Millennium Era Gaming PC

Hi everyone! Been a while since my last “Zscaler Logo On An Old Computer” post, so here’s a fresh one: for the last couple months, I’ve been slowly building out a “Millennium Era” gaming PC, from the following parts:

• A generic late-90’s PC tower, bought for $20 at a yard sale

• A Hewlett-Packard motherboard with an Intel Corporation Celeron CPU (bought for $5 at the same yard sale)

• A Gateway CRT monitor, found on the sidewalk a few blocks from home

• A LiteOn CD-R burner in the top 5.25" drive bay

• A Creative DVD-ROM drive in the middle 5.25" drive bay

• A Sound Blaster Live! audio card with "LiveDrive" audio in/out module sitting in the bottom 5.25" drive bay

• A 3.5" floppy drive (which came in handy when I had to bootstrap the machine and needed to install some basic drivers!)

• A multi-format memory card reader in the lower 3.5" drive bay

• A Roland MT-32 MIDI music processor (the flat black gadget sitting on top of the monitor)

• A GeForce FX5200 GPU (as best I can tell, it’s the fastest PCI graphics card ever made)

• A Dell “Bigfoot” mechanical keyboard, bought for $6 at a thrift shop

• A Gravis “Destroyer Tilt” motion-sensitive gamepad

• A "Space Orb 360" gamepad (the best way to play Descent!)

• A crappy generic optical mouse (I’m still hunting for a more “Millennium Era” mouse)

The machine is running Windows 98 Second Edition, and is wildly over-powered for playing virtually every DOS / Windows 95 / Windows 98 game. Classic games like Descent, WarCraft, StarCraft, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake and Carmageddon play like a dream on this machine, at silky-smooth frame rates that the PC’s I was actually using in the late 90’s couldn’t even approach. It’s very much an ongoing project, so don’t be surprised if I share it again down the road, after another round of tweaks and upgrades. Happy Friday!