These days, it's exceedingly difficult not to be jaded and weary about the tech market. Memory, graphics cards, and now storage are becoming impossible to obtain; there's basically no new consumer hardware being released; and there's AI everywhere. Technology YouTuber TrashBench (TB), too, is tired and was harkening back to the halcyon days when everything was fresh and straightforward — so he went back in time with a retro build.
More specifically, he recreated a facsimile of the first machine his parents bought him in 1996 when he was a wee lad, to playThe Need for Speed: Special Edition— a PC-improved version of the first ever game in the series. According to the man, it was thanks to this machine that he fell in love with computers in general.
PC Prices Got Stupid… So I Tried Gaming Like It Was 1996 - YouTube
TB kicked things off with an Intel Pentium MMX 200 MHz CPU sitting atop an Epox Pronix EP-P55-BT motherboard, boasting what was at the time a new, fresh, convenient ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket. This motherboard popped up during the RAM transition from SIMM to DIMM, which is why you'll see two slots of each on the top. 32 MB of RAM went right in, a generous amount for the year.
Funnily enough, the CPU barely needed cooling, which is why a simple 40-mm fan suffices, although anyone who's lived through this era will tell you that those were guaranteed to start whining after just a few months of heavy usage. There is no case cooling, as it's just not needed.
However, he did need to correctly set the motherboard's jumpers, as such luxuries like automatically detecting CPU speed and voltage were just becoming normal. Yes, this meant that you could burn out a CPU if you played the jumper game wrong.
For graphics card duty, he enlisted an S3 Trio32 card, which was pretty, ahem, modest even in the era, and had no 3D rendering capabilities whatsoever. In this era, the now-ubiquitous 3D accelerator cards were just coming into fashion, and he eventually replaced the S3 with a Matrox Mystique 3D, another offering of dubious quality. Yet those were happy days, as any form of 3D acceleration was far better than none.
Storage comes by way of a Western Digital Caviar 22100 hard drive with a whopping two gigabytes of storage and the uncanny ability to emulate the dulcet tones of a jackhammer. TB eventually swapped it later for a roomier 80 GB unit. Again, due to the idiosyncrasies and constant transitions of the era — hardware doubled in speed and capacity nearly every year — he had to set a jumper to clip it to the likely amounts of either 8.4 GB or 33.4 GB, as the addressing space of BIOSes and disk controllers of the time were limited.
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The build wraps up with an OG Sound Blaster 16 sound card and a CD-ROM drive. After test-driving the machine with Need for Speed, he moved on to Microsoft Flight Simulator 98, which necessitated a joystick. Naturally, he got the much-beloved Quickshot QS-123, a staple in many home PCs, and one that needed replacement in about six months, as its build quality matched its price.
Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
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