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Building the perfect tweener for win98/DOS stuff

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hunterjwizzard

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After much soul searching I've decided to try and put together a dedicated tweener. I have multiple machines in inventory I  use as tweeners. But I think its time to make a purpose build.

I've determined I probably won't ever be going much further back than the 386 era.

My ideas so far:
-gonna run XP 32 bit. That can talk to my NAS and to 98
-needs plenty of PCI slots
-drive wise I want a zip100, actual 3.5" floppy, dual CD burners, built in USB multicard reader

I'm probably looking for a core2duo era board since they're cheap and reliable. Obviously I need ide and floppy headers.

Trying to think what other features I need?

This system does not need to game.
 
You're going to be restricted wrt floppy capability with anything later than a P3. Most later systems support only a single floppy at most. There are exceptions--I have both Socket 754 (AMD) and 478 (P4) boards with 2 floppy support.

Given your requirements, you don't need eye-watering speed. Even a P1 would meed your needs.
 
Seeing as I don't actually have any working floppy disks, one floppy will do fine. Its mainly there in case I do find a working floppy disk and want to make an image. My actual daily drivers use Goteks.

For the operating system I do want XP so something a bit later than a p1 is kind o a must. I am actually looking at P4s at present since the boards are dirt cheap.

I need 2x IDE headers and 1 floppy. Not seeing a ton of c2ds that manage that.
 
Ideally I would like a board with dual IDE, floppy, and SATA.

I do in fact have such a board. Perhaps that I'd the ultimate fate of that system.

I do wonder: is windows 2000 possibly a better choice for a tweener OS than XP?
 
A couple of ISA slots would also be useful. A warning on that subject: You may find p4 and later systems that claim ISA support. However, most use "bridge" chips that unfortunately don't manage DMA very well. Intel's 440 (BX,GX,etc.) chipset was about the last good candidate for complete ISA support, which you'll find with P3 systems.

I liked 2K a lot, but XP has, by far, better driver support.

I use SATA drives on my IDE-only systems; I use converter boards to do the adaptation. You could probably get by just fine with DOMs or CF cards.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
After much soul searching I've decided to try and put together a dedicated tweener. I have multiple machines in inventory I  use as tweeners. But I think its time to make a purpose build.

I've determined I probably won't ever be going much further back than the 386 era.

My ideas so far:
-gonna run XP 32 bit. That can talk to my NAS and to 98
-needs plenty of PCI slots
-drive wise I want a zip100, actual 3.5" floppy, dual CD burners, built in USB multicard reader

I'm probably looking for a core2duo era board since they're cheap and reliable. Obviously I need ide and floppy headers.

Trying to think what other features I need?

This system does not need to game.
Click to expand...
I have a SuperMicro H8SMi-2 with an Opteron 1385. Supports two floppy drives, but only one onboard IDE channel. Of course you can always add more with a PCI card. I use SATA for everything except the LS-120 drive.
 
Go for a fast P3.
You will have better chances of using SATA on P3 via 3rd party PCI controller, than P4 mobo ISA bridge having full support. Not to mention, ISA P4 boards are not cheap. Also floppy support, in Core 2 era 5"25 support was dropped from most of BIOSes, and I guess some formats are also problematic on those boards that do support non 1.44MB. P3's controller should cover all standards.

So you can have most if not all storage peripherals connected.

I think other features you need are a good retro big tower with a new PS.
 
What is the justification for ISA on a tweener? If I have any good ISA cards they are going in the true retro machines. The tweener is just to create a bridge between modern windows where I download files and ancient windows where I play them.
 
Depends on how many old machines are in your stable. If this is your lone retro box, then ISA makes sense, particularly if you incorporate any oddball retro hardware for which PCI cards don't exist.
I almost missed the "play" mention, however. I don't play games. None, nada. My retro hardware is for data migration only.
YMM (obviously) V,
 
Chuck(G) said:
Depends on how many old machines are in your stable.
Click to expand...
15? Maybe 20. Depends how you count I guess.

Since everything XP and newer can simply browse the NAS or file-share with my modern systems I guess those don't deserve to be counted, in which case the number drops to around 5. But the damn things are multiplying. I just added a pentium II laptop. I still want a 486 despite having virtually no use for one. I could go on but I won't.

I'm a huge fan of using CF/SD cards and goteks in place of original drives. I'm too lazy to fix my retro machines when I break the operating system, so I make routine images of the CF cards. This is also nice for testing out different configurations. I would run windows 10 on a CF card if I possibly could.

I have also found when it comes to imaging old CDroms, software I have on windows XP just seems like it works better. Same with straight up burning CDs. I know its stupid but it feels like my 20 year old copy of Nero Burning ROM just works better than modern burning software.

As for drive selection - I want to mount a "real" 3.5" floppy in case I do come across a working floppy disk and want to create an image of it for use on gotek. I simply don't have enough working disks to bother keeping them in my retro builds. I also want to put a ZIP100 drive in there for sneakernetting. Right now whenever I want to get a file over to one of my retro PCs I literally have to shut the damn thing down, yank the CF card, and plug it in. Zip disks can carry decent sized files a little more easily without having to shut down. With the added bonus of windows already having the drivers.

I've already got the makings of this system. I will have to grab a mess of 3.5 to 5.25" bay adapters, but I've got an old Antec900 tower with 9x 5.25 bays collecting dust. I would swap in the P4 motherboard I've been lovingly preserving but failing to find a use for. And from there Bob's your uncle. Side note: I wish Chuck were my uncle. He has cooler stuff.
 
I have a working XP-32 gamer but can do a host of other things as well as IE. The system has a Gigabyte PCI mobo and an Intel I7 840. The box itself has a CD-ROM (R/W) as well as a 3.5 floppy. The system SSD is a Kingston 140GB and dual boots (via the BIOS) a WD 600GB HD which is DOS 7 only. If you'd like particulars glad to provide.
 
Zare said:
Go for a fast P3.
You will have better chances of using SATA on P3 via 3rd party PCI controller, than P4 mobo ISA bridge having full support. Not to mention, ISA P4 boards are not cheap. Also floppy support, in Core 2 era 5"25 support was dropped from most of BIOSes, and I guess some formats are also problematic on those boards that do support non 1.44MB. P3's controller should cover all standards.

So you can have most if not all storage peripherals connected.

I think other features you need are a good retro big tower with a new PS.
Click to expand...
In additional to the bios support of 5.25" drives, Windows XP SP3 doesn't work well with 5.25 drives. You may need to use XP SP2.
 
h2ospa said:
In additional to the bios support of 5.25" drives, Windows XP SP3 doesn't work well with 5.25 drives. You may need to use XP SP2.
Click to expand...
Eh, I don't even have any working 5.25 drives, let alone any disks. I got a whole mess of working 3.5" drives but no working floppies. I suspect this is the result of some sort of gypsy curse.
 
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