Well, for nostalgia I fixed up an old 486. Paid $5.00 for it at a flea-market and was given a large box of parts (sound cards, video cards, floppy drives, etc.) from a Ham Radio friend of mine.
It's a 486-DX2 80-MHz, 256 KB Cache, 48-meg of ram (almost unheard of back then), 1-meg Cirrus Logic Video Card, 2-Gig HDD, 8X CD Rom Drive, 3.5 & 5.25 Floppy Drives, a SoundBlaster 16 Sound Card, and MSDOS 6.22 & Windows 3.11.
While we laugh at these specs, in the early 90's this would've been one heck of a system. I hooked it all up, spend hours downloading abandonware, and have had a blast. I haven't played with Win 3.11 or DOS in years, not to mention ChessMaster 2100, Commander Keen 1-7, King's Quest 1-4, Leisure Suit Larry 1-3, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom.
I have to admit, it's been a while since i've manually setup an autoexec.bat and config.sys in DOS, especially manually configuring the CD-ROM drive and optimizing memory management.
It even plays MP3's with a Windows 3.11 MP3 player - 256k encoding too, not the horrible sounding 128k mp3's.
Amazing for an old 486.
Now if I get really nostalgic and ambitious, i'll hook up a Commodore 64 one of these days (complete with 1541 Floppy Drives)...
Sorry about the poor pic quality.
It's a 486-DX2 80-MHz, 256 KB Cache, 48-meg of ram (almost unheard of back then), 1-meg Cirrus Logic Video Card, 2-Gig HDD, 8X CD Rom Drive, 3.5 & 5.25 Floppy Drives, a SoundBlaster 16 Sound Card, and MSDOS 6.22 & Windows 3.11.
While we laugh at these specs, in the early 90's this would've been one heck of a system. I hooked it all up, spend hours downloading abandonware, and have had a blast. I haven't played with Win 3.11 or DOS in years, not to mention ChessMaster 2100, Commander Keen 1-7, King's Quest 1-4, Leisure Suit Larry 1-3, Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom.
I have to admit, it's been a while since i've manually setup an autoexec.bat and config.sys in DOS, especially manually configuring the CD-ROM drive and optimizing memory management.
It even plays MP3's with a Windows 3.11 MP3 player - 256k encoding too, not the horrible sounding 128k mp3's.
Amazing for an old 486.
Now if I get really nostalgic and ambitious, i'll hook up a Commodore 64 one of these days (complete with 1541 Floppy Drives)...
Sorry about the poor pic quality.