A fun project I worked on. Here is my c64 accessing my local ai server (ollama with qwen 3.6). Kind of panicked on the questions lol.

This thing is pretty neat. As a sucker for mid-late 2000s in general (especially tech) seeing an original, OEM pc in a good shape like this just isn't something id wanna pass up on. The most surprising thing? This GTX 260 that came in it is literally brand new condition wise. Im certain im the first person to pull it out of the slot. Installing Vista home premium on it as we speak.

The psu and the hdd are not original since it came without one but the crucial parts are. A cool find no?

VCF Ontario has been postponed until the summer of 2028. As a new event, we’re giving ourselves more time to plan and put together a great show for the vintage computing community. The exact dates will be announced once confirmed.

In the meantime, get your retro computing fix at VCF Montréal 2.0 on November 7–8, 2026, at Champlain College Saint-Lambert!   Come celebrate vintage computers and connect with fellow enthusiasts.

Find out more at cvcfed.org
 Purchase your tickets here: https://events.humanitix.com/vcf-montreal-2026-2-0?c=cvcfed_web

Thank you for your enthusiasm and support—keep those CRTs glowing!

#VCFOntario #VCFMontreal #RetroComputing #VintageComputers

Got my 1979 NEC PC-8001 chatting with a local Gemma!
Gemma runs on my Mac, connected through a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 at 300 baud. I built the Z80 chat client and serial loader using my Zig_80 project.
The responses stream onto the original CRT as they’re generated!

does anyone know what type of polzarizer is used for this laptop? I have one that has the number 570 on it and one that has TV on it.

Here's what I came up with:

• MSI K8N Master2 FAR
• 2x Opteron 254 2,8GHz
• 2x 7800GTX 512MB
• 4x 512MB 400MHz CL2 ECC memory
• Creative SB0460 with front panel
• Lian Li PC-V1000 case in black
• some dark grey and white fans by Revoltec and Recom
• green CCFL by Revoltec

Little bit of Trivia: The board is dual Socket 940 with SLI support and very rare. I bought it as NOS and this is the first time it's in a case. Still it needed new caps all around.

The CPUs are comparable to FX-57s (single core, 2,8GHz, 90nm). The coolers are bespoke to this board and were shipped with it -> at least one, I had to import another one from spain. :D They have Intel socket 478 retention brackets on a 940 socket as nothing else would have fit. VERY loud at 6000+ rpm, but also very cool, and luckily the board has an onboard fan controller.

The GPUs are originally Quadro FX4500s, these are a lot cheaper and easier to find. I replaced all memory chips on them for faster ones and did some more shenanigans.

Anyone have any suggestions on what I could do for a power solution on a Dell XPS M1730 without spending a pretty penny on a original power supply? I know the power connector is unique to that laptop and thus is the only official way to go about powering/charging it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I’ll fix the screen size later.

I modified my G4 cube with a Radeon 9000 Mac Edition and a component refresh on my stock VRMs (some mods)

Testing it with Total Annihilation on MacOS 9.2.2 before I button it back up

Hi all,

Just sharing my Dell Precision E521 i slightly upgraded a couple of years back and went AM2 because it did not get much love most went to Intel 775 for their retro builds. I use this rig for Xp and Vista in dualboot, current specs are as follows.

Current spec:

CPU: Athlon 64 x2 3800 89w with a alu Dell heatsink

RAM: 2x1gb 667mhz DDR2 (previous upgrade was 2x512mb 533mhz)

GPU: HD 7750 1gb GDDR5 (previous upgrade was with igpu Nvidia 6150LE)

STORAGE: WD 320gb with 2 partitions from 2008

OPTICAL: DVD-RW

PSU: Stock 305w

SOUND: Stock

Lately it feels that the hdd is on it's way out it has slow downs when the hdd is doing tasks so i will try to upgrade that and more with the following

Upgrade spec:

CPU: Athlon 64 x2 6000+ 89w with a copper Dell XPS 420 heatsink

RAM: 2x2gb + 2x1gb = 6gb of 800mhz cl5 ddr2 (still on it's way)

GPU: GTX 750 1gb GDDR5 (only single slot fits) want to go more to something era apropriate like 8800gt or 9800gt mainly Nvidia for Physx.

STORAGE: 500gb 7200rpm (not ordered yet, need a fast and reliable drive not really into ssd for these OS)

OPTICAL: DVD-RW

PSU: Stock 375w (from a XPS 420)

SOUND: Creative Soundblaster SB0460 for EAX (still on the way)

MAINTENANCE: I did also dust the rig out and applied new MX7 on the motherboard chipset, caps are still good

Still waiting on some parts but really want this rig to run at it's best and will share some pics and update once everything is in and running.

Tower of power is the tech mullet. Almost done with the tower, got few more cables in next couple months for this tower. Another tower next to it but figured this group can only handle so much mullet.

93% of the cables were custom made by blue jeans. Rtx 5080 is about a even trade for just the cables.

I put together the "ultimate" Ivy Bridge build to celebrate XP's 25th anniversary. This is technically part 3 of my "Windows XP Saga".

https://youtu.be/mBU9xEhfNl0

Some people like my stupid editing, others hate it. It's fine. But thought some of you might at least like to see the benchmarks towards the end of the video

Asrock Z77 Extreme 4

i7-3770k

24gb DDR3 1600 (originally was only 8 like the video says, but I found another 16gb in a box so I added that too)

Titan X and Titan Xp gpus

2x 500gb Samsung 850 evo SSDs (RAID 0)

1000w Rosewill PSU

This is from one of my Devlogs for my latest game GLYPHIS_IO BBS: The Proxy Tapes 1989. It shows my new retro office layout and the virtual PC in the game. That old school dial in sound hits the nostalgia strings every time.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4179570/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=retrobattlestations&utm_source=chatgpt.com

Old sony vaio from very early 2010 running windows 7

I have been looking for an upgrade for my pc with a socket A mobo, and I found a Duron 950mhz in good condition, but after contacting a friend about it he said they were extremely prone to damage, specifically versions with the die removed. Should I get one? My pc has an s3 graphics inc savage 4 and 256mb of ram.

I just put together a build with the intentions to install windows xp for retro gaming.

I acquired a gtx260 core 216, intel e8500, 4gb Kingston hyper x ram and asus p5q turbo mobo.. I put it all together. It turns on l, all fans are going but I get no screen at all on my crt (Samsung syncmaster 793mb) I got a dvi-I to vga adapter.

I know the screen works. When I put into another home windows xp machine that has a vga output on it I get picture.

The second I plug it into the adapter (not even plugged into the new build yet), the screen goes into standby mode. It does not work when plugged into the new build as well. Could it be my adapter?

My first time dealing with older machines.

I could really use some help! Was super excited about putting this thing together

Linux kernel 7.3 is now released, and I'm back with more updates on SHORK 486, my Linux distribution for 486 and 586 vintage PCs!

Firstly, SHORK 586 is now technically a thing! I recently added the option to optimise SHORK for various 486 or 586 CPU revisions, and selecting a 586-related option grants the "SHORK 586" nameplate. Right now, the difference is purely optimisation and cosmetics. I anticipate SHORK 486 and 586 will diverge as I test and add things that can make better use of Pentium and Pentium MMX.

I decided to have another crack at getting the vga16fb driver to work so that SHORK can have a framebuffer device on general ISA, VLB and non-VBE2+ PCI display cards, and found some success! I found that Linux text modes (vga=normal, vga=3841, etc.) took precedence, so the driver never bound. I added a kernel command line parameter that allows the driver to be force-bound. The driver is also supposed to work with EGA cards too, yet I found its support of such lacking, so I took care of that too. This means I can finally use SHORKGUI on my 365ED, and a much wider range of pre-PCI PCs! That said, I'm not going to lie, it doesn't run well right now, but it's certainly a start... I'm trying to optimise the stack (TinyX and TWM) and be creative with it to try to improve performance, but at least for ISA, it seems the issues are quite bus-bound. Nano-X is an alternative I'm keeping in mind, if needed.

Finally, I added more ways of getting remote access and transferring files to SHORK. FTP, SCP/SSH, Telnet and TFTP daemons are now available! (I also added a cool splash screen that I forgot to photo, hence the screenshot at the end...)

I was also delighted to see SHORK featured on the This Week in Retro podcast 288! Much thanks to Veronica Explains for their enthusiasm, as always!

My retro battlestation I've built over the last year in my office. Originally it was just the 2 flat panels and my laptop for work, but eventually added the Sun X7149A, PVM 14M2MDE and a basic NECH CRT for retro gaming.

All I know about this machine is it was used by Ryder Truck rentals from 1997 to 2004 in Tennessee, it has two different Ryder CDs with it, along with two floppy disks that came in the computer bag, along with a good bit of Ryder documentation on it.