Reply To: Who uses real hardware?
Space is definitely an issue with this hobby. When I moved house a few years back, I got somewhere literally twice the size I would otherwise have needed purely to accomodate all this stuff. The house was strangely underpriced (for reasons that still aren’t clear to me), so it barely cost any more. A big loft room for all my old systems was a must have which is where all the older DOS machines are. It’s a lot more than just PC’s in there but I’ll spare you the rest. These are all the computers running DOS:-
The monitors in here don’t neccessarily match up with the PC under them for space reasons. So the system on the right of the desk is an Amstrad PC1640 which was a common budget PC over here. It’s an 8Mhz EGA machine which is slightly too slow for most EGA games I find, so the PC driving the monitor is actually the 16Mhz 286 on the floor. That’s got my old Soundblaster and an MT32 set up.
I wanted a composite CGA setup so I fitted the Amstrad itself with a CGA card which is driving the Apple monitor on the far left that’s sat on the IIGS. The PSU driving that PC is actually built into the EGA monitor so I have to have that switched on if I’m using that setup. The IIGS under the composite monitor is connected with a SCART cable I knocked together into a TV in the corner.
The little grey machine is a Japanese FM-Towns 486SX25. They usually run Towns-OS but you can run DOS on these machines so it sort of counts as a DOS setup. It’s more or less a PC under the hood but with some bells and whistles bolted on to do things like sprite manipulation. It was one of the first machines to have a CD-ROM drive (back in 89 if you can believe it) and loads of DOS games got unique enhanced releases.
Left of that is a Tandy TX 1000 with an IBM CGA monitor. I love these old Tandy machines for the extra speaker channels and the 16 colour graphics mode. That’s probably the one I’d keep if I had to choose from all of these.
