A welcome break from all the TeraDrive posts I’ve been putting up over the past few days. I seem to have accumulated enough ISA and PCI cards to form a small army, although there’s one slight problem. I don’t think I’ve got enough computers to put them all in!

Mind you, there’s the Amstrad Mega PC, a couple of TeraDrives, the IBM PS/2, some 486 boards and a few other machines scattered about. Come to think of it, perhaps I’ve got more computers than I realised. That doesn’t necessarily mean I need every card in this enormous pile, though.

Most of them came from bulk lots, and I’ve managed to pick up some pretty interesting hardware fairly cheaply. There are Gravis UltraSound cards, Sound Blasters, modems, SCSI controllers, TV tuners, video cards, network adapters and assorted floppy and hard-drive controllers. I was looking for a basic sound card the other week and couldn’t find one. Now I’ve suddenly got about ten of the things!

There’s even a 3dfx card in the collection, which I’m rather keen to get running because I’ve never owned one before. A few of the S3 and other video cards look promising too, particularly those with a decent amount of VRAM. The Gravis UltraSound is another favourite, although it’s so long that finding a case it physically fits inside might become a project of its own.

I’ve also picked up some floppy drives, all untested. One of the 3.5-inch drives turned out to be dead, and at least one video card appears to have problems with its VRAM. No doubt the rest will reveal their own interesting surprises once I start testing everything.

I’ll have to sort through the collection and decide what to keep and what to throw back into the eBay pool. You can only fit so many sound cards into one computer, after all. Clearly I need more 286 to 486-class machines! ;)