Old Pentium 4

[PoppaDre]

I bought an old computer case that I wanted to mod and play with my new airbrush on. The guy I bought it off of included the motherboard processor and PSU with the case. I had some old hardware lying around and decided to throw in some RAM and and old IDE drive and managed to get Windows XP booted up on the P4 inside. Has 4GB of ram and just the onboard graphic for now.

Anyone have any ideas for what to do with the thing? I hate throwing out old hardware but have a lot of modern things. My thought was to put on some emulators that the Pi3 can't handle too well (PS1, N64) and put it by my tv for some retro achievements.

 

[DinohScene]

Turn it into a small fileserver?
Pentium 4 is horribly oudated.

 

[paulttt]

I bought an old computer case that I wanted to mod and play with my new airbrush on. The guy I bought it off of included the motherboard processor and PSU with the case. I had some old hardware lying around and decided to throw in some RAM and and old IDE drive and managed to get Windows XP booted up on the P4 inside. Has 4GB of ram and just the onboard graphic for now.

Anyone have any ideas for what to do with the thing? I hate throwing out old hardware but have a lot of modern things. My thought was to put on some emulators that the Pi3 can't handle too well (PS1, N64) and put it by my tv for some retro achievements.

Build your own router.

 

[PoppaDre]

I was debating connecting it to my network to share roms and game saves. Just wondering about the security issues. I currently have a i5-3570 w/ 1050ti as my main clean gaming rig, and a old phenom ii 945 with 5770 as my pc i don't mind getting dirty. Might still have at it with my dremel and airbrush. This is the ad with some pics

https://www.kijiji.ca/v-view-details.html?adId=1298541063

 

[Minox]

I'm not sure if this is anything that would interest you, but personally I would see if Windows 98SE could be installed on it for nostalgia factors. I know Pentium 4 was one of the last generations where it was possible to do so and even a built-in GPU should be enough for a lot of older games.

 

[PoppaDre]

I'm not sure if this is anything that would interest you, but personally I would see if Windows 98SE could be installed on it for nostalgia factors. I know Pentium 4 was one of the last generations where it was possible to do so and even a built-in GPU should be enough for a lot of older games.

I did have an old P3 that I put on some old nostalgic games on like Duke and Commander Keen. Even had a big old mechanical keyboard for it too but ended up selling it to make some space. Had more demand than this old XP unit

 

[Taffy]

one time i found an ancient pentium 2 in a laptop

 

[FAST6191]

I did have an old P3 that I put on some old nostalgic games on like Duke and Commander Keen. Even had a big old mechanical keyboard for it too but ended up selling it to make some space. Had more demand than this old XP unit

That was DOS era and readily handled by dosbox and similar things. I dare say Minox was heading more towards late stage 3dfx/glide api, s3, dos4gw, windows 95 based stuff, early 3d accelerator and such games. Many of those are an absolute pig to get running even on XP, never mind 7 and up and a lot of newer hardware has... limited or iffy support for the older standards (a lot of it kind of went away or stopped being patched for regressions around the first directX10 cards, and even the various flavours of 9 were not so hot at times). It is usually possible, there are patches from someone, emulator layers (I recall playing with 3dfx emulation some time around 2000) and you could always run a straight virtual machine but if you have hardware about as good as it got* then why not.

Another link because why not
http://www.mobygames.com/search/quick?q=Minimum+DirectX+Version+Required+:+DirectX

*I know you said no GPU but that is not such a problem, equally you can probably pick a basic one up for next to nothing -- some of the tip top/final version for the format cards are expensive as you like (see the prices of some of the last manufactured AGP cards these days and compare them to their PCIe equivalents) but something that will do is a different matter.

one time i found an ancient pentium 2 in a laptop

You know you are getting old...