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Hey, remember this old beast? - I'm finally pulling it out of storage and adding a Syba SD-CF-IDE-A 3.5" IDE Host Interface to Compact Flash Adapter to it.

A kit finally came up on eBay for cheap, so I'm sticking one in my 20-year-old system because reasons... Ermahgerd es-es-dee!!!

I first learned about the Compact Flash Adapters from an episode of LGR, a few years back.

I also managed to track down a 5.25inch Floppy Drive that I'm gonna stick in this bad boi so I can play Ultima V and Sword of Aragon that I picked up not too long ago, because I am a filthy boomer scrub hipster who prefers authentic DOS gaming...

I was also thinking of routing the VGA card through my KVM switch to my Elgato HD60 S game capture so I can run it on my big monitor, and another job I need to do is install a network card in this thing and fix the ODIN bios battery.

Anyway, here's the specs of this unit:

OS: Windows 98

MB: Gigabyte GA-586VX Socket 7 (Rev 3.36) *Would you believe that you can still download drivers for this unit...

BIOS: Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG with a Plug and play extension 1.0A.

CPU: Intel 430vx Pentium-s 200mhz

RAM: 64MB

GPU: Nvidia Riva TNT2 Model64

Sound card: Aureal Vortex

I've got a PCI version of the 3com EtherLink III card for networking to add.

And for the CMOS battery, it has an ODIN OEC12C887A, which are soldered to the board, so a good excuse then to go and buy a de-soldering station or bypass it using a the cr2032 standard 3v hack.

The 5.25" Floppy Disk Drive was a bit of a journey to get working,

I'd been looking for a 5.25inch Drive to stick in my DosBox for some time now, Hola! A Newtronics 5.25" Floppy Disk Drive Made in Japan 2C28K0397 shows up on eBay for a reasonable price none of that RARE, VINTAGE crap, the guy says the drive works, and it only needs to travel 135.5 km to get to my house. (2 hours by car)

So, I got it and stuck it in my system, so far it hasn't made any strange noises...

But I've been having trouble getting the thing to work in Windows 98 for a variety of reasons, floppy cable orientation and placement on the chain, dead CMOS battery and needing to tell the BIOS what format the drive is, the 5.25" Floppy Disk jumpers that I'm sure are correct and the disks I'm testing with, I am only confident that one of them works and it's a 720k disk (I know for sure a written on a 720k drive), I am pretty certain that my drive is a 1.2mb model given its build date (1992), but this last part is for another thread, for all I know the drive could be DOA and I'm just wasting my time, but what a journey it has been.

Update: I managed to get the drive working after much trial and error.