Ah, the age-old question "Can it run Doom?", yes, an ancient firewall can run Doom.

You might also consider a USB sound card paired with a 3D accelerator PCI video card.

Very interesting video! I had no idea old embedded hardware like this was sometimes just a single board computer on the inside. Makes me want to go to my local electronics recycler and see what turns up!

This was a fantastic project, thank you for sharing. That will help to keep my eye open for something like that and maybe doing a similar project. Congrats on the build, really cool.

Honestly, I just want to say, as someone that has been soldering since age 8 ish and own some decent soldering equipment. You did a fantastic clean job on that multilayer board with that bulky basic iron.

this is so cool. i'm not sure how i got recommended this video when it's your first one ever, but i'm glad i did. i just subscribed and now i'm going to watch the rest of your videos!

Really awesome for taking something from the scrapyard into something that can be used once again in a different use. Subscribed!

Nice idea turning a firewall into a nice little retro-gaming machine! For some reason KZfaq suggested this video to me. Subbed!! And I'm going to watch your other videos, too!! Looking forward to your upcoming videos!🤘

I did the same thing with a different "firewall appliance" known as a Cisco PIX-520. It was a fun build in spite of needing to replace the case. Thankfully, it was a normal Pentium II ATX motherboard with the venerable 440BX chipset inside. For your setup here, I recommend finding an ITX or micro-ATX case and going from there.

This is absolutely awesome for an otherwise considered useless piece of e waste. I never thought I’d see the day someone used a piece of network hardware of all things to use for a retro build. I’m subbing immediately 👌

This is absolutely amazing reuse of old hardware.

I love this project idea. I would love to see you turn this into a Windows 98 all-in-one PC, which is certainly something that is at least uncommon if not nonexistent. Would be really cool to see a small form-factor build like that that incorporates a modern idea of what a slim form factor would be but with retro Hardware.

So glad I found your channel. Best content I've watched since LGR!

Very well put together video, had no idea those used desktop pc boards inside. Looking forward to more content :)

Verry nice project ! Good job ... now I regret throwing out old watch guard firewalls

would not have known this was a "first" video. It was great. Keep it up

Nice video and great usage of that old firewall 😬👍👍

This is very impressive!

Recapping through-hole is always so satisfying

wow thats a throwback the s3 savage 4, one of my first "3d " Graphics cards

I'm subscribing now, because when in a few years this channel got 100k+ subscribers I will have my bragging rights to say that I was one of the first to follow this dude. Great content and stile of presentation. Keep up good work!

KZfaq recommendations brought me here, and I was all ready to make a comment about how great it is to discover a new channel with such high quality. But then at the end you hit us with the "this is my first ever KZfaq video" - woah! 😁 This channel is destined for great things. Keep up the good work my friend!

i just discovered your channel, and wow you are indeed really cool, and do cool projects! keep going, i love the videostyle.

Just stumbled across your channel glad i did amazing presentation

I love such usage of old hardware. For certain a better and more authentic experience than either DOSbox or PCem.

BRILLIANT WORK! 👍😃

That’s Great. I have an old Hp “Table’ette” thingy thing, from a hospital. It’s almost an inch thick and has 2 60gb Zif drives and a DVD burner. Remote, pencil and fingerprint scanner. It has one of these VIA CPUs in it. Only driver I could find worked fine with 2000. Xp rejected the driver for some reason. I packed it up in a box years ago. I’ve been thinking of it recently. Maybe... God Bless.

Cool built 👍

i wish i had the technical know how and the electronic knowledge to do something like this... this is amazing.

Fantastic production sir, smashed the subscribe button

Real nice project and first video! Count me in! Subscribed! PS: "Odd and Obsolete" is what I think whenever I look into a mirror at myself.....😂😂

you are really underrated, i really love your work

This is so frickin cool !!!!! and this pops up after a had another look at the history Cyrix COOL.

Damn that's cool! I'd love to get my hands on one of these to make a micro 98 PC. Just imagine, a miniature beige box 😍

Never thought I'd see a Clavister this old. I work with the NetWall E20 and E80s mostly in my day job.

As soon as you started talking, i subscribed lol, a nice little pf sense box too.

this was very nice and interesting to watch, good job! 😉 you could try to find a WIn98 compatible USB sound card and use PCI slot for video (but probably will have to trade the DOS compatibility)

Very Cool idea

nice piece of hardware

Please keep posting :D, i loved your video

you're doing much better work than I do and with much crappier tools, I feel ashamed but now obviously I need to subscribe for more xD

This video made me sub! Great work!

Keep it up, thank you for sharing :)

For your first video this is really excellent! Nice job! Interesting that there wasn't 3D acceleration for that chip - I wonder if this was post-2000 and perhaps the Win2K drivers are better? But yeah no *real* DOS for Win2k of course (Although 2k is my retro OS of choice because I prefer those early OpenGL games and they all run fine for me) I wonder if you can get a video card & sound card combined? Would be interesting... But yeah, some of the ideas about getting a PCI riser I think are going a bit far... It's gotta fit in that snazzy case of course. IMO though with 4x ethernet ports it makes more sense to use the thing as a Linux/BSD server or something.

I have that same helping hand, I hot glued mine to a heavy flooring sample from Home Depot to make it more stable.

Snyggt jobbat!

Interesting system like!

I'm very impressed

Cool project! Get a IDE DOM for storage, CF are prone to failure in heavy use scenario such as a systemdisk. I'd look for a low PCI riser (or on flexcable) in combination with a lowprofile/wedgestyle soundcard to keep the build really compact. And I concur on including a Voodoo card if you go with a dual PCI riser.

I wonder if that PCI slot supports the feature of having a PCI rizer board with multiple connectors. That would help with the expandability great project by the way !

Games I used to run on similar hardware (laptop) were Age 1 & 2, Tomb Raider 3 & 4, Soul Reaver, NFS III, Command and Conquer Red Alert demo, and many others. I'd imagine those may run well on this computer. and yes, Back then I had NeoMagic which ALSO didn't support 3D at all. 🤣 A PC like this is nolstalgic. I would have loved playing on it back in the day, that's for sure! Just would have been scratching my head about the lack of a CD-ROM Drive which every game I played used.

OMG. did anyone else get goosebumbs when the win 98 startup played? nope just me okay...

The win 98 splash sound brings back memories..😆 Also this would great for snes or n64 emulator games.

Another option is a micro ATX case. Line it up so the sound card slots into the first rear bracket and get a USB header bracket and VGA header bracket and you have 3 out of the 4 slots filled. Connect your card adapter to a 2.5" drive adapter and mount it in the case and adapt the front panel (power switch + LEDs) and you have a surprisingly-capable little box. Heck if you want to get really-creative you can get an internal powered USB hub bay that takes SATA power, and then connect that and your motherboard power supply to a switching unit like a Meanwell and have a proper IEC output for the power supply. I think it could turn out great! With that powered USB hub, you can instead attach an external one internally to expand it's capabilities, utilizing adapters to give you CD-ROM, Floppy and Sound. Then the PCI slot could be for a proper graphics card.

here before this channel is at 100k subs

Reminds me of some old Watchguard Fireboxses.. The just had an Pentium 200 (i think mmx) inside.. you just had to have to add a graphics card when opening the case to the system without the brackets, put some keyboard on them (i think they also had some standard ps2 connection and voila you had a normal pc booting with some onboard storage, but you could also add extra devices via some ide port.

Neat! Not a bad first video either. Are there any other ports or headers on the board that could be used? I know that there are PCI risers that can give you extra slots, so it may be possible to use both the sound card and a GeForce FX 5200, but idk if a riser would work on that motherboard. It could be something that needs to be supported by the chipset, or in BIOS.

Awesome work! Just for fun, can you test the power consumption on it while emulating, then compare to original native consoles and then also in the other direction to modern android tv boxes. Obviously it's of no concern, I just think it would be interesting.

I have 2 firebox firewalls with one using a socket 7 and other a 370, ill get around to them sometime to do the same

S3 savage. My recollection is that s3 savage is one of those 3d accelerators that couldn't accelerate a slideshow, let alone a game. How did you find the Pinout of the VGA header, and how did you figure out that it's x86?

You can install on pci slot a good 3dfx video card and for the sound you can find a usb sound card that is working on win 98

The video out connector looks very similar to what you used to get on older GPU's especially low profile ones, where you would have a VGA out on its own small PCI bracket.

VIA created the Mini-ITX motherboard format, and the CPU, graphics and chipset were similar to what's in this firewall. They were a bit underpowered, but were intended for industrial uses - digital signage, controlling equipment, and such - so the relatively slow graphics weren't a problem. The same hardware is often found in Thin Client computers, often in much smaller cases. It's easy to find something with similar or better hardware - I have several, one with the later VIA Nano CPU at 1.2GHz, and the graphics are improved somewhat too. They usually lack the PCI port, so sound support in DOS can be tricky. Phil's Computer Lab here on KZfaq has made several videos on Thin Clients, turning them into retro gaming boxes.

Great vid! Little tip since you only have

Now I'm looking for an old firewall to convert. I'll add it to he list.

At first I thought the thumbnail had a VCR in it, and I was thinking: "wait, can I really turn THAT into a PC?"

Great video, have an old firewall sitting somewhere in the basement, gonna check what it is. What did you use for removing solder from the holes? I usually use the vaccum tubes to get rid of the solder, but this seems like a great alternative when that doesn't work fully.

Great video. If possible, try installing Linux on this hardware with some lightweight desktop like i3, icewm or even lxde. There are plenty of games and emulators that might run ok, like openTTD, openRCT2, freeDOOM and SNES... If there's gpu driver available for this one.

How about a plexiglas top-plate for the original case, then drill and tap holes for stand-offs to hold the sound card parallel to the motherboard. You'd need a flexible PCI bracket adapter but they're cheap enough online. I'm curious what in-game renderer you used with Unreal - it offers a bunch of choices. What about trying a Glide wrapper like DgVoodoo? Or you could get a flexible PCI connector that delivers two slots instead of just one, and then you could run a sound card AND a Voodoo2 stacked on top of the original case! Pass the onboard VGA into the Voodoo2's 2D input and then your monitor connects straight to the Voodoo card! That would be right up my ally!

Freaking well done! Where on earth did you find drivers for that thing at? The bane of my existence.

With a PCI angled riser can use the soundcard and a PCI VGA card. I used an Radeon 9250PCI in a Dell (2600 it was?) without AGP slot and with windows 95 was a pleasant experience for old games. Also, I had no issues on dos. For sound I used a generic PCI64 soundcard made by Creative (es1370? I might be wrong). The IDE controller support master/slave drives? What is the model of that firewall machine?

Reminds me of the 8bit guy 👍

I legit thought this channel had at least 50k subs.

Nice project, nice channel. But oh, what's the thing at 3:40 you use to hold the board in place? I need that!!!

You can get a PCI riser that will let you plug multiple cards into one PCI slot as long as the motherboard can drive the signals down the extra length of PCB.

Fantastic stuff! +1 Sub & Like.

Hello, did you check dxdiag for hardware acceleration? The twister supposedly has the same Direct3D capabilities as the Savage 4.

How did you find out the VGA pinout? Nice project!

I remember Wireless LAN Access Point (not Wi-Fi standard) from LGR channel are x86 IBM PC standard motherboard inside.

Did you have a diagram for which pin was which on the onboard VGA? Or was there a load of off-screen debugging? Nice job either way!

@Odd & Obsolete, can I ask what the make/model of that PCB holder is please?

Hi. Is it possible to use usb soundcard and have video accelerator in pci slot? About quake - have you tried new versions of it like fuhquake ez quake and others? I remember playing 640*480 on p2mmx266 with c&a 65554 video card.

I'd be curious to see what this cpu compares to in a vintage windows benchmark like sisoft sandra. I guess similar to a 233 mmx ?

What would have been displayed if you left the old boot rom chip from when it was an internet appliance? Did it run a *NIX or MS DOS OS? Also does Windows 98 have drivers for the 4 NICs?

Riktigt skoj video det här också! 😀 Måste bara fråga, vad är det för låt du använder från 03.00 i videon? Jag känner igen den, men kan inte hitta den. Brukar spara no copyright låtar i en spellista och lyssna på när jag jobbar 😋

Wery cool

i'm super curious what OS/Software it shipped with from the facotry

Needs a nice yamaha audician opl3 and you have a killer dos gaming pc

The background track to this video is a banger. What's the source?

Interesting on how you recicled this into a decent pc

How did you know what wire goes where on the VGA connector?

nice! is it possible to use a pci riser and reuse the old case? :-) also.. youre swedish right?

Parents were cleaning out the garage and they found this old ethernet-based firewall that was long decommissioned, we opened it up but it had proprietary circuitry. how did you get so lucky with yours?

I had some think like it with out a vga but did have a pci slot and a ide solid state drive at 4GB ran windows OK win XP no sound ended up like all the junk dropped in the Bin.

The twisterT does have 3d acceleration. Unreal is rather fussy with support though. Unreal Tournament should work. As well as Halflife should run pretty good as well. At least I got those to work on my VIA Epia board with the same chipset.

I would love to see you find an old usb sound card and put a real 3d card on this machine.

There is a bunch of 3rd party OPENGL software for win98 I forget what it is called. Being a 3d card in chipset name???? I would believe you need both the right driver. And the different 3rd party softwares, like dx9, glsetup public beta 1.0.0.121 maybe?? I really dont remember the name of the file I'm thinking about at the moment but the downloaded version was like 70+/-MB large anddid a hUGE install... hope that helps. wish I could remember the name OF the file I'm thinking about. I know I have it on some random archive.

how did you find out the vga output layout ?

They make little rotisserie things for pcb? My god.

In 98, i had celeron 700MHZ. ALI board with some SiS chipset with integrated Nvidia TNT2 (shared sys RAM scheme). That peace of crap didn't have AGP port. So I couldnt upgrade graphic card. And that PC was more powerfull than this. Utterly, i stumbled on C&C Renegade game, runned 640x480 low untill last mission where GDI ion sattelite blew the brotherhood of Nod main base. And there I got litterally 1-2 FPS AT ENDGAME. Next scene: I threw that junk out of the room through the window, landed on the street in 1000 peaces. Then I went to local PC shop, and they made me custom PC with Athlon xp 2500+, radeon 9500 pro 128 MB. And that was the kick I needed. All computers beyond that point was build by my hand. Machine in this video is too low spec to be considered '90 's gaming PC. You need AMD K6/2 or Pentium 3 with AGP slot. And Nvidia geforce GPU. Period. Nice work btw