First post, by appiah4
- Rank
- l33t++
OK, my own experience, and from what I can tell the experience of any other average VOGONSer goes like this:
1. Become interested in a certain retro game or computer hardware
2. Find your way onto Vogons
3. Start reading up and accumulating information
4. Decide to do your own Retro Build: Start building a Socket 7 Pentium MMX PC
5. Start hunting for parts
6. Hunt for that elusive perfect ISA sound card
7. Drown in frustration as you find yourself short on experience/knowledge/hardware
8. Overcompensate by overspending on your build
9. Finish your build and immediately start looking for ways to enhance it
10. Go on the market for a 3dfx add on card and contribute to the inflation
11. Buy said 3dfx add on card
12. Decide your system is not fast enough: Start building a Slot-1 or Socket 370 PC
13. Build Slot-1 or Socket 370 PC
14. Discover it doesn't have the power to cover all your Win98 gaming
15. Start upgrading Slot-1 or Socket 370 PC
16. Hunt for that elusive perfect positional 3D PCI sound card
17. Decide you want something more exotic that can do both Win98 and real DOS: Start building a Super Socket 7 PC
18. Overspend on an AGP Socket 7 motherboard
19. Drown in furstration as you navigate SS7 AGP Hell and realize it was never worth it
20. Try many different configurations only to end up with the cookie cutter Voodoo 3 AGP build.
21. Ok, now you are the man. Time to build a real retro PC: Start building a 486
22. Start hunting for 486 hardware. Overpay because why not?
23. Buy 3 motherboards that turn out to be faulty before you get a fourth that works.
24. Rip your hair out as you slowly learn the quirks of this board and the drivers, because every board Pre-Socket7 has them in plenty.
25. Eventually get your 486 working only to figure out a slow 486 is still too fast for many early DOS games and a fast 486 is too slow for many late DOS games.
26. Of course, by this point you have been impulsively buying and hoarding retro PC hardware that you had no use for and likely will never use.. but who cares, you have 100 ISA sound cards!
27. By this point you are having serious issues with storing your junk without pissing off your S/O so you start selling off some things.
28. Start testing the stuff in your stash. Find out that the defect rate is basically 50%
29. Time to get serious: Invest into a soldering/repair kit. Overpay for something you will use maybe a few dozen times at most.
30. Start experimenting with repairing your faulty hardware. Kill a lot of cards and boards.
31. Manage to fix something, immediately make an order for a solder kit that's way out of your league.
32. By now you know 20x more about retro hardware than you have actually experienced first hand. You know the GUS models by heart without ever owning a GUS. You spend 4 hours a day typing posts on Vogons.
33. It is time to boldly go where many other men have gone before (and many have regretted): Start building an XT/AT system
This is where I am currently. I can't really tell where this is going, perhaps others who have progressed further in this hobby can tell me what lies ahead.
Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.