Quick, down memory lane! This one was a fun video to put together, slowly piecing an AMD Athlon K7 onto a brand new, old stock motherboard. All-in-all it went together quite well. This PC went on to be used for testing the Sega Dreamcast HKT-0120 dev kit. It worked a charm too. Then it got passed on to some kids who ended up setting it on fire… Good times?

The motherboard is an MSI Slot A model, still sealed in its original box after all these years. I was rather excited to open it up and see what we’d have received at the turn of the millennium. There’s plenty of wonderful packaging artwork, a Y2K approval claim and all the usual promises of astonishing computing performance.

One of the reasons I wanted a machine from this era was its mixture of expansion slots. We’ve got AGP for graphics, PCI for the more modern cards and ISA for older hardware that I still want to experiment with. That makes it rather useful for development equipment from several console generations, including my Sega hardware and assorted ISA cards.

I had an AMD Athlon processor ready to go, although I managed to confuse myself about its speed. The marking made me think I’d acquired a 750 MHz model, but on closer inspection it was actually a 500 MHz Athlon. So now I’ve got two 500 MHz processors. Apparently reading the label correctly is an optional part of computer building!

The graphics card is a 3dfx Voodoo5 5500, which makes this a rather entertaining late-1990s-style machine. I’ve also got a SCSI card for the Dreamcast development kit, a collection of SDRAM modules and a parallel ATA CD-ROM drive. It’s not exactly what most people would choose for a modern workstation, but then I’m not building a modern workstation.

Everything went into a Corsair case, which looks rather fancy for hardware of this age. The ATX layout certainly makes it easier to fit the components, although there were a few missing cosmetic bits and plenty of cable-management opportunities. One advantage of a large case is that you can actually get your hands inside without removing half the machine first.

After assembling the computer, I gave it a quick test with Linux and had a look at whether the hardware was behaving. The Voodoo card appeared to be working, and the machine was happy enough to get through the initial tests. I still needed to decide exactly how I wanted to configure its long-term storage and operating system.

Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP were all possibilities. I’d always had a soft spot for Windows 2000 because it was considerably more stable than the older Windows 9x releases, at least in my experience. On the other hand, Windows 98 has a certain nostalgic appeal when you’ve got a Voodoo card and hardware from that era.

I eventually spent some time getting Windows 98 running, installing drivers and investigating the motherboard’s chipset. The old MSI documentation was useful for identifying the AMD-751 and AMD-756 components, although finding archived BIOS files and drivers for obsolete motherboards can be a challenge in itself.

There was plenty of unrelated rambling during the build, including my upcoming university examinations. As usual, I was wondering why I hadn’t done quite as much study during the semester as I’d planned. It turns out that taking apart computers is substantially more interesting than revising for exams. Who could have guessed?

Rick and Morty might just have nailed it.

This video is ancient. The Nokia 301, what a hunk of junk that turned out to be. Ended up selling it on for half of what I bought it for. I wonder if it’s still in use today? It was my last attempt to break away from the Apple ecosystem.

In the original unboxing I thought the Nokia was rather larger and heavier than expected, and the keypad felt disappointingly spongy. At least it had a normal 3.5 mm headphone jack and micro USB, which was a change from some of Nokia’s earlier accessory arrangements. But it didn’t quite win me over.

I tried and I tried but everything integrates so nicely with the Apple ecosystem. Guess I’ll just keep on paying the Apple tax. sigh

Well, I better get back and lock down for the study period. Stay in school kids! Perhaps just stay enrolled, everything is recorded these days. We really do live in wondrous times!