[jazzy musical vistas] - Greetings and today I've got this package that
appears to have gone through a small warzone or two, but it's, hopefully, still
in good shape inside. We'll see, this is an IBM NetVista
desktop computer system that you may have seen if you've watched the channel RetroManCave in the past couple of months or whatever, I don't remember when
the video went up exactly but yeah, this is from Neil and he actually did a couple of videos about these where he
just got this whole lot of them for pretty cheap and they were all disgusting, needed a lot of cleaning for one thing, but also a good bit of
repair work and restoration and just all sorts of things that yeah, he ended up going through all of them. I think they were 14
or something like that and he ended up with a bunch of them that he was able to get together and several of them
ended up being parted out but anyway, I ended up getting this here because what he ended up doing was putting a number of
them up at auction on eBay for charity, ended up going for 480 pounds or a little over 600 US dollars and about 100 bucks in shipping. Obviously, these computers
aren't worth that but it's for charity, so whatever. This was 100% of the profits going to to the Brighter Futures Wiltshire to help the NHS. So yeah, all the folks over there doing some
rather difficult work, dealing with all the
things going on right now. And so, yeah, I just wanna
support the charity anyway, so I donated to it and
also bid on this in case. I don't know, just to
see if I'd win and I did. But I mean, looking at this thing. All that work and maybe it survived. If it doesn't, whatever
it was just for charity, I didn't really need this computer exactly but I'm gonna use it if it works, I just, again, want to support the auction and the good cause that it was going for. Let's go ahead and open it up. Where is my, it's here somewhere. I don't know where my box
cutter is but this will do. Hey, I got a note in
here and some capacitors. Dear client, thank you so much
for your amazing bid to win this PC and to make a difference
for my local hospital. I hope it brings much happiness
to you and my collection. It certainly will it already has and I haven't even gotten to it yet. Best wishes to you too, Neil. Now, thanks for the capacitors, always handy because yeah,
a lot of these machines, again, check out his videos if you wanna see like
some of the other work that was done to some of them. They needed recapping. Wow. This is just gonna come right apart. We got some additional rails and we got some 120 megs of PC 133. Yeah, he said he would send
along some extra parts, which is quite nice, quite considerate. He ended up with a decent
number of extra parts I believe by the end. It's just the box, the box is terrible. I hear some things
rattling around in there. Yeah, not a good sound and here we go. That is the computer. Let's move this camera, got some dings and scrapes and all that but it had that
before it was shipped out. These have been very well used and worn over the years
but he did a good job cleaning them all up and windows 2000 and 98. Maybe I'll install 2000 on here I think. He has 98 on here right now. The drives seem to be secure but I don't know what that is. Let's just open it up and see. Love how easy these
NetVistas are to get into. So that, this exhaust fan just flapping around, I guess it just came loose or something. I was hoping it wasn't like
some plastic piece broken off and dead I mean. Can't quite get it to
slide in the right spot, should be right there but
whatever, I'll get it later. Oh yeah the lovely Pentium 4 system, again pretty simple, these
aren't worth what I paid but worth is completely
pointless in this respect since it was a charitable cause. Yeah, looks like this
one does come with one of those Nvidia cards, Vanta 16, similar to a computer I had back in 2001. I'm quite curious to check this out. I'm wondering if this is
one of the recapped ones, some of those do look a little different. Nice work, Neil. Very clean, oh man, especially seeing what it
looked like before in the video, my goodness. I wonder if that CD
drive is original or not. Let me know if you have
any ideas for upgrades or anything for this,
especially once you see what it can or can't do
once we get it booted up. One thing I'm feeling
on the bottom though, is it doesn't feel like the feet are, yeah, they're not all there are they? I don't know if one of them
maybe came off inside there but there's one of the feet missing, it's not holding level. Well, looked through the bubble wrap, couldn't find the other foot. So I'm just gonna replace it with some of these
little furniture dealios 'cause I actually quite like
these more than like rubber, in some cases. Yeah, they're often the perfect size too, look at that, wonderful. Check it out, now I can
just slide it around, it's not gonna get stuck
in anything or yeah. All right, lemme go ahead and set this up with some peripherals and see what is installed on here, although I don't think much. One thing to make sure
of though, this coming from the UK will need to
switch it from 230 to 115 there, otherwise, we would
have some power issues. [upbeat music] Yeah, looking pretty good. Get it all plugged in, whoa. I guess it wanted to turn on by itself. All right, yeah. Nice. Media test failure. Hmm. PXEE6, what does that mean? I don't know but it's loading Windows 98 so, that is a thing. It's finding the monitor,
well, so far so good. [Hot Wheels music] - Greetings. [laughs] - Yeah, that was
definitely an LGR startup. - Thank you very much for watching. [laughs] - Dude, that's a nice touch. That's pretty funny. Okay, so that's the exit
window sound and the startup, [Hot Wheels music] - Greetings. - I forget what video
that's from, I wanna say Hot Wheels Stunt Truck
Driver or something. [Hot Wheels music]
Yup. - Greetings.
- The Hot Wheels, I was right about the Hot Wheels part. It's the Hot Wheels computer restoration. [laughs] Neil, you're a dork, that's awesome. Okay, so let's see what all
we've actually got in here. We've got lots, a lot more RAM
than I thought, 383-ish megs. I wonder if that means
there's a, no that's like 384, so that's about right. So the Vanta, that is when I'm wondering if that's like a 16 meg card, eight meg, I don't know, SoundMAX, integrated digital audio, we're
gonna have to replace that. I mean, we don't have
to but I probably will registered to RMC, what! We have to re-register
it, my computer now Neil, you can't have it back. Right, so let's hear
what these sound like. I'm curious about the media capabilities. I mean, you've got probably, hopefully, if you installed all of the media on here. Indeed, we did not install all the media on here, doggone it sir,
I need all the media. It did at least copy
over the Windows 98 cd, so that's good, so we can do that. I always do this anytime I'm setting up a Windows 9x computer, I install all the multimedia
man because you have to. And the accessories, like
you want the wallpaper and the games, didn't even install games. What kind of RetroManCave are
you running over there sir? We don't need quick view, that's stupid. We do need the screensavers, desktop themes, yes, please. Don't necessarily need web server. Yeah, it looks like it just
one of the default settings which is understandable. He was doing a whole lot of computers. Okay, so we should just
be able to point it to, here we go, let me get the camera set up in a better spot here
while it's doing its thing, there we go. So now we should have
MIDI files to play with. Really we only need one. [PASSPORT.MID plays] What a dinky little mini wave table. That's pretty cool though. [PASSPORT.MID plays] Add some reverb. [laughs] [PASSPORT.MID plays] And that's not the worst
sounding wave table I've ever heard at all but it's got some weird
little sounds like listen to this instrument that, [PASSPORT.MID plays] [laughs] that little synth right there, what a weird little thing. Reverb sounds awful but yeah, that's fine. It's, I've never heard
of this, 3Com EuSynth that's just, that's interesting to me. The SoundMax, man I've
had a couple of systems with SoundMAX chipsets like
that but I've never seen one with this, that's cool. Yay, new things. I wonder if we can change it
over to like AdLib emulation. It does not have that. That begs the question,
what is DOS compatibility gonna sound like, if any? That's always the thing
with these computers. It's always fun to mess with
them because of that too, because yeah, you never know. Okay, so we do have some
Sound Blaster emulation set to 300, let's move that to 330. 220, IO51 that's pretty, enable please. 3d effects, no. You must reboot your machine. Let's do that. - Thank you very much for watching. [laughs] - That is so dumb. Oh, what is this, PXE-E61,
I'm gonna look that up. PXE stands for pre-boot
execution environment. Okay, to boot up using
a network and if it, okay oh so yeah, I don't need that at all. I'm gonna just turn that
off in the BIOS next time. I don't like extraneous
error messages man, even if they're not hurting anything. [Hot Wheels music] - Greetings.
- Dang it! Stop using Task Scheduler. Get rid of all these
things while we're at it. I'm sure everyone has their
own particular Windows 98 base setup that they go
with but I've got mine and I stick to it. Alright, so now let's
see if we can change over to emulation of another,
well we still can. Not for MIDIs, so I guess MIDI is straight up just
gonna be this EuSynth, but we should have some
DOS compatibility now. All right, well, let's try a dadgum dos game real quick. The choice for the first one is obvious, gonna go with "Duke 3D Atomic." Put the CD drive to the test. Duke Nukem time. Actually, before we do
that, let's check here. See if we have anything, we do. So, it's loading CD drivers autoexec just see I mean, which is cool. That's more than I thought
it would have honestly but that's good. Yeah, again, just let's just
run this through the prompt. There we go. CD-ROM spinning up
doing it's CD-ROM stuff. I don't know what speed that is, but it's pretty speedy
considering how quick it's moving over that group file. LG CD-ROM CRD8484B. It's a 48 speed, that is the IBM version though, LG sold them in a black faceplate but IBM has the IBM beige. All right, 515 Sound Blaster. Probably the Sound Blaster Pro. [electronic sound] It sounds like it's adding reverb to that. [electronic sound] Yeah, what a funky thing. Nothing's enabled in there but of course that is just the synth. I mean 3d effects are not
applied to digital audio. I specifically turned that off. Let me just try general MIDI here at 330. [Duke Nukem theme plays] Nice, see how it goes. Here with that Sound
Blaster emulation is like [electronic sound] yeah, that is definitely kind of garbled, crunchy, noisy interesting.
[Duke3D music] Oh, that's terrible. I honestly didn't expect
much better though. [laughs] Yeah, you hear that? It's like oh man, it's like it's running
through a bag of chips. - Come get some. - Oh no. Ah, that's inverted, turn that off. [gun fires] Yeah, that's just what you get with some of these integrated sound chips back then, the were not good. [gun fires] So you're definitely gonna be dropping like a Sound Blaster live or something. Something cool in here,
maybe a Sound Blaster [gun fires] 16 or AWE 64 or any number of
the billion other thing, even like on R a "Vortex 2" would be pretty excellent,
lots of choices. [gun fires] Of course we are restricted to PCI only because
there are no ISA slots. Yeah. All right, well, Dude Nukem works just not very well. Maybe it's the Sound Blaster Pro part because I was telling it
to try and emulate the pro, maybe it'll do better with
another one, I don't know. I love testing this kind
of stuff out honestly, especially when it's a system
I've never used before, may sound like I'm complaining and I'm actually just having fun. So let's see, sound card type. Let's try the 2.1, no, let's try 16 because maybe that's what this. [electronic sound] Nope, still sounds like, horrible. Let's just try compatible. [electronic sound] Nah, man, it's just not
a good sound chip at all for this anyway. I mean, it's probably
fine for Windows things, I don't know, we'll try
that here in a minute. One more thing I wanna try though, let's put it back to 16 and then let's try a mono. That's way better. Mono 44 kilohertz. [electronic sound] Wow, that's even weirder,
did you hear that? [electronic sound] Dude and one other thing
I wanna try, AdLib. I don't know if it even has
AdLib or FM synth emulation but, it doesn't. It doesn't have it at all. Just what I thought because I didn't see anything in the control panel or anything else about it. So it does 330 h for the general MIDI. That's, again, pretty typical
for these kinds of things. These are fascinating man. This is neat, okay. So, we should at least have
sound that's not crunchy. Nevermind. [laughs] Whatever and I would try it in DOS mode but as we saw earlier, it doesn't even have, it's not configured. For that, we might need
some like DOS mode drivers or whatever. So let's get something else like a Windows game here. This is a Pentium 4 right? Like 1.6 or something gigahertz, yep, a Socket 478 Pentium 4, 1.6 gigahertz with all these things. 256 K, L2 Cache, got a IBM manufactured
Intel chipset motherboard i845 chipset, interesting. 384 megs of SDRAM PC 133 and I still don't know
exactly how much memory is on the video card, but I'm guessing 16 it is a Vanta 16 so I think that means 16 megs, actually let me just
run DxDiag and get that. Now, yeah, 15.5 megs, so about
16 megabytes of video memory. Not particularly great, but that will let us play some
some games so let's do it. So now, let's try some "Unreal Tournament" Game of the Year edition and then "Need for
Speed:Porsche Unleashed." In my experience, these
are the type of games that are pretty much ideal for a system like this at least with the half decent video and sound card, which this does not have
but let's try it anyway. This will install Direct
X seven, good times, let that do its thing. We'll get a floppy disk really quick while this is installing, okay, got a disk filled with some
bombastic fiddle-faddle also known as "Planet x 3" so let's insert that. It is reading. Nice, well, thanks for
fixing that up Neil, I was fully anticipating
fixing it up myself but he was so kind as to
do it so I didn't have to. And it's so refreshing to have a fully working system here. I am so very often
getting machines from eBay that like 50,000 things have to be done to them before you even
see a hint of it on video. This is just like un-box
it and here we go. Which one is gonna to complete first? "Planet x3" or "Unreal Tournament"? Got ye, we will see. Looks like it's gonna be PX3. Yep, it is, floppy drive wins. How exciting. Of course we won't have any
music on here I don't think because it uses AdLib. Eh we can use PC speaker of course. [PC speaker music] Yeah, not the loudest
PC speaker but it works. Yay. All right. Floppy drive very much working. With how bad the Sound Blaster support was, I just had to
see if maybe it was drivers or software or something. So I actually went and found
some updated SoundMAX drivers through IBM's old FTP or an archive of it and as far as I can tell, these were the latest ones for this model, it's like a 25 megabyte file,
seemed pretty substantial. So yeah, I got them copied
over to a USB thumb drive here and yeah, the USB does work on here. Unfortunately, the front
ports don't seem to, so I had to plug it in the
back but whatever, minor thing, I can hopefully fix that. Anyway, with the new
sound drivers installed, it actually has another icon down here. So, it got rid of that
other thing, the EuSynth and this is what it's got now. So yeah, a lot more options, especially in terms of MIDI music. So look at this, there's a new one here, let me let me open a MIDI file. So you know how passport
had that weird synth and it was all twangy and just odd, now listen to it now. [PASSPORT.MID plays] Yeah. That is a lot closer to what I expected. [PASSPORT.MID plays] Yeah, everything sounds
better, reverb, chorus, the just the bass
instruments that it's using. So, that helped that. Let's go over into "Duke 3d" and see what Sound
Blaster emulation is like, because unfortunately, it got rid of that little tab here
for setting things up. So I don't even know if
it's gonna work anymore. I'm gonna assume it's the same settings but again, it's not letting me check in the control panel. [electronic sound] That sounds clear now. That's a thing. Music general MIDI 330, oh, that's not good. Well, it seems to have
broken the general MIDI now wow, it's just like muted in DOS and yeah, I mean I forgot
the software synth balance turned all the way up, I mean I did before
but I mean it still is. So, either way, we should
have like nice sound in Duke now, just no music I guess? [electronic sound] No, that still sounds really corrupt and garbly and crunchy. - Lets Rock. - Oh, that's terrible, nevermind. [laughs] You know what? I'm just gonna say this
is a garbage sound chip, especially for Sound Blaster emulation. No real surprise but I'm surprised at how bad, oh dear. Let's try some Windows games though. Yeah, "Unreal Tournament" time. I don't recall this
playing particularly well with the Nvidia Vanta card
that I had back in the day, mine was 16 megs as well but
mine was like the TNT 2 Vanta [electronic sound] What was that? And the system restarted. Well, reinstalled the
old drivers for the sound 'cause it was just super unstable with any Windows games
I was trying to run. So, let's try that again. Yeah, it was not shut down
properly last time it, did not. There we go. [unreal music] 640 by 480, 16 bit color depth, it supports 32 but
we're not gonna go there and it selected medium
skin detail by default. So let's just stick with that. Oh, look at that frame rate. It's trying.
[guns fire] Man this brings back memories
of like bad performance, yet still entirely playable, whoops. Yeah for a short period in time. [gun fires]
- Headshot. - I definitely played this
on a TNT 2 Vanta, 16 meg card on a Compaq Presario [guns fire] Then I upgraded to a Voodoo 3 and things were a little better. - You like that? - Yeah, there's something about
the not perfect frame rate that is oddly alluring. I don't know again, like
weird memories I guess. - Killing spree. [gun fires] Headshot. [gun fires] Headshot [gun fires] Killing spree. [laughs] - You keep spawning up and
I'm gonna keep killing you. - Headshot.
- There we go. It's over now. - Headshot, you are the winner. [upbeat music] - All right, let's try out
some "Need for Speed Five" see how that goes, again, I
don't remember it being great on this card but this is
a lot faster processor than I had back then. So, I'm probably even miss remembering my own performance memories. 640 by 40 by 16, high
and very high settings [electronic music] it'll be fine. Give me that 72 911s, yeah, nice and red, classic. [car engines rev] - Three, two, one, go. - Yep this definitely runs better than it did for me back then. Higher processing speed
for sure is helping and a lot more RAM but
yeah, even with this Vanta, [laughs] this is way better man. I'm going way too fast, oh man I would have been so happy if NFS five ran this well for me back, even on the Voodoo 3 like when I installed
that, I don't think it ran as good then. Yeah, Pentium 4 baby. Yeah I always wanted a Pentium 4 like so badly at the time. This game just had so many problems running on the different systems we had access to, me my friends, with my Compaq Presario being like a 750 or 850 megahertz, whatever
it was, I wanna say an AMD Duron or something. A friend had a Pentium three laptop, neither of them ran them
any anywhere close to this, especially now with the GPUs they had. Like I said, adding a Voodoo 3 did help but even then, like, you
still need a quicker processor and things like that. Obviously this has a lot more RAM, I'm going too fast. [car engine revs] But yeah, even just swapping out for a better video card in this machine would make this an excellent Windows 98 gaming PC. Sound card too of course but that's less important, I suppose. It would be nice to have
one with better DOS support of course. Oh yeah. [laughs] [upbeat music] Good old "Need for
Speed: Porsche Unleashed" - You've won the race. - Yes, I did, thanks for noticing. Well, well, well, we got to try like a
strategy game or something here 'cause this is like
a great machine for that. All the processing and the video card is more than enough for like, oh yeah. Oh hey, it's done. Yay. [upbeat music] [ominous music] Get some green over
here, time to attack 'em. Anyway, ideal system for strategy [ominous music] and anything that's not
ridiculously graphically intensive but like I said, even with a just a
simple video card upgrade to like a 30-64 megabyte card something like that would be excellent. What if they put like a GeForce 2 or something in here, that'd be awesome. Yeah, kill 'em. [ominous music] Get them boys. Or not, just get got boys. Wow, so it goes, good old "Age Kings" and there we go, that is the IBM NetVista. What is this 6792, whatever it is man it's not a RetroManCave NetVista. Well now, it's the LGR NetVista. NetVista, I'm saying that word a lot because that's what it is. And yeah, this was not quite
the video I intended to make this week, I had three other
projects fall apart completely. This actually was gonna be an LGR blurb on my other channel but yeah, like I said, everything else fell apart. So, this turned into an LGR
video, I guess whatever. I hope you enjoyed seeing this regardless and yeah, do go and check
out the original videos of our RMC restoring these things and perhaps donate to the charity if you're feeling charitable. Once again, that's about it. Let me know what you
think of this machine. If you had any experience with it, regardless though, we
should be getting back to some more structured
scripted LGR fair next week. So, hope you stick around and as always, thank you very much for watching.
The system sounds though 😂😂😂
Aw man I'd totally forgotten about the fun of customizing your Windows installation. "All the multimedia! Nope, don't need Wordpad..."
Reminds me of the computer labs in my high school back in the late 90s.
O/U how many times LGR has played through the opening sequence of Hollywood Holocaust on his channel: I'm going to say 25 but even that feels a little low.
Glorious!