That's a great hobby you've got there!
Have you any machines; for example, Pentium IIs and older? It would really be cool to have a 386 or 486 machine and test DOS and Win3.11 and Win95. Those computers seem to be harder and harder to find nowadays, perhaps because they're currently very old and broken or on the verge of breaking and perhaps because there aren't many such systems still present out there.
Thanks for writing up!
I do indeed have a vintage collection.
TI-994A, memory expansion, color monitor, voice synthesizer, cradle modem, game cartridge/joysticks. It was the floor model from Sears I believe, sold after they had stopped carrying the line.
I think the IBM 8086 is no longer functional. Needs a new battery and probably a re-capping. It had issues with Y2K as well.
Macintosh Performa HD is a computer I picked up at a school. They were tossing it out. Fully functional.
Regretting not keeping my original 486 with Pentium overdrive. I still have the processor, but not the computer. And I haven't a clue where my AMD K6 went, might still be at my parents house.
I have a dual Pentium Compaq server/tower. Its disk controller alone has its own AMD 486. 11 SCSI drives (one external cabinet for six drives) Used to be the file print server at a local company. It has a linux instance on it, but is pretty much useless for anything. It's total storage is something like 20GB, which was a lot back when it was operational.
Only active one I sometimes use is a Dual Pentium II (slot), with a Voodoo 5 5500 (PCI), SoundBlaster Awe32 with midi board. 512MB of ECC memory installed, but only 256MB registers (my efforts to update the BIOS always fail for some reason, scraped Dell's FTP server to find the support materials). Has massive dual 800W PSUs and a pair of 10GB SCSI drives, all hot swappable. An old Dell Poweredge 4200 (not to be confused with the more modern one with the same name) I originally only wanted the chassis, but it turned out the whole thing worked and I couldn't bring myself to take it apart. So I replaced the single CPU with the fastest compatible P2s I could find, added the memory and dropped in the video and sound. I have it running Windows 2000 and it plays a mean round of classic UT. I really need to convert it over to a modern PSU and swap the case fans for something a little more reasonable. I'd always planned to put a sleeper build in it, but it is such an eclectic pile of old parts, I can't being myself to do it.
I sold my Athlon XP 1800 core parts to pay for a new GPU as I recall, and I think a similar thing happened with my old Duron 450 or 650, that was an odd one. It was a complete spare system that I put together from parts. Started out as a 1Ghz T-bird, but that system never worked right and was parted out. Swapped the 1Ghz chip for the Duron and some other parts and built a working system that acted as a local server at lan parties. I think I donated my old Athlon XP 2800 to charity as it was my last IDE based system. My old Celeron 466 I eventually upgraded to a PIII 800Mhz, lost to family members if I recall. I still have the slocket adapted Celeron as a desk ornament. Still have my Athlon X2 6000 system, but it is basically just a slow modern computer. 6GB of ram though, with an old GTX285.
I also have an old, and I mean old, digital camera that I got from a university. Really need to get the lens appraised, it looks fancy. But it was a studio grade camera that comes with its own external hard drives for storage. Never been able to track down the model, what it is intended to hook up to, etc. Every few years I go searching vintage camera forums, but nothing ever comes up. Seems it is just too obscure, but no one at the department knew how it worked either. It had been sitting in a closet for years.
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