imi wrote on 2020-07-26, 14:02:

too bad I wasn't as busy collecting in the times of old 🙁

The right time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second right time to plant a tree is now.

So get the s775 while they're cheap 😀

Marentis wrote on 2020-07-26, 14:11:

I can see this happening with Core 2 Duo/Quad hardware when people who loved gaming on XP are getting older and older.

Let's stock up on them and get rich in 10 years!

Seriously, I'm not sure if the Windows XP era hardware will be getting as expensive as the parts for our beloved DOS machines. Recent Windows versions tend to be very backwards-compatible - we're still on the NT architecture, after all.

That means that XP era games and applications mostly still work on Windows 10, so there's not a big need to get hardware from that period. We're also still using D3D and OpenGL, everything has been pretty much standardized for a bunch of years. No outdated API's, not a lot of reasons to buy older hardware. In my opinion, people who get nostalgic about some old XP games will probably just play them on their current machine.

But we'll see how that goes. Maybe I'm wrong and that Core2Duo will be the hot shit in a few years. I still doubt it, though - look at Pentium 4 machines and parts. Nobody buys those either.

Marentis wrote on 2020-07-26, 14:11:

Now it's very hard to find one.

I'm also responsible for that. When I see cheap parts I just have to buy them even when I don't need it. I just bought 50 CPUs even though I don't need them at all (yet). I just want to stock up on parts before prices go through the roof. I can afford them now but might not afford them later.
Look what happened to Voodoo cards, somebody decided they were hot items, people started to buy them up, prices got to crazy levels.

schmatzler wrote on 2020-07-26, 14:25:

Seriously, I'm not sure if the Windows XP era hardware will be getting as expensive as the parts for our beloved DOS machines.

In the 80's it was privilege to own a personal computer. You had to be rich to buy one.
Now everybody can afford it which means that there are millions and millions of used computers and parts everywhere.
I doubt that a post 2010 computer will become a rare collector's item in the next 30 years.

As the cost of recycling decreases and its efficiency increases, e-waste will continue to be interesting to scrap and smelt. So equipment which is now abundant will probably be gone in a few years time as well.

And young people now might still have that pang in the heart when they reminisce in 20 year's time. And they'll collect Galaxy S9's and will want to rebuild that pc they played Fortnite on.

I kinda agree with what you're saying but if it was only about compatibility and not that "nostalgic feeling" people probably would only use Dosbox for DOS games. It does a very good job for most games from the DOS era and Dosbox is arguably
infinitely better when you have only one mainboard, cpu and sound card because it can emulate different devices so is - in theory - more compatible. But for sure it can't really emulate real circuitry so it just doesn't feel like the same.
At the same time 386/486 are so loved because for what they are and I often hear "I have that system because I had the same/a similar one/wanted always one back then" as the guiding motive.
In contrast to that a Commodore 64 holds absolutely no value to me besides being a very interesting piece of computer history. So at least from my point of view emotions are a really big part of our hobby.

I mean if i'm honest nearly every game I played on Windows 98 does work just fine on Windows 10. It really is about that "experience" and pure nostalgia for me so I can really only speak for myself.
Games I played on Windows 98 include: Counter Strike, FF7, Diablo 1/2, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, C&C Tiberian Sun, Red Alert, Red Alert 2, Half-Life, Half-Life 2 (that was on XP already, iirc), Unreal Tournament, Baldur's Gate 1/2, NOX
and many others.
And if I'm honest now every single one just works on Windows 10, some after community patches but when those are applied they just work. But I still prefer the "real deal" that's why I'm assuming that other people might one day
feel the same about Windows XP.
The same goes for my DOS games: they're probably better played in Dosbox but I still prefer a real machine for them. I don't really have a logical argument for that, it's all about that "feeling" especially because we had a 486 DX33 back then and it was that machine that got me interested in computers and ultimately lead me to study Computer Science.
Also I do think that compatibility to XP will be lost more and more because there's no sense in keeping everything compatible forever as that slows down development and can introduce ugly code
and performance and security issues (not saying that it HAS to be always like that, it just gets more and more likely.

@flupke11
fantastic argument!

We had a lot more special hardware around the 90's and early 2000's.

I've built myself a retro machine because I wanted to use the 3Dfx Glide API.
Granted, emulation has come a long way, so it's not really neccessary to own actual 3Dfx hardware anymore.

But there are still other things like peripherals (Gameport joysticks and wheels), special audio cards (Aureal Vortex) or forgotten and obscure graphic APIs (Ati, S3) that can't yet be emulated with DosBox.
So in my opinion, besides nostalgia there are still many reasons to own real hardware for DOS and Windows 9x.

The XP era on the other hand was a time when a lot of these "lone wolf technologies" died out and manufacturers settled on using universal standards for rendering, audio, peripherals etc.
There will probably always be people that want the real hardware for nostalgic reasons, but I still think the technology gap will not be that big this time and prices will not skyrocket like they are right now because of that.

But we'll see if I'm wrong. 😀 I should set myself a reminder to look into this thread in 10 years. Looking forward to the new VOGONS redesign in 2030. 😁

Yeah, good point actually.
I mean we all think that X might happen in the future but we rarely look back if what we thought would happen at this point in time actually did happen.
That reminds me: a friend's father was absolutely sure that GPUs would become as cheap as chocolate bars one day. Well... 😀

Marentis wrote on 2020-07-26, 15:17:

Yeah, good point actually.
I mean we all think that X might happen in the future but we rarely look back if what we thought would happen at this point in time actually did happen.
That reminds me: a friend's father was absolutely sure that GPUs would become as cheap as chocolate bars one day. Well... 😀

Well, considering that integrated ones in AMD APUs are quite capable (though obviously not as fast as expensive discrete ones) and arguably quite cheap : an AMD Athlon 3000G is about 50 USD for a CPU and GPU , father's friend might not have been too far from the mark .

it all depends on the chocolate bar 😉

imi wrote on 2020-07-26, 16:02:

it all depends on the chocolate bar 😉

We are definitely in jumbo size Toblerone territory . 😉

Tetrium wrote on 2020-07-26, 13:53:

Sometimes a seller would put in "rare" even if it's blatantly untrue 🤣.

It's such a commonly abused word I makes me laugh rather than have a look at the item. Like a PlayStation listing with 'rare' in the description. Over 100 million were manufactured, and it's not even one of those audiophile-coveted ones with the RCA sockets. 99.99million of them must already be in landfills! Well, how much for this 'rare' piece of gaming history? Oh, £4.99.

Big Pink wrote on 2020-07-26, 19:30:

Tetrium wrote on 2020-07-26, 13:53:

Sometimes a seller would put in "rare" even if it's blatantly untrue 🤣.

It's such a commonly abused word I makes me laugh rather than have a look at the item. Like a PlayStation listing with 'rare' in the description. Over 100 million were manufactured, and it's not even one of those audiophile-coveted ones with the RCA sockets. 99.99million of them must already be in landfills! Well, how much for this 'rare' piece of gaming history? Oh, £4.99.

I would think that millions of original Playstations have been recycled by now and quite a few have bad lasers so they are useless. Not rare but not like you see them everywhere like the newer versions.

When I started collecting computers in 2000 or so I put out advertising on freecycle and would get offers for C64s all the time. Nobody had the balls back then to want to charge somebody for a machine they made something like 20 million of and were then useless. Over the years the amount of machines must have dropped quite a bit since they do command a few bucks these days plus boxed game prices are getting some bids.

Marentis wrote on 2020-07-26, 15:17:

Yeah, good point actually.
I mean we all think that X might happen in the future but we rarely look back if what we thought would happen at this point in time actually did happen.
That reminds me: a friend's father was absolutely sure that GPUs would become as cheap as chocolate bars one day. Well... 😀

Well every Intel chip has built in video and can display HD content fine plus play most common games so you have that.

I sure wish Ebay would be more strict about who lists what when it comes to categories. Why do I have to wade through a sea of PCIe video cards when I entered PCI in the search?

flupke11 wrote on 2020-07-26, 14:51:

As the cost of recycling decreases and its efficiency increases, e-waste will continue to be interesting to scrap and smelt. So equipment which is now abundant will probably be gone in a few years time as well.

The difference is in the number of units sold before their production stopped.
How many XTs were sold? How many 286s? How many socket370 systems? How many P4 systems?
Recycling may be more advanced but people still keep their old computers in the attic, give them away, throw them in the trash where resellers find them. Recycling networks are owned by resellers who pull everything of value. Retro computing is a huge business. Asian countries always sit on huge stockpiles of new old stock and they can flood the market with obsolete parts when it suits their needs.
I'm convinced that a s775 CPU that costs less than a $1 now won't worth much more 20 years later. Hell, I can buy a 386 CPU for $5 and that's more than 30 years old!
Mass-produced items won't be expensive in our lifetime under normal circumstances.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2020-07-26, 20:12:

I sure wish Ebay would be more strict about who lists what when it comes to categories. Why do I have to wade through a sea of PCIe video cards when I entered PCI in the search?

Because PCIe has PCI in it. Just limit the search with some - terms.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-07-26, 22:02:

Repo Man11 wrote on 2020-07-26, 20:12:

I sure wish Ebay would be more strict about who lists what when it comes to categories. Why do I have to wade through a sea of PCIe video cards when I entered PCI in the search?

Because PCIe has PCI in it. Just limit the search with some - terms.

I see no place to do that here. If there is a better procedure for searching, I'm open to using it - but I think Ebay could make life easier if checking a box for PCI actually limited the search to that interface.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2020-07-26, 22:36:

but I think Ebay could make life easier if checking a box for PCI actually limited the search to that interface.

well, that would also require the seller to actually select the correct specs... which many do not if any at all.

To add to the bit about searching for parts, that's one of the things that pushed me to start really researching what I'm buying before I buy. It's made twice as hard because I can remember all sorts of previous trends in vintage PC pricing back when people had forgotten about these machines or made fun of them. Only certain makes/models have parts available, and have those parts available in quantities that don't mean they would only make sense ordering if I was setting up some kind of shop.

Like back when I first started diving into laptops in 2003, I could buy generic/off-brand 486s and 386s all day long for the price of a song on e-bay, but good god, if you ever wanted a memory upgrade, or a power supply, or batteries, I had to dig and dig and dig and dig. And if it still had parts availible, people were probably still using the device on the daily. I remember mid 2006 when I bought my first IBM ThinkPad (755CD) and remember being totally elated to find out that I could get updated Lithium Ion batteries for it (instead of NiMH). That's party of why I picked the machines I pick these days when I have a choice, because I can still get parts for an NEC Versa.....but a Compaq Portable 486c is like finding a needle in a haystack for ANYTHING regarding that machine. That's why I sold the latter off to another collector who had parts. Yet thanks to Asian distributors and the fact that NEC sold that screen to other companies to use on their machines long after 1994, I can find plenty of screens for those, plus other parts (motherboards, power boards, batteries, power supplies, keyboards......).

I probably spend 3 1/2 years chasing a 128902-001 640x480 Sharp TFT LCD for that blasted thing, only to give up and be willing to pay up to $100 for one from one of those sites you find surfing the web looking up part #'s. THREE places said they had it "in stock" - two e-mailed back stating they don't, and one did not even get back to me. When I did find a place in China with one, they started spamming my e-mail box with plastic molding machine parts - none of which were the parts to my portable......and yet other places said they would ship for $189.95 or whatever, and it would be for 10 of them - I don't need TEN laptop screens, and I don't need to take that kind of gamble on a then 25 year old computer that I only need ONE of that part for.

Another frustrating thing is chasing drivers! Like recently was trying to find drivers for my 40EC and my M75 before it arrived - It took 2 weeks of surfing and LOTS of digging for the ftp.necam.com on archive.org after finding out their FTP died sometime late last year. Sheesh. Sometimes if it's really rare - like the MediaVision ProGraphics 1280 card I had years ago, I had to dig and dig for 2-3 years before I found the drivers, and the only way I found them was I found the one of four or five people on any forum who knew that card and had the drivers....only to find out the card was fried. That's why I'm now storing these things all over now so people can still get them when I'm done with them. However for web sharing, the cloud has made it a total nightmare. Then sometimes drivers have an OEM specific extractor (looking at you NEC) so you have to HAVE a product of theirs to extract for another product they make.

Recycling networks are owned by resellers who pull everything of value. Retro computing is a huge business. Asian countries always sit on huge stockpiles of new old stock and they can flood the market with obsolete parts when it suits their needs

Not only that but a lot of PC parts, especially screens on laptops and even some planar assemblies from the 1980's-1990's were used in industrial equipment, SBCs, and Embedded applications, so you also have these scores of chinese clone part makers and recyclers that o nly sell in bulk for large prices because they are designed to cater to the Industrial market. Those frustrate me when looking for parts because I don't need 20 NL6448AC30 640x480 TFT LCD screens at $1,996 a crate, or $80 cases of light pens based off another 1980's PC design. Also, some of those places falsely advertise they have the parts availible online, but never pull the listing for the sold-out inventory and then tell you they don't have it in stock. Also, I don't like that they often use a picture of another part to represent the one they are selling and it makes it difficult to tell if it's the right part or not - and at some of the prices they are charging, it's almost a gamble to be sure you are ordering the correct part.