DescentBB

I'm looking at trying to pick up and get into service a real retro gaming machine, and rather than deal with ebay and people I don't know, I figured I'd ask here where people I know hang out.

Would like to get one in the DX 66MHz range with an actual Sound Blaster 16, turbo button to slow it way down, double speed cd rom, and 16 megs of ram or so. I think that's how much a good 486 had back in the day right? I'm gonna be doing dos gaming on it, maybe Windows 95. Hard disk not really needed, I'm probably going to get a compact flash to IDE solution.

I will be hooking it up to a KVM switch so will need 2 ps/2 ports, or one ps/2 mouse and an AT keyboard as I have a ps/2 to AT adapter around here somewhere for a keyboard. Not willing to find out if my logitech mouse can work going from usb to ps/2 and then from ps/2 to serial.

Also is there such a thing as a VGA pass through that will properly convert a 4:3 VGA output from a machine like this to a pillarboxed 16:9 format so it doesn't look all stretched out on my monitor?

Why would you want this when you can actually run 99% of games in DOS box or something similar?

Same reason people still look for old SNES consoles when they can run 100% of all games available for it on an emulator.

If you're looking for a collector. Packard Bell back in the day had one weird looking computer.

Boy that sure is....something else.

But I was hoping for something more along the lines of a small tower. Hell, even just a good motherboard, ram, and processor and I'll stick it in one of the empty cases I have laying around here.

I just found out that one of my lab's obsolete instruments is coupled with a computer running Win 3.1. I'm really tempted to snag it, but one of the scientists has dibs on it. We keep the instrument around for spare parts, but I don't think she actually needs any of the computer hardware. *fingers crossed*

I used to have a 433Mhz laptop for old games before it finally crapped out two years ago. I miss it. There is this one fighting game I like that I can't get to work on newer hardware. And by "newer" I mean another laptop from 2002 running Win98. It's weird how some of this stuff doesn't port to emulators well.