Hey all! In the spirit of mary4's adventures, I decided to revive and refresh one of my retro PCs.

I have a Tyan S1564D motherboard, dual Socket 7 with Intel HX chipset, and 8 (!) 72-pin EDO slots.

When I took it out, there was an assortment of various 8 and 16MB SIMMs. So I ordered some 'new' RAM from "Memgate". An eBay store that sells refurbished, tested RAM from 30-pin through to DDR4, ECC, parity, you name it! Guaranteed and covered by a warranty, no less!

I got two 2x64MB 60ns EDO kits, for a total of 256MB. On a Socket 7 system! And you can go up to 512MB!! My Pentium 3 box doesn't even have that much hahaha!

Storage is a modern Sandisk 32GB CF card in an adaptor. It and the motherboard support UDMA4, so it's ludicrously fast. I also installed a DVD drive for convenience.

Video is a Matrox Millennium II 4MB, nothing special, but a quality card with bright, sharp output. Network is a PCI 3C905B-TX, again nothing special, but reliable and well supported.

Finally, for sound I have something special: A Sound Blaster AWE64 Legacy.

It's a modern recreation of the AWE64 Gold, using original Creative Labs chips, full compliment of 28MB RAM on board, hardware MPU401 MIDI interface, wavetable daughterboard connector, real hardware OPL3, and high quality analogue stage. They didn't make many, but man it's a nice bit of kit.

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=68555

I added on an NEC XR385 wavetable board, which is an OEM version of the Yamaha DB60XG. Very high quality, General MIDI compatible, and of course Yamaha XG compatible. Latter not so useful for games, but damn it sounds nice just as a GM device.

For software, it's dual-booting Windows NT 3.51 workstation and MS-DOS. The former for file transfer, and the latter for games, obviously! Windows may eventually be replaced with NT4, or even Windows 2000, I haven't settled on it yet, but apparently there are some cool community things happening to make newer apps run on NT 3.51, so I wanna try that out first!

Anyway, full specs:

Tyan S1564D Tomcat IV Dual Socket 7 mainboard
2x Pentium MMX 233MHz
256MB 60ns EDO RAM
Matrox Millennium II 4MB PCI Video
Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold Sound + Yamaha XG Daughterboard
3Com 3C905B-TX Ethernet
32GB Compactflash Storage
DVD-RW Optical

And here's a SIV32 screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/GNJWMXl.png

I'll take some photos when I'm home again and post them in a follow up.

Happy retro computing everyone!

Cheers,
RetroSwim

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* Origin: >> Pool's Open - The RetroSwim BBS (21:2/121)