Ozzuneoj wrote:

BeginnerGuy wrote:

Apple doesn't seem to big around this board but I recently passed on an Apple IIGS (looked like a ROM1 with a RAM upgrade board) at a garage sale complete with a printer, disk drives, games, rgb monitor, etc because I wasn't carrying any cash. I wish I had gone back for it, the IIGS was the computer I learned programming with and would be fun to revisit.

For some reason, I've never had much of an interest in messing with Apple computers. It could just be my perception of them, but the constantly changing yet proprietary nature of Apple's computers means you have a huge number of different models with parts that aren't interchangeable... it seems like each system may have some variation in parts and some accessories, but the vast majority would be stock systems, all the same. Plus, lets face it, this is VOGONS... other than the educational games I played on an Apple II in grade school (Oregon Trail being the most memorable), Apple's aren't exactly known for their extensive gaming catalog.

I haven't been interested since the IIGS, but back then (The apple ii) DID have plenty of expansion slots and just about anything you can imagine was made to work with an apple 2. This was a Steve Wozniak era machine, he knew people wanted expand-ability and an open system. The IIGS had color graphics and fantastic (if you could figure out how to program it) wavetable synth. The only issue is the CPU (65816) was gimped to 2.8MHz when it was able to run way faster, in order to keep the Mac as the "high end" system. There are CPU upgrade cards (TransWarpGS) out there but I never cared to have one, not sure they can be had for a sane price anymore. It did have nice OS options (GS/OS), and a massive following. Tons of games exist for the Apple II, magazines used to be chock full of type to play games, etc. John Carmack and many other 90s household PC programmers started on the Apple II. Apple committed suicide as a PC option for programmers and gamers with the Mac and never redeemed itself (in my opinion) until OSX, which is basically just a super luxury priced version of Linux now.

Anyway, check out some Apple IIGS videos, you'll be pretty impressed (if you have never seen it). This was Apple at it's best, before the closed platform nonsense.

JidaiGeki wrote:

Probably should qualify that the Mac doesn't have a wide catalog, but the Apple II sure did! 😀 don't know the current state of Mac gaming, has anything changed?

Anyway, not a funny story, but about two years ago I picked up a huge amount of gear, at least two SUV loads. I had the chance to take two Compaq Alpha workstations that were destined for a presumably sad fate, but passed them over as I feared that fixing any problems would be expensive. Given that the bulk of the machines and gear I took worked, I wish I had just done that third trip 😢

You can grab Steam on OSX now, there is a wealth of games that will run on it now that they use an X86 platform, but it doesn't stack up to Windows or just a Linux distro + Wine, though it could. Unfortunately DirectX still has a big grip on the gaming market. Apple still shoots itself in the foot by trying to keep a closed market, a half decent system is extremely expensive. It's WAY cheaper to just build a hackintosh, but your average Joe can't or wont do that. I've been looking to buy a 2010 era Mac Pro (dual 4 core Xeons) to toy around with, but really just for compiling and toying with my programs, not for gaming.

Intel OverDrive DX4-100 (5V) that I saw on eBay, but someone bought it (financial reasons).
Intel Pentium OverDrive P24T 83MHz (too broke).
Socket 370 baby AT motherboard <-- too pricey (bought an ATX one that was bundled with memory, CPU, GPU, and Ethernet card).

Bancho wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Those two boards with the orange heatsinks look interesting. Seem to be late model BX boards. Weird choice of placement for the power connector though.

They look like Gigabyte GA-6BXC boards. I have a v1.9 & v2.0 and those boards in the picture looks very similar.

You sir, were correct, they are GA-6BXC. I will buy one of these, the PCI 128 and the TNT2 M64, and maybe a rando Socket 370 board.. Because why not?

one of those Aureal vortex 2 cards that were cheap on ebay few years ago. Even back then knew I should have got one!

Something I had not only seen but bought and used too - but I gave it away later and I regret it very much. It was a 8087 FPU, back in '93. Now I have a 1000+-piece CPU/FPU collection but no 8087.

alvaro84 wrote:

Something I had not only seen but bought and used too - but I gave it away later and I regret it very much. It was a 8087 FPU, back in '93. Now I have a 1000+-piece CPU/FPU collection but no 8087.

Holy cow... 1000+ and still haven't come across one? That's crazy. 😵

a voodoo5 5500

at the time was very cheap
now look for one, they just kill you with the price

About 14 years ago, I had a chance to pick-up a working dual 603e-133MHz BeBox. But for some odd reason I didn't.

Two years ago. I found a white 500MHz iBook G3 Dual-USB for $10 at InterConnect. I chose not to get it because even though those older Apple laptops have a charm for looks, their expandability (especially on the iBooks) really set me off because you basically have to take the entire system apart to replace even a simple little part like the hard drive or optical drive.

For a while I regret not getting it because old Macintosh laptops are pretty rare now... then my worries ended when I got my hands on a Powerbook G3. I still have a thing for those tiny 12" Apple laptops from the 2000s despite their limited expandability.

I missed out on a cheap Apple 9150 tower a decade ago (was the second guy to ask about it), wish I had one now. Those were beasts to ship and the one I found was in the same state when shipping wasn't that bad.

I was 5 mins staring at a crappy ALS100 soundcard and DE220 today, both ISA, seen in a thrift, angel "You've got enough crap." devil "what if you don't have enough sound or net" angel "you've got plenty" devil "it's got a ROM socket for IDE or other ROM" .... I didn't get them... yet? ... $5 each though.

appiah4 wrote:

A bunch of Slot 1 and Socket 370 motherboards, 6 USD a piece.. Passed because I have enough of these, but still..

Anything in particular worth having in this bunch?

Hey those 3 PCI slots ones look like maybe they want to be installed in VCR or other small box for mini retro HE compatible system....

appiah4 wrote:

A bunch of Slot 1 and Socket 370 motherboards, 6 USD a piece.. Passed because I have enough of these, but still.. […]
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A bunch of Slot 1 and Socket 370 motherboards, 6 USD a piece.. Passed because I have enough of these, but still..

Anything in particular worth having in this bunch?

The one with the purple AGP slot is an EPoX board. Looks a lot like an 8RDA+, but the heatsink in the middle is different. The only reason I spotted it is because my 9NDA3J has exactly the same color scheme. I love the fact that they stuck with a green PCB for their boards. It was that kind of interesting looking lighter colored green that premium boards and server parts used. Really stands out against all of the crazy colored "GAMER!!11" boards from the past 15 years.

Anyway, its an Nforce 2 Ultra 400 board most likely (if I've identified it correctly), which makes it one of the best Socket A boards you can buy. Right up there with the Abit NF7-S and Asus A7N8X.

EDIT: Looks like there's another model called the 8RDA3G... no idea what the difference is, but it looks like they had a fan on the northbridge, and the heatsink looked more like the one in the picture. Most of the northbridge fans from this era crapped out after a few years, so they probably just pulled it. Hopefully they didn't overclock without proper air flow though.

Someone locally contacted me about these old HP mini towers from the late 90s. Are they as bad as I remember them being, or do we love these things now that they're old? I remember that they often used Quantum Bigfoot hard drives (usually laying flat inside the top panel), but beyond that I can't remember anything about them and the specs don't seem to be available online.

What kinds of sound\video cards and such would these likely have?

EDIT: Found some possible specs for the one on the right, but I don't think they're totally accurate.
http://www.computer-specifications.com/specif … 646C-Specs.html
K6-2 500, 64MB PC-100 and a 20GB hard drive? Doesn't seem quite right for a Windows 98 system. My Gateway in 1999 had a P2-400, 64MB PC-100 and a 6.4GB hard drive.

Yeah there have been a couple over the years... Here are the ones that I still think about every now and then, and sometimes still think... what if o.0

In order of rarity (aka magnitude of facepalm after the event).

🙁. SGI Crimson "Jurassic Classic" ... price was good, couldn't fit it in the car.

🙁 🙁 SGI 750 (dual Itanium workstation).. well, its itanium, so nuff said... however two were offered to me and they were both pennies o.0 I later found out that the number of them actually shipped globally was in the double digits (so less than 100)... they would have been my only itaniums!

🙁 🙁 🙁 Acorn Phoebe case. 80 quid, ~2 years ago (I posted in the ebay thread, no one took the bait, so I aalllllmost did). It would have been a talking point, being the only official yellow computer case I know about (not yellow because of UV!). Phoebe was the next gen RiscPC that was never released other than some prototype cases.

🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁 Amiga Walker on ebay quite a number of years ago... didn't realise there were only two prototypes in existence, price was nearing the 200 GBP mark when I saw it, although I don't know what it went for in the end though. If it was today, given Amiga fans, 10K, 100K, who knows o.0

I tended to get pissed off with rare stuff I didn't get, not so much getting something for a good price. I jettisoned a lot of my retro gear few years ago and stopped 'collecting', although I'm sure I could find space for any of the items listed above.. 😉

This is different, but I completely missed something I would have bought in a heartbeat if I'd known about it sooner.

Someone listed a Roland CM-32L on VCF recently for $60. I'm sure it sold within 24 hours, but I just saw it last night. Oy... 🤣

I passed on a rather nicely upgraded Amiga 3000T that was sitting on a local buy & sell for MONTHS at $350. Sounds like a lot, but I probably had a bit of haggle room. I had JUST gotten rid of my giant-turdbucket CDTV after figuring out how much money it would take to get it where I wanted, and I was about to move so it was a big heaping case of "agh, whadda I need that for??" Yep, self, meet kick.

That Amiga is actually worth its weight in gold you know that right? The 3000T is the best Amiga ever bar none.

^^ Yeeeeepppp. Like I said, own shin, meet boot.
The damn thing apparently never sold either (ad expired), I tried contacting the seller & didn't hear back. I'm still holding out some hope that it will pop up on the local classifieds site again. There's a 2000 with a SCSI controller & HDD on there right now, but if I'm going to give Amigas another go I want AGA.

There is NO market for retro PCs in this town, it took me months to sell my CDTV & I had to bring it over to the mainland to do it.

I found a massive NCR dual Pentium (socket 5) server on the side of the road put out for garbage collection. This would have the be the biggest (in physical size) PC I have ever seen. Full height SCSI hard drives, MCA bus, loads of strange cards, RAM and CPU cards as big as many motherboards. There were service documents in an envelope inside the machine. It was purchased in 1994 by a Coles Supermarket and received processor, ram and disk upgrades until 1996, by then it has 128MB ram. I couldn't even imagine a machine with 128MB ram in 1996 - I think I was still running a 486SLC with 4MB RAM at the time.

The power supplies were missing and being non standard I though I wouldn't have a hope of finding them. I was still tempted, but then I tried to move it and could barely pick it up - even without the power supplies it was still too heavy to move and I was recovering from neck and shoulder injuries. I did take the cards out if only to save them from the next scrap metal picker to drive by, but it would have been cool to get it running. I've even got a copy of WinNT 3.5 that I could have installed on it to use both CPUs.

I missed lot's of bit newer stuff because I never thought I would be interested in building anything that wouldn't have isa slots, so I missed alot of good pci sound cards like diamond monster audio mx300 and such. I recently tried bidding one mx300 on ebay, but price went too high, so I regret not getting them when I had a chance to get them for free.