To be honest, start with a complete, working system.

Starting with just the board, retro hardware will consume you 😵

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

To be honest, start with a complete, working system.

Starting with just the board, retro hardware will consume you 😵

I agree it's like a disease. You can easily get OCD from this stuff.

Well I had been looking for CPUs to use with a new board or upgrade an existing one and found a PNY Quickchip 486-133 overdrive chip listed for $29. Should have snatched it up, passed on it thinking "I'll give myself a day to think about it" and someone else snatched it up (unsurprisingly). I guess the moral here is snag something like that when you can.

Have you tried playing your old games in DOSBox already and determined whether that satisfies your "nostalgia bug" or not?

Yeah, I just think that part of the fun for me is screwing around with the old hardware. But it does get expensive. Not to mention you can end up with boxes of stuff laying around your office.

Buy an OEM desktop / tower. 😀 Plug & play + clean.

snorg wrote:

Yeah, I just think that part of the fun for me is screwing around with the old hardware. But it does get expensive. Not to mention you can end up with boxes of stuff laying around your office.

Stick to using DOSBOX on your main system. Once you get the bug for vintage hardware, you never get rid of it. Expect to lose friends, family, even pets. Turn back now while you still can. 🤣

Amen to that. I have nearly finished one build and have enough parts for another 2. I am seriously considering just selling all the additional parts and sticking to one retro PC. It's very time consuming.

The only thing I modify in my OEM desktops are the sound cards / NICs and sometimes VGA cards (IBM PS/2 Model 30 8086s). Yesterday I had a lot of fun getting Novell NetWare up and running. Works pretty well. A lot faster than LapLink. The only challenge is that the 8086s have 640KB RAM so they lose too much memory loading all the TSRs (no HMA). 🤣

There are a lot of interesting posts here. There are truths on both sides of the fence. I think it is true that once you start down that path there is no end to it. I have so many computers it is ridiculous - I have been trying to slim these down to one for each "era" - dos/win3.1, win95, win98, etc.

On the other hand.... just buy a new pc. Well now, then you are putting yourself in their hands. You are going to be locked into a constant upgrade cycle. When it dies it two or three years, throw it out and get a new one. Because by then they will have a new OS which won't run old apps, plus you wouldn't have been allowed to keep the older software. Try to reinstall something on a new computer - gotta go online and active it - oh sorry, we don't "support" that anymore. What about the money I paid for it? Too bad. Gotta but this new version.

ncmark wrote:

There are a lot of interesting posts here. There are truths on both sides of the fence. I think it is true that once you start down that path there is no end to it. I have so many computers it is ridiculous - I have been trying to slim these down to one for each "era" - dos/win3.1, win95, win98, etc.

On the other hand.... just buy a new pc. Well now, then you are putting yourself in their hands. You are going to be locked into a constant upgrade cycle. When it dies it two or three years, throw it out and get a new one. Because by then they will have a new OS which won't run old apps, plus you wouldn't have been allowed to keep the older software. Try to reinstall something on a new computer - gotta go online and active it - oh sorry, we don't "support" that anymore. What about the money I paid for it? Too bad. Gotta but this new version.

Unfortunately, that is a problem. Even the best made hardware doesn't last forever. I thought I would be able to buy new gear, though, and keep running win 2k in a virtual machine along with my favorite software but the problem is, unless you are limiting yourself to nothing made past a certain year, the old OS's are no longer supported. XP requires activation, software is going subscription, it is a major PITA.

snorg wrote:

XP requires activation

It is trivial to bypass XP's activation. Even without it, activation is primarily necessary to access updates from Microsoft, which won't really be a problem anymore soon.

and volume licence requires no activation at all! Once MS turn off their Activation servers I'm sure they will forgive you as long as you can prove you have an OEM/Retail licence. (Even then I doubt they will really worry)

VM's are good for keeping old software going, hell you can argue dosbox does a better job then a real dos pc for games. so if that's where your interest lies I'd stick with that.
but as far a hobby or trip down memory lane this isn't tooo expensive. If it wasn't old PC's I'd be wanting to do up old cars which cost a lot more money and space.

Well - back to the original subject. Obviously I cannot speak for everyone, but I have gone through "spells" of deciding it's all a bunch of junk and throwing it all out.

When building a PC, I suggest you ask yourself "do I have a USE for this." Fairly recently I decided to resurrect DOS/WIN 3.1 an old PC. I used to it to play through some old DOS games, some of which did not play under windows. That said, I fairly recently (like last weekend) set up windows 95 on an older PC. Will that really be used? I kind of doubt it - that can be covered with a windows 98 machine. Still, it was remarkable to see how lean windows 95 really was in comparison to 98. Also, after so many years of moving things off onto DVDs I decided to set up a machine specifically for burning CDs.

I will say this. Back to the "bunch of junk" comment. I have quite a few old DOS programming languages.... QuickBasic, Turbo C, Turbo Assembler. That was one reason for building the DOS machine.... I wanted to run those in their native environment. But it kind of puts things in perspective when you realize any program you write with those languages cannot even be run on a modern PC. (Was not XP the last OS to support DOS apps?) So at this point, programming for DOS would be like programming for a Commodore 64....who would use your program?

Just my two cents.....

ncmark wrote:

Also, after so many years of moving things off onto DVDs I decided to set up a machine specifically for burning CDs.

This is utterly baffling. A DVD burner is entirely capable of burning CDs.

ncmark wrote:

Was not XP the last OS to support DOS apps?

The 32-bit version of Windows 8 will still run DOS apps. Functionality is limited, particularly since Windows 8 completely dropped support for the old XPDM drivers (though Windows 7 didn't), but it's there.

@ncmark
Lots of people are still programming for the C64, and lots of people are still using those programs! (mostly games and demos of course)

ncmark wrote:

Well - back to the original subject. Obviously I cannot speak for everyone, but I have gone through "spells" of deciding it's all a bunch of junk and throwing it all out.

When building a PC, I suggest you ask yourself "do I have a USE for this." Fairly recently I decided to resurrect DOS/WIN 3.1 an old PC. I used to it to play through some old DOS games, some of which did not play under windows. That said, I fairly recently (like last weekend) set up windows 95 on an older PC. Will that really be used? I kind of doubt it - that can be covered with a windows 98 machine. Still, it was remarkable to see how lean windows 95 really was in comparison to 98. Also, after so many years of moving things off onto DVDs I decided to set up a machine specifically for burning CDs.

Just my two cents.....

I have thought about this many times as well, but I have regretted getting rid of stuff that I don't use often more times than not. I try to keep as much retro hardware and software as possible without becoming a hoarder 🤣

As long as I can keep everything organized, I will keep collecting and not "give up" on building or acquiring retro systems to cover as many eras of computing as possible. It's not always about making use of these systems for me, instead, I am happy to just have them available to be able to use if I get that retro bug...my reccommendation is to keep as much of your stuff as possible because you never know when that retro bug will bite you again.

sliderider wrote:

Stick to using DOSBOX on your main system. Once you get the bug for vintage hardware, you never get rid of it. Expect to lose friends, family, even pets. Turn back now while you still can. 🤣

So using DOSBOX on your main system will not make you lose friends? 🤣 ...I think that spending time in front of a modern computer using DOSBOX is just as time consuming (albeit in a little bit of a different way) than tinkering with retro pc's.