I have to give a very big shoutout to Steve from Steve's Tech Shed for originally posting the eBay link on my Discord server. He's into IBM stuff and has his very own channel, and I think if you enjoy my videos you'll definitely like his too! www.youtube.com/@StevesTechShed
Ha! I do actually have multiple green t-shirts and a few black ones, I just happened to put on my one and only orange one on the day I went to pick it up 😁 Here's some behind the scenes info - in the last scene when I successfully get DOOM up and running in Windows 98 it's actually day 3. I couldn't be bothered to wash the same t-shirt again so I decided to just not appear on camera. I'm actually wearing a blue one!
You can actually get doom with sound under pure dos with that ac97 chip nowadays :) Someone made the impossible true : they've made a "sbemu" driver for dos that does great sound blaster compatibility in DOS on the ac97 chip !
Why ME? I never used ME back in the day, only Windows 98, 2k and XP when it came out. ME was always called here in NL "Meer Ellende" which roughly translates to "Misery Extended".
I never really thought 98 was very good. I tried 98 FE when it was launched, and it broke so much software that I immediately went back to 95. Tried 98 SE and it was ... eh. At the time, the only reason to switch would've been for USB support, (DIY computer, so no OSR 2 for me.) which finally got to be important around the time when ME was released. So I moved straight to that instead. It was fine. I tried Win2K as well, but it felt so heavy on my Pentium II that I just stuck to ME until I upgraded to a Pentium III and Windows XP.
AGP 👀 Well I'm glad you saved this machine, and if nothing else, should you ever decide it doesn't HAVE to stay original, you have some pretty vast possibilities for what you can fit in here. There even seems to be enough room for another small computer inside...
Kool beans, Doom is always a worthy cause in my opinion :) Couple of caps looked suspect on that motherboard btw - but you've probably noticed that already. Very interested to see how the 'Desktop' PC evolves :)
I have an idea for your fax. In the 90s we had one and turned it into a poor man's scanner and printer. We connected the cable directly from the fax to a fax modem in the PC and basically faxed a document directly into the PC and faxed directly to it to print. I actually scanned a page from a coloring book and then colored it in using MS paint in windoss 3.1.
Okay, that was tremenDOSly entertaining and inspiring. I already mentioned on the video on the update on sound, but I'm very much getting enthused about getting the early-2000 PC I have equipped for some DOS shenanigans. Superbly done video on a one-of-a-kind topic!
I used to have a 17" or so CTX CRT VGA monitor, the image quality was truly fantastic, probably the best CRT I've ever personally seen. Unfortunately not long after I got it (thankfully it was free but still), it developed vertical collapse and I had to get rid of it.
back in the mid to late 90s I was in high school and had found a wood desk, 3 sets of drawers on the right side and 1 long drawer on the left side. My mom had it refinished and I took the top right drawer out of it and built my 486 dx 2 66 computer right in that spot. I didnt have room for a case on top of the desk or turned up on its side next to it. it was a great desk.
This was awesome! The Desk of Doom. Love it! (Also I recall always being "tempted" buy Tiny computers back in the day. They were cheap, but the spec was always just shy of what I wanted....well...that's why they were cheap).
Remembers my first PC, a 386 with 3mb of ram. The 486 had just been released and they had 4mb or more ram but I could not afford one so had to go with the 386 not for lack of trying as I must have walked around maybe twenty different shops looking for a PC I could afford. When Doom released I was so disappointed that I could not run it on my 386. It took a couple of years to finally pay off the finance for the 386 and upgrade to a new PC that I could finally play Doom on. I've had many a PC since then. Recently found a Lenovo i5 pc that someone had thrown out, it had been out in the rain so was a bit wet but I took it home dried it off and left it in a warm place overnight, surprisingly it worked perfectly when I cautiously switched it on, not only did it work but booted to the windows 10 desktop in sixteen seconds (in comparison my i7 Lenovo laptop takes twenty five minutes or more to boot lol) The 386 was not my first home computer as that honour went to the ZX81 with a wobbly 16kb of ram. Also had Spectrum +2 & +3 (much later had a rubber keyed 48K), a Toshiba HX10 MSX (died with a puff of white smoke after a few weeks when I accidentally removed a cartridge without powering it off) and a Sam Coupe (regret selling that!). Later on I had an Amiga 500 and Acorn Electron (both I accidentally left behind when I moved).
What a fantastic video. Best thing I've seen on CZcams for ages. I've found your channel through your tweet. So quite pleased with that. Definitely subscribing and checking out some more of your videos, mate.
Fun fact, original Shareware/Release DOOM keybinds were EDSF or Arrow keys. WASD didn't show up until Ultimate DOOM release after DOOM II, due to craze if Thresh's DoomWorld championship win in DOOM II. Thus spawned the config updates for Quake, with Unreal and Half-Life following suit to release with WASD as the standard. I still prefer and always rebind my keys to EDSF today though, as it's much more ergonomic with modern games.
Such a weird thing, glad that I've stumbled upon the video and the channel in general! I actually had a very similar looking CTX lcd at one point that I swindled from a place that was closing down, one thing that the CTX of mine, CTX PV520 had was an ability to turn it vertical, you may check if yours can do it too.
You can connect fax machine and modem to a phoneline simulator and make a low resolution (and very slow) printer out of it. If you have another modem, you can connect one of your computers to LAN and share its internet connection and make a dialup server (I have done both) it was really fun to hear dial up sounds after 15 years or so, but the connection will be restricted to 33 kbps because modem to modem connection is restricted to V.90 and below.
That center in Bilston was actually down the road from where i live and my Primary School actually used to walk us to that center for activities. Weird to think a computer i actually used now belongs to a CZcamsr
My first experience playing shareware Doom was on a Windows 98 PC since it took me a while before I got one for university work. Coming straight from an Atari ST seeing something like Doom running was mind blowing! Plus I still was able to play my ST games via emulation so a 90s PC was the ultimate gaming machine...
This "office furniture" is so obscure and cool that I'm now thinking of building my own homemade version with modern components out of a desk that I bought locally for $20.
Cool video Rees! Are there low profile pci risers that would allow for a sound card? If that doesn’t work, perhaps external audio solutions like covox (or disney sound source) options could improve audio in pure DOS so that you’re not limited to pc speaker only
Not seen one of these Time education systems in quite some time, the ones I am familiar with though had CRT monitors and not LCD so unsure if it came with it or not. They were great for school use as they were complete systems, just unbox, screw some legs on and plonk it in a corner.
I'd throw a modern board in there if I had it. It's a pity you can't use a discrete GPU with that enclosure, but a good APU would still make for a decent machine.
Windows 2000 was great back in the day - it didn't do games quite as well as 98 (though it did them a lot better than NT4 did) and a lot of newer Windows games ran on it just fine - it can probably run Doom95 (the official Windows port). That machine does not deserve to run Windows ME (very few machines do). Also, bonus points for the mouse pad
Back in college, I was .. acquainted (..?) with a guy that had decided that The Future was modular furniture with 1-2U rack rails built into the desk. He pulled me aside one day in class, all conspiratorial-like, with a friend of his, and got all pumped up about this concept that would be a game-changing business venture. "Hey, what do you think? You wanna do this? I think we could make a lot of money." I was not exactly blown away. "I dunno, it's not really something I think I would be able to contribute to." They were crestfallen. I'm still not sure exactly why. Either they thought I had some vital skill they needed, or just disappointed that I didn't immediately see the vast potential in their golden opportunity. A couple years later, computers started getting smaller. First, using laptop components, and able to sit on the desk in a minimum of space. Then, not long after, small enough to mount on the back of your monitor if you wanted. Neither using rigid steel cases, and 40mm fans at 6000 RPM to keep the CPU and power supply cool.
@@nickwallette6201 you know, a 2U unit would have fitted nicely above a drawer in a 3 drawer desk, but you’re right, it wouldn’t have been that economically viable then assuming we are talking about between 2010-2015. Now you could do it relatively cheaply using recycled furniture, ebay sourced servers and rack runners but not then.
@@actuallyusingmyrealnameher5061 This was more like 2002, but that hardly matters. The idea of sourcing substantial chassis meant to support their weight from the front panel, and trying to sell them to businesses at 3-4x the cost of a commodity PC, all for the privilege of not using the desk space directly under the monitor...? I didn't see it taking off. :-)
I remembered ME when it first came out and it really 'was' bad, especially for DOS games because MS was trying to hide access to it. I actually bought a copy of Windows 98SE to get my version up to date so I won't have to be forced into upgrading to ME. And it got me through till the XP era.
Not 1 gig, but 95 mb of ram, which is an odd amount. The number that confused you on bootup seems to be higher than it is but it signals 95 thousand-ish kb, hence 95 mb. When the whole specs are shown for a fraction of a second after that, it shows that it has 95 mb of ram. Also, can it run Crysis?
You know what? You're right - very well spotted! What an odd amount. I guess it's 128MB with the rest allocated to the GPU? I'll have to investigate for a followup video.
Might as well leave it on 98 SP3 instead of installing millenium, for that way lie actual doom and despair and bluescreens! Both are DOS-based and, unless there's some specific piece of soft or (more likely) driver that complains if you load it on 98SP3, you really have no good reason to install ME. It's such a terrible system...
I have to give a very big shoutout to Steve from Steve's Tech Shed for originally posting the eBay link on my Discord server. He's into IBM stuff and has his very own channel, and I think if you enjoy my videos you'll definitely like his too! www.youtube.com/@StevesTechShed
Rees showed me this on eBay. Before I could say “do it”, he’d done it.
I’m proud my friend. Your brilliant stupidity knows no bounds.
Love it.
If you were seriously committed to continuity you'd have five identical T-shirts to wear.
Ha! I do actually have multiple green t-shirts and a few black ones, I just happened to put on my one and only orange one on the day I went to pick it up 😁
Here's some behind the scenes info - in the last scene when I successfully get DOOM up and running in Windows 98 it's actually day 3. I couldn't be bothered to wash the same t-shirt again so I decided to just not appear on camera. I'm actually wearing a blue one!
With Hiren's Disc it's a matter of minutes to get passed that password.
The ntpasswd tool was my go to tool with these problems. Usually it's enough to just change / remove the Administrator password.
Duron was a competitor to Celeron. I also seem to remember wordplay jokes about Duron/Durex.
You can actually get doom with sound under pure dos with that ac97 chip nowadays :)
Someone made the impossible true : they've made a "sbemu" driver for dos that does great sound blaster compatibility in DOS on the ac97 chip !
This desk could be nice base for building some kind of "sleeper" machine with modern parts.
Good plan, then I can play DOOM 2016 and Eternal on it too 😉
I'm unclear about the size of the desk without seeing the "rees scale"
Doom UNDERNEATH the desktop! Legit!
The Doom is coming from INSIDE THE DESK 😱
Why ME? I never used ME back in the day, only Windows 98, 2k and XP when it came out. ME was always called here in NL "Meer Ellende" which roughly translates to "Misery Extended".
I never really thought 98 was very good. I tried 98 FE when it was launched, and it broke so much software that I immediately went back to 95. Tried 98 SE and it was ... eh. At the time, the only reason to switch would've been for USB support, (DIY computer, so no OSR 2 for me.) which finally got to be important around the time when ME was released. So I moved straight to that instead.
It was fine.
I tried Win2K as well, but it felt so heavy on my Pentium II that I just stuck to ME until I upgraded to a Pentium III and Windows XP.
I quite like Me. Throw it a good amount of RAM, turn off the desktop widgets/live desktop and it's just a really solid Win 9x experience.
AGP 👀
Well I'm glad you saved this machine, and if nothing else, should you ever decide it doesn't HAVE to stay original, you have some pretty vast possibilities for what you can fit in here. There even seems to be enough room for another small computer inside...
If he goes the route of mini PC's or Raspberry Pi he could fit a dozen different computers into the one desk lol.
This would be an intresting desk to turn into a sleeper build!
If only Gene could see what his old office setup is being used for now. 🤣🤣🤣
All jokes aside this is actually very useful like you say. Perhaps upgrades would be in order one day? Might make a nice video of "pimp my desk" 😁
Kool beans, Doom is always a worthy cause in my opinion :)
Couple of caps looked suspect on that motherboard btw - but you've probably noticed that already. Very interested to see how the 'Desktop' PC evolves :)
What a fascinating idea! Really tempting to do something like this nowadays... great stuff, thanks for this video! 🎉
Rees and taking 'desktop computer' literally :) Love it!!!
I have an idea for your fax. In the 90s we had one and turned it into a poor man's scanner and printer. We connected the cable directly from the fax to a fax modem in the PC and basically faxed a document directly into the PC and faxed directly to it to print.
I actually scanned a page from a coloring book and then colored it in using MS paint in windoss 3.1.
I watched this on a modern PC that I built into a desk.
Fascinating stuff Rees, love it.
Okay, that was tremenDOSly entertaining and inspiring. I already mentioned on the video on the update on sound, but I'm very much getting enthused about getting the early-2000 PC I have equipped for some DOS shenanigans. Superbly done video on a one-of-a-kind topic!
That thing is glorious
I used to have a 17" or so CTX CRT VGA monitor, the image quality was truly fantastic, probably the best CRT I've ever personally seen. Unfortunately not long after I got it (thankfully it was free but still), it developed vertical collapse and I had to get rid of it.
back in the mid to late 90s I was in high school and had found a wood desk, 3 sets of drawers on the right side and 1 long drawer on the left side. My mom had it refinished and I took the top right drawer out of it and built my 486 dx 2 66 computer right in that spot. I didnt have room for a case on top of the desk or turned up on its side next to it. it was a great desk.
This was awesome! The Desk of Doom. Love it! (Also I recall always being "tempted" buy Tiny computers back in the day. They were cheap, but the spec was always just shy of what I wanted....well...that's why they were cheap).
Duron was a great little cpu in it's day. Cheap, overclockable, rock solid.
That's not one gig of RAM but an exact ninety-six megs. Weird, but nothing Win 98 couldn't handle.
Remembers my first PC, a 386 with 3mb of ram. The 486 had just been released and they had 4mb or more ram but I could not afford one so had to go with the 386 not for lack of trying as I must have walked around maybe twenty different shops looking for a PC I could afford.
When Doom released I was so disappointed that I could not run it on my 386. It took a couple of years to finally pay off the finance for the 386 and upgrade to a new PC that I could finally play Doom on. I've had many a PC since then.
Recently found a Lenovo i5 pc that someone had thrown out, it had been out in the rain so was a bit wet but I took it home dried it off and left it in a warm place overnight, surprisingly it worked perfectly when I cautiously switched it on, not only did it work but booted to the windows 10 desktop in sixteen seconds (in comparison my i7 Lenovo laptop takes twenty five minutes or more to boot lol)
The 386 was not my first home computer as that honour went to the ZX81 with a wobbly 16kb of ram. Also had Spectrum +2 & +3 (much later had a rubber keyed 48K), a Toshiba HX10 MSX (died with a puff of white smoke after a few weeks when I accidentally removed a cartridge without powering it off) and a Sam Coupe (regret selling that!).
Later on I had an Amiga 500 and Acorn Electron (both I accidentally left behind when I moved).
What a fantastic video. Best thing I've seen on CZcams for ages. I've found your channel through your tweet.
So quite pleased with that. Definitely subscribing and checking out some more of your videos, mate.
You could use the fax machine to fax Perifractic
Great idea, he'd love that.
Fun fact, original Shareware/Release DOOM keybinds were EDSF or Arrow keys. WASD didn't show up until Ultimate DOOM release after DOOM II, due to craze if Thresh's DoomWorld championship win in DOOM II. Thus spawned the config updates for Quake, with Unreal and Half-Life following suit to release with WASD as the standard. I still prefer and always rebind my keys to EDSF today though, as it's much more ergonomic with modern games.
Windows 2000 brings back so much mem. Thanks for sharing!
Blowing a gale outside and when that cd started clicking i thought something on the roof had come loose 😂
Informative!!
Someone call lockpicking lawyer
Such a weird thing, glad that I've stumbled upon the video and the channel in general! I actually had a very similar looking CTX lcd at one point that I swindled from a place that was closing down, one thing that the CTX of mine, CTX PV520 had was an ability to turn it vertical, you may check if yours can do it too.
You can connect fax machine and modem to a phoneline simulator and make a low resolution (and very slow) printer out of it. If you have another modem, you can connect one of your computers to LAN and share its internet connection and make a dialup server (I have done both) it was really fun to hear dial up sounds after 15 years or so, but the connection will be restricted to 33 kbps because modem to modem connection is restricted to V.90 and below.
That center in Bilston was actually down the road from where i live and my Primary School actually used to walk us to that center for activities. Weird to think a computer i actually used now belongs to a CZcamsr
That's up there with the most catchy CZcams video title ever!
Excellent. I still love the Doom music. And I just bought the Complete Reference book for Windows ME, even though I've never used the OS.
AC97 audio under DOS? That is exactly what SBEMU is designed for!
Yes, go for the Doom meme market! Gain all the random subscribers!
OK Doomer
My first experience playing shareware Doom was on a Windows 98 PC since it took me a while before I got one for university work. Coming straight from an Atari ST seeing something like Doom running was mind blowing!
Plus I still was able to play my ST games via emulation so a 90s PC was the ultimate gaming machine...
fun thing. too bad they didn't make it so that the slots were usable without messing with it.
This "office furniture" is so obscure and cool that I'm now thinking of building my own homemade version with modern components out of a desk that I bought locally for $20.
That’s actually a very well made product!
No wonder you have such bad traffic, you’re driving on the wrong side of the road.
That's odd, that it's built into the desk, I've never seen that design anywhere.
You should make some built in speakers for the desk to complete the project.
Did you try SBEmu project to get sound under DOS from that AC97?
What a great find!
Cool video Rees!
Are there low profile pci risers that would allow for a sound card? If that doesn’t work, perhaps external audio solutions like covox (or disney sound source) options could improve audio in pure DOS so that you’re not limited to pc speaker only
Desk-top PC?! Top-desk PC?!
There's a linux boot floppy that can reset the password of win 2000 with no issues whatsoever.
Interesting!
Not exactly doomed idea ;)
There’s enough space in there for either an Atari or a JAMMA contraption thing 😀👍🌱
Not seen one of these Time education systems in quite some time, the ones I am familiar with though had CRT monitors and not LCD so unsure if it came with it or not. They were great for school use as they were complete systems, just unbox, screw some legs on and plonk it in a corner.
I'm surprised you don't have a set of lock pics. 😊
oh doom, i was lucky and lived near the ID headquarters and just went into the office to buy doom the week it came out.
It didn't run on a pregnancy test. It was just the screen from it being used.
Wow, I'm surprised you fitted that in your car. It looks like it's about 0.7 Reeses (700 milireeses?) long!
PS. Windows 2000 is the best Windows
it surely is the best windows.
@@wilsonicsnet And is really the only fitting OS for that desk. Millenium - NO! 2K - YES!
I'd throw a modern board in there if I had it. It's a pity you can't use a discrete GPU with that enclosure, but a good APU would still make for a decent machine.
Time offered cheap PCs but had a bit of a bad reputation
11:45 I spot some leaky capacitors! Future repair video?
Don’t forget Quake 4.
Windows 2000 was great back in the day - it didn't do games quite as well as 98 (though it did them a lot better than NT4 did) and a lot of newer Windows games ran on it just fine - it can probably run Doom95 (the official Windows port). That machine does not deserve to run Windows ME (very few machines do). Also, bonus points for the mouse pad
Windows Me??? That wasn’t a late April Fools joke, was it? I hope so.
Unfortunately, the pregnancy test thing Foone posted was fake. He didn't run it on the actual Pregnancy Test hardware.
Yeah, but does it have wifi...
This is so ridiculous.
I want one
Cut the back off the inner case and install a low profile gfx card
This makes me want to build a 1U server into a table 🙂
Back in college, I was .. acquainted (..?) with a guy that had decided that The Future was modular furniture with 1-2U rack rails built into the desk. He pulled me aside one day in class, all conspiratorial-like, with a friend of his, and got all pumped up about this concept that would be a game-changing business venture.
"Hey, what do you think? You wanna do this? I think we could make a lot of money."
I was not exactly blown away. "I dunno, it's not really something I think I would be able to contribute to."
They were crestfallen. I'm still not sure exactly why. Either they thought I had some vital skill they needed, or just disappointed that I didn't immediately see the vast potential in their golden opportunity.
A couple years later, computers started getting smaller. First, using laptop components, and able to sit on the desk in a minimum of space. Then, not long after, small enough to mount on the back of your monitor if you wanted. Neither using rigid steel cases, and 40mm fans at 6000 RPM to keep the CPU and power supply cool.
@@nickwallette6201 you know, a 2U unit would have fitted nicely above a drawer in a 3 drawer desk, but you’re right, it wouldn’t have been that economically viable then assuming we are talking about between 2010-2015. Now you could do it relatively cheaply using recycled furniture, ebay sourced servers and rack runners but not then.
@@actuallyusingmyrealnameher5061 This was more like 2002, but that hardly matters. The idea of sourcing substantial chassis meant to support their weight from the front panel, and trying to sell them to businesses at 3-4x the cost of a commodity PC, all for the privilege of not using the desk space directly under the monitor...? I didn't see it taking off. :-)
I'd upgrade the duron to an athlon thunderbird or even the AthlonXP palomino/thoroughbred/barton chips as far as u can go on that mobo
i have a copy of doom or doom 2 on my laptop it was a copy recovered years ago
all was going well until you said "windows millennium" oh dear!!!!!!!!!
😈
ME's not that bad imo, though really the main reason to install it is for the meme when 98 exists.
I remembered ME when it first came out and it really 'was' bad, especially for DOS games because MS was trying to hide access to it.
I actually bought a copy of Windows 98SE to get my version up to date so I won't have to be forced into upgrading to ME. And it got me through till the XP era.
The problem with “me” ( as a pc builder at that time ) was driver support. Me was a strange beast breaking compatibility with a boat load of stuff.
Could have been a French bloke called Jean 😁
Not 1 gig, but 95 mb of ram, which is an odd amount. The number that confused you on bootup seems to be higher than it is but it signals 95 thousand-ish kb, hence 95 mb. When the whole specs are shown for a fraction of a second after that, it shows that it has 95 mb of ram.
Also, can it run Crysis?
some of it for gpu? or some on the board? 1 stick of that size would be really peculiar.
Maybe one 128MB stick in there and 32MB shared video memory ? I can only see one stick of memory in the shot of the motherboard.
You know what? You're right - very well spotted! What an odd amount. I guess it's 128MB with the rest allocated to the GPU? I'll have to investigate for a followup video.
It's 96, not 95.
Might as well leave it on 98 SP3 instead of installing millenium, for that way lie actual doom and despair and bluescreens!
Both are DOS-based and, unless there's some specific piece of soft or (more likely) driver that complains if you load it on 98SP3, you really have no good reason to install ME. It's such a terrible system...
😈
What a fun project. Thank you
You could've just installed doom 95 it works on windows 2000
it needs Linux 😂
Watch this space... 😉
or beos?
Why have a PC when you can have a Time machine?
Even though it is a Time machine I will give you £100 for it :)
Massively overspecced for running Doom as it turns out, you've basically got a software rendering powerhouse there.
I wonder if the monitor can hit true 70 Hz. Would be the best for Doom's double-buffered 35 fps framerate.