You can get desoldering stations that are not that expensive. I have a ZD-915 and it works great. I paid like 70 Eurobucks for it.

You guys use heat guns to pull out ICs, right?

I've done so, but you have to be careful to control your temperature.

Let me think, what retro hardware would I buy if I had $5,000?

- A Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh
- A couple Voodoo5s (preferably PCI)
- An nVidia Geforce 256
- Some Voodoo2s
- A few spare beige cases
- A Slot A motherboard and one of those elusive 1 GHz Slot A Athlons
- An IBM Model M keyboard (or two)
- Some sort of 486 desktop

That's what I can think of for now, depending on what I'd have left afterwards, there might be more. 🤑

Powermac 9150
Apple Mac II
68040 upgrade for my Amiga 4000
Some Amiga monitors and keyboards
Boxed software
Hard drive for my Atari ST
More solid shelving to store what I have.

Hardly worth 5000 dollars, american, but I kind of want one of these:

My friend had one, and I remember being somewhat irked that the P100 was WAY faster than my Cyrix 5x86 120 MHz...

Imho cool-looking, and then quite popular little machine that comes with a Tseng ET4000 and OPL YMF262-M.

jheronimus wrote:

I'd probably go for a really odd build: […]
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I'd probably go for a really odd build:

- IBM 5160 because to me that's the most beautiful and iconic retro PC ever made. It looks like 5150, but it has 8 expansion slots (more on in a minute);

I'd rebuild a 5160 I used to own, and take it further - not exactly a practical or useful build, but that's not the point...

Start with a 5160. Keep the original motherboard, even though it's a bottle neck. Install an Intel inboard/386 upgrade card. Max out the RAM on the inboard card to 16MB if possible - the card I originally owned only had the base 1MB. I know a 4MB board existed. Perhaps I could make up a board that would take a 72 pin SIMM. Try swapping the CPU for a 486DLC or SXL. Try going from the original 16MHz to 25MHz. ee

Keep the original full height floppy drive just because. Add a gotek, but it wouldn't be visible from the front of the case.

In the 386 5160 I used to have I still ran the original 10MB ST-412. Now I'd probably go with either CF card on an XT IDE or perhaps SCSI just for the hell of it. Either way I'd keep the original HDD face plate.

For the display I want my Wyse WY-700 monitor and card back. 15" paper white monochrome, the most beautiful text display I have ever used. I will also do 1280 x 800 resolution graphics mode, something I never tried when I owned it. I wonder if the Windows 2.x drivers would work in the special version of Windows/386 that was released specifically for the inboard/386.

For color I'd go with an original CGA card (the worst text display I've used), but with a composite NTSC monitor this time to try the out artifacted color modes. Back in the day I could never get this to work with any of the monitors I tried - even those that were supposed to be NTSC compatible (I'm in a PAL country).

In keeping with the odd display idea maybe try to find one of those weird IBM 20" orange plasma displays. They were made as a super kind of terminal for IBM mainframes - then try to work out a way to drive the thing...

If I had $5,000, forget the Amiga 1200 - I could actually AFFORD the Amiga 4000 for a change, perhaps with one of those rare PowerPC accelerators thrown in and a good RTG card to sweeten the deal, and on top of all that, an Apollo Vampire 500 V2+ accelerator that I bought my Amiga 500 for.

I might even have enough left over for a Sharp X68030 with 68060 accelerator, a Fujitsu FM Towns, and an NEC MultiSync XM29/XV29/XP29 family monitor to hook up to all of them. 27" of surprisingly-good-for-a-shadow-mask CRT goodness, handles 15 and 24 KHz without complaint, NTSC and PAL alike, also great for light pens/guns for systems that support 'em. They're probably the only non-aperture grille CRTs I'd go with, just for the size and retro compatibility.

If I still have some room left in that massive budget, it's SGI time - particularly if I get my hands on something with N64 or other console devkit hardware in it, like the renowned SGI Indy find that had the Turok source code on it.

There's no need for me to blow that kind of money on retro IBM PC-compatible or Mac parts; I have just about everything I could want from those two categories already, and if anything, need to offload my excess Mac stuff before someone else throws it out (mainly IIcx, iMac G3 350 and possibly iBook G4 1.42).

Should my Power Mac 6500 give up the ghost, though (I just heard it making a very unsettling noise like a bearing gave out tonight, though it's still fully functional), it's getting replaced with a Power Mac 9600 - a whopping six PCI slots without any garbage integrated graphics to detract from that, all the legacy interfaces (including a floppy drive that can read DD 400/800K Mac disks), ludicrous RAM capacity for a system of its age (more than a Beige G3!), and G4 CPU upgrades. The best 68k Mac may be a classic Amiga with RTG and ShapeShifter or Fusion, but no ADB = no Thrustmaster FCS support, for starters. (You need a Mac FCS with associated WCS and PC gameport rudder pedals if you want analog throttle and rudder in Flying Nightmares or A-10 Attack!/Cuba!, to name a few. Emulators don't support this.)

Also, there is one IBM computer from that era I'd consider setting space aside to own: the IBM/Sega Teradrive, one half 286 PC, one half Mega Drive/Genesis, and both halves can talk to each other, like a glorified devkit.

So yeah, it's mostly Japanese computers and the one American computer line that saw more success in Europe than its homeland, where Commodore had every right to steamroll IBM and Apple with superior technology but utterly failed to do so. It's quite telling that importing an Amiga 500 over from Germany was more affordable for me than just buying one here in the States, because the only people who know that the Amiga exists also knows what it's worth on eBay!

As for components, I can't think of much left that I don't already have and isn't in the "overpriced" to "unobtanium" range yet.

A Voodoo5 5500 PCI Mac Edition would be nice for my MDD G4, so I can run an ATI card with Core Image support for OS X Leopard in the AGP slot without fear of extension conflicts under OS 9. A second one would be really nice if I ever got my hands on an Amiga 1200 or 4000 with some kind of PCI busboard for RTG.

A Forte VFX1 setup with the VIP card and whatever graphics card still has a fully functional VESA feature connector would be one hell of a way to relive my nostalgia for Quake in '90s VR, though I mainly want to play System Shock 1 with it, which can't be done on a Virtual i-O i-glasses! VPC setup. I could entirely forgo this if someone made a VR fork of DOSBox specifically designed to emulate '90s VR systems (VFX1/i-glasses!/CyberMaxx) using a modern Oculus Rift or HTC Vive setup.

Actually, speaking of VR, why don't I treat myself to one of those Virtuality systems mentioned earlier? Or, while not technically VR and just a fancy sim cockpit, I could use some of those Virtual World Tesla pods - the kind that ran pre-Firestorm Battletech (read: NOT just MW4 ported to an arcade cockpit) and Red Planet. I never got to play Red Planet while arcades in my area still had those pods...

I don't think I'd want another 5K worth of retro hardware cluttering up my computer closet. I'm about at capacity.

ElementalChaos wrote:

For me, every Japanese micro I could name off the top of my head (MSX2+, X68000, PC-88, PC-98, FM-7, X1, FM Towns)

I am with you on that one. God how great would it be to have a x68k with all the peripherals a good library of games.

For me it's more useful to ask what I'd buy if I had $5 for retro hardware since it puts me in a mindset to get more from less. Not sure what I'd buy with it though, nothing at the moment I guess.

If I had $5000, I'd be putting it in the bank towards a house, so that my retro-stuff can be out and running all the time, without having to share monitors and parts, and needing to be rotated all the time due to desk space.

I guess everyone has things they want to get. If I had 5k, I'd probably get the following:

NexGen board and CPU, the later ones that had FPU's.
SCC-1/LAPC-1. I came close to splurging on one a few years ago for $200 bucks. Regret not picking one up
Probably a Apple Lisa
MOS KIM-1 board
IBM5154 since I already have a 5160 and a EGA card

I'd have to think hard about what else I wanted to collect. I kind of have everything else I ever wanted.

Man I read this thread and kind of feel bad. A few people mention Amiga's. I have 2 4000's with 040's and a 030 accelerated 1200. I didnt realize theyre that hard to come by!! I didnt grow up with them, but started collecting a few years ago.

Maybe theyre not so rare in LA. I got mine from a few guys that worked at the movie studios and associated stuff.

If I had that much in one lump sum, I would build a decent sized brick shed to store my collection. My small house is like a warehouse, with no free space to actually put systems together.

Attempt to buy a V5 6k

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

Let me think, what retro hardware would I buy if I had $5,000?

- A Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh

That thing is overrated. It looks sort of interesting, but the case is all plastic with wear and tear sensitive metallic paint and the Bose speakers and subwoofer sound horrible (like a home cinema set). If you want a pre-Steve Jobs Macintosh, then take a Macintosh 9500 or 9600, those are really interesting because they have lots of expansion possibilities.

A Transwarp GS and a PC Transporter for my ROM3 IIGS, and a SystemSaver, and... uhhh, can't think of more but surely there'd be something to use the remaining money on.

and reelmagic mpeg decoding card for games like zork & dragon lair etc

RaVeN-05 wrote:

and reelmagic mpeg decoding card for games like zork & dragon lair etc

Is it really worth having? I can buy one locally, the seller has no idea of its worth, never occurred to me to get one because it was collectable..

Since I don't have enough room to store those epic Full-Towers and Crt's I would pick my favourites, Laptops 😀
And I would pick all of them twice to play with my younger brother some dos games 😀

286 - Compaq Portable SLT/286
386 - Compaq LTE386s/20
486 - Compaq LTE Elite 4/75CX
Pentium - Compaq LTE 5000

It seems I kinda love these Beige Compaqs 😀