Retro Gaming Rig Thread
 

Last night I was staring at my pile of unused hardware, and I decided to pull some stuff apart, do some heavy cleaning, and make a retro gaming rig for my daughter and son:

• My old Cybertron case
• Athlon Mobile XP 2800 Barton (266 fsb, 512k cache, unlocked multi, 2.1ghz)
• Aopen 350W PSU (fairly new actually but no SATA connectors)
• ECS K7S5A (SiS 735) Socket A SDR/DDR motherboard
• 2x512mb DDR
• FX 5700 Vanilla AGP 128mb
• 40gb Deskstar
• WinXP

The build went together nicely, and it was fun to see everything clean and together (even though I swore over two years ago now that I'd never touch WinXP and Socket A again, lol) ... Now, I'm not expecting miracles from this system at all, but it is reasonably snappy (back when my systems had cards like FX 5700 I usually only had 512mb RAM anyway, and a slower CPU)... overall this is around the spec of a high-end system from mid-2002.

I built this so it could play BF 1942, Call of Duty 1, RTCW:ET, UT2004 and Star Wars Ep. 1 Pod Racer on a 1024x768 LCD. The only things I might like to do to improve the system would be to get the RAM up to 1.5 or 2gb, and possibly get a GPU in there that can do hardware acceleration in Flash (HD 4650 AGP, ~$70)... or maybe if someone here has any old AGP card that's better than FX 5700 that they could sell/trade ...but part of me thinks that if I decide to put resources into that I might as well at least upgrade to 939/PCIE.

Whatever the case, this retro rig is ready to play 2001-2003 titles, and it was fun to put together. I hope my daughter & son like it. I worked hard on this bugger last night.

If you've built a retro gaming rig lately, post it here! :)

Re: Retro Gaming Rig Thread
 

Pics, or it didn't happen :p

Re: Retro Gaming Rig Thread
 

Very nice! I was thinking about doing something like this because there are some older games that I'd love to play again that just don't like modern hardware and Windows 7. I have some old parts laying around. It's just finding the right combination of parts that actually work.

Re: Retro Gaming Rig Thread
 

http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/5730/kidpc01.jpg

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/2160/kidpc02.jpg

Nothin' special... but hey, it'll play BF1942 @ 10x7, all details @ highest, no AA/AF...

One problem I'm having is that the 175.19 Forceware driver's not working right, OpenGL games (RTCW:ET & Call of Duty 1) don't work.... DirectX titles work though...
EDIT: Problem solved via driver re-install... I rolled back a bit as well, the FX 5700 doesn't need OpenGL 2.1. :p

Re: Retro Gaming Rig Thread
 

Heh, I used to have a K7S5A, it was one of my first actual builds. Used to run my 1700+ Thunderbird in there. :D

Re: Retro Gaming Rig Thread
 

I have LOTS of older spare parts, including some shuttle boxes (one with an nforce2 and socketA and one with a VIA and AM2), a few 939 MB+proc, LOTS of DDR1 RAM, followed by things more recent.

Send me a message if you want me to sell some for cheap.
I'm located in Bay Area.

Re: Retro Gaming Rig Thread
 

You should post it in the FS Forum frenchy. I'm sure some people would love to buy it off of you.