[jazzy jazz music] Greetings, and welcome
to an LGR computer thing! Related to old computers,
but this is not actually an old computer even though it has old components inside. This is what became known
as the Lazy Green Giant, a Windows 98 Pentium III build that I put together last year: 2019. And this was based on
an existing project PC that I'd used for LGR for, well, since the beginning really. I had always wanted to paint it, make it sort of a dark green, dark teal. So I finally did that, and put all sorts of other
new components in there and just re did the whole
thing and came up with this. And originally it looked pretty cool. I liked the idea of Plasti Dip and stuff because I'd used it on
car components and hubcaps and things like that. However, for this is was,
it ended up being terrible. As you can see there's bits of scuffing that have just, you know,
started peeling off. And sure, I've resprayed it twice now, but that ends up building
up even more of a layer of this rubberiness that kind of conflicts
with some of these things. Like this is getting harder to press in and the disks are like,
it's just, you know, it's adding layers of that
rubbery Plasti Dip stuff. And so yeah, it starts scuffing and peeling off different components. And then there's the fact that
because of that rubberiness, you're getting a build up
of things like dust and hair and grime, and you can take a wet
cloth and rub it over there and get a good chunk of that off, but it still builds up extremely easily and it's very visible. And even then, like the
finish is just becoming uneven at this point. So yeah, screw this whole situation. I was never particularly
happy with this case anyway, so I'm just gonna replace the case. I mean I'm gonna keep it but I've gotta peel off this Plasti Dip. I'm not gonna do that today, I just want to replace
it with a better case as well as swap out some of
these components in there. We'll get to that, but lemme just show you the case that we're going to be using. Oh yeah, here we go, check this out. This is something that
I've been wanting to use for a good while now. I picked this up some time ago and I've just had it
in storage ever since. This is a new old stock Lian-Li case, the PC-60, or really the PC-62. A little bit later. This is like from the early
to mid 2000s or something. I believe the original case design stems from the late 90s or thereabouts. So yeah, we're going to be
installing it in this case. But also, I've got some components that we're gonna be swapping
out and upgrading as well. I'm gonna be keeping a
lot of the internal stuff. The graphics card, motherboard,
CPU, and RAM and all that, and sound card, but I'm going to replace
the optical and disk drives for a couple reasons. For one thing, they're green now. And like I said, I'll
peel off this stuff later, just not today. I don't feel like doing it. But I also just wanted to take care of some of these other things
that have been bothering me ever since I built this. So um. Yeah first off, got
a three and a half inch 1.44 meg floppy disk drive here. Just standard black drive. But I am gonna be using one of these here. This is just a regular one. This is not, dang it. This is a CD-ROM drive. Well I meant to pick up a
DVD-ROM from my storage, I guess I didn't. I know I have a couple. Anyway, I'm gonna put a
plain DVD drive in there instead of the burner
that's in there right now. And I'm also gonna be putting in a IBM Personal Computer five and a quarter inch
360K floppy disk drive. It's a new old stock
one from Computer Reset like the one that I put in
my NuXT build a while back. The floppy drive that's
in here is a 1.2 meg high density drive, and it's fine, it's just that pretty much
everything that I play in here in terms of like floppy disk games on a five and a quarter inch are going to be on 360K disks like this. And the other thing, writing. I want to do things with writing five and a quarter inch
floppy disks on 360K, and this just, it's not built for that, it's not the greatest for it. There's issues with writing 360K disks on a 1.2 meg drive like this. And then the other thing
I'm gonna be swapping out is in the back here. You may remember that I
put in this nice little IDE to SD card reader instead of hard drive, and it works great. I really don't have
many complaints about it except for the form factor itself. I kind of cobbled together
-- well lemme just show you. Yeah, it was on one of
these brackets in the back, but I discovered that the bracket was kind of in the wrong spot and it went right up
against the motherboard and I couldn't actually
install it in there so I just kind of had it dangling around. And so what I did to combat that later on after that video was I sort of mangled together [laughing] a couple different brackets and just sorta screwed it into
this one and made it work. And it doesn't really,
it was just a quick fix. You know, I never intended
this to be permanent. And because it's a project box, I really didn't care
about aesthetics too much. But I've begun to care, dang it. So I don't wanna use this anymore. I was thinking about just going to this front loading three and
a half inch drive bay CF adapter instead, and, I mean this would work great, but I just don't wanna use
Compact Flash cards anymore. And unfortunately I cannot
find any SD to IDE adapters that go in the front like this. I mean I could make a custom bay if I had a 3D printer or something, but you know, or Dremel something. I don't know, I tried
Dremeling something out and I was not happy with my results. So I found this instead. What we've got right here is
an SD card to SCSI adapter instead of IDE. Same basic idea, but
it's a front loading one, and it has a black three
and a half inch drive bay bezel right here. So front loading SD card instead of having to go to the back. And then it's also got
a little Micro USB there for something, I don't know. But anyway, I think this'll work great. Now I already have a SCSI card in there, so hopefully it's just
a matter of hooking up that 50-pin cable and making it work. And then finally, the last
thing that I wanna do. This is totally optional,
but I wanna try it. Is I wanna put one of
these babies in there. This is a Creative Sound
Blaster AWE64 Gold card. Yes indeed. I've never used one of these models. I've used some of the later ones, but this is the one I picked up, I don't even know when. Doesn't matter, it's just a cool card. You got RCA out and everything. But it gives me more compatibility
for DOS games and OPL3. I mean you know, so what I have in here is the Aureal Vortex 2 card. And that has some pretty
decent actually DOS emulation for things like FM synth
AdLib compatibility. And the Sound Blaster is
supported actually pretty good, but there's a lot of my favorite games, especially share ware games that don't work so well with that. So I'm thinking if I
can set it up properly and I need to make sure
there's no conflicts then I can get both of
these inserted in there. Whether or not I can use
them both at the same time, I don't know, but at least have them both in there and disable one or the
other depending on my needs. So anyway, that's what we're gonna do. Let's put this all together and I don't know, play
some games or something. You know, LGR stuff. I'm excited. [lounge music] [box slicing noises] Hmm, got some thingies here. Check this out, aluminum PC cases "designed for high performance PC system." Okay, what's on the other side. So they had aluminum bezels
even for CD and DVD-ROMS to match your cases. Aluminum mouse pads. Some well illustrated installation stuff. Very clearly labeled, good grief. Check out that breakdown schematic. That is awesome. [laughing] That is so much deeper
than I thought it would be. Oh, that's what I said. Whatever man, I'm committed at this point. Oh dude. Back it up, get it all in the frame. Look at that, that is
seriously well put together. They've even kind of
smoothed out these edges. All right, so oh man,
that comes off very easy. A lot easier than the other
case I'm currently using. Dude. Got some components and things. Yeah dude, look at that. Even got little protective
plasticky bits here again, to make sure you don't scrape
yourself on those sharp edges. Let's see what's in here. All right, got an I/O shield, whole lot of screws and rubber stand offs. Various adapter cables. What are these? Oh, fan control. This is definitely
overkill for this computer, but there we go, look at all these. Three Noctua fans. Well those are a little
bit different looking than more modern Noctuas, that's for sure. Don't have any of that signature
tan and brown going on, but either way, good to have these. Something else I'd like
to give a shout here, this whole motherboard tray, I/O section, I think comes right out. Oh yeah. Very convenient. The case that I'm replacing does have a slide out back
portion for the motherboard but this is, I don't
know, a little different. That's really awesome. I'm gonna put it together I guess on here and then slide it all into place. That, I like this already. Oh yeah. Well, let's go ahead and get
everything out of this one, well, all the components
that I wanna keep anyway, and put it in here and get Windows 98 going with some games. Yeah, it's disassembly time! [synthy disassembly music] And there we go, an empty case once again. Well, mostly. We're leaving those in there cuz I don't know what
I'm gonna do with this. Something, someday. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Although I believe a fan controller should be on the agenda for the future. No big deal though, this has never been a
warm system by any means over the past year or so. Nope, nope, what am I doing? Gotta install the I/O panel first. Hehe, I went uh... So far as getting the whole thing
screwed in before realizing. There we go. Now with the shield in place
we can get to screwing. [synth music] All right, time for some cards. Voodoo 3 card here. Diamond Monster Sound Aureal Vortex 2. Ethernet card that I have
still not used in this system. SCSI controller and our Sound Blaster AWE64 that I have not installed beside this particular Aureal card before so we'll see how that works. Nice. That is an awesome set up and we don't even have it
installed in the case yet. Uh. [chuckles] Okay! [music continues] [laughing] That is so satisfying. Time for some power cables. You know, I just now thought to check. I wonder if this has a
PC speaker installed. Yes it does, huh, right there. Exact same spot as the other one. Fantastic. And it's a cone as well. It's not a little piezo garbage junk. All right, let's wire all these up. [more music] All right, drives, let's
get them installed. This is such a cool case. This is not sponsored,
I just really like this. Listen to this. [metallic scraping] Ahh. [bass-Driven jazz music] So I think I'm gonna put this here. The screw goes right here. Okay, well guess that's what
this little contraption is for. I gotta say, that's kind
of an annoying design because there's only one
set of screws on each side like that, it's like [clunky clanking]. For not being a floppy
drive, that sure is floppy. I think I am gonna put
it the other way around because at least it'll smoosh downward onto the floppy drive. The actual floppy drive. That makes more sense. Floppy cable here and SCSI cable. Nice. We gotta unbox this lovely thing. Aww man, opening these
new old stock drives never gets old. By definition it gets old, but anyway. Ha-haw. Fantastic. You know, there are some
existing scuff marks where I can see that there were
a couple of drives actually installed here previously, so I guess this case
wasn't quite new old stock. It was lightly used old stock. It was certainly in really
well repacked condition. Maybe it was a refurb or like return unit or who knows what,
display unit, something. Obviously it wasn't brand new. Let me go ahead and. Oh my goodness, does it not reach? It does not. Hah! Well that's a pain. Wow! Yeah, the case is too deep. It would've reached. ♪ Hello darkness my old friend ♪ [sigh of defeat] Guess that's gonna have to wait. Well, at least get the
IDE CD-ROM installed. [laughing] Gotta say, it's kind of
annoying having this here because I can't see what I'm doing. For now I guess I'm
just gonna take this out and just dangle it over
there a little bit closer. Ironic. I got this thing so I wouldn't have to dangle anything and here I am dangling
things again, dang it. Yeah, whatever. [laughing] It's fine, everything's fine. See if it works. Okay, powering it on. And it powers on, which I already knew, because I've actually been
screwing around with this for about half an hour trying to figure out this
little SD card adapter. 'Cause it's not as straightforward as I hoped it would be unfortunately. In fact there's a few different things I gotta tweak already. I'll move this down here so I can actually get the cable to reach which is actually what I
did with the other one. I just, I forgot about that, the whole A and B priority thing. Anyway, when it loads up the SD card it's not actually looking
at that card itself to just see what it is. It actually goes to
whatever the default is on the board itself and then just tried to load the card based on the defaults. Which the defaults weren't good. It was set to like two
gigabyte hard drive. And I have a 64 gig card in there formatted to 32 gigs and that was set for the IDE configuration that I had on the other
build for this Windows 98 PC. So I had to actually connect
it to a modern computer and download the utility to reconfigure the SCSI2SD board itself. Mine's a v5 by the way, so this is formatted at
32 gig and it's set to 64. Anyway, it seems to be
working and there we go. We have Windows 98. It's the same. It still says Lazy Green Giant right here. I can change that, but
ideally this solution should not only be more convenient in terms of having it in the front whenever I get the proper cable for it, but should be a little bit quicker too. From the benchmarks that I've seen, SCSI2SD with the right configuration will actually run quicker in terms of like smaller read writes and
everything like that. Sometimes with a ton of little files, it would really bog down and took a while to write to SD cards
over the IDE interface. At least the ones that I had. But yeah, whatever. Okay, I'm done with this. So lemme turn this off and I'm gonna go and finagle with things and see if I can get
these other deals working. Morning. [plops down coffee mug] I've been working on this thing all night. And I am extremely satisfied
with how it's turned out so I've made some tweaks. I moved this down here so that I can actually plug it in using the same cable. Still haven't gotten a long
enough SCSI cable or adapter to fit the SCSI2SD thing but it's down here plugged in and working and I had to take out the
ethernet card, I don't know, for now, because I was trying to get both of those sound cards working and I was running into some IRQ conflicts and it was just nice to free up a little bit of resources. But now it's good I think. As you can see, I've changed the OEM info and yeah, now it's updated. It's called the 'Megaluminum Monster!' Yeah I don't know,
sounded cool at the time at like 2AM. So yeah, everything is in here. And yes, including the AWE64. I have disabled the Aureal Vortex 2's Sound Blaster Pro emulation
cuz I just don't need it. We've got the proper
Sound Blaster in here now. The only thing that isn't really working is the joystick port on the Vortex. Again, don't need it
because the AWE64 has one. And now that I have these
two sound cards in there, the way I have this set up is around back I've got the line out of the Aureal card going into the line in of the AWE64. And then of course the AWE64's RCA outputs are going out to some speakers. So check this out. Let me just show you, this is so cool. Look at all these MIDI synths I have. Yeah, you got MIDI outs and synths and MPU-401s and wavetables. So both the AWE64 and the Vortex have wavetable output for MIDI, but it also has the Creative Music synth which is just an OPL3. So you get that classic Sound Blaster 16 kind of AdLib sound. [Canyon.mid plays] Okay, so you got that, but choose the AWE64's
MIDI synth, apply that. Same track, same spot. [Canyon.mid plays again] That's a cool sound. I know a lot of people are rather fond of the wavetable on these AWE cards. But I'm kind of not, it's all right. I do however, really like the wavetable
sound of the Vortex. So check this out. [Canyon.mid plays with Aureal card] And because of the way it is you also have access to the
effects on the Vortex, so. [Canyon.mid continues
playing as effects change] Yeah man, I just really
like this for General MIDI. I love the sound canvas, and of course anything
related to Roland stuff is good, MT-32. That's not General MIDI but
it's a good option for DOS. But this one in particular, because they are both
card and they're internal, I don't have to hook up
anything else externally. I don't have to mess
with a MPU-401 interface and like a box sitting outside here that I have to plug in. Like I like that stuff for other setups, but this one, I just wanted
everything in one, and it works. And it also lets me
choose different synths for DOS games that use General MIDI. So for instance, I've got Duke 3D here, and if you just set the. Well okay, first I have
the sound effects card set to the AWE 32, which yeah. [Bowling pin sound test plays] So you get that full stereo
44.1 kilohertz sound, and everything on there
sounds really good. A lot of simultaneous voices. But then you get to the music, and right now it's set to the Vortex. [GRABBAG theme plays] So you can do that or because I have both of them in here I don't have to switch here. I can actually switch it in the options, and choosing the General MIDI, I switch to the MIDI port. So I have the Vortex set to 300 and the AWE 64, that's on 330. So now you get that. [GRABBAG plays again] So maybe there you kinda
get a good example example or a good reason why I
kind of prefer the Vortex in some cases for wavetable. I mean, listen to that. [Aureal Vortex 2 plays GRABBAG] I don't know, it's got
more of a punch to it. There's more grit to
some of the instruments like the guitars and what not. It's just a radical wavetable option. And so yeah, when you boot up Duke 3D and it's got the Sound Blaster sound. [loud boom] [Duke 3D theme music] [gunshots] [keyboard clicking] That's so cool, I got both! That's exactly what I wanted
to make this kind of setup for. And I coulda done it in the other case, but this is just so much cooler. And it's also means
that I get proper sound in a lot of my favorite shareware games because as decent as the Vortex is at doing some Sound Blaster emulation, it's not quite right. [Jill of the Jungle music] It's still not perfect. I still like the Sound Blaster Pro 2.0. And some of those earlier
Sound Blaster 16's and such for, you know, I have preferences. I have a lot of different systems for a lot of different things. But this is a wonderful all
around kind of solution. But yeah, let me just show
you a couple other things. So yes, floppy drive, we have
floppy drive A here working. So we've got 1.44 meg on disks. And so that's cool. And I have a 360k disk in here right now. And yeah, the 1.2 meg drive I had before could read and it could
even write to them, but you wouldn't be able to read a 360k written on a 1.2 meg on anything but another 1.2 meg. So if I wanted to take something like say I was gonna write
Balloon Challenge here to a 360k disk and transfer this over to my IBM AT or something with a 360K drive. Or even the NuXT. It wouldn't be able to read this disk that I am writing now. Even though it's a 360K disk on that 1.2 meg drive. But since this is a proper 360K, it reads and writes like all my old games, and it's gonna be fantastic
for making backups and writing software to disks that I wanna put on older
machines with other 360K drives. And yeah man, it's a
convenience thing for me. I may also put like a 1.2
meg five and a quarter inch floppy right here later if I can find one that's actually in decent
condition in black. I only have gray and beige ones. Oh and of course, the Voodoo
card is in here and is working. And let's open up some
Unreal Tournament here and just get a quick taste of that as well as showing how
it can take advantage of the Aureal Vortex's 3D audio which you're not gonna be able to hear because I'm recording this
with a lapel mic over here and the speakers are over there. Anyway, trust me, it'll be 3D sound. [UT99 intro music] ♪ Really dark. ♪ [Intro music continues] ♪ I can't see [bleep!] ♪ All right. Time to frag. [UT99 carnage commences] Well anyway, I don't know if you could
really hear the 3D sound difference at all over this mic, but it is turned on. So yeah, lemme go ahead and
put it all back together and just get the case on
there and assemble it all and get it looking pretty here and finish up the video. [Smooth reassembly jazz] Ahh, that looks slick. And we can't forget LGR case badge. Only have a few of them left. Gave away like 100 of them at VCF Midwest. Yeah, that's the stuff. Now it looks complete. All right, well that is
the Megaluminum Monster put together like 98%. [Windows 98 startup sound] Ahh, that dual sound card setup just makes me so excited
to screw around with things just, I don't know, for fun. I mean also making videos,
but mostly for fun. And yeah, there's still a couple things to address in the future. Like I've just got the bezel from the SCSI2SD on the
front of the case there. The actual board is still
hanging around inside. And I'd also like to see if I can attach a hard disk indicator LED to that board. 'Cause while it does
have an orange indicator on the board itself,
there's nothing external, and I like blinking hard disk lights. What can I say? I'd like to hook it up to this on the case but there's no header on the board. It does actually look like there is a spot to connect a header so hopefully that's what it is. And if that's the case, I'm just gonna solder
one of those in there, and of course get the DVD-ROM installed whenever I can find the one I
actually wanna put into this. So whatever, I'll do that and maybe post an update on Twitter. Regardless though, I hope that you enjoyed seeing this come together. You'll absolutely be seeing
it again in the future as I have a whole bunch of
random Windows 9x projects. And this machine will be perfect for it. Much more suitable than
the Lazy Green Giant. Stick around for that if you'd like. Either way though, thank you
very much for watching LGR.
