, but this pic actually makes me very sad. I used to have a family member with VERY similar Kenwood HiFi setup, from around the same era. From what I remember today, turntable was KD-1600, amp was KA-60, Tape deck KX-50 MK2 and tuner KT-50. Sadly neither the HiFi and/or the person who owned these are no longer with us, as the last remaining piece of Kenwood setup was sold 2 years ago. (and that was the turntable, which had tons of problems so I really couldn't justify spending more money on something which doesn't work)
 
Sadly wasn't able to save the original speakers though(KL-666X, those were awesome:rockout:) or the turntable(KD-3100). The pioneer turntable has been lying around here for around 20years, just needed a new cartridge and belt. Amp is used mainly as a headphone amp(audio techcica m40x heddies) as i don't have speakers for it. Will get some decent ones eventually.
 
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Although I'm not the biggest fan of sockets (Slot-1 forever!), I do have to say that your mobo looks very, very nice! :) As for the CPU, I also got one of the 866, I've uploaded the pic several times actually

 
Here's that Kenwood KD-1600 I've been telling you guys about... Pics were taken just before I sold this thing & bought the new Akai, USB turntable. I also used to have the instruction manual for the tape deck, but I think I threw those away last summer, as I was moving into much smaller apt :(



EDIT
Found an old (and forgotten) pile of pictures, featuring computer hardware, BIOS screens & similar, so I'm gathering all this stuff together & uploading it to PostImage, should be up in couple of hrs at most. Some of these may have already been uploaded before, and so if that's the case I apologize, although I've handpicked every single pic in order to prevent that from happening.

EDIT2
Well, darn. Looking back at my 1st couple of posts here on TPU and found some of the pics that I'm uploading as we speak. Not all of them, so there's at least 50% of new material, but rest of them are indeed duplicates. Oh well, these were uploaded on January 2nd, 2015 so for all of you who joined the Nostalgic Hardware club later on, they're all going to be new :D
 
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