Obsolete hardware junkyard

Broken 5 1/4 floppy drives
A semi-working Turbo 486 PC?
How about a monstrous W2K-era IBM Thinkserver, or a stack of Pentium 4-era Dell Dimensions?
Want to make a small coffee table out of legacy CD-RW drives?
What do 3DFX and iomega mean to you?
Windows 95 in.. Hebrew? מְאוּדֶה

These are all things I appreciate, but my computer liebe falls short of Kraftwerk's
and I'm in a spot where I have no clue what to do with most stuff. I've already given away half of it, yet the mountain stands tall. It may be time to visit an electronics recycler. Anyone else ever find themselves in this spot?

 

I have a Windows 98 machine I built with a P4 2.53GHz and a Voodoo 3 3000. I like this system a lot, though I haven't used it much in a while. For certain games, it's the best way to play them.

I've always been a fan of 3dfx, and I've become more interested in their hardware in the past few years.

 

I have a Windows 98 laptop with a pentium (!) which I use for dos games and other old win 95 games, but certainly not in a situation where stacks of old electronics accumulate. Except Panasonic minidisc players...I have like 8 of the damn things.

 

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention I also have an iMac G3, a Power Mac G4, and a Power Mac G5.

 

Would @GoodTofuFriday appreciate this thread? Maybe @AtomizerZero as well?

 

Still have my Datavue Spark, the computer I got when I was 10...


I made a little website on it.

 

Some HP Rack's 4U size, est. 50 KG | 1300Watt @ 230v

Can't use them atm due my engery provider, way to expensive.

 

Here's a picture of all of my computers, both new and old, that I took a while back. I edited it to make it look cleaner.

 

You might be surprised how easily you can get rid of things if you throw them into a 7-day Sunday eBay auction with a $0.99 starting bid and local pickup only. Maybe you should give that a shot?

I had a huge 1m cubed box full of junk games, consoles, parts, etc. and did that, it sold for like $50 and the guy picked it up within a few days. Instant space saver for things I actually wanted to keep and put on shelves. And when I was moving from Japan to Australia, I had hundreds of junky Super Famicoms, Nintendo 64s, Gamecubes, and more that I put on Craigslist for free and they were gone the next day. Some French nerds in cargo shorts picked them up, said they were starting a retro gaming cafe, I wonder how that went...

 

Last week, one of my co-workers asked if I could help him get some CAD files off an old P2-era workstation. It had a Win98 sticker on it, so I figured "USB, then. Easy." I turn it on and.. Surprise! NT4 SP6. No USB support. I hadn't seen NT4 running in at least a decade. It was fun to revisit. This particular machine appeared to be decommissioned sometime in 2005. I needed to get 1GB worth of content on a flash drive. My readily available means for extracting these files? Floppy (nope), Zip Drive (nope), CD-RW (they never installed the drivers that came in the box + didn't feel like burning discs). Ethernet port? Ethernet port.

Browsing the 2018 WWW from the newest version of NT4 IE6 was just funny. 9/10 webpages wouldn't load. Google didn't work. Yahoo didn't work. None of the websites where I have an e-mail address worked. Bing works. I tried using Bing to locate a site with a 2012-ish build of Opera (last to support 9x and NT), but all the sites that hosted these files didn't work.

The solution? IE6 was integrated with Windows Explorer. It served as an OK FTP client. I hardwired my modded CECHB-01 PS3, opened MultiMan, turned on FTP, got the IP address, typed it into the address bar on the browser, and... Hey! There was my PS3 root folder. I sent the files to a safe directory labeled 'nt4' (maybe in a subdirectory of dev_hdd0, can't remember now) and then copied them to a flash drive from MultiMan.

After that, I downloaded that Opera build on my laptop, put it on the flash drive, put it back in my PS3, then downloaded it to the NT machine from my PS3. I believe I would have needed to upgrade Windows Installer for it to work. At that point, I just said 'fuck it, that's enough' and turned the computer back off. With the right upgrades (even without), it could still be a decent and capable workhorse. 128 MB RAM is more than enough for modern computing. Anything beyond that is just outlandish and experimental.

Socket 478-era Pentium 4 + Voodoo 3? Interesting combo. There was a strong demand for 98SE even into the hyper-threaded P4 era, if I remember right. It took awhile for the public to warm up to Windows XP. I preferred 2K well into the SP2 era. It felt cleaner, more efficient, more serious. My elementary school was filled with G3 iMacs (and the odd Apple II) like that one in your picture. I made a lot of stuff in Kid Pix.

You know what all the cool kids say - go MMX or go home. There is a camera shop in NW Philadelphia that - last time I was in - had several brand new Sony Minidisc players. Even better yet, they were still going for their og retail price. Something tells me they are still in the same place.

Very cool. It looks so discreet from the angle in the picture.

Great idea and worth a shot. I never tried doing local pickup on ebay. Maybe I can find the right diehard with the right means of hauling. As the old saying goes, one man's mangled NES Four Score is another man's weekend project... or something like that.

 

I'm not sure what socket it uses. This system is indeed fully compatible with Windows 98SE. I'll admit that it's a pretty weird combination of early-mid-2000s hardware and late-90s hardware. It also has a Pioneer slot-loading DVD drive (2003 I think?) and a 160GB HDD. My original plan with this system was for it to be based on an 800MHz PIII. However, I tried for quite a while to get this system to work and was unsuccessful. So, I gave up on that system on bought another fully working P4 system, and replaced some of the parts with parts I already had. Later I got the Pioneer drive. The newer parts of this system don't really cause any issues for older software (the software I'm using, anyway), and one of the benefits is that the OS and programs load faster. I can also play DOS games on this system.

I like the G3 iMac. It was actually my first Mac, which was already pretty old when I got it, but I still thought it was pretty cool. It has Jaguar installed on it.

 

Have you ever played around with KernelEX? It did some amazing things for 9x "forwards compatibility" in the later XP era. With enough RAM it could probably still pack a good punch, though I'm not sure what would be guaranteed to work with it in this day and age. I heard about it relatively late (2009), but it helped me turn an old P2-266/128 MB RAM/2MB integrated VRAM/W98 "First Edition" Dell Optiplex into a rather capable machine. It could browse Facebook, YouTube worked through an old version of Flash Player and patience, etc.

 

This system originally had Windows 7 installed on it. It seemed to run that fine. It originally had an FX 5200 installed before I replaced it with the Voodoo 3. I also removed some of the memory. If I put the original parts back in, the system should be capable of almost anything, except maybe streaming HD video and newer games. Anyway, I have no desire to do that with this machine; I have a modern PC that can do whatever I want. I specifically built this system to play late-90s and earlier PC games, especially 3D games. My goal was so that, between this system and my modern PC, I could play basically any Windows or DOS game ever made natively without using emulation or a virtual machine, etc. And apart from a few games that require specific hardware, it fulfills that purpose perfectly. The system has native support for Glide, OpenGL, and DirectX. Between those 3 libraries, it can handle the vast majority of 3D games from that era, and my modern PC can handle anything newer.

 

That's cool, man. So many uses, so much opportunity. So little time.

 

Definitely. This system could also be used for running any older Windows software that won't run on newer Windows versions. I could swap out parts in this system to create a totally different hardware setup, if I wanted to. I could use it as a dev system too, except it doesn't have ISA ports, so I'm limited to only cards that use PCI or AGP. The Voodoo 3 uses AGP.

I definitely want to spend some more time messing with my older Macs; I think those are really interesting systems. At the moment I don't have anywhere to keep them set up permanently, but I want to get the iMac G3 and Power Mac G4 out some time soon to make sure they're still working properly, and to learn some information about the hardware I've been wondering about for a while.

 

If I remember right, the PowerPC Macs of that era were relatively underpowered to most PCs on the market at the time yet offered a level of stability and performance that were hard to match thanks to good optimization. Outside of playing around with a 360 XDK and taking apart a G5 rack server that my buddy got for free once, I have very little experience or knowledge of that side of things. It would be fun to experiment with in addition to some other unusual architectures like ALPHA & IA-64.

 

I think they were generally comparable to x86-based chips in terms of processing power, though that varied a lot. The main problems were things like size, power usage, heat, and cost. Those were things that IBM had difficulty dealing with. A lot of people assumed that Apple was going to make a G5 PowerBook, but this would have been really difficult because it would have been huge and use a lot of power.

An interesting thing about my Power Mac G5: it has a dual-core processor (970MP), which means it was one of the first "consumer" PCs with a dual-core chip - as in, dual cores on one chip as opposed to dual separate CPUs.

I find PowerPC processors really interesting in general. Their development is interesting - the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) alliance. That was actually an agreement that was made while Steve Jobs wasn't part of the company, while he was running NeXT and was a majority shareholder in Pixar. There were some really cool arcade systems that used PPC CPUs, like the Model 3, the Taito Type-Zero, some Konami boards (including the M2, of course), and I think some others. I think it was cool that there used to be more competition between CPU designers. There used to be lots of them. Now there are basically only 3.

 

2005 was the end of an era, in a way. I never knew that the G5s reached the same spot that P4s did. Apple made the switch to x86 right around the same time that the mammoth-sized "desktop replacement" P4 HT laptops went out of style in favor of P3-derived processors like Pentium M/Centrino. Between 06-08, Core 2 had pretty much become the norm. POWER lives on doing heavy lifting in places far away from the public eye.

I suppose IBM's part in the AIM alliance was partially in spite of Microsoft due to all the troubles that came out of OS/2. They briefly made x86 processors during the Socket 7 era. I used to have one of these:

 

I guess my "junk" would be third party controllers, extra Genesis consoles, composite cables, ps1 boomerang adapters, and a non working Saturn mission stick.
My old pc would be a pentium 3 hp desktop running Windows 98 se.