Oldschool dev PC setup

I was going to dig out one of my old PCs to use when I set up my studio/dev room. I was thinking about my old dual Pentium Pro machine, then realised my last P3 would probably be better. Then I remembered... I saw a couple of P4 boards with ISA slots. This would be excellent!

I had a search, and found several interesting boards:

http://www.ibase-i.com.tw/mb800.htm
http://www.ibase-i.com.tw/mb886.htm
http://www.avantek.co.uk/acl/mobo/p4_isa.htm
http://www.l-trondirect.com/aimb-741e-00a1.html (Advantech seem to have several)
http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.htm
http://www.globalamericaninc.com/new_spec/index.php?id=779
http://www.bwi.com/category/543

I like the look of the MB-8650 personally. Has anyone ever used one of these?

I might do a little more research and put up a page listing all the boards I can find, if anyone would be interested.

 

Thanks for sharing the MB-8650. I didn't know boards like that were still being made.

 

Depends on what you want to do with it i suppose. If you're going to use software that requires Windows 95 and runs perfectly on a 386SX then why invest in a new P4 ? Usually the really old stuff doesnt run very good on win2k/XP.

 

Thats why its good to have older PCs. I'd use that Pentium Pro. Install Win98SE or Win95. Keep the old dev software in an evironment it was developed to run under for maximum compatability.

 

Has anyone ever actually run Win95/98 on a P4? I was copying an old hard drive a few years back and accidentally connected it as the primary drive on a newer athlon 2100. Despite a handful of driver complaints on startup, everything worked well. So for fun, I decided to quell the driver issues the best I could and reset the system. Booted win95a in about 3 seconds. I couldn't seem to find a program installed on the hard drive that wouldn't start up and shutdown instantly. It was kind of funny. Wish computers would work like that today.

 

old dev pc nice idea just last week i disassembled my old sgi 540 workstation so a friend could spray it with a nice coating gotta work in the inside to do also (getting 4 pieces of p3 xeon 900mhz is a pain in the ass)

 

Why a modern chipset, ya say?

• Can use modern components (e.g. SATA, AGP 8x, DDR)
• Will run faster
• Easier to upgrade
• Can install multiple OSes on a large drive, and have more storage (older chipsets often being fussy with modern drives)
• Components will be new and not on their last legs
• Also useable as a modern PC for devving and/or other tasks.

Sure, using the original OS is often the best way to go. Still, we can take advantage of more up-to-date software versions than were available say 10 years ago (e.g. Photoshop 5 to CS2). If not compatible with 95/NT/whatever you plan to run, you can dual boot into 2000 or whatever you fancy

Yeah, for me I'll go with an old machine, most likely, as I have them here. The PPro is nice (if I can find it!), but my P3 is nicer... Pentium Pro ran at I think 200Mhz or 250, something like that. P3s ran at up to 1GHz. Both were available dual CPU, too... but what's the point if running Windows 95?

I know these machines were built to do these tasks, and back in the day were state-of-the-art. Take a look at them now, though. They are SLLOOWWWWWW!!! It would be great to run a little more RAM than the average 64Mb home PC of the day... but the majority of boards would only take up to 128Mb sticks, 256Mb if you're lucky, and then it would more often than not have to be 16 chip. 512Mb SDRAM (and boards that will take it) was a luxury not often seen.

Also, P4 chips have been around since, what, 2001? So they're not really "new" - it is just as likely you'll have an "old" 1.8GHz P4 as a P3 500 sitting around. Only the P4 board most likely doesn't have ISA. A little investment and you could have a new-old machine again

Still, it is quite fun resurrecting archaic PCs. VESA graphics card, Maths Co-processor, 4Mb SIMMs and a Windows accelerator card, anyone? hehe

 

Yes i have, and i remember having some driver issues (first versions of windows 95 didnt even support USB, only latest version did i think). Also it had problems coping with 1gig of ram and it would regularly mess up because of memory fragmentation etc. I'm sure there's more i cant think of at the moment

I suppose Win98 would work a lot better than 95 already.

 

I can barely remember the spec of my Dev P.C, it's just a 'tool', nothing fancy, that does the job.

...Thinking about its 9 years old this year!!!

It's got a slot 'A' MSI mobo (the idea never caught on, it was meant to compete with the early slot based PIII, but no one thought about the footprint!) fitted with an AMD 600mhz slot based processor, erm, 512mb RAM, an AGP 64mb GeForce 2 gfx card a couple of 'small' HDD's, a 50pin SCSI card, a PCI IDE card oh and a network card.

The key thing is it's a simple tower setup that never has the side cover screwed on properly i.e. it's always ready to slide off and plug in a specific PCI interface card depending on what console is being worked on.(one of the disadvantages of only having 3 PCI slots)

Oh and lastly it dual boots the two key O.S's that seem to cover every base...Win2k and Win XP Pro.

It never fails, it never falters and its fully updateable as well as being backwards compatible as far as I need to go.

 

it's such a shame I threw out my old P1 and P2 computers.. didn't have any room for them in my apartment =(

 

I built my dev pc four years ago, and it was "old-tech" back then. Now, it's considered extremely dated
It has a 1.6ghz AMD Duron running at 1.2ghz because the cheap socket A mobo doesn't support a faster FSB I have 384MB in it now, with 20gb and 10gb hard drives triple-booting Windows 98, 2k, and XP. But I've found that I usually end up using XP the most.

I think it's nearing the end of its life, as it had a bad case of leaking capacitors on the motherboard. Some parts from digikey fixed that, but now I think one of my memory sticks is bad.

Does the job fine (n64 dev) and with some coddling, XP runs as fast as ever.

At the end of this page http://www.goosee.com/best/project.htm it explains how to install Windows 95 OSR2 that has all the benefits of 98, but without the crap like IE integrated into the shell.

 

I thought replying here instead of opening a new thread...

Can anyone please tell how to build the ultimate dev pc,hardware and software related (oses,apps...)?

I am interested in connecting katanas/tools/xbox 1 / xbox360...

 

pitsunami: sorry, I can't help you there, I usually look for computers for old-school dev like retro there. I have a problem though. Anyone here know about the PsyQ Mega Drive/Mega CD SDK that came out forever ago, I can't seem to get that to work with DOS 6.22, Win 9x, or Win NT. Are they just bad binaries?

 

I build up my devpc with an Gigabyte P3 Board (Sockel A). It has 2ISA and 5 PCI Slots with AGP graphic. The Gigabyte Board supports 4 RAM (max 4x 256MB PC100) banks and go up to 1GHz P3 CPU.
Most of the P3 Boards only have 3 RAM banks.
I use adaptec SCSI Controller for HDD and Dev Stuff. With Win98SE / Dos6.22 / win3.11 i use it for all my retro dev stuff.
Works great :thumbsup:.

 

I do most of my stuff on a PIII @ 1.4GHz + 768MB of PC133 + ATI Radeon9200se + 250GB HDD running Win98SE with KernelEx, Revolutions Pack9, AutoPatcher and Service Pack3. Very fast, quite compatible with new stuff (I can run a looooot of 2K/XP only stuff such as Flash10 and FireFox3.x.x) and fully compatible with old stuff too. If I have to, I can still boot into 2K or XP.

 

I wish i could find a MB-8650 but sadly i cannot...

Anyway i am more interested in the software stuf,which setup is needed for each dev?

I know for katanas i need a win98se setup with its sdk and a win2k with visual basic c++ 6 for xbox 1.

What about the others though?

 

You can run XP fine for the Xbox 1, including the older dev stuff I have tried

 

http://www.itox.com/pages/products/mothers/revcontrol/g4e620-bn.php
http://www.itox.com/pages/products/mothers/revcontrol/g7s620-n-g.php

these are the boards boards I use in my development systems.

while i agree one usually needs older boards/cpus to run some software and hardware, you'd be surprised at what decent industrial boards can do for you. I've found c2q supporting boards with 2 isa slots and win 3/nt era full driver support!

I use Windows 7 for all my ps1/ps2/yaroze dev hardware with no major issues (codewarrior's 32-bit tools work like a charm), but some items like the dos based ps1 dev board tools won't run correctly in 7, but that's nothing a dual-boot with 98se can't fix. Xbox1 development environment works great, including explorer extensions as well.

I can see that other platforms might be harder to work with but in the end, most older platforms require a moderately capable dos environment and a serial/parallel port.

 

Since so many people seem to know modern boards with ISA, anyone know of some with both PCI-X (64-bit 33/66/100/133MHz PCI) and ISA? Hopefully a single processor board since DOS/95/98 won't make use of others.

That would certainly be ideal for me.