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what do you use your "later PC's" for?

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wolfie

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i know they make pretty decent servers and are good for playing older games. i was just wondering what other People use there "later PC's" for?
 
For me, mostly games. Sometimes it's good for writing or doodling... an old word processor or graphics program is nostalgic and still functional. (Provided you pick something that has a file format you can still import into a modern program.)

I would have said (a couple years ago) that its good for checking email... but not anymore... all the webmail out there like Yahoo is too heavy for the poor old browsers. A POP3 or IMAP client is still probably OK though.

And a related question (and not to hijack your whole thread), is what do people run on their machines? I'm running DOS 6.22 / Win 3.1. I know some people run '95 or Linux, but is anyone running something 'weird' like DR DOS or OS/2?
 
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I've got a 1.6GHz machine with 512 ram which is our local http/ftp server for testing. It's always on and I gotta say, putting that up is one of the best computer choices I've made. It's a treat. My wife uses it for testing blogging software, and I'm working on some forums. We both use it for web pages. It's also an easy way to exchange stuff between us - we just put the material on some page for the other to click on.

I've got another P4 which is 1GHz (also with 512 ram) which is used for browsing, visitors, etc. Since it is running BSD it is almost as fast as any newer machine we have.

@carangil There will be no MS-Windows in this house, but I am a serious doshead. I have a P133 with 128MB ram and a 6GB HDD. That is my secondary machine and it gets almost as much use as my main one. It happens to be MS-DOS6.22, but to me there isn't any significant, or even noticeable, difference between doses. PTS-DOS is supposedly a bit faster but at 133MHz who cares. :)
 
I use most of my retro machines for games mostly. On some occasions I build a system solely for testing. I always use Windows if I can simply because I find it very easy to use (and for running games ofcourse).
I tend to use XP on machines from about 800Mhz and up and use ME on machines roughly 1Ghz and below.
Depending on the cacheable area of a machine I might put 98SE or 95 on it.
I tend to prefer ME over 98SE because it suits my needs better and because I've been running ME for about 9 years now and it seems to run games perfectly fine for me.

I play games ranging from Stunts all the way to whatever I can find in the €5 bucket :)

I have machines ranging from a DX4 all the way up to AM3 and virtually all of them have been build (or heavilly upgraded) from parts given to me, found by me or bought by me second hand. On a sidenote, when picking the correct parts, I've found all systems build by me to be very stable (except for that DX4, but that's more because it was the 2nd system I ever build and it's badly configured).

Cheers!
 
I have machines from the XT class up to P3's in the collection. The p1-p3's are mostly for gaming and I collect the early 3D video cards. The earlier stuff is for old apps (DOS/Win3) and some gaming and also to experiment with hardware and OS I never used (OS/2, Desqview/X). I am building up a nice collection of old boxed software to experiment with.
 
i was referring to "Later PC's" as 386's, 486's and some P1's. anything P2 or newer can run windows XP or in some cases they can run windows 7.
i find older games work way better on the computers that they where designed for. i have tried using some older games on my newest computers and they seem to run slow or have problems. i have IE6 on my in my 1 486 and i am able to kind of surf the web. it can bee very slow but i have been able to get onto facebook. i tend to run win 98 or DR.Dos.
 
So later PCs in which you're referring I use for playing around with older OS's usually except my newest later PC which would fall into your category which I installed freebsd and had it as my firewall and router. It worked great although I think it started to make a clicking noise so a few years ago I powered it off and was debating replacing the hard drive or reloading the OS. Kinda a pain to configure it all though so I got lazy and just used the SOHO gear I already had to replace the functionality with a lot less stability (the routers I tend to have to reboot after large amounts of traffic).
 
I had a Smoothwall box powered by a AMD K5 PR90 years ago. It got the job done. But the thing is that hardware sucks several times the power to do the job of a little router, and there's no wireless unless you attach a wireless router or access point to it.

I have lots of old stuff around (486 and newer). I tend to throw something together occasionally, just to play with the hardware again, and then get bored with it once it's up and running. :) I rarely play games on old stuff anymore. I prefer to use my modern PCs for games because most old Windows games work fine on them and DOSBOX gets DOS games up and running a zillion times easier than old hardware does.

Most recently, I got myself a free P4 Prescott AGP-based box and stuck a Radeon 8500 in it. I wanted to see how the 8500 could run some more recent games if it wasn't CPU limited. UT2004, Half Life 2 and a few other things. That was interesting and surprising.
 
I used my Compaq Presario 660 (the first PC I ever bought new; I was a Commodore 8-bit and Amiga guy before that) as a firewall/router for several years. But like Swaaye says, it drew more power than a dedicated router. Today I have a D-Link device that combines a modem, router, and switch into a single device no larger than the Healthy Choice frozen meal I ate for lunch. Much nicer than having that Compaq, my old football-sized Alcatel modem, and Netgear hub piled up on a file cabinet. That Compaq did a nice job, but I don't know if it would have enough horsepower to handle today's loads.

But back when I was doing it, it made sense. In 1999-2000 your choice was to buy a Linksys for $200, or roll your own. So my friends and I would get together and make one out of whatever 486 or early Pentium we scrounged up. The first couple of times we did it with Red Hat 5.1, but eventually some good single-floppy distros came along that made it all go a lot easier. Installing Red Hat 5.1 on a 25 MHz 486 with a double-speed CD-ROM drive isn't something I want to ever do again. :)

Every once in a while I get a hankering to rebuild that Compaq so I can play Civilization and Railroad Tycoon and Monkey Island on it again, but DOSbox is a lot easier. Plus I get to sit in my comfy chair and use my nice LCD monitor, and if something else comes up I can pause it and switch to another window. That Compaq 486 wasn't my idea of easy even back when it was current--not after being spoiled by my Amiga.

I ran DOS and OS/2 on that 486 when it was new, and for fun I got Windows 95 running on it for a while. It ran it OK. I do still think someday I'll put a 4 GB compact flash card and adapter in it and install DOS 6 for those times when DOSbox doesn't quite feel real enough.
 
I have a lot of ISA peripherals that aren't duplicated in PCI, so boxes with ISA slots (as well as PCI) are very useful to me. If you've ever done any hardware prototyping, it's much easier to design something for ISA than for PCI.
 
I keep older systems that match programming projects I worked on many years ago. Unlikely that anyone would still want to make bug fixes to a program written in VB1 but being ready to do so convinces some that I am somewhat reliable.
 
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krebizfan said:
I keep older systems that match programming projects I worked on many years ago. Unlikely that anyone would still want to make bug fixes to a program written in VB1 but being ready to do so convinces some that I am somewhat reliable.
Click to expand...

Over on a gaming forum we had a little discussion about how difficult it would be to set up a computer with the development environment for an old game project. The topic came up because of how some game companies are using no-CD cracks from the warez scene instead of producing their own executable without copy protection for use with the Steam service.

It's definitely a bit of an undertaking to set up a working development system for a decade old game or any other piece of software for that matter. Some of these game companies have simply lost the source code anyway, or just don't even want to try to figure out how to make the source work again.
 
I've still got several 486's I use, a 286, and a 186. These are aside from my systems that are strictly hobby systems.

One 486 is used for data transfers between old disk and tape formats and present-day formats. It also has a devic programmer on it that supports older devices than my newer programmers do. It runs DOS 6.22/WFW3.11 and Yggdrasil Linux and OS/2 2.1. Mostly because that's what it ran when it was a current system and those partitions are still there. It's got 3 hard disks with 6 partitions total. Total HDD space is about 1.5GB.

Two other 486's still in use are laptops used as testing clients and serial device emulators for my hardware design work. They each have a number of hard disks I can swap in and out with different OS configs. One mostly runs SuSE 5.1, the other is mostly DOS 6.22.

My still-in-harness 286 is a data migration system that talks to just about any floppy disk you can name, from 8" to 3". It runs DOS 5.0.

My 186 is my good old HP200LX, a frankenstein built up from the parts of many others to keep it going. I still write most of my x86 16 bit code on it, though DOSBOX on my newer systems is starting to compete with it. The 200LX boots under both its ROM DOS (a version of 5.0) and 6.22 on the memory card.

I've just retired another 486 mid-tower from active service. It's going to get rebuilt as a period gaming system and get thrown on the gaming network alongside some other 486's and PowerPCs. Until recently I used it for data recovery and archiving, but its duties have been split between the first 486 above and a PA-RISC pizza box that now has all my SCSI tape drives on it.
 
Games and pure nostalgia. I was born in 1990, so during the time of my first memories Windows 3.x was in it's hayday and DOS games for the 386 and 486 were rampant. I played DOS games and Win3x games (pipe dream, woot) up through when Win98SE stopped being viable for the latest games (2005 - yes I used 98SE until then on my main machine, really). Of course I still play DOS games, but now it's mostly on my Compaq all-in-ones. I am planning to buy that RAM patch so I can put 98SE on my main machine in a dualboot with Win7 x64, heh.

Anyway seeing saundby's post perhaps I should elaborate more.

I have a maxed out Pentium 3 (1ghz) Dell box that WAS a l550r iirc, but now displays l999r when it boots. ;) It's got 512MB RAM and ran Win98SE but at the moment It's in a corner with no OS (aw.. :/ need to get that machine back up and running..). This box is for games that are too much for the below Voodoo machine to handle, and I hope to eventually find a PCI Voodoo 3 for this one so it can do the later Voodoo stuff.

I use an overclocked mobile-Pentium that was converted to a desktop chip in China that I run at 300mhz (was rated 266mhz) with a Voodoo II (Diamond 8MB) for Win98 and 95 games that won't run on a modern system (or won't run as well). This machine is named Voodoo - I even got a 3dfx case badge for it. :) I realize that AMD chips of that era (K6-III and such) would be much faster and less limiting to the V2, but I enjoy the untranslated feel of the Pentium so opted for the fastest one of those I could find, leaving things that require more to later systems.

My Presario 425 (likely to be replaced with a Prolinea [same but with built-in net, freeing an ISA slot]) is used for the majority of DOS/Win3x gaming, and likely some Win95 gaming (early stuff) too soon enough. This has a SB16 and an Etherlink III at the moment in it's two slots, and I run DOS 7.10 on it.

I don't have a 386 platform yet (I do have a board or two around, if I needed one for some reason), as typically things that were designed for a 386, 286, and even 808x run fine on a 486. However, I should be getting an interesting 50mhz 386 system soon from glitch (as well as the aforementioned Prolinea).

For 286 (though I typically use my 486, as I said) I have an original IBM 5170 AT. It's got a VGA card at the moment, but I'd eventually like to get it going with EGA and a 5154 for games that might require a true EGA card.

For 8088 (again, typically use the 486) I have an original IBM 5160 XT. It also has a VGA card currently, and I'd like to kit this one out with CGA and a 5153 for the same reasons, but for CGA games. I also have the Panasonic Sr. Partner for this - though it's screen is monochrome, so it's not ideal for games (I treat the Sr. Partner as an arcade machine - I play Frogger, Gremlins, Galaxian, etc.).

For 8086, which probably has not a single game that won't run on an 8088, I will be using the NEC APC (also from glitch soon enough). If I understand correctly this machine might not be graphics-compatible with era games, but I'll likely relegate it to text-based games for this very reason, and also for games specifically written for the APC (because those do exist!).

This list consists of one or two machines from each category, so bear in mind I do have other less frequently used machines. One can't use every machine on a constant basis, obviously, which is why I usually stick to my 486.
 
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I keep a beige box 486 around with fairly "good" (for a 486) specs...VLB Diamond graphics card and IDE controller, 66 MHz Intel 486DX-2, 64 MB RAM, 10 GB IDE hard disk, 24x12x48 CD-RW, AHA-1522a SCSI controller (for its SSSD floppy support, mostly), 230 MB Fujitsu MO drive, Zip-100 drive, and currently 3.5" HD and 5.25" HD floppy drives. I use it with Windows 95 and WinImage for reading/writing WinImage format floppy disks, and with MS-DOS for CP/M transfers (22DISK) and ImageDisk read/write. It also contains the interface card for my EPROM burner, which uses hard-coded timing loops and gives write errors with anything faster than a 486 or early Pentium system. Since it's connected to the network, I can transfer image files to/from the machine, as well as EPROM bin or hex files.

I keep an IBM PS/ValuePoint machine running for my girlfriend...it's a 66 MHz 486DX-2 as well, but its primary purpose is in playing DOS games. It does have Windows 3.1 installed, and although it's pitiful at it, can browse the Internet using one of the later releases of Netscape Communicator. Along that same line, I've got an Apple PowerMac G3 "AIO" (the "Molar Mac") running MacOS 9.2.2 that's used for playing old Macintosh games. Having an integrated high-resolution monitor is nice.

Don't know if it counts, but I do have a 486-class machine that runs as a router/firewall. It's a Soekris embedded machine, running m0n0wall on a 128MB CF card with an AMD 5x86-133 processor. They're very neat devices, and can be purchased (the older models, anyway) for around $50 secondhand. I've also got a Cobalt RaQ-Cache, which is a MIPS-based 1U device intended as a web cache server. As such, it has two 10/100 Ethernet ports, and functions well as a NAT router on the network, running Debian Linux "Etch." Kind of neat to have a 150 MHz RM5230-based device doing your Internet routing! (it was also $10 at some computer shop)
 
Damn good price on that 1U bugger - I bet that doesn't overload like most routers if you tax it heavily either.
 
I just rediscovered a P133 that has a few interesting options to the mainboard-- USB, PCI and ISA slots, and 72-pin simm and 168-pin DIMM options! I can't really remember why this one was in mothballs, but the processor wasn't seated right so that might have been the problem. More when I get all the stuff back in that I yanked from it-- like everything but the floppy drive.
 
I used to use a 486 for old gaming until it broke (motherboard died). Now I am going to use my 386 for floppy disk back up and general gaming. Most of the old systems I have set up I use to play games on. ( With the exception of my Performa 6200CD it is my mac floppy disk back up machine). Tho I might experiment with programming on the 386 also.
 
DOS games and playing with Linux or BSD mostly.
In the past I've used them for serving diskless Sun workstations and archiving Commodore disks.
I first installed and used X on a 486 box (until I later had other cards that X supported but that was LONG ago).
 
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