All of mine are frankenstiened to an extent, I have three that were the most so though.
The most Frankenstiened computer I currently have is my 486.
- The case was bought in 2004, new old stock, on E-bay, from some california consolidation/warehouse company. It's a Songcheer XT chassis with a 150 Watt PSU (Which the fan has now gone bad on....planning it's replacement as soon as I'm out of my leg cast). The case had never been used. It was first a PEntium 200 MMX I called "Creeping Net P200MMXT", which I later gutted and turned into "CNXTII" - which had 2 boards I bought from Terry Yager in it from an IBM Industrial PC and an IBM PC Portable in it, one of which I upgraded to 640K. Then my CAT 486 was broken in an accident and I decided to "gut" this case and use it for the current 486.
- The motherboard came from another VCF User, it's a FIC 486 PVT board with VLB Local Bus, Socket 3, Award BIOS. It came with a tiny hearing aid button cell for the CMOS but I found that the traces on the motherboard lead to support for a bigger, modern, coin-cell battery holder, which is what I installed as the hearing aid battery was D.O.A. I cannibalized the holder out of an old Pentium 4 Motherboard that hung on my man cave wall as "Wall Art".
- The CPU Chip, an old Intel 80486 DX2/66, I've had since probably about 2002 or so and it's been in everything from an IBM Ps/Valuepoint 433DX/D, several 486 era Laptops, a few other desktops, my first LInux Box (a Zenith Data Systems 486). I'd kept it as a spare for years though. It replaced the 486 DX4/100 as a pin got yanked out of it by a malfunctioning processor socket
. This thing has a crazy little tiny fan on it that really moves some air, I bought it from a computer shop, though it was marketed as a "hobbyist hi-speed mini-fan" way back around 08' when I built my current modern PC.
- The Hard Disk is an 8GB Seagate that was out of a Thrift Shop found PC years ago that said it was a 386 but turned out to be a Pentium 200. It has a DDO on it and 4 FAT-16 Partitions to allow me to run Windows For Workgroups 3.11 with 32-bit Disk Access happily.
- Video card is an old S3 805 1MB VLB I yanked from the CAT, prior to that, the card was bought from a pile of expansion cards I Found at Goodwill sometime back in about 2005-2006ish. It has room for more RAM, I hope to find the right modules to bump it up to 2MB someday.
- Multi I/O card (FDD/HDD/Ser/Parall/Game) is VLB and was from the same stack of cards the S3 805 came out of
- Sound Card is the CAT's old SoundBlaster Pro 2.0, which I had the CD-ROM for and used until it died. I want to put another AWE32 in there someday but I can't find one currently.
- NIC is a N.O.S. Linksys Etherfast "10BaseT" Ethernet card I found new in box, shrinkwrapped, in Goodwill sometime about 2007 or so. I bought three of these and have one on backup. My 286 has the other one. It's also PnP and surprisingly works really well in DOS using PnP.
- RAM came from a grab Bag of SIMMS I bought from an old fella in Opelika back around 2003-2004ish who had a unmarked thrift shop just chock FULL of vintage computer stuff. I bought so much stuff from that guy and helped him fix up his inventory for awhile. Anyway, one day I go in the back and he's got this HUGE bag of 30 and 72 pin SIMMS, I took the highest capacity ones I had left and put them in this machine (the CAT had 4MB Modules, this one has 64MB of RAM, 4 16MB Modules). It took a few hours getting the memory matched for this machine as I had so much of it to work with. The FIC takes up to 128MB, I've been thinking about going that high eventually.
- The Floppy Diskette drives are probably the parts I've owned the longest, the 1.2MB TEAC is out of Creeping Net 1, another MAJOR frankenstein computer I've had. The other floppy came out of a Holt Office Systems 486 I bought from Value Village for $10.00 and parted out in 2007. The CD-RW is from a dead Compaq Presario that I cannibalized, and all the assorted mounting screws/hardware are probably from all over the place.
- The computer also features the internal speaker being piped into the SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 so I can control the volume of it, that and I plan to make some Youtubes in the future and I want ALL audio being recorded. I built my own custom cable using a CMOS Battery connector soldered to a Reset Button connector, and then cleanly wrapped in electrical tape to hide the "hackish" nature of that modification so it just looks like a big black cable.
- Currently it's setup at my desk running through a thrift shop VGA to Composite converter device so I can record it to my desktop for youtube videos (once I get my DV capture working again). It has a Chicony 101 Key XT Keyboard just like CN1 had but it's newer and not drenched in root beer. I have a frankensteined together PC-TRAC serial trackball on it, and a weird totally-80's/90's looking game controller for playing video games on it. It also has a 3-D Glasses set I picked up awhile back (which I need to hack for use with the PC...might do it through the VGA/Comp converter as the adapter for the VR Headset is missing the VGA dongle), and the last part I picked up was a 15" AOC MOnitor with digital controls as I was blowing up LCD's a lot with all the wacky old video modes the S3 throws out for higher resolutions.
Here's a pic of that thing....
The Most Frankenstiened computer I've Ever Had......The GEM (386/P200MMXT/Celeron/PIII)....that thing was ridiculous...It started life as a 386 built by GEM Computer Products in Norcross Georgia, it had this awesome Compaq Deskpro 8086/286/386 clone chassis that was full AT. It had a AT keyboard connector in the front and the cable ran to the back to the connector on the motherboard. I later hacked it up to make it a micro ATX Board and stuck ATX guts into the full AT power Supply case with the big paddle switch replaced by a big red button.
It had an Addonics 386 board first, then a brief stint with a AMD 5x86 P-75 Pentium Overdrive in a BIOstar MB8433UUD, then I got a Gatestar Socket 7 board, used that for awhile with an AMD P75 and then a Pentium 120, then yanked that out and put another BIOstar board in it (this time socket 7) with a P200MMX and 64MB of RAM running Windows 98 SE. Then it had an HP "Firebird" Celeron board in it for awhile with a 500MHz Celeron and 384MB of RAM, then I yanked all that for it's final board setup - an Intel D815EPV Socket 370 (??) Pentium III board.
In it's Pentium III incarnation, I started off with a 667MHz Intel PIII which was later bumped up to an Intel 1GHz PIII Coppermine. I had to go through a ton of different thermal units till I found one efficient enough. It had half a Gigabyte of RAM as that's all the board would support, and ran Windows 2000 SP3 at that point because Windows 98 SE would crash under so much computing power.
I accumulated and swapped parts in that computer so much I wore the case plum out and had to get a new case when I built my current box, a also frankensteined (though not nearly as interestingly so) Pentium D running 64-bit Windows 7. A lot of the GEM's parts live on in that beast.
Here's a photoshopped picture of that thing.....I had some plans to bump it up to a Core 2 before the case gave up the ghost.
