The Retro PC Thread

[Ziggy]

But, his tower might only have two CD-ROM bay slots. You need one for a 5.25" FDD.

I have two DVD-RW drives installed in my main (current) PC.

[noiseredux]

actually the CDROM drive doesn't work. And neither do any of my spares apparently.

It is a... no brand? I don't know. Very generic beige case. According to all the shit I deleted off of it, it used to be a networked PC in a dentist's office I guess.

So yeah, I'll end up needing to install a working optical drive and a 5.25" floppy to get started. A Gravis gamepad is possible for nostalgic charm.

[Ziggy]

If there's no brand name on the case, and no brand name splash screen when you boot the computer, then it could be a custom built PC.

8GB seems like a scary low amount for a HDD these days, but that's actually not horrible for DOS gaming. Most DOS games are gonna only be a few floppy disk in size, so 8GB is a lot. Even Windows 9x games on CD-ROM, pre 3D stuff isn't that large. But still, I wouldn't blame you for putting something bigger in there.

Since new retail PATA drives don't exist anymore, watch out when you're shopping around for one. NOS is always good, but be weary of refurbished shit. A lot of them are pulled from business machines that have a zillion hours clocked on them (you can check the SMART values to see this). They're one foot in the grave.

One option is to get something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822998002

Then you'd be all set with a 16 or 32GB CF card, which aren't too expensive. I have yet to do this myself, so I don't know how hard the initial set up is, but I've seen plenty of examples of others doing it.

If you wanna get rid of the 8GB HDD, PM me!

[noiseredux]

Oh i have a stack of IDE HDD's already actually.

[noiseredux]

so I think I need a controller card in order to install a 5.25" floppy drive, right? I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for, though.

[fastbilly1]

Actually I should still have an IDE raid controller.

[Ziggy]

No, you don't need a controller card. You would if your mobo didn't have a floppy header, which is like pre-Pentium boards and earlier. PII boards have IDE and whatnot on board, you don't need controller cards.

What you probably need is a different floppy cable than what came in your computer and then you should be good to go.

edit: Your floppy drive probably just uses a cable like this:

You need to switch it out for one like this:

Then you can use both your 5.25" and 3.5" FDD on that one cable. You might have to adjust a setting in the BIOS, and it might take a little trial and error to figure out what part of the cable should go to what, but you should be able to get it working just fine.

[noiseredux]

No, you don't need a controller card. You would if your mobo didn't have a floppy header, which is like pre-Pentium boards and earlier. PII boards have IDE and whatnot on board, you don't need controller cards.

What you probably need is a different floppy cable than what came in your computer and then you should be good to go.

alright then yeah, that's my question... This PC has some IDE cables in it. But I don't see any 5.25" drives that have IDE. So how would I connect a 5.25" drive to this thing? Haha.

[Ziggy]

I just edited my post above with that info.

[noiseredux]

AH! Ok, yeah that's interesting. Although I don't actually have a 5.25" drive yet. Just planning ahead.