sliderider wrote:

Hatta wrote:

Yes, absolutely buy a spare of anything you can. Most PC equipment from the 80s and 90s has already been destroyed, and the only ones who care about it are weirdos like us. Your vintage PC will break down eventually, and if you don't already have a parts machine you'll probably be SOL.

But yes, you have to balance that with life and space requirements. If you don't have the time and space to care for your collection and be organized, there's no point to keeping it. Don't be a horder. Focus on what you can do well, do it well, and be proud of it. For me, that means significant gaming platforms. No CPM machines, no UNIX boxes, no weirdo clones, etc.

Yes, but then there's the problem of the idiots on Youtube who make "Watch me blow up my vintage PC or video game system" videos. If one of us buys the stuff before one of those morons gets their hands on it, then it's better for us all because those parts have been saved. Letting a part sit for too long on ebay pretty much insures it will meet a nasty fate whether at the hands of a "watch me blow stuff up" Youtuber or a gold scrapper.

True to some extend, but I'm not gonna be paying those insane prices ebay sellers sometimes ask for their old parts 😜

I usually go for the "good stuff" only. Quite picky in what I want and therefore my collection is not that large. I do like to have backups like 2 Sound Blaster Pro cards and 3 AWE64 Gold. I try to buy in bulk to save shipping, so that's how I often end up with a few bits extra.

I don't collect boxes or complete collections, just the "good" stuff cards and stick with Intel, Creative, Roland to be on the safe side.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I usually go for the "good stuff" only. Quite picky in what I want and therefore my collection is not that large. I do like to have backups like 2 Sound Blaster Pro cards and 3 AWE64 Gold. I try to buy in bulk to save shipping, so that's how I often end up with a few bits extra.

I don't collect boxes or complete collections, just the "good" stuff cards and stick with Intel, Creative, Roland to be on the safe side.

True. nowadays I only collect either stuff that's worth the hassle but I also take stuff for free and I'll see later what I can do with it. If it's absolutely worthless then I can always bin it later (after having taken all useful stuff like jumpers, coolers etc).

I do not really understand why people think parts are no longer available / hard to get. I see thousands of items on eBay and many go unsold. I personally do not think we are going to run out of stuff anytime soon to be honest.

PeterLI wrote:

I do not really understand why people think parts are no longer available / hard to get. I see thousands of items on eBay and many go unsold. I personally do not think we are going to run out of stuff anytime soon to be honest.

Well, money will buy you (almost) anything, but if you don't have the money to burn on what you want, then it becomes sorta unavailable...riiight? 😊

I'm still kinda on the lookout for (cheap) 2.88MB floppy drives. I don't look around that much for them anymore but once in a while I take a look around, see the asking prices for these drives (mind you, Im only interested in the PC version, not those IBM ones 😜 ) and then quickly forget about them again.

Postage will certainly keep getting more expensive. Exporting from Australia already costs so much I won't even bother trying to sell overseas if I ever decide to sell something.

But I agree it is often more hassle to sell stuff compared to what they are worth. Apart from some Roland gear maybe.

That is a fair point. I typically also find stuff pretty cheap and/or put in offers and get what I want (eventually) at a fair price. I am also not in to parts as much. I notice parts is a big thing here on Vogons. The only thing I am OCD about is early Creative / Roland. The good thing about those is that they keep their value and when you get them cheap you can usually recover your $. 😀 I use OEM desktops to play games and those are very common and relatively cheap (and come with all parts in it usually: MOBO, FDD, HDD, VGA, I/O, RAM).

I wish I would have hoarded some of the rare stuff a decade ago instead of just grabbing one for the collection (cards mostly).

I used to visit a new defunct scrapper and got to pick out cards from their piles as they got them in for a dollar or two so I have a small stack of extra soundblasters of all kinds (among other cards). I have a few extra PS/2 Model 80's (for example) because they were $5 a piece.

One of my collecting interests is old analog video capture cards, and I like to install them into dedicated systems so I have quite a few "extra" machines stuffed with those cards. I also have a dozen or more 486 class machines because I like trying out different VLB cards. Quite a bit of the stuff I have can no longer be acquired without spending some money because most of it has been stuffed into somebody elses collection or recycled.

Unknown_K wrote:

One of my collecting interests is old analog video capture cards

If you happen to know something about the Actionmedia II (made by IBM and Intel, clicky for pic) then feel free to give me any information you have about them or better yet, do you happen to have some footage on youtube of such a card in action? 😁

Unknown_K wrote:

One of my collecting interests is old analog video capture cards, and I like to install them into dedicated systems so I have quite a few "extra" machines stuffed with those cards.

Do you have a Pro Movie Spectrum?

I think my PS/2 capture card are IBM M-Motion. Don't think I have the Pro Movie Spectrum. My collection of capture cards is for the PC and early Mac plus later PCI cards.

Rasterops, Supermac, Targa, Truvision, Media 100, Optibase, AVID Media Composer, Matrox, Radius Videovision, DPS, etc.

Tetrium wrote:

PeterLI wrote:

I do not really understand why people think parts are no longer available / hard to get. I see thousands of items on eBay and many go unsold. I personally do not think we are going to run out of stuff anytime soon to be honest.

Well, money will buy you (almost) anything, but if you don't have the money to burn on what you want, then it becomes sorta unavailable...riiight? 😊

I'm still kinda on the lookout for (cheap) 2.88MB floppy drives. I don't look around that much for them anymore but once in a while I take a look around, see the asking prices for these drives (mind you, Im only interested in the PC version, not those IBM ones 😜 ) and then quickly forget about them again.

I look for anything that I feel is undervalued. I may not need it right now, but may in the future and even if I never get around to using it then I can trade it away for something that I do need or resell it for a profit because I got it for next to nothing to begin with.

sliderider wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

PeterLI wrote:

I do not really understand why people think parts are no longer available / hard to get. I see thousands of items on eBay and many go unsold. I personally do not think we are going to run out of stuff anytime soon to be honest.

Well, money will buy you (almost) anything, but if you don't have the money to burn on what you want, then it becomes sorta unavailable...riiight? 😊

I'm still kinda on the lookout for (cheap) 2.88MB floppy drives. I don't look around that much for them anymore but once in a while I take a look around, see the asking prices for these drives (mind you, Im only interested in the PC version, not those IBM ones 😜 ) and then quickly forget about them again.

I look for anything that I feel is undervalued. I may not need it right now, but may in the future and even if I never get around to using it then I can trade it away for something that I do need or resell it for a profit because I got it for next to nothing to begin with.

I tend to look at what's undervalued, useful in general but also useful to me (if not now then in the near future). I try not to buy something that might increase in value in the future...but I know I'll never use for myself. Even if something doesn't increase in value even though I expected it to, I can still use it for my own projects and I'll know I didn't overpay to get it 😀

I think iam hording too. But i only buying specific parts i only would mostly use on the computers iam building on.

If iam busy on one platform, iam not going to build two systems on the same platform.. I know i have space to do my things here.. But its not unlimited.. So i need to decide which systems iam going to build..

For the first dos games iam building on my NEC V20 XT system ( with the turbo button i can slow it down as a normal speed XT one, with turbo i can do the faster things on it)

My second system would be a 286 -12 system iam going to use it for every game that wouldnt run on de XT , or is to speedy for my 386 system.

My third system would be the 386 DX 40 mhz system, iam going to use it for every game thats to slow for my 286 system and for every 386 game

My fourth system would be the 486 system (iam not out which cpu iam going to use, but need to figure that out, whats best for me.

My five system would by more the time period of windows 95, it would by an 200 - 233 Mhz mmx system.

Then we had a long windows 98 se period.. So i decided to build two systems for this.

The slowest would be an Pentium III 550 Mhz (its still Pentium II 400, because of 2 voodoo SLI i prefer make it a little bit faster..)

The fastest windows 98se (iam also want to trying windows me instead) i think i would go on a dual boot with windows xp sp3. (this on two seperate disks)
This system would be build on S462 platform. (why?, i thought about to go for a Pentium III 1400 system as well, but those parts where very rare and expensive to get. The first socket DDR1 board did had 6 pci slots. later it changed to 5 slots instead.. For everyting i wanted to install in this computer i didnt had any pci slots left on the system board.. So i decided that it would a better idea to go for an intergraded NIC solution on de board it self so i saved one pci slot on this solution. And to make this build more special, i want to water cool it.. The bad side is that i need to change to case.. I have still have an old coolermaster HAF932 case here ( i wanted to sell it, but want to keep it to house this system in, this case would give me advantage for water cooling. ( in the older case i didnt had the space for water cooling)

The last system would be a total 32-bit fast system on S775 and QX9650. Its running already, but i need to make some improvements on this system. Iam also think of dual boot this system.. So it could to latest period of windows xp and to whole windows 7 32-bit period..

So with all of this systems i covered a whole period of gaming!