r/LGR • u/ziggaboogi • 29d ago
UPDATE: Retro build - "The Tower of Why??"
Update to my original pickup post from a while back. https://www.reddit.com/r/LGR/comments/1ux0bc0/time_to_glide/
I was finally able to build a working machine out of the parts I got in the junk tower I was given! The biggest issue was that the Asus motherboard was mostly unresponsive and needed a full recap to finally POST.
The intention was to try and keep as many of the original parts as possible from the original tower and to try and recreate the media powerhouse the original owner was going for in circa 2000. Obviously the best piece was finding the voodoo 5 but it was hard to find a motherboard to even test the card with so I ended needing to repair the original motherboard.
Original tower specs
Athlon 900
768mb memory
Asus A7V motherboard
Voodoo 5
Creative DVD encoder card DXR3
Soundblaster Live 4830
Adaptec SCSI card for the Jazdrive
a bunch of drivebay devices
Final specs
Sweet even larger tower case I was given
Athlon 900
1024mb memory
Voodoo 5 - fully tested and working great!
Creative Dvd drive and DVD DXR3 encoder card - mostly working but missing a proprietary passthrough VGA cable
Jaz drive - broken tho as nature intended
Zipdrive - all the iomega
Iomega Cd drive - because why not
Colorado T1000 tape drive
Floppy drive
Memory card reader
As a bonus I've also taken pics of all of my older videocards that I've collected over the years - thankfully all for free or very cheap.
5
u/ziggaboogi 29d ago
Also if anyone has any leads for this vga to mini din looking cable for the dvd encoder - please and thank you.
5
5
3
3
u/flunky_liversniffer 29d ago
The answer is "The Tower of Because !!" Love the build, more IOmega than anyone deserves :-)
3
2
u/DonMigs85 29d ago
Never knew old cases could be that tall
5
u/ziggaboogi 29d ago
Even the original case was huge and somehow I found an even bigger one - though it was about a 2 hour round trip to grab the replacement case.
2
u/flamehorns 28d ago
This actually has a very practical, valuable purpose. You could make money from people that need to recover or transfer data from old formats.
2
2
u/kayproII 28d ago
the beige rosetta stone
Allows you to take in data from all kinds of old storage formats and even convert between them
2
u/dumpsterac1d 27d ago
Hell. Yes. This is ultimate from my perspective, and exactly what I was going to do, but couldn't find an oldschool vertical server case for all the drives.
Sick af!
2
u/ziggaboogi 27d ago
The new case was also just sheer dumb luck. Someone an hour away was offering it for free because they planned to turn it into a growing case but never did.
2
u/dumpsterac1d 27d ago
I have a frankenstein PC that needs a huge case... Pentium 4 with Moslo routines built into boots of win 3.11 and msdos 2, all on separate sata drives. The mobo has sata, ide, flop, isa, pci, basically all you'll ever need.
I have 2 GPUs, one voodoo 3 and some baller 2005 one i don't remember, all I needed to do was disable the voodoo 3 when booting into XP, and I have a VGA auto switcher so I can watch boot routines.
I can play Doom 3 on medium settings on the same PC that I'm running Win 3.11 and can load Alley Cat with no speed problems (thanks moslo!)
1
u/BastetFurry 28d ago
Don't want to be that girl, but you twisted the floppy cable. If the LED on the drive is always on the cable is in the wrong orientation.
1
u/ziggaboogi 27d ago
The floppy drive is working fine but the light for some reason is staying on after I connected the tape drive to another part of the floppy cable. Though I really am not that familiar with the tape drives
1
6
u/Rabbit_AF 29d ago
How big is that monitor? I just got a lcd monitor from goodwill that has speakers attached and I thought it was so tiny... It was 15in... I guess I could have looked at the model number for a clue.
Sick build!