outsdr | Darklord ... Mk 1.0! (Reply)

Recently, I talked about the building of Darklord Mk 3.0. I've been going through old archive disks, in preparation of making new archive disks, and I found all the pictures I took from the making of Darklord Mk 1.0 in March 2002. Which I now proudly show to the general public for the first time, along with what little comments I had written down at the time, in italics. I took the pictures intending to write a letter to Andy, who was serving in the Navy at the time, but never did.

In the beginning... there was an obsolete Pentium 166mhz computer just waiting to be upgraded into something with power, something that had a chance of taking over the world...

There's the wall with all the pictures, and the computer desk, and everything. Yeah, I'm messy. Oh well.

The new motherboard, made by PcChips. It’s a standard ATX design, with 5 pci slots and one AGP, built in ethernet, modem, sound, video, and usb... not bad for $107 dollars. (I still have the cd-rom of drivers that came with this board.)

The RAM chip cooling system... neato.

And the 512 megabyte RAM chip... sweet. (It was my first home-built computer- I was very excited! That RAM cost me over $100.)

The CPU and the cooling fan... at some point, I’ll probably get a better cooling fan... of course, there’s lots of things I want to add to the computer. All in good time.

Okay, I’ve got the RAM installed, and the CPU in place. (It was an AMD chip, it turns out, and 1.2GHZ in speed!)

(I don't seem to have made any more notes, unfortunately. So I'll just describe things now as well as I can.)

Thermal grease! I hadn't discovered Arctic Silver yet.

Ah. I still work in my underwear 50% of the time at home.

The CPU cooler installed. The entire build process was nerve wracking; I knew what I was doing in theory, but I was very afraid of messing something up. Such as the CPU.

The shiny new case.

The motherboard is assembled and ready to be installed. Here I show it with the old case that I initially wanted to upgrade; it was a dell, and everything in it was proprietary, down to the power supply connectors. I hate working on Dell machines to this day.

I'm not sure what that is I'm holding.

Putting in the motherboard.

Sweet!

To this day, the spaghetti mass of wires coming from a power supply is a little daunting at first.

In goes the floppy drive.

Time for a quick power test.

It works!

I needed moar USB.

At first I thought this was a shot of the USB card in pace, but now I realize it's a shot of the DELL motherboard. What a malacious beast that thing was. The processor was on a daughterboard built into a steel cage, along with all the expansion cards, and it all slid into place.

Screwdrivers. Utterly fascinating.

Taking a phone call.

Putting in the USB card.

Hard drive cooler!

I splurged on a shiny new 40gb Maxtor drive. $100 or so. I think I still have it somewhere.

Taking a phone call from Andy!

The video had some issues at first.

I ended up buying a super-cheap video card (8 megabytes of RAM!) I didn't know squat about them then, and had blown most of my budget already, so just got what I could. It wasn't until months later that I found out that Black & White was supposed to run at more than 5 frames per second. They were very smooth frames ... slow motion instead of flipbook. Very bizarre.