Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Winning Great with Win 98: Fluxed Capacitors.

No I didn't change my mind about Win 8 and misspelled it in the title.

If you're expecting this to be one of my long drawn out diarrhea of the keyboard sessions with lots of unrelated twists and turns and ultimately ends up with me realizing that what I wanted was in front of my face the whole time making all that work moot, you're right. Let's get started.

A while ago a friend of mine got a butt load of ancient copiers and was tearing them down for the scrap metal. I blundered by and took a look around to see if there was anything worth saving. I saw nothing and told her to make sure to separate out the aluminum. As I was getting ready to leave I stumbled over this:

 
 Cool. "Do you mind if I take it home and look at? If it's good enough I could take it to the auction and sell it for you."

"I was hoping you would. I know nothing about computers."

Skipping ahead to my workspace. I open it up and was surprised to see a couple of SATA ports and a stick 1 GB, 256 GB, and 128 GB of ram. Somebody must have added that ram in at some point. Now I plug everything in and peek through the bios and see a 2.6 Celeron. Nothing fancy but an interesting choice for a computer meant to run some copiers. I leave the bios and note on the post screen the option for a boot menu. Now even more surprising is that I can boot from a USB. Now I'm impressed. For a pretty old machine it has a function my brand newer rig doesn't.

Alas it turns out that hard drive is scrap metal. Throw in another and proceed to find the drivers. Going from HP's home page I drill down until I find the HP Compaq D530 SFF. That page says "Huh? We don't know what that is." You got a picture of it right there! "Huh? We do?" (By the way, I just looked again, it's worse, they won't even show me the page.)

It's Google time. First page is drivers for XP. Good good. But I need drivers for Vista at least. I click the link on the left and am presented with a whole list of OSes. Usually when presented with such a list all I typically get is the drivers for XP and maybe a network update for everybody else. Well not quite, OS/2 had audio drivers. Meanwhile 2000, XP, Vista, and 98 and audio and video drivers.

HOLD IT! You mean this thing has drivers for Windows 98? I have been wanting this for such a long time. I have some old games that won't work on 7. (I've tried DOS Box and it's a real pain in the ass.) Driver for Win 98? Especially on a machine this new. It was probably built in 2004, maybe 2005. I have a couple of machines from the 90's, but they're like bottom of the barrel even then. So I try downloading the drivers and the links are surprisingly good. (By the way, I'm not sure if that website is an actual HP site or a clone of it.) I go to my Windows Museum and grab out a copy of Win 98 SE. (Again, by the way, it has to be SE. I made the mistake of loading up Win 98 and the drivers didn't work.)

Drivers are all loaded up. Things are going great. I decide to keep it for myself. I go back and pay my friend. She wasn't too happy about it. She'd seen computers go for $200. I told her that was one of mine. I also sold one just like it a week later for $20. Minus a ten percent commission. I'm giving you a guaranteed $100. "$100!? Oh I'll definitely take that!
(My words. Hers were more like "(Bleep) YEAH!")

Back home  it's time to load up all those great old games, everything goes to crap. Change out the DVD, ram, reconfigure the PATA setup, (I hope it's not the power supply, it's one of those proprietary ones,) even Lunix wouldn't load up, and lastly I try the CPU. I removed the heat sink and find that 7 out of 10 capacitors are corroded over. This motherboard is crap.

I take the board to another friend's computer store. (My family has put his grandkids through college by now.) He lets me dig though his pile of similar machines. Unfortunately the boards are different and don't have Win 98 drivers. I keep digging and find an unlabeled one with an almost exact motherboard in it. The numbers are different, but hey, it's worth a try.

I am now happily playing Discworld Noir. Let's see if I can get Discworld 1 and 2 loaded. Wait, what's that? They're available on Scumm VM and it works in Win 7?

DAMMIT!

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