Mail Call: Season’s Greetings & Vintage Videogames on Period-Correct Hardware

New refurbished drives for the Beige Box AMD K6-III Always a good idea to open up these old drives and clean & regrease. 91% Isopropyl to clean the drive heads & motor screw shaft, White Lithium Grease for the screw and other friction-bearing bits. All of this just to play the classic 1997 Voxel-rendered “Blade Runner“. In this specific case, there is no version like the original. Currently in the earholes:

Updated: December 24, 2023 — 2:50 am

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  1. Bringing back some memories for me with this one. I was solidly in the AMD camp around that era, owning a K6 200 followed by a K6-II 350. Miss those socket 7 days compared to now… Descent was a great title, sunk quite a lot of time as a teenager into that one. Another I remember having a lot of fun with was a racing game called “POD” that I was really into; one of the few early games that did something useful with MMX instructions as I recall. Merry Christmas to you Rev. Munk and all! -Mitchell F.

    1. Yeah, AMD was king for a time then. This build reminded me how I got *all* of my parts from those little hole-in-the-wall computer parts bodegas back then – still have components with those little paper stickers with price/date on them. It seems those places all seemed to dry up and vanish sometime between the Pentium 4 and Core 2 Duo days. Kinda miss those places – I bet they’d have a lot of old dead stock in the back rooms. (:

      I don’t have POD either – had some massive housecleaning binges a decade or so ago that really thinned out my old computer stock & boxed software. I do have a “Wipeout XL” copy specifically for the ATI Rage 3D card I have in here, but it didn’t seem to want to run in Win98. This build is a fresh reminder about how flaky hardware and software was in them days :D

      1. Yeah I remember all the local shops as well. Even sort of unofficially worked in one for a time out of boredom. We even had a yearly computer expo at a local exhibition hall, where you could buy all kinds of dubious grey-market import PC components for quite cheaply if you were prepared to deal with no warranty and support.

        Every time I feel like I might want to play with some older PC hardware, I usually snap out of it after fighting with drivers or something else silly. But I still keep some hardware on hand just in case. But thats why I stick to my Commodore gear for my retro computing fix usually. They didn’t call it plug’n’pray for nothing! -Mitchell F.

  2. Old PCs, parts and local computer parts shops. Welcome back to the 80s!
    Remember computers and parts shows?

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