Reviving the hobby

2025-08-18

Rebuilding my retro computer once again

It had been about a year and a half since I last used my retro PC. Back in summer 2023, two days before a LAN party, the motherboard I got from the school just died. Even after a full rebuild my computer wouldn’t even post. The day before the LAN party, I took the computer with me to my friend’s place, and when we tried to power it on… it magically booted up first try. But of course, when we arrived at our friend’s countryside summer house, it just died again. After tons of RAM swapping, we managed to get it running once again. Fortunately during the LAN party it didn’t break down and we could enjoy playing old games, but once I got home, I had zero motivation to deal with that cursed setup anymore.

By spring 2024, my brother’s PSU broke, so I gave him the one I had in my retro PC. A few months later, my friend kept calling me to come play WoW with him and revive our retro PC hobby, but without a PSU I couldn’t do anything with my problematic machine. I kept planning and dreaming though. We discovered Escargot (revived MSN Messenger on custom servers) and Legacy Update (lets you patch Windows XP with its final updates for a bit more security online). I added those to my list of things that I’d like to try out when I’d finally have a working retro computer again.

January 2025 was when I finally jumped back into the hobby. By the end of the month I had not one, but two PSUs of which one of them is a smaller SFX unit I’m saving for a future server build. A few days later I dusted off my neglected computer, and to no surprise, it didn’t boot. I expected that, after all that happened before our last LAN party. I completely lost trust in that setup that I had. I tried everything: swapping RAM, CPUs, disconnecting anything not essential, even testing different motherboards with different RAM and processors, but no luck. Either no POST at all, or just RAM error beeps. Sometimes one stick wouldn’t post at all, two sticks would just beep memory errors.

By February my friend and I rebuilt the whole thing with parts from his collection. I didn’t even want to look at my old, cursed hardware anymore, even if on paper it was better. Sure, it was technically a slight downgrade, but I was just happy to see the Windows XP loading screen again. The new build consisted of another ASUS P5KPL-AM, an Intel Core 2 Duo E7400, and slower 2x1GB 400MHz RAM. Don’t get me wrong, compared to XP standards, it’s still a late-2000s setup and a good one at that. A few weeks later I added a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme sound card from my own part collection, my first ever dedicated sound card experience. The GPU stayed the same: Nvidia GeForce GT610. We still haven’t managed to find a better, or a working replacement.

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Time for multiplayer

Now that I had a working retro PC again, it was time again for constant tinkering and gaming. I installed Escargot MSN, patched XP with Legacy Update, and switched from Mypal to Supermium after some sites would not load with Mypal. We dove into Unreal Tournament, using a community patch to access servers that are still alive. At first, we were just messaging each other on MSN after matches, but eventually we wanted voice chat. Ideally on the retro machines themselves, not with messy audio setups across multiple PCs.

We tried running our own TS3 server, but it turned out to be impossible: no XP client and modern server combo worked together. That’s when the depressing thought hit us, XP’s days are long gone, and it’s a miracle we can still squeeze this much out of it, that so many things still work online. But for how long? Just as we were about to give up, we found forum posts revealing that there are a ton of public TS2 servers running. At first, the idea of joining a public server didn’t sound great, because anyone could pop into our channel, but when we tried it, it was an odd experience… the servers were empty. We sat in one of hundreds of empty servers for hours without anyone disturbing us. Maybe people were in hidden, private channels, or maybe there really are just hundreds of abandoned community servers still running, we still don’t really know.

As I mentioned earlier, we played a lot of Unreal Tournament, but we couldn’t play a game that intense all day… especially when you suck at it. Once I got the hang of it though, it was really fun, but we still wanted to try many other games. Next on the list: Diablo II. We hadn’t played it before, but after a lot of digging we figured out how to play it co-op. We downloaded the game from europebattle.net, which allowed us to play on their servers. We could easily download the game for Windows XP from their website. At first it was confusing, but eventually we learned we could host private games just for friends. The full playthrough is still pending though, because meanwhile I also started experimenting with Minecraft.

I found the right Java version to make it run, and to play we used the Betacraft launcher, first I created a singleplayer beta 1.8.1 world to test the waters, it was super nostalgic to play my most played game on the OS I first played it on. We really wanted to try the mod BetterThanAdventure but my friend's retro PC couldn't handle a modded playthrough. Since we were playing on the retro computers, we went for a Beta 1.7.3 server because thats the trendy oldschool vanilla Minecraft version nowadays. Of course, I hosted the actual server on my modern machine. And that was it, Minecraft completely took over the next few months. I’ll probably write a separate post about the world we played on and the whole beta experience later.