This is a Mystery PC. I say mystery for 2 reasons. The first is that I found it on eBay
and I don't know what's on it.
- don't ask me exactly why I bought it, but there was something incredibly nostalgic about
that case. It'd been sitting in my basket for months, and despite the fairly high price
tag, I needed to re-home it, and do something with that dormant hardware.
The second is because it's a mish-mash of parts. This case, that CD-ROM drive, the turbo
button. It doesn't fit. The mystery deepens when you realise that an AMD K5 100MHz lies
at the core of this beast. It's clear that this PC has a story. Like many PCs, it's evolved
with the owner. That yellowing isn't discolouration by the hands of UV radiation... it's a part
of this machine's life. Those cracks around the plastic, isn't brittle plastic yielding
to the unforgiving metal frame... it's an intertwining, an evolution of the case. That
dirt in the corner of the floppy drive and around the buttons isn't everyday filth...
it's... yeah, ok it probably is, and that broken plastic is actually a result of the
absolutely inadequate packaging used to send this thing from Hungary to the UK. Because
that's where this metal creation hails from. You can see the badge says "Ready Computers,
1054 Budapest", which is of course the nation's capital city. Why it has a cheese sticker
on the side, I have no idea. But there's no denying that this thing looks the epitome
of 90s retro. All of the 90s in one box.
Opening her up, reveals the timeless circuitry, ready to fire up once more. I mean, there's
also a loose speaker knocking about, but you can see from where it fell. For now I'll just
disconnect it. Here's the AMD K5, secured under a small heat sink and fan. Connecting
it to the outside world is an Intel PCIset chipset and a 1995 Award BIOS. The PCI and
ISA expansion slots are mostly bare, save for a faithful Trident TVGA9000i video card.
An incredibly common range of cards on base PCs, and actually the very first video card
I had myself. Housed in the top expansion bay is that mighty 52X LG CD-ROM drive, interestingly
both the CD-ROM and 270MB Conner Hard Drive underneath are setup as Primary and secondary
IDE master devices, no slaves here. Incidentally, Conner Peripherals were acquired by Seagate
in 1996. All of this splendour is powered by a JNC Power Supply, packing a beefy 200W
of pure POWER.
Ok, we'll need a monitor to find out what secrets lie within. This Dell Trinitron will
do nicely, as will this IBM keyboard. There are no PS/2 or USB ports here, just a good
old fashion DIN connector for the keyboard, and serial connections for whatever else takes
your fancy.
With everything ready, the first problem I encountered was the power switch. It's obviously
taken a hefty knock in transport, which has moved the switch away from the plastic housing.
Pressing it delivers no response and no feedback. Still I can undo this screw and then click
the switch from here.... and there we have, the sweet, sweet sounds of a 90s PC, booting.
Listen to that hard drive spin up, the sounds of the floppy drive. Obviously there's no
BIOS beep as I disconnected the speaker, but it matters not, for all is well.
64MB of RAM means the triple memory check takes a worthy amount of time, but then, we're
in. Well, actually, Windows '95 didn't seem to like the Turbo button being deactivated.
But a click and a reboot and we're good to go. Now, the turbo button was actually designed
to slow faster machines down to run older DOS games... you know, ones without decent
speed compensation, but it would be incredibly rare to find one on a Pentium era machine.
They were generally found on 386 hardware, possibly the odd 486, which tells me that
this machine has almost certainly been expanded past its years.
Actually, before we get back to it, let's have a look at the BIOS.... ohhhh yes. Look
at all these legacy options. I remember spending hours playing around in this exact BIOS, with
these settings. The options fill me with excitement and possibility just looking at them. This
was the early days of Plug & Play and you still had to set aside your options for legacy
cards. Amazing stuff.
Anyway back to Windows loading.
I don't know who set this Windows '95 colour scheme, but he's a masochist, whoever it was.
My first problem is that I think all my mice/mouses are PS/2 or USB... so I thought this might
have been game over (for the time being). But then I remembered that hideous Star Trek
mouse from a few weeks back, and we're good to go. Rather appropriate screen saver for
this device.
Obviously we're booting into a different language as well. We can change some region stuff in
the settings, but to change the OS base language, we'd have to do a re-install. Still, it matters
not, we can muddle our way around.
In terms of resolution, we're operating at good old 640x480 in 256 colours. We can up
it, but, I dunno, this resolution feels kinda homely.
So time to nose about. Immediately in the root direct a SIMSON image, turns out it's
a guy on a motorcycle. Oh christ, look, before I continue I have to change these colours,
it's like being stuck in a sh*t pie. Apparently media files are outside the scope of this
thing. Probably an unsupported format, or missing codec. Anyway, we've got all the usual
Windows programs here... Paint, Wordpad... WOLFENSTEIN 3D.... Now we're talking. Actually
it's a Spear of Destiny demo... the sequel to Wolfenstein. Completely devoid of sound
given both the PC speaker is disconnected and there is no sound card what-so-ever.
I was having troubles with the controls, and it turns out I wasn't joking when I said this
guy was a Masochist. The bloody fire key is set to "M". Who even does that? Anyway, the
game runs fine. It's Spear of Destiny. This would run fine on a 386.
At this point, it seemed better to exit to DOS, as finding things under Windows 95 can
be a pain. Of course, the main problem here is the keyboard is setup for a different country.
But a few lines in the config.sys and autoexec.bat straighten that out. We've still got the wrong
installation language, but at least the keyboard works as it should. To be honest, the only
obvious DOS program I found, simply entitled.. SEGA... tried to run at a resolution too low
for this monitor, so let's go back to Windows. I'm presuming it's probably Sea Quest. I thought
I'd try it in a window, within Windows, but '95 was having none of it, but then I noticed
this folder within the SEA directory.
O M
G
Have we just stumbled across some 90s objectivity right here? Within the suspect directory we
have a Pictures folder, then Decadens, then _ko_, and then we find the folders of truth.
I don't know if this guy was trying to hide this stuff as deep in the directory tree as
possible, but if he was, WHY CALL THE FIRST FOLDER..... THIS? Kinda gives the game away
chum.
So, these are all JPG images. This machine won't open them, and Paint can only deal in
Bitmap or PCX formats, so time to copy some files across to floppy. Just to be fair, I
thought I'd take an array of files. Some of that... oooo, yeah, some that too. Great.
and after loading them up on my PC. I CAN INDEED CONFIRM. FILTH. Oooooo, oh hello. Wow.
Yep, it's what we thought chaps. Of course it is. But I'm not going to display any here
or indeed mention it by name, because this is Youtube and THIS ISN'T THE TIME OR THE
PLACE.
I don't think we're going to top that, but it did
make me want to search deeper, for other suspect directories. All I really found was Doom,
disguised as Toca Touring Car Championship for whatever reason. Maybe Tibi was happy
to keep his explicit photo collection for all to see, but wanted to cover up he was
playing a game with demons. WHO CAN POSSIBLY TELL. Doom runs fine, even under windows,
although why it's hidden in this bizarre directory is beyond me. There didn't seem to be anything
else of value in there.
There were a few more interesting program on here. Daytona didn't work, but we've got
Windows Commander, which was always a handy file navigation utility. In the recent documents
folder there were some documents, in a language I don't understand. I presume that these are
all the work of our friend Tibi. Who could tell, or possibly know. To be honest, at this
point I was bored. We'd peaked with the hidden folder
and now it was time to shut this beauty back down.
I have plans for it. Great plans. All of which I will share with you all in due course.
In the mean time, thank you for joining me on this Mystery PC investigation. It's been
a blast.