Near-Final

I was able to install an older 3COM network card I had in storage, get it to work in DOS, and configure Windows 3.11 for Workgroups with Microsoft's TCP/IP to get it on my home network. It works! I since downloaded Internet Explorer 3.0 and an old Netscape version (Firefox not available for Windows 3.11) from oldversions.com. I also installed old versions of Macromedia Flash plugin, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Goldwave (for audio editing), and JASC's Paint Shop Pro. Everything works lightning fast for Windows 3.11. It's amazing how fast older operating systems can be when coupled with hardware newer than their intended usage. It completes similar tasks in Windows 3.11 faster than a Pentium 4 can accomplish them in Windows XP.

I also ran MemMaker on each one of my four boot configurations to optimize loading modules in upper memory and free more conventional memory. These configurations include gaming with EMS, gaming without EMS, complete DOS (doskey, CD-ROM driver, etc.), and complete Windows (CD-ROM, network, etc.). My gaming configs result in 604KB free of conventional memory, while my complete configs are between 560KB and 580KB of free memory. I took all of my old batch files, custom menus, etc. from my original retro PC and copied them over. Now the PC is complete software wise, but I'll be doing benchmarks and diagnostics on it just to test everything for the long haul. I definitely want to see the exact performance marks for the 266x CF card over UltraDMA-33.

Since many of the old games I have on this system use the default PC Speaker instead of a sound card, I ran a cable from the motherboard's PC speaker pins to the input on the sound card. Only older sound cards such as the Sound Blaster 16 ISA I am using have an input for the PC speaker and support a separate volume control for it. I reduced any possible RF noise on the line with the cable passed through and wrapped once around ferrite cores at each end. The quality of the sound output through Klipsch speakers dedicated to this PC is amazingly clean. Those old Sound Blaster 16 ISA cards had a surprisingly high signal to noise ratio given their date of manufacturing.

I still have acrylic fan grills (tribal-design) on order to replace the metal ones, but here's some pics of the near-final PC. These are both with and without the blue EL lights powered on: