The time should have never come. Keep in mind that one day your kids will grow up and leave the house. Just down size your retro computer hardware for now. Sell everything that you won't be using or slightly interested in and keep a small amount of things that you are attached to. Two retro computers and a few spare parts should do it. By the way, can't you just make a retro room out of your attic? You can always disassemble a second retro rig and hide it in a closet. This is the reason why I always advice to stack up on high end, but simple parts with less capacitors fans and so on. For reasons such as unnecessary spending, lack of space and unpredictable life cycle of old computer parts. Speaking of lack of space, I have been looking to buy an oak computer desk with double shelf underneath for computer cases. This way you can put a modern and a retro computers on the same desk with the help of a KVM switch if a second monitor is not an option.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I'm guilty of this too, it's easy to test and play too newer games on the SS7 platform. The massive highlight of this platform i […]
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I'm guilty of this too, it's easy to test and play too newer games on the SS7 platform. The massive highlight of this platform is the flexibility.

In DOS it will play:
- 386 speed sensitive games
- 486 speed sensitive games
- Pentium era games
- High resolution DOS games

Under Windows you can also set the multiplier live and with a Voodoo3 for example there are a TON of awesome glide games that run well as well as early Direct3D games.

Games such as Half-Life, Deus EX, IMO are too new and I would play them on a much faster machine. They do run, but not as silky smooth as I like. Quake II with the AMD patch and MiniGL drivers show the potential (from 60 to over 80 FPS), but unfortunately not too many games got such a treatment.

So yea, it's the most flexible system IMO letting you play games from many different eras, a really cool machine.

I get well over 45 fps in half-life with a TNT2 PRO @ 1024x768 on my ss7 build. It's smooth as butter. It only starts to struggle at 1280x1024, but only when lots of shooting happens. Performance does vary from system to system - quite a bit so - some configurations are as much as 40% faster then others, the main factor being motherboard, ram and bios settings.

kanecvr wrote:

I get well over 45 fps in half-life with a TNT2 PRO @ 1024x768 on my ss7 build. It's smooth as butter. It only starts to struggle at 1280x1024, but only when lots of shooting happens. Performance does vary from system to system - quite a bit so - some configurations are as much as 40% faster then others, the main factor being motherboard, ram and bios settings.

As always, this is very subjective. 45 fps is ok, but I wouldn't call it smooth at all. And during busy scenes it gets much worse than that.

A few ideas to consider.

1. Depending on how your home is constructed, you can lay plywood down in the attic and use it for storage. If the ceiling is high enough, you can use the attic for hobby play. You would need to insulate the attic's ceiling though. I know you already mentioned you don't want to put the lot in the attic, but see 3.
2. Extend your house. This is something in the works for me.
3. Your kids will eventually move out, and between that time and the time you become a grandparent, you may be wishing you kept your hobby toys.
4. If you have no time now to play with the lot, think of how much time it will consume to sell the parts one by one. Refer back to 1.
5. You could also consider some custom built-in desk/shelving system to fully optimise your space.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

I get well over 45 fps in half-life with a TNT2 PRO @ 1024x768 on my ss7 build. It's smooth as butter. It only starts to struggle at 1280x1024, but only when lots of shooting happens. Performance does vary from system to system - quite a bit so - some configurations are as much as 40% faster then others, the main factor being motherboard, ram and bios settings.

As always, this is very subjective. 45 fps is ok, but I wouldn't call it smooth at all. And during busy scenes it gets much worse than that.

Personally, I don't like to go above 25 fps in any game. This way I can relive the feeling I had back in the day of being too poor to upgrade. I am probably the minority here...

The loft, under bed storage, and shelves can help, plus suitably stored in a shed, but I can appreciate having to get rid of some things. I don't have kids but want a proper guest bedroom/project room, and am thinking of getting rid of various kit (if it makes you all feel any better, there's a possibility it may become a VR room too..). I don't think it's necessary to need much more than about two retro PCs, collections really can be rationalised a lot.

My Main retro PC is a pentium II, and although there's a minority of older games that don't run well on it, for what I want it currently is a small minority.

Iris030380 wrote:

Thanks Phil. […]
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Thanks Phil.

It's difficult to know which parts are an investment. I am slightly out of touch as I stopped collecting a few years ago. Since then only things that have fallen into my lap have made their way into the storage room.

eBay is not an option for me, after someone tried to scam me out of an HD5970 I sold on there some years ago, I had to pull the listing, and as far as eBay is concerned it was a "sold" item and they wanted their percentage. I was forced to close my PayPal account because of this, and have never used eBay since. That HD5970 incident was just the last straw in a series of bad experiences, including a woman stealing a working motherboard from me (and taking her money back via PayPal) and posting me a broken one covered in dust, but in MY original box I had posted her my motherboard in! Again, eBay ruled in her favour, so I was down a motherboard and £45! There were more "incidents" and eventually I gave up on eBay / PayPal entirely. On a plus side, a fella from London ended up buying that HD5970 from me for £250 and simply forwarded me the money, which somewhat restored my trust of people a bit, so it wasn't all so bad.

I'm gonna stick with AMIBAY and local listings I think. It might take some time but with recovering sprained knee, I have time! 🤣

This post made me end up spending over 2 hours browsing on Amibay, clocking links, reading stuff, hey I got a private message from last september!

Over 2 hours later I come back here "Ow yes, I was gonnan check up what he got up for sale", too late now, bedtime for me 🤣

But good luck.