Gaming on a 25 year old Cisco firewall

Taking a look at a Cisco PIX 520, a late '90s enterprise firewall. These PIX units used commodity hardware, this one has an Intel motherboard and a Pentium II CPU. I'll get a hard drive and CD-ROM hooked up to it, install Windows 98 SE, and trying gaming on it!

Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

#cisco #retrotech #intel #networking #homelab #retrogaming #pcgaming

Rack stuff

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00:00 Intro
00:31 PIX 520 Physical Overview
03:05 Failover Capabilities
04:14 Looking Inside
06:50 Booting it up
08:49 Putting in an AGP Video Card
10:52 Pulling the ISA Flash Card and Booting
12:04 Hooking up a Keyboard and Mouse and Looking at the BIOS
15:43 CD-ROM and Hard Drive Headaches
19:08 Trying to get Windows 98 SE Installed
25:50 Trying Audio Cards
27:44 Driver Setup
28:19 Playing Need for Speed II
29:42 Future Plans

[arizonapalms]

everybody gangsta at the LAN party 'til clabretro brings out the PIX gaming rig

[andyg]

A Labor Day weekend clab drop?! I’m 1000% here for that 🔥

[subynut]

Oh, the hours and hours and hours of NFS II my brother and I played are almost countless! Good good times!

[mayw]

It really is just a commodity board! This makes me appreciate my OPNsense even more!

[gnudad]

Boy, you were spot on. As soon as you pulled the lid, it screamed Desktop computer. Other than the card Cisco threw in there, it was, as you said, consumer parts. Wonder what their price tag was....
As far as Win 98SE, yeah, just relived that agony a few days ago creating a VM for whatever sadistic reason. What fun....not!
Fun vid, though! Keep them coming. I'm catching up. Lol

[oldacc]

As someone who can't find any IDE/SATA and compact flash adapters locally, plus the AliExpress shipping being astronomical for even the cheapest thing, IDE drives are kinda a must. Or what I would personally do, insert a SATA PCI card.
This Cisco thing really has potential to be the craziest PC ever. Please try getting it on the internet, give it WiFi and rice it as much as possible with upgrades, cards etc... At least that's what I would do.

[jdkap]

I've had trouble with CF to IDE adapters in the past too and it ended up being due to the CF card's speed. Typical speeds would be 33 (UDMA 2), 66 (UDMA 4) and 133 MB/s (UDMA 6), whereas UDMA 4 was only introduced in 1999, so it's fair to assume the motherboard of the Cisco firewall wouldn't support it. Theoretically CF Cards should be backwards compatible, where it auto-negotiates a UDMA level that it can use and if that fails it falls back to PIO. In my experience, that backwards compatibility is janky, but what ended up working for me was throwing in a UDMA4 card. In antoher case, a UDMA7 card initially worked but eventually got so corruped so that it wouldn't read at all (the motherboard didn't support UDMA; throwing in a bog-standard non-UDMA card solved the issue).

[MadITGeek]

My Need for speed choice was Need for Speed III which would also run quite well on that setup. I've had issues with standard PCs and win98 not liking CF card solutions...having a traditional HDD seems to work, much much better in my experience its probably due to CF is removable vs fixed disk or a HDD as all the ATA commands and sometimes those converters "Drops" those, making it hang. I've used that USB driver stack for decades, never had a issue. its actually a backport of windows ME USB drivers down to win98SE

[tvandbeermakehomergo]

We used to play NFS2 to death as well (had an advent 8520 PC in the UK with a P2 333mhz and 64 mb of ram).

Greatest discovery I had was after getting a voodoo 2 card installed, I randomly had to re-install NFS2 months later, and it put on the 3dFX version which was superior in every way.

Would love to see if you can shove one in the PIX if possible!

[davidwilkerson]

I bet I know why the flash cards failed. They are considered removable disks like floppies. They had to program the 'removable disk' part into the drive code whereas you didn't need all that extra code with an analog floppy drive. This is why the computer hung up on the flash card hardware as opposed to the real 'fixed disk' SATA connection. I am willing to bet you that if you connected a flash card setup to the SATA connector that it would fail in a similar fashion until you either hooked up a floppy drive to it for a removable drive otherwise it will get confused.

[adinnugroho]

This is basically a computer that act as "Firewall" 😅

[leonidas]

Hmm I could buy a right angle USB cord, but I have a dremmel...

[genevievehoulton]

Awesome video. Have you got our invitation of 4K digital microscope today? Check your email pls.