[HN Gopher] Building my childhood dream PC
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Building my childhood dream PC
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 124 points
Date : 2025-05-18 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fabiensanglard.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (fabiensanglard.net)
| p_ing wrote:
| I can't say a PS/1 would have been my first choice for a 486
| platform; I'd imagine there are faster motherboards out there and
| a desktop (i.e. ASUS w/ SiS chipsets). That said, I had a 486/66,
| so... (some Dell).
|
| And it looks like the PS/1 is missing VLB, but of course the
| video card is integrated in this model so that makes sense.
|
| I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card and
| a Sound Blaster AWE64.
|
| But that's my childhood machine, not the author's :-)
| bluedino wrote:
| I was always afraid of a lot of the IBM and Compaq computers
| because of all of the incompatibility notes or issues I'd read
| about in README.TXT (usually minor workarounds), and then to a
| greater extent in getting Linux running on them.
| p_ing wrote:
| Linux wasn't too much of a concern when these machines were
| in their prime. But yes, I remember those compatibility
| notes.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| > I would have probably went with a Cirrus Logic VLB video card
|
| This is exactly what the IBM PS/1 2168 have (see the unboxing
| section).
| p_ing wrote:
| The video frame doesn't render; on macOS Firefox it shows "No
| video with supported format and MIME type found.", so I
| missed it. But looking at the pictures, it only has ISA slots
| on the expansion board, unless I'm missing something.
|
| But I missed that part of your post. I haven't seen
| integrated VLB before, only slotted. Does this board have an
| expansion to 2MiB? Though that would only matter if you
| wanted higher resolution/colors.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| It is in the unboxing page. ASTRA.EXE shows the video card
| and the bus: https://fabiensanglard.net/2168/unboxing/#:~:t
| ext=The%20inte...
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| The 486 generation was fraught with bus wars and the
| motherboard market was rather fragmented.
|
| I once visited a college buddy who had a genuine EISA system,
| and I believe that I left flecks of drool as I admired the
| superior electronics and engineering invested in that EISA bus.
| Of course, nobody seriously purchased EISA if they expected to
| be compatible with stuff.
|
| My father had a PS/2 50Z, which unfortunately saddled him with
| the MCA Microchannel bus. A likewise superior bit of
| engineering that was compatible with virtually nothing.
| Thankfully, Dad never felt a burning need to trick out his
| system.
|
| Personally, I enjoyed the standard ISA path on my 286 and 386.
| It was with some regret that I chose VLB for the 486 board,
| because compared to the above buses, VLB was a hack and a
| kludge, and you could smell the duct tape and chewing gum on
| every expansion card.
|
| However, VLB expansion cards were as plentiful as Star Wars
| action figures, so I was able to absolutely cram cards into a
| full-size tower until several generations of Pentiums obsoleted
| everything except PCI.
| p_ing wrote:
| The days of nearly-full slots was great. While by the time I
| had my first computer, a 386SX (12Mhz?) IDE and floppy
| controllers had made it to the motherboard, we still had a
| sound card, modem, video card, potentially game card if no
| game ports on the sound card, and awhile later in PCI land a
| 3Dfx card.
|
| Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe slot
| is a 'waste' (though I do have a BT 5.1 card for a purpose I
| no longer need). SLI is dead. Only those with special needs,
| LLMs or crypto, would ever fill up the additional slots.
|
| Building computers is now just stupid simple and in my view,
| sorta brainless. No jumpers, no "must go in this slot #". The
| only thing I ever have difficulty with is mounting the CPU
| cooler, the thing is f-ing huge and requires a special very
| long Phillips screwdriver.
|
| /oldmanrant
|
| Oh yeah, and if you didn't bleed when building a PC, you
| didn't really build a PC. Now everything is rolled steel for
| those kitten hands.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Today it's... video card and that's it. Every other PCIe
| slot is a 'waste'
|
| Made worse by the video cards being ridiculously fat. As an
| example, the one I have is two slots wide, and protrudes
| over the third slot; my motherboard has a PCIe x1 slot
| there, which is made unusable by that. The fourth and last
| slot of my motherboard, a PCIe x4, is clearly intended for
| the Thunderbolt card (there's a special connector near it
| on the motherboard for the sideband signals), but I can't
| see much use for Thunderbolt on a tower desktop, so it sits
| empty.
| p_ing wrote:
| Yep, I have a 4090. It runs adventure and zork like no
| one's business.
| keyringlight wrote:
| MY likely-underinformed opinion is that the ATX form
| factor for building PCs is creaking at the seams for the
| generic '1x dGPU' specification, but there's a number of
| factors that work against a change to something
| substantially better. It'd need a number of companies to
| offer new product lines at the same time, probably
| incompatible with ATX and all the challenges that would
| bring.
|
| It's not just the huge heatsinks to get rid of the heat
| output, the power input is another. Also while dGPUs are
| growing at the high end, low-end dGPUs seem under-served,
| while AMD have APUs that I think could make a lot of
| people very content they don't seem too eager to make
| them easy to get hold of, and intel have the building
| blocks for a similar product but are hesitant to
| providing something beyond the minimum
| p_ing wrote:
| Intel proposed the BTX format [0]. Didn't catch on. ATX
| has a lot of momentum (including the related mATX, EATX,
| and so forth).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(form_factor)
| keyringlight wrote:
| I think BTX serves as the example for why a major change
| is unlikely, it's death is a warning to anyone thinking
| of doing the same. That said, even though it was led by
| intel back when they were in a much better position than
| they are now, I wonder if it wasn't against the
| background of Pentium4/"Preshott" and Athlon/Opteron
| would it have gone down better.
|
| It's a shame as the only real personal computer
| desktop/tower maker that's exercised their freedom to
| make a significantly different design Apple with Mac
| Pros, and that's a different animal entirely.
| vel0city wrote:
| The popularity of the mini-ITX board size really shows
| this along with alternative mounting locations and risers
| for GPUs.
|
| The old ATX power supply standard really needs to get
| phased out. I'm hopeful to see progress on ATX12VO become
| more common.
|
| But even separate from that I see things like the Ryzen Z
| series opening even smaller devices while still offering
| a lot of graphical punch. I love the Z1 Extreme on my
| Legion Go, it's an awesome platform. And yeah, having
| that plus an external GPU could be cool but as noted it's
| $$$.
| wpm wrote:
| As someone with those "special" needs (if 10Gb/25Gb
| Ethernet and HDMI-capture are that special), it is
| incredibly frustrating.
|
| The CPUs all come with enough PCIe lanes for a single dGPU
| at x16, x4 for the PCH/chipset, and maybe another x4 for a
| single M.2 SSD. If you aren't building a bog standard
| gaming PC with one SSD, one huge GPU, and nothing else, you
| get a configuration that doesn't match what you need.
| Bifurcation is hit-or-miss, if you can even physically get
| to the second PCIe slot, if that slot is even big enough.
| Random M.2s are linked to the PCH with random modes and
| bandwidths that change based on other configuration
| options.
|
| All due to the stingy lane count on consumer platforms,
| again, targeting the lowest common denominator. It was even
| worse before Ryzen came out and offered a _generous_ 24
| lanes (16 for a GPU, 4 for the PCH, and 4 for an SSD) vs
| Intel 's 20.
|
| Of course, PCIe lanes aren't free, but somehow, having
| "I/O" targeted workloads means you also must go and spend
| 2-5x as much for "workstation" or server class
| motherboards, which also are engineered to a common "usual
| needs" spec that add in a bunch of shit I don't need, and
| usually require sacrificing single-core speed unless you
| get top of the line $10K+ server CPUs that draw 5x the
| power.
|
| What I'd really like is instead of 4 lanes going to the
| chipset, I wish _all_ of them did. Or at least, all of them
| went from the CPU to some switch chip that would allow me
| to set which lanes go to what slots, and have a software
| configured lane /bandwidth allocation. 24 lanes of PCIe 5.0
| is 48 lanes of PCIe 4.0 is 96 lanes of PCIe 3.0, which is
| more than enough, but trying to actually unlock all of that
| bandwidth is still limited to the hardware configuration of
| the motherboard, and no way to reallocate unspent
| bandwidth. Instead of it all being hardwired for specific
| configurations, to the CPU directly OR to the chipset, I
| wish they were all wired for x16 (or x4 for the M.2 slots)
| direcly to some switch chip, which is then fully wired to
| the CPU's remaining lanes after PCH/chipset connections. If
| I need to stuff 4 slots with x16 cards, but they only run
| at 3.0 speeds, that would still leave 8 lanes of PCIe 5.0 I
| could allocate elsewhere.
|
| I'm sure this is probably technically impossible, or would
| be incredibly expensive, but a man can dream.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| [delayed]
| vunderba wrote:
| Great article. The mention of Cyrix brought back a rush of
| nostalgia - one of the earlier PCs I built used a Cyrix 686
| 166mhz processor.
|
| From the article:
|
| _> 8BitDo makes a fantastic modern keyboard inspired by the M
| looks and feel._
|
| Hard disagree. I found most of their keyboard replicas to be
| rather cheap feeling. However, their controllers such as the
| Arcade Stick and Pro 2 are excellent.
|
| I think the closest approximation you can get to an old school
| model M keyboard with buckler springs is probably from Unicomp.
| If you don't care about that kind of authenticity I would just
| stick with something like a Keychron mechanical keyboard and call
| it a day.
|
| https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/NEW_M
| christkv wrote:
| I had the same Cyrix cpu and all I remember is that FPU
| performance was terrible in Quake.
| bitwize wrote:
| I had a Cyrix 6x86MX and it was good enough for Quake (I
| played Quake originally on a Pentium-60, and it was fine).
|
| The Quake code was designed to take advantage of the fact
| that the Pentium could have one integer and one FPU
| instruction in flight at the same time, thanks to
| optimizations by an even bigger space-alien wizard than John
| Carmack -- Michael Abrash. The Cyrix CPUs... couldn't dual-
| issue instructions like this, so clock-for-clock their
| performance suffered compared to Intel.
| micv wrote:
| It was alright in Quake, as I recall, but it really didn't
| cope at all well with Quake 2 and Jedi Knight.
| tos1 wrote:
| Love the image of the monitor showing Battle Chess! As a side
| note to all like-minded people that love old DOS games, check out
| the library of DOS games on archive.org:
| https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games
| pjmlp wrote:
| The best version of Battle Chess was on the Amiga, though. :)
| automatic6131 wrote:
| You never forget your first teenage dream PC. For me, it would be
| a 8800 GTX SLI build with a QX6850. And now I've revealed how old
| I am :^)
| p_ing wrote:
| Too young to remember how to configure an
| autoexec.bat/config.sys for maximum memory in Falcon Gold, too
| old to forget what a Folder is.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Fire up MEMMAKER.EXE which makes recommendations after two
| restarts.
| coolcase wrote:
| Mine was weird. An Amstrad 1512 but shrunk to about half the
| length in every dimension inc. monitor. I could probably make
| that now using 3d printer and rpi!
| criddell wrote:
| More than once I've had a TI-99/4a and fully loaded peripheral
| expansion box and an Atari 800XL on my eBay watch list. I've come
| so close to pulling the trigger but I know it would give me a
| weekend of fun and that would be about it. Back to eBay it would
| go for the next impulsive dinosaur.
| bluedino wrote:
| Reminds me a lot of the IBM 486 we had in school, it was the
| first Windows PC I had ever seen, most everything else was either
| an Apple II or an IBM running PC DOS.
|
| It had a CD-ROM, speakers and sound and color and everything. I
| think it was $10,000, or that's what the computer teacher said.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Jealaous of that video game library. Fabien has good taste
| indeed.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| Every times I think I a "done" I see something I want to add.
| The technique I used to limit myself is "whatever can fin on
| the three top shelves".
|
| It worked until I started to store some boxes horizontally.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| I love this. What a trip down memory lane.
| kriro wrote:
| My entry was the mentioned 486DX2-66Mhz. Double speed CD-Rom and
| Sound Blaster. Norton Commander was great, Doom and Pirates Gold
| where my games of choice.
|
| Also started programming on this one with QBasic and then moved
| to Turbo Pascal 7 (because I needed a .exe file to be called from
| autoexec as a password protection vs. my sister which I couldn't
| do with QBasic :)
|
| Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to install
| some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
| yazantapuz wrote:
| > Didn't take me long to destroy everything by trying to
| install some old SUSE-Linux from a floppy disk :D
|
| With a friend we destroyed the msdos 622 installation on the
| new 40 mb hd of my family 386 when deleting tmp files...
| vincent-manis wrote:
| My teenage dream machine was a PDP-8 (the original) and a
| Teletype ASR-33. Fortunately, I never got it.
| musicale wrote:
| Fortunately you can connect a replica PDP-8 front panel to an
| emulator!
|
| https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8
|
| Or an FPGA-based hardware version:
|
| https://hackaday.io/project/180081-opencores-pdp-8-on-fpga
|
| http://fpgaretrocomputing.org/pdp8x/
|
| etc.
| ok123456 wrote:
| PS/1 seems like an odd choice since it was intended for the home
| and small business market. It was IBM's answer to beige box
| clones dominating everyone who wasn't an institutional buyer and
| paying for the PS/2 premium.
| tokai wrote:
| Because of the authors childhood experience of his neighbors
| PS/1 being much better than his own machine.
| marcodiego wrote:
| My first x86 was acquired in 1997: a 200MHz pentium MMX with 32
| MB of RAM, a 2.0 GB harddisk, a 2 MB S3 ViRGE as video card,
| Aztech Labs AZT-R 2316 sound card, a 33.600 bps winmodem and 28X
| (I think) CD-ROM. I soon wanted to install Linux on it. It ran
| minilinux, a small distro that could be launched directly from
| DOS without partitioning, relatively well. I also downloaded
| Debian and prepared the 10 floppies to install it but never got
| ahead because it didn't support my keyboard layout (ABNT2) out of
| the box. I eventually installed Conectiva Linux 3.0 (marumbi), a
| RedHat based distro, on it. It worked somewhat beautifully but
| had no support for the modem and soundcard.
|
| As my relatives and siblings updated their computers, I inherited
| their spare parts. My machine got some very interesting upgrades.
| It got 2 floppy drives (very rare at the time), 2 harddisks, a
| cd-recorder unit, RAM was upgraded to 64 MB and the modem was
| replaced by a ne2k compatible network card. I also had a Linux-
| supported Canon BJC 4200 and a SANE-supported TCE table scanner.
| Still, I couldn't get the SoundBlaster that my brother had and,
| sadly, my machine continued without sound support on Linux.
|
| At around 2006 I replaced it with a new self built computer which
| had better compatibility with Linux than with windows-xp and then
| this new computer became my first dedicated Linux machine. I
| found out that Linux eventually got support for AZT-R 2316 at
| around 2007, but the last time I tried my old computer, it
| displayed "parity error" probably from oxidation in the memory
| connectors. I then just gave up on it.
|
| Later on I thought about if it would be possible to install a
| graphics card with OpenGL support and USB port on one of the
| remaining PCI ports. I certainly wouldn't be able to install a
| modern Linux distro on it, but certainly it would work with one
| of those specially crafted for old computers like TinyCore. With
| recent kernel changes, swapping maybe smart enough to be usable
| on SSD with SATA to IDE adapters even in that computer. Now, that
| would be a dream machine.
| dt3ft wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I love the design/theme of the site. Pure
| bliss.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| In Part 2 the photo immediately after "It seems IBM integrated it
| to the motherboard" completely fooled my brain into believing
| that I'm looking at the side wall of a garage. The garage door to
| the left. The opener equipment top-right.
|
| And I'm just immediately fixated on this whole vibe of a life-
| sized tinkering workspace that's the inside of a PC case.
| somat wrote:
| makes me think of the IBM AN/FSQ-7 built into the SAGE air
| defense stations, the largest computer ever built.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7_Combat_Direction_Cent...
|
| While realistically I understand it was just a bunch of racks
| and consoles, due to the permanent nature of the installation
| and the way it was integrated into the building I like to
| imagine the operators and technicians scurrying around admits
| bunches of wires and tubes.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I can't help but notice the ship date on both the keyboard and
| the main unit. It looks like you had already bought the keyboard
| before the pc itself arrived.
| dep_b wrote:
| Could be a fun exercise:
|
| - Commodore 128 with dual floppy drive vs my tape-only C64 -
| Maxed out Amiga 1000 with a bunch of sampler and MIDI extensions
| vs my A500 + 512kb - B/W PowerMac G3 fully expanded just because
| - Dual Celly 300A @ 450 with Dual Voodoo II vs my 450 with single
| Voodoo II
|
| Nothing after that had this "I really want this, but I can't get
| it" thing. I just bought what I wanted.
| adamcharnock wrote:
| The very moment I saw the letters 'MMX', a long forgotten part of
| my brain woke up and said, "I know what that smells like!"
|
| Which is bizarre. But to me it is (apparently) the small of new
| electronics, plus perhaps the 'hot dusty things' smell. It also
| comes with the memory of playing Pod (a racing game), by Ubisoft
| (I think). Good teenage memories!
| tecleandor wrote:
| Oh, that was nice. I think it was one of the first "high fps"
| games and it looked super smooth...
| liotier wrote:
| I did that a few years ago, with the 1990 computer that I lusted
| over as a teenager: the IBM 8595 AKD (European reference - it is
| 85950KD in North America)... 486 DX, XGA display, 320 MB SCSI, 64
| MB RAM... At that time my computer was a 1988 Olivetti PC-1 (512
| KB 8 MHz Nec V40 with CGA and a floppy drive)...
|
| I was awed by the beast... Everything about it screamed over-
| engineering - even the case was incomprehensibly robust and the
| power switch had a satisfyingly loud motion... I could even touch
| its legendary tangential fan... Touching the 20 years-old dream
| was an emotional moment - I'm glad I did it... The ultimate
| Windows 3.0 host !
|
| But it had to go after a little while: my two-room apartment was
| too small for so much awesomeness, so it went to another fan.
| agcat wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Its a great writeup
| sthuck wrote:
| The part about buying a misleading CPU really hit home with me.
| Man all those small retailers in the 90s were living the dream
| with their unaware customers.
|
| My parents bought an AMD 486 100mhz at the end of 1995, it was
| still a viable low end machine for that time but they paid as if
| it was a Pentuim. Had to somehow make it work up until 2001 with
| that machine. Don't know if I had a career in tech if I wasn't
| forced to tinker with it.
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