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i bought

a

Gravis ultrasound PNP + 8mb of ram installed on it. no box no manual, no cd. Just the card

and paid 100 dollars for it, i think i paid too much,

and will never pay that amount for something retro again.

Pabloz wrote:

...and will never pay that amount for something retro again.

also $100 is rather low for a GUS.

i know but i always pay 10 or 20 bucks for good stuff
i never paid that much on retro hardware

think of all the good junk i could buy with those 100 🤣

Yeah not everybody is going to pay tons of money into that hobby, especially when you can get most of what you want for cheap ^^

I never paid anything over 60€. And except that 286 that was 60€ I don't think I really went over 30/40€ (and I don't often pay over 30/40€)

I've paid over £100 for retro motherboards, and my most expensive collectable CPUs were more than that. $100 for an AMD Thunderbird Slot A 1 GHz, $150 for a SUPER Chips J38600DX-33 MHz rev A, the list goes on 😀 If I want something bad enough, I will find a way 😀

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Pabloz wrote:

...and will never pay that amount for something retro again.

also $100 is rather low for a GUS.

Grin.

debs3759 wrote:

I've paid over £100 for retro motherboards, and my most expensive collectable CPUs were more than that. $100 for an AMD Thunderbird Slot A 1 GHz, $150 for a SUPER Chips J38600DX-33 MHz rev A, the list goes on 😀 If I want something bad enough, I will find a way 😀

See it as an investment.
Retro-PC-parts nowadays are something like old cars or other collectables. They don't get worthless, because their scrap-periode is already over. Now prices stay the same or rise.

Ok, perhaps nobody of us would sell their parts, but the money itself isn't lost at all, it's invested!

LeFlash wrote:

See it as an investment.

Recipe for a disaster.

appiah4 wrote:

LeFlash wrote:

See it as an investment.

Recipe for a disaster.

Only if you need the money back some day! 😉

The argument makes it much easier to explain to your wife why you're hoarding massive amount of "trash" in the attic.

Scored a Hercules Game Theater XP, should support Sensaura sound stuff, Im having a bit of trouble finding win98 vxd drivers for it though, looks like download links are dead?

LeFlash wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

LeFlash wrote:

See it as an investment.

Recipe for a disaster.

Only if you need the money back some day! 😉

The argument makes it much easier to explain to your wife why you're hoarding massive amount of "trash" in the attic.

I just saw a SB PRO 2.0 (CT1600) be sold on eBay for 90 EUR. I think quite a bit of hardware is definitely in the investment category... Instead of owning paintings or cars, you will own a few vintage 80s and 90s PCs. 😀

Nah, vintage hardware can lose a lot of value quite easily when it stops working. Being able to repair helps, but everything electronic has a disturbingly short lifetime.

I try not to spend too much for stuff, I sometimes fail though, and I do tend to buy too much. (See Nvidia FX 5950XT, Voodoo 3 3000, pair of voodoo 2 cards with SLI)

But I also find lots cheap or on the road for disposal that I can get cheap (12 good 250gig IDE hard drives for $15, Free P-II 350 with Asus P2B motherboard, ect)

canthearu wrote:

Nah, vintage hardware can lose a lot of value quite easily when it stops working. Being able to repair helps, but everything electronic has a disturbingly short lifetime.

I try not to spend too much for stuff, I sometimes fail though, and I do tend to buy too much. (See Nvidia FX 5950XT, Voodoo 3 3000, pair of voodoo 2 cards with SLI)

But I also find lots cheap or on the road for disposal that I can get cheap (12 good 250gig IDE hard drives for $15, Free P-II 350 with Asus P2B motherboard, ect)

The hardware could fail, yes. But most likely it's due to high load, bad cooling or caps.
Especially older HW (Socket 7 or older) is not that much stressed, has bigger silicon stuctures etc ... unless you are using it 24/7 under high load, it theoretically should last forever.

Remember: Most parts are for collecting or playing with it, not as a daily driver. So they don't stop working for no appearend reason.

I repaired many boards and only encountered errors that where there due to the user doing something wrong (putting voltage on control pins, grounding 5v rails etc ... the stuff is nearly indestructable.

There are only 2 main ticking bombs: batteries and caps.

Monkey see, Monkey do...
Got a Hercules too for almost FREE.

It seems that a number of sellers I've bought from recently are relying on paper as suitable packaging for electronic goods, or basically stuffing up somehow 😢 Latest purchase - an AT case, with this classic fascia:

The case was wrapped in brown butcher's paper, padded with newspaper, and placed in a box. Admittedly it was a long journey from Russia to Australia, and the paper/newspaper must have kept a reasonable amount of impact damage at bay. The only problem was that the seller only secured the cover with one screw ... which meant that a bump somewhere along the way twisted the cover off enough to slam forward into the top of the bezel, bending the chassis slightly and knocking off pieces of the bezel corners and cracking the plastic. The reset button also fell off and won't stay in properly any longer.

I don't feel angry, just a bit sad that the seller didn't have any foresight to secure the item properly for shipping. Won't be leaving feedback for this one, and deliberating on whether to lodge a dispute for a partial refund - but the damage is probably just a bit on the small side to warrant this. Will have to get cracking on some plastic repair.

On the upside, a Mac Performa 476 shipped over from the US in perfect condition, with decent packaging. Also managed to salvage some great parts from this smashed up laptop (Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today) - 486DX4/75 motherboard and other parts (including the hard disk!) all still work, transplanted them into another Acernote laptop which arrived intact by some miracle as it was also very very badly packed - it was sent to me in a thin bubble-lined envelope!

I have been seeing allot of environmentally friendly packaging lately with newspaper and cardboard and brown paper.
I purchased a Mac Performa 575 the other day only to have it arrive broken. I asked the shipper to pack carefully with bubble wrap, packing peanuts and 3-inches of Styrofoam at bottom and sided and top, Also to double box or at least double line the the cardboard box.
It arrived broken because the only packed it with sponge foam padding.

From what I have seen packages that are double boxed and filled with packing peanuts survive the trip.

These shippers are rough with boxes and will drop large heavy boxes. So a computer needs about 3-inches of padding on the bottom.
Styrofoam or packing peanuts.
The package needs to be able to with stand the trauma from a drop of about 3 feet.

I always send my seller a message asking them to Please pack carefully.
With bubble wrap, Packing peanuts and double box or double line the cardboard box.

This hobby is very fun, but getting costly. I think I paid way too much, but I will let you be the judge. These items for $100.

Focus FK-2001 keyboard, work status: Unknown.

IBM Model M keyboard, work status: Unknown.

PCChips M919 v3.4: included 64MB of RAM, 166MHz processor (not sure which model yet), and 256KB of cache on a stick. Work status, POSTs with my Realtek VGA test card. I am super excited about the manual. All online scans are a terrible gif that is hard to read. Any idea on where I could post this guy to get it archived. Looks like the pin layout was the same for all/most m919s.

The seller has 3 more Model M's (none with the metal badge) and another 2001 as well as several other clicky keyboards. My visit lasted longer than intended where I discovered I may be dealing with a hoarder. House smelled clean, and was recently vacuumed... just had a ton of tech everywhere. Nothing stacked though. Mostly organized. He has tons of XP era systems with older stuff buried in a storage unit. A few things I had to tell him would be better off recycling (rack mounted SCSI raid, battery backup, and server2003 units) than selling on eBay. Shipping would be insane. I did help him get a couple 7 systems running though. Hopefully I scored some points to cut a price to sell deal with him.

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Scored a Hercules Game Theater XP, should support Sensaura sound stuff, Im having a bit of trouble finding win98 vxd drivers for it though, looks like download links are dead?

What type of cable is required between sound card and head unit ?

twilliamc wrote:

PCChips M919 v3.4: included 64MB of RAM, 166MHz processor (not sure which model yet), and 256KB of cache on a stick. Work status, POSTs with my Realtek VGA test card. I am super excited about the manual. All online scans are a terrible gif that is hard to read. Any idea on where I could post this guy to get it archived. Looks like the pin layout was the same for all/most m919s.

The only 486 CPU which can reach 160 is the AMD 5x86 so this should be it. 166MHz isn't possible though. For archiving I would suggest archive.org although there is also a section for that on vogonsdrivers (in doubt archive.org will probably last longer than this site).