Crysis on an Altair, I never thought I'd see the day!
Greetings and welcome to lazy game reviews, LGR, for eight years in a row now,
that is ridiculous to me, I never thought that it would go on this long when I started in 2009, but here we are.
Anyway, let's get to the topic at hand today and that is...
The Altair 8800 personal computer, holy crap would you look at this thing?
This is a machine from 1975 what many I've seen referred to as the first personal computer
in the sense that a lot of people would understand one, I would say that's highly debatable.
There's probably half a dozen other machines before that I would say could easily earn that title,
but that's a topic for another video. Today we're going to do something really interesting
with this particular machine that I am very fortunate to be able to own.
So, let's just get right to it. So yeah, we are going to be building a modern PC into the case of an Altair 8800.
I'm sort of... I'll clarify what I mean here momentarily... but let me just take a minute to talk about the Altair:
pretty much kick-started the personal computer revolution in 1975,
it's what got Microsoft really started with their Altair Basic.
And you program it by these switches on the front bit by bit in binary
and look at all the red lights lighting up, and this tells you what it's doing?
There's no external display unless you were to add on that kind of thing you could do that later.
But, originally this is what you got, switches and lights, is a pretty much a big glorified desktop calculator,
but it's amazing. It's really powerful for the time you could do games and word processing
and terminal connectivity. It's pretty fantastic. We will get to more of this thing in a future video.
That is why I got this computer mainly is because I'm going to do a historical overview
and show you how it works, but today we're going to be taking it apart and doing some other stuff to it.
And you may or may not have noticed that this is not an original Altair 8800.
Of course it's not! I'm not that well off yet.
The most recent one that's sold on ebay at the time of this video is upwards of three half thousand dollars,
sometimes it goes for even more than that.
This is a one-to-one replica of extremely high quality, this is from altairclone.com.
It costs a little over $600, so it's not cheap either, but I mean,
it's the single best replica of the altair that money can buy.
Everything looks, feels, functions, just like the real thing except for when you open it up.
There is practically nothing in here. You gotta keep in mind this is such a simple computer,
I have genuinely seen toasters with way more computing power than this thing.
It has a power supply but you could run this thing off of four AA batteries for over 50 hours.
There's not much going on in here, and it doesn't need it.
The biggest part is that led and switchboard assembly on the front.
So, on the website for the clone, they actually do say that they have pre-drilled the cabinet,
to accept a micro ATX motherboard and a three and a half inch hard drive.
So what I want to do is put a modern computer in here and just see how that works,
because I've never seen anybody do that with this particular kit.
Now I'm not going to be building like a powerhouse gaming computer for a few reasons:
1) I already have one, I use it for gaming and editing and all the high-end stuff, so I don't need anything high-end,
I pretty much just want something that like I can put next to my TV in the living room,
when I'm not using the Altair parts.
I also just don't want it to be too intense, because I don't want a lot of heat inside of here,
and I also just don't want it to be too expensive, you know, a few hundred bucks is pretty much my limit.
So, a visit to newegg.com and a few days later this package arrived with my goodies and inside the box here
I ended up going with... it's a KabyLake intel Pentium CPU the G4560.
To answer the inevitable question "why not go it Rizen", well for one that's a silly name, for two this was on sale.
I also got a copy of Windows 10 home 64-bit, and yeah, I'm going with Windows 10.
I could do Linux or something. I still might.
For the motherboard I ended up going with an MSI H110M Grenade.
So gaming! These cheesy gaming things...
is like everything for computers has been made for 14 year olds, but anyway... I don't know.
I ended up getting this because it had this specs that I wanted.
For a power supply I went with a pretty basic remanufactured Corsair RM 450.
It's a modular power supply, I didn't want a bunch of stupid cables floating around in there that I don't need.
For the storage I went with an m.2 SSD here by Plextor.
It's a 128 gigs and I quite like this form factor of SSD, I use several in my main rig.
I call them chewing-gum drives because they're about the size of a stick of gum. Technology is awesome.
And yeah, I have some thermal paste,
I went with some Arctic Alumina ceramic polysynthetic thermal compound.
I also, grabbed this StarTech assortment of screws and nuts and standoffs and all that,
because this case doesn't have any of that, so I'm going to need a bunch of these.
Even though I have some around, I will not be installing a graphics card in here. I don't want all that heat.
I'm just going to use that Pentium chips integrated graphics circuitry. I think it's an Intel 610.
Alright, let's start unboxing this stuff, starting with the grenade,
and... Oh, looks like it actually comes with a grenade! How thoughtful of them.
I just put that aside and here is the board itself and yeah, I think it looks quite nice.
It's got a lot of gaming gimmicks that I couldn't give a crap about,
but it's supposedly some pretty decent hardware in here and again I'm not doing too much with this computer.
So it's fine, works for me. Time to see where this thing fits inside the Altair case.
And you know, I couldn't figure out how this thing is supposed to be oriented.
I thought the I/O would maybe be towards the back, but none of the holes were lining up.
Well, then I turned it over and the pre-drilled holes do line up,
but you would have to take off the entire back panel of the Altair replica.
And I just don't want to do that, because my goal for this, is to get both computers
running completely independently of each other and both in there working at the same time.
I'm not removing that back panel. Not only, the screw holes that are in here are just too big.
None of my standoffs or little insertion thingies for motherboards... just none of them fit.
I've never seen holes this big in a case. I also didn't know where to stick the power supply.
I don't know, we'll figure it out.
Alright, first things first, though, we'll get that Pentium into the LGA 1151, right there.
That goes in there quite easily.
And then I'm going to clean off the thermal goo that came with this and apply some of my own,
and, man, this is the easiest to install heatsink I've ever applied to pretty much anything.
It just snaps right in place, feels really cheap, but you know that does the job.
I don't really care, because I'm not going to be pushing this thing to its limits.
Time for that little m.2 SSD. Chewing gum goes right in here on the motherboard.
Again, I just like this design, these things are so cool.
I wish there were like 50 of them in my main computer.
And I almost forgot, I have another package of goodies here, which includes these stick of RAM,
that I ended up going with, which is a Crucial 8 gigabyte PC2133 DDR4 RAM,
which is what this board takes. It was cheap so I went with it, and then I've got a little case power switch here.
This will make powering it on really simple,
without having to rewire anything on the front panel or anything like that,
I mean that could be done. I'll probably do that in the future,
but for now I'm just going to use this basic little switch.
Alright, time for the power supply and pretty much just need these two cables here,
one for the CPU and one for the motherboard's main power source.
And I'm plugging HDMI in right here to one of my spare monitors
and this little cheap Logitech keyboard and mouse, for now.
And I powered on to make sure it all works, before mounting it or anything like that and...
nothing happens at all! Not a thing...
Okay, it's got some red lights. It's about it. That's always fun.
So I noticed that it has one of these easy ... something or others.
It's supposed to let you know what's wrong instead of beeping.
And the RAM light is lighting up, so I'm like... okay. Well, maybe there's something wrong with the ram.
I didn't have any more DDR4 RAM lying around,
so I went into my main rig and cannibalized one of the sticks that were in there.
This is some Corsair, this is one of my 16 gig sticks.
And we're just going to put that in there and see if it boots up with that instead and...
Nothing happened... again! No display. Nothing's going on.
That same light lights up, and I know this RAM is good. Thankfully I have a perfect solution.
Few days later some more RAM showed up, I ended up going with some Corsair Vengeance RAM,
here a dual channel eight gigs. Looks cooler, I don't like crucial anyway.
Try to boot it and again... No POST, nothing okay? So here's what went wrong,
and I guess this is technically my fault for not doing enough research.
This board does support KabyLake CPUs. I saw that online.
However, it can only be done with a bios update, I can't update the bios until I put a CPU in there.
Because this is a board that doesn't support bios flashing via USB alone,
so I grabbed another "cheapo" Pentium, older Skylake model,
so I can flash the bios and get my CPU that I actually wanted in there in the first place.
What a pain. I've never swapped heatsinks and thermal pastes and all that crap so many times in one day.
Anyway, it finally posted this time and went straight into the setup.
I put the files on a USB stick and flashed it. Thankfully the flashing process worked just fine.
I put my KabyLake CPU in there and it's asking for a boot device.
Awesome, now the copy of Windows 10 I had did come on a DVD, but I really just wanted the key for it,
and I'm gonna download Microsoft's USB thingy to install Windows 10 from USB instead
and being that this is all quick solid-state stuff that was done in just a few minutes.
There we go, the computer is up and running. It only took eight days.
I love not living near any good computer stores.
Alright now to get all this stuff mounted inside of the case.
And I'm going to be using these standard little offsets
and just drilling into the case with progressively larger drill bits.
I'm just using a sharpie here to mark where I want the holes.
I don't know about you, but I don't like my holes in the wrong spots...
Cool! Offsets fit. Just fine screw those things in there.
That came up the metal piece junk garbage.
Screw it in place, and everything's all good, sweet, and, yeah, I ended up putting it in this spot in the case,
because there's nowhere in the back for the I/O to even poke out. As for the power supply.
This I'm just going to be using some heavy duty Velcro and sticking that thing right in there
and again that exhaust fan that's already in the case doesn't really do anything for the out there itself.
So it doesn't matter, it's just pushing air out and the fan that's in this power supply
doesn't even trip until it's like 40 percent load, which it's probably never going to happen to this machine.
Now check the CPU and that's running cool even with everything closed up and no fans going at all.
So I'm not too worried about it. Oh, yeah, looking nice!
You might be wondering:
how am I going to get the power cord to the power supply out of the back of the computer,
because those little ports that you see for serial are really tiny.
Simple I'm splicing myself a cord and stick it through there, just strip the wires,
get those all twisted up, string it through the hole, stick some heat-shrink on there for later,
solder the wires back together.
With some electrical tape around those and then heat the heat-shrink to shrink it with heat.
Ain't pretty but it does the job. So... works for me.
And the last little bit is that power button, which I'm just going to stick it in the back of the computer here.
Just sort of dangling out and use a zip tie. It's fine for now, okay.
Ok, I'll assemble it with my freshly spliced together power cable. Let's see if it boots, and we have success!
Yay!!!
Yeah, this is exactly what I was hoping to be able to pull off.
It's running the PC part right there and then you can turn on the outer part and it still function 100% independently
They are two separate things, two separate power supplies and everything.
They're not connected in any way. They're just both in the same case.
I might like to integrate them a little bit more later on,
you can hook up one of those auxilary switches to switch on the PC portion, but that's... yeah...
I'll do that later. Now, obviously I would have to open up the case if I want to do like anything,
you know, if I want to plug in something USB or whatever, but that's not really a big concern of mine.
I'm just doing everything wirelessly. It's not just like the coolest friggin computer case you've ever seen.
It makes me want to put my main one in here, almost.
It's fantastic, I wish more computer cases, like modern ones, came in blue.
It's just... it's nice and yes now if anyone asks: "Oh, nice Altair, but does it run Crisis?" Well... yes!
Yes, it does! Not perfectly, of course it's not, you know, a great computer,
but it's cheap and it works pretty friggin' stupid to be able to play Crysis on this thing.
But I mean that's why I made it, because it's such an absurd idea, you know, turn on your Altair and run Crysis.
Obviously, I'm not really going to be playing Crisis on here.
It's not made for modern-ish gaming Crisis at 10 years old good grief...
Yeah, just more of a conversation piece plus I will be using the Altair portions in the future.
So it was important to me to keep all that stuff intact, that's pretty much it. Came together how I envisioned it.
I will probably continue tweaking it to, you know, finish up some of those rough edges and whatnot,
but for now I'm going to boil up some of these.
Well, it's pretty much it for the LGR 8 year anniversary special with the Altair 8800 Windows computer.
You know I never thought I'd be able to do this.
So, once again thank you very much to everyone for watching and supporting
over the years, both just by like, you know, sharing videos and stuff like that
and also on Patreon and other direct support, like sending me things
and man, this is like the coolest job in the world.
I'm going to keep it going as long as I can and if you enjoyed this episode of LGR,
then I hope you might enjoy some of my others.
There are all sorts of videos on my channel, new ones coming out every Monday and Friday.
And, as always, thank you very much for watching.