Gammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
My next retro rescue / refurb project, kindly donated to me by (Danjones_uk on X.com) Thank you so much mate! 👍
Gateway 2000 - P5-120 (Pentium 120Mhz) from 1996.
An absolute beast, nearly 2ft tall!
First it needs an initial quick cleanup, it's grubby!
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
23 Inches Tall!
"Ooh, Matron!" 😲
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
Dirrty
*said in Christina Aguilera's voice*
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
Looking a bit fresher now, I will be taking all the plastic off the case and deep cleaning it, but for now, better!
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
VGA Card (PCI)
Dedicated Parallel Port Card (ISA)
Modem (ISA)
Unfortunately no soundcard, for now.
Lots O' Rust!
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
Ok, let's take a peak at the goodies inside:
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
Feline approval granted! 😺
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
Motherboard:
Gateway 634784-608 Socket 5
4x PCI
3x ISA
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
Matrox MGA Millennium 2MB PCI
+
2MB Memory Upgrade Board
=
4MB Amazing! 😍
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
ISA Parallel Port Card
Appears to be 8-bit, notice none of the 16-bit pins go anywhere (might be wrong).
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
8-bit Hardware Modem, notice that cheeky EPROM, XT-IDE potential 🤔🤔🤔
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
64K of potential!
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 1, 2025
I've decided that I need to start doing more videos and get over this irrational dislike for the sound of my own voice.
Here's the first power on test! 😳🤞
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾
Floppy Drive Boot Test:
Aug 1, 2025 at 6:06pmMastodon for Android
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
One thing I've discovered with this machine, something I've had with early Pentium PC's before- it's insanely fussy on harddrive solutions.
SD-IDE ❌
SATA-IDE ❌
It seems to only like either very small IDE drives, or simple CF-IDE, the BIOS is very limited.
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
I seem to have gotten through my larger CF cards, I have a bunch of smaller ones, <512MB. I do however have one 1GB, that I've managed to install an old version of DSL (Knoppix based) Linux distro.
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
The system works flawlessly, I'm super happy the Matrox is working well @ 1280x1024. There's something magical about using Linux on a system that's nearly 30 years old, it's fun!
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
A while ago I made a PCI based XT-IDE card for such computers, I used this one in another build, but I may make another, rather than using a software drive overlay solution.
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
So, I've been messing with storage options again, EZ Drive fails, and Ontrack was tricky. Using all the three options it gives to setup the bios. But looks like I've figured it out, here's the error I kept getting.
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
So, I had to manually set the bios options for the drive, to give me roughly the storage on the SD card (SD to IDE). Then Ontrack let me setup a Fat32 partition. Instead of formatting it in Ontrack, I used format on the Win98 setup. I'm currently installing Win98 as a test...
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
32GB SD BTW.
I want multiple os's on this:
MS-DOS
Windows 95/98
Also a useable Linux install, DSL Knoppix I think.
Fingers crossed this works and is bootable, very fiddly!
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
I forgot something, I'm not using the original PSU, so the front fan is not powered on, I've setup a usb fan to cool the CPU (wasn't too hot, but safety first).
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
So far, so good 👍
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
Looking good.....
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 2, 2025
Perfecto 👌
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 4, 2025
So I've discovered there's a way newer bios than the one this machine has installed.
I'm currently running:
BIOS Version 1.00.05. BROT
The newest version addresses issues with the HDD detection, it's:
BIOS Version 1.00.10. BROT
The bios chip is soldered, but I'm going to try it.
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 4, 2025
Perfect!
The update went well and it's now detecting lots more new drives, SD to IDE and also SATA to IDE.
There's an 8.4GB limit, but that's way bigger than anything that was available when the PC was built, so I'm happy.
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 4, 2025
Partition Magic 8 can see the full amount:
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 4, 2025
Quickly tested a Windows 95 install, all went well. I'm thinking that I'm going to put multiple drives in here and have a boot loader CF, Windows 98 with MS-DOS mode, plus some other OS's, like Linux, BSD etc. Should be fun to test out.
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 5, 2025
So I've installed a PCI network card and also I've got loads of Soundblaster 128's, so I've decided to use it in this system. It's actually got amazing dos support, not Adlib but General Midi that supports 8MB wavesets.
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 5, 2025
Here's Duke Nukem 3D in DOS, with General Midi (Excuse the mess 😀):
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 5, 2025
A little bit of Doom with General Midi:
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 5, 2025
Updates in progress.......
Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 5, 2025
So this machine has 4x PCI slots, so far I have used 3. I think the best option for slot 4 is a USB card, but they're tricky with these old chipsets and Windows 98.
So far I've tried a modern VIA VT6212L, but as soon as the drivers start to load it crashes the system.
Show threadneocolapsarAug 5, 2025
@Gammitin What a classic!
Show threadStuart Longland (VK4MSL)Aug 4, 2025

@Gammitin You might find under Linux, you can put a bigger drive in if you ensure there's a separate /boot partition in the first 8GB.

I've got a Pentium II laptop with this limitation: BIOS only saw 8GB (and thus bootloader could only read the first 8GB), but Linux could see the entire drive once the kernel loaded. A 160GB drive ran fine.

Show threadGammitin (Ben) 💾Aug 4, 2025
@stuartl yes, it should do that! 👍
Show threadMiraAug 11, 2025
@Gammitin I once had a machine that had IBM-DOS, Win98, OS/2 1.3, and Slackware on it. Use PQMagic (iirc) for the multi boot options