PC Building Simulator

[googlemad]

PC Building Simulator on Steam

 

You would be amazed how addictive this game is! Still in early access so quite a bit still to add, fix etc. (Once you're up to Level 20 it gets a bit boring as there is no more level up after that yet) but well worth £14.99!

[ShellfishClive]

I actaully watched one of my friends stream this the other day. Even though that's my day job, I still wanted to play it...

[Dos_Box]

Are their retro components involved?

Imagine the fun you could have with motherboard dip switches, scsi cables, hard drive jumpers....ahh bliss.

[sted]

Are their retro components involved?

Imagine the fun you could have with motherboard dip switches, scsi cables, hard drive jumpers....ahh bliss.

 

or the rear cabling to wire up a 2d card a 3dfx and a hardware mpeg card lol

[Norphy]

I had that setup once. One of the cards, I forget which, didn't use standard DB15 cables, it used some kind of crappy DIN plug instead. That was always coming out. Most annoying!

[Dos_Box]

or the rear cabling to wire up a 2d card a 3dfx and a hardware mpeg card lol

 

Upgrading your CPU in 50Mhz intervals (thanks AMD K6-2 series) every 6 months.

[synaesthesia]

Hnnngh, sorry it doesn't really look like it's worth £15. With all that partnership going on, you'd have thought it'd crop up for a LOT cheaper. I might actually have been interested if it went back to the old days as mentioned, install an MFM card here, a winchester drive there, install/remove jumpers to set clock speeds and IRQ's for the serial/parallel ports on the IO expansion cards, popping in some extra cache...

[Dos_Box]

Hnnngh, sorry it doesn't really look like it's worth £15. With all that partnership going on, you'd have thought it'd crop up for a LOT cheaper. I might actually have been interested if it went back to the old days as mentioned, install an MFM card here, a winchester drive there, install/remove jumpers to set clock speeds and IRQ's for the serial/parallel ports on the IO expansion cards, popping in some extra cache...

 

Manually setting IRQ's?!

Thanks, that is one memory I really didn't need.

I seem to remember PCI modems being particularly troublesome in regards to IRQ's.

[chazzy2501]

jumpers for the CPU and FSB multipliers! (1st gen OC people!)

[Katy]

I seem to remember PCI modems being particularly troublesome in regards to IRQ's.

My memory of PCI modems is you have to do everything in a precise order, plus have some luck thrown in, otherwise COM3 that it wants to use just never turns up in whatever Device Manager was called back in Win95 days. This is why I always used a nice external modem plugged into a physical real COM port. (Plus I trusted a US Robotics external modem more than some el cheapo dodgy PCI one with the instructions in Chinese) - and I wanted to stick the modem on a machine running NT which was a no-go with the PCI one.

[Dos_Box]

I do 'sort' of miss the days when you really had to read the motherboard manual when building a PC or else random things would happen/not work.

Plug'n'Play is all very nice but has taken the element of surprise out of PC building.

[Katy]

I do 'sort' of miss the days when you really had to read the motherboard manual when building a PC or else random things would happen/not work.

Plug'n'Play is all very nice but has taken the element of surprise out of PC building.

We still get the element of surprise when we need to move a motherboard to a new case for some reason, and there's no pinout for the front panel connector etched into the board, no manual online... "which way round do we plug these LEDs to make sure we don't blow them". I do sort of fondly remember the days of jumpers on the motherboard to tell it what CPU was in etc, but only when it was a one off e.g. home build... wouldn't want to have to poke about with motherboard jumpers at work on 400 machines.

 

Also miss the days of doing our own PC builds here, in an IT lab with the benches cleared and just rows of cases, big box of motherboards, box of CPUs etc but it's just not worth the price difference vs a pre-built one especially when you're comparing DIY with 1 year parts warranty vs something with 3 year warranty for the entire system.

[synaesthesia]

We still do self-builds here depending on the purpose. Refurbs are great but have limitations; for instance horribly locked down BIOS systems, limited to zero upgrade paths, custom cases. We have SO many decent machines in 10 year old and over RM G series cases.

 

And yeah, back in the days of AT systems when the only onboard connector was the 5 pin din keyboard, all IO was via ISA card and irq's set by jumpers in the most cases (thankfully only a few options needed). However some of the old hard drives, the controller boards had astonishing amounts of jumpers as time went on to set amount of cylinders & heads until they went software controlled.

Edited April 17, 2018 by synaesthesia

[sted]

I had that setup once. One of the cards, I forget which, didn't use standard DB15 cables, it used some kind of crappy DIN plug instead. That was always coming out. Most annoying!

i think the creative labs mp2 card was din on one end vga on the other but i might be mistaken its been a while

[Norphy]

Thinking further back on it, I think it was the obscure Voodoo card that I had; it was a Miro HighScore 3d with 6MB of RAM rather than the 4MB that most Voodoo cards got. The extra 2MB made virtually no difference!