Horun wrote on 2022-11-05, 04:33:

For vintage purposes I prefer old AT based boards over newer ATX but that is due to my long history with computers in general. One thing I do dislike is MCA crap (and stand by my statement) of IBM stuff.
You can never persuade me to think it was a good thing compared to ISA or VLB or the later PCI... just my opinion.

There also was EISA, albeit it was more of a server/workstation thing.
Too bad it vanished so silently. Performance wasn't bad compared to PCI, even.
If it had stayed a bit longer or even had evolved over the years, ISA would still be with us (on a dedicated layer inside the slot) an available to those who need it.
Labs with measuring instruments, hobbyists, industrial controllers etc.

I guess I wouldn't consider myself a collector. I have zero interest in any era other than MS-DOS 1990-1997. And I have two systems for this purpose: a 486 and a POD200MMX. With those two systems, I have no interest in obtaining more systems. When I first started, I did build some systems from Win9x and XP, but after building them, they sat unused. If I had a convenient way of giving them away, I would.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-11-06, 11:39:

There also was EISA, albeit it was more of a server/workstation thing. Too bad it vanished so silently. Performance wasn't bad c […]
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Horun wrote on 2022-11-05, 04:33:

For vintage purposes I prefer old AT based boards over newer ATX but that is due to my long history with computers in general. One thing I do dislike is MCA crap (and stand by my statement) of IBM stuff.
You can never persuade me to think it was a good thing compared to ISA or VLB or the later PCI... just my opinion.

There also was EISA, albeit it was more of a server/workstation thing.
Too bad it vanished so silently. Performance wasn't bad compared to PCI, even.
If it had stayed a bit longer or even had evolved over the years, ISA would still be with us (on a dedicated layer inside the slot) an available to those who need it.
Labs with measuring instruments, hobbyists, industrial controllers etc.

In about 1993, there must have been a lot of analysis paralysis in the IT world when it came to picking a high speed 32bit bus for those that needed bus performance. For myself at that time it was a couple of price notches above where it was worth worrying about, though given a little more money, I guess VLB was the affordable one for the desktop at the time. At that point though, PCI had come out, was looking like a server thing, EISA was a little more mature, also seemed like a server thing. MCA was mature, but had been IBM locked in, but with formation of an industry association, might be going places, and VLB was in the market, on consumer motherboards and just doing it's thing. Tick tock, a year or two pass, VLB stuff nice and cheap, PCI getting around, MCA and EISA now look dead-end. VLB still looked like a contender, and maybe another year went by before everyone actually realised it wasn't gonna carry forward into Pentium boards in any significant way. The earlier prognostications on it's future had not made much sense to the averagely computer savvy. It's 32 bit when the Pentium bus is 64 bit... yah, but 16 bit ISA went years on 32 bit CPU, and PCI is 32 bit, sooooo??? But there's a 64 bit version of PCI... yah and they're USING 32 bit...etc etc. .. So I don't actually know if PCI just won "mindshare" on the promise of widespread 64bit upgrade that never happened on the desktop, because the argument of "VLB will need a bridge" didn't make much sense when PCI also needed a bridge. Though other factors like space and footprint considerations were in PCI's favor.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-11-06, 14:34:

I guess VLB was the affordable one for the desktop at the time. At that point though, PCI had come out, was looking like a server thing, EISA was a little more mature, also seemed like a server thing. MCA was mature, but had been IBM locked in, but with formation of an industry association, might be going places, and VLB was in the market, on consumer motherboards and just doing it's thing. Tick tock, a year or two pass, VLB stuff nice and cheap, PCI getting around, MCA and EISA now look dead-end. VLB still looked like a contender, and maybe another year went by before everyone actually realised it wasn't gonna carry forward into Pentium boards in any significant way. The earlier prognostications on it's future had not made much sense to the averagely computer savvy. It's 32 bit when the Pentium bus is 64 bit... yah, but 16 bit ISA went years on 32 bit CPU, and PCI is 32 bit, sooooo??? But there's a 64 bit version of PCI... yah and they're USING 32 bit...etc etc. .. So I don't actually know if PCI just won "mindshare" on the promise of widespread 64bit upgrade that never happened on the desktop, because the argument of "VLB will need a bridge" didn't make much sense when PCI also needed a bridge. Though other factors like space and footprint considerations were in PCI's favor.

VLB was the perfect hack of its time in 1992. Manufacturers needed something cheap, fast and cheap, did I mention they wanted it cheap? VLB is nothing more that a brand name slapped on 486 processor bus. Instead of inventing new bus manufacturers just negotiated between themselves a standard way of wiring peripherals straight into CPU address/data pins. Advantages were numerous:
- cheap, no need for new silicon designs able to operate at very high speeds
- lets make it even cheaper by reusing failed standards connector (MCA) taking advantage of huge corporation (IBM) spending countless hours engineering, testing, validating and paying for tooling
- fast, as fast as CPU is capable of transferring data (burst). "The fastest burst cycle requires two clocks for the first data item, with subsequent data items returned every clock.". 16 bytes in 5 CPU cycles. Afaik even faster in Bus Master mode (4 bytes per cycle).
- simple, no additional hardware required on peripheral cards, very basic logic on motherboards

With all those goodies came shortcoming:
- strong dependence on 486 CPU
- taking over main bus forcing CPU to stop during transfers
- no plug&play support
- signal integrity issues causing
1 upper limit on FSB clocks
2 problems with pcb routing
3 limited number of slots
4 parasitic impedance loading of CPU bus (partially solved with later buffered VLB variant?)

PCI was inevitable, it brought:
- decoupled peripherals from main CPU bus
1 cpu can finally run in parallel
2 no more signal integrity issues
3 CPU speed independence, own dedicated (in theory) clock
4 CPU architecture independence
- plug&play
- transaction based
- actual engineering went into the design, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflected-wave_switching
- error detection (parity)
- full blown bus arbitration build in for dealing with multiple masters and contention

The other part of PCI, was that Intel was the main proponent. Don't forget the amount of influence Intel had in taking the reigns the PC compatible market in the 90s. USB is another thing that became popular due to Intel's influence, despite there were already established options for peripherals, and USB was just another option that had no devices supporting it yet. So once the PCI standard was written, and all the bugs were worked out, all the manufacturers put it in the boards, because they wanted to make PCs and Intel was basically the defacto PC standard.

PTherapist wrote on 2022-10-21, 11:06:

I'd love to get hold of it's successor the MZ-800 someday, but those are quite rare it appears.

Me, too. The MZ-800 had real graphics mode (max 640x200, like CGA), an SN76489 PSG..

Unfortunately, it doesn't have a great games library.
Graphically, it really looks like someone in the UK or Europe simply ported ZX Spectrum games to it,
making you wish you have a blurry monochrome monitor. 😁

If only some textadventures were made using 640x200 mode or something. *sigh*
Just like for the Amstrad PCW/Schneider Joyce.
I mean, the Infocom library had so much to offer at the time.
Or let's take Magnetic Scrolls.. Or some other EU publisher of the time.

Sure, the MZ-800 could also play MZ-700 and MZ-80A/K games with their distinctive block graphics, but so does the Japanese MZ-1500.
Both are descendants of the MZ-700.

The MZ-1500 looks similar to the MZ-800, just nicer, I think.
It has a black chassis, two PSGs and better colour graphics.
It merely sadly lacks the hi-res mode (640x200 mono) of the European MZ-800.

https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=208

So maybe it's worth holding out for an MZ-1500 instead?

PS: There's also the Unicard for MZ-700/800.. But software support is a problem, I guess.

Early on I decided my lower limit to be roughly 386 for practical reasons. I had originally set my lower limit at 486 but decided to go down at least one more generation since 386 seemed interesting as well and was still fairly modular and compatible with standard AT.
I didn't want 1000 different types of cases, so I ended up with going only tower AT and tower ATX (with some exceptions here and there).
Peripherals I didn't really have a lower limit.

Don't really have an upper limit, but I don't really collect on a large scale anymore either. Still I find virtually all CPU generations interesting in some way from the start all the way to modern. And I simply don't have the room to collect everything and am fairly happy with what I already have.

For collection in PC x86 area

software - msdos & win 3.x

hardware - anything is supported in dos & win3.x, very few exeptions some hardware for NT

I have almost 0 interest in win95 and new software

Monitors, I like old CRTs, 93 and less,with dot pitch .28+,no much interest in new ones, no interest at all in 17 inch+ or tft

I do not collect much mainly because I live in a small place now but my line from 486 DX2 66Mhz until around P4 or Core 2 duo. I plan to move to a new house in around 1 or 2 years so that time i change my opinion maybe.

We tend to try to revive our childhood memories and my first PC was a 486 so that's it i guess. I grew up with an spectrum +2 128k though, but for that i prefer emulators and anyway there's no market here almost (or it is super expensive) for the major 8 bit computers obviously, only MSX what I don't like.

My oldest is probably Amiga 1200 (full kitted) and MSX2+ (just for Castlevania and Metal Gear). On PC side I'm on P133 which I'm inclined to replace it with P166mmx.

nach wrote on 2022-12-27, 01:15:

[..] anyway there's no market here almost (or it is super expensive) for the major 8 bit computers obviously, only MSX what I don't like.

No wonder, MSX1 and MSX2 are like night and day. I didn't know this either, by the way.
It's akin to Commodore ViC20 vs C128.. Or ZXSpectrum vs Atari ST.

MSX1 was horrible, I think, like an incomplete prototype - almost killed the platform.. *sigh*
It had a few gems, though. Arctic Adventure, Parodius Da!, Q*Bert (Konami version ) and.. I forgot.

Have a look at MSX2 games like Snatcher, Angelus, Valis, Jesus etc.
They're of Japanese origin, but give a nice impression of the MSX2's capabilities.
MSX2 also had disk mags and a community that still lives on.

MSX2 hardware was the last hardware to be released in the west, afaik.
MSX2+ and TurboR are Japanese exclusives.
Anyway, MSX2 is good enough in most cases. That's were most games are compatible with, including many MSX1 titles.

The only real incompatibility was the amount of RAM, I vaguely remember.
Western systems had too much of one of the RAM types (RAM/VIDEO),
causing western games to cause trouble on Japanese hardware.
The other way round was no problem, afaik.

SymbOS runs on MSX2 hardware, too. The 9938 video chip is much better than the 9918 (TI99/4, MSX1, NABU).
There's even something akin to our AdLib/FM synthesis scene.
They like to use the OPL4, for example. The Moonsound cartridge was very popular, if memory serves.

In essence, MSX2/MSX2+ and TurboR are a bit akin to our 286-486 PCs.
It's just based on Z80 and 8-/16-Bit technology instead, like as if it's from another reality or something.
MSX DOS is like a crossover of CP/M and MS-DOS 2.x, for example.
There are batch files and familiar DOS commands like "DIR"..

I mainly use the computer for playing games so on the PC side I draw the line on a 486 because anything slower is just to old and unreliable.
Also the 486 will support more memory and can be slowed down to 386 and 286 speeds by disabling cache. So with a 486 you can pretty much play any DOS game in good quality and performance.

On the Mac side the “Macintosh color classic” is as low as I go. It’s much like the 486 in the amount of games it can play on the Mac side.

And both were released around 1993.

i don't collect...by design & happenstance i still have some of the original pc's that were my daily drivers back in the day. i have added a usb 2.0/3.0 card here and there and did replace 1 motherboard although i kept the old one as it is likely repairable. only recently have i 'collected' a couple of new isa sound cards to play around with. my 'current' daily driver isn't exactly a spring chicken either being an i5-6400t overclocked on a z270 gaming board with sli gtx 550 ti's (directx 11).

i have a socket 478 p4m900 (via ddr2) system that is still a daily workhouse. i use it as a linux file and plex/dlna server only because i can stripe 4 massive 320gb ide drives that would otherwise have been thrown away. i have a box full of replacements for any ide hdd failures (only 1 smart failure so far in the past decade).

my other retro desktop is a socket a amd761 (now kt133a) isa system which is a dedicated win98se/dos box. although i can slow this system down pretty effectively by disabling caches, lowering multiplier/bus/timings and modifying acpi registers, it is rarely used for gaming except as an external serial-connected midi synth (munt, s-yxg100, roland vsc, timidity, emu8000).

my main gaming rig is an nec versa p54c laptop with ess688/opl3 sound hooked up to an external monitor & mouse. it is the 2nd laptop i have ever owned--the first being the versa-e 486 50mhz which i wish i had held onto for parts.

if i were to go back further to fuel my nostalgia i would have to get a commodore 64 with a 300baud modem, which i have no desire to do.

AT is definitely a format I won't mess with. From the need for loads of expansion cards for basic functionality, the weird and (as I understand) potentially dangerous power supplies, the very limited selection of cases, to the non-removable batteries, it seems like a much bigger hassle than even the earliest ATX motherboards. My Pentium Pro 200 MHz build is still in development hell but once it's done that will probably be my slowest build.

Woolie Wool wrote on 2022-12-28, 00:21:

AT is definitely a format I won't mess with. From the need for loads of expansion cards for basic functionality, the weird and (as I understand) potentially dangerous power supplies, the very limited selection of cases, to the non-removable batteries, it seems like a much bigger hassle than even the earliest ATX motherboards.

AT is not so bad. Typically the only cards one needs in an AT case is a controller card for ports and a video card. Though there are MBs with built in controller boards in which case all you need is a video card.

Batteries depends on the motherboard. Some are natively removable, some not. But even in the latter case, usually some simple soldering is all that is needed. Unless it's one of those annoying Dallas clock/battery things. Those are more of a PITA.

As far as X86 collecting. I stop at 386s, though I have a 286 I got in a lot pickup.

Gaming and micro computer wise I stop at the C64.

Woolie Wool wrote on 2022-12-28, 00:21:

AT is definitely a format I won't mess with. From the need for loads of expansion cards for basic functionality, the weird and (as I understand) potentially dangerous power supplies, the very limited selection of cases, to the non-removable batteries, it seems like a much bigger hassle than even the earliest ATX motherboards. My Pentium Pro 200 MHz build is still in development hell but once it's done that will probably be my slowest build.

Please let's don't forget that Baby AT ≠ AT.
The form factor usually associated with 386/486 mainboards from the 90s is Baby AT , not the full-size AT.

Vanessaira wrote on 2022-12-28, 00:41:

Gaming and micro computer wise I stop at the C64.

Just before or past the C64? 😆

Edit: Just kidding. I like making fun of the C64 from time to time. 🙂

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-12-28, 00:26:

AT is not so bad. Typically the only cards one needs in an AT case is a controller card for ports and a video card. Though there are MBs with built in controller boards in which case all you need is a video card.

+1

Nowadays unknown, but back then quite normal were so-called "multi i/o" cards.

These are ISA cards with floppy controller/IDE/V.24/parallel/gameport..

I believe they originated from the PC/XT cards which contained a real-time clock, a little RAM upgrade and a parallel port.
Some also had a floppy controller, too.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-12-28, 02:20:

Woolie Wool wrote on 2022-12-28, 00:21:

AT is definitely a format I won't mess with. From the need for loads of expansion cards for basic functionality, the weird and (as I understand) potentially dangerous power supplies, the very limited selection of cases, to the non-removable batteries, it seems like a much bigger hassle than even the earliest ATX motherboards. My Pentium Pro 200 MHz build is still in development hell but once it's done that will probably be my slowest build.

Please let's don't forget that Baby AT ≠ AT.
The form factor usually associated with 386/486 mainboards from the 90s is Baby AT , not the full-size AT.

Yes, and? If one were to do an "AT vs. ATX" comparison I think that would definitely include Baby AT, as it would Micro-ATX on the ATX side. I am talking things like power supplies, electrical systems, general design principles that make computers from the ATX era easier to build and work on.

When retro stuff is concerned, I won't be using a computer that lacks ISA slots since I'm mainly focused with DOS (and Windows 9x to some extent). Even then, I'm not a collector due to lacking space and having everything I need.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-12-28, 02:20:

Vanessaira wrote on 2022-12-28, 00:41:

Gaming and micro computer wise I stop at the C64.

Just before or past the C64? 😆

Edit: Just kidding. I like making fun of the C64 from time to time. 🙂

😆 Yeah nothing before the C64. I own a classic bread bin C64 and if a VIC20 ended up in my collection. I wouldn't complain but nowhere computer or gaming wise before it.