Bought a Super GameBoy clock speed mod for my Super GameBoy to lower the clock speed to the exact speed the GameBoy utilized.

Bought a few A/V cables for my retro consoles. Hyperkin's HDTV cables for the Nintendo systems (SNES/N64/GameCube), Sony systems (PS1/PS2), Sega systems (Genesis/Master System/Nomad), and the Original Xbox, including the component cable for the Original Xbox. $30 a piece for the Hyperkin adapters and $10 for the Original Xbox component cable.

The picture quality is a lot better than composite any day (S-video at best for some systems), and the Genesis picture quality is amazing, like the multi A/V board I made that has Composite, RGB, C-Sync, and Audio (from either the 8-pin DIN for the Mono only CRT sets, or from the headphone jack on the front of the Genesis Model 1). The PS1 and PS2 support RGB natively and the picture quality is pretty good. The SNES has a shadowing picture showing up on games and I think it's the power brick I'm using that's a low quality item and going to buy the genuine power adapters for both the SNES and Genesis Model 1.

Soundblaster X-Fi SB0880... first PCIe sound card I've had.

And the last one with support for soundfonts 😉

Bought an ASUS TUF GeForce GTX 1660Ti for my main desktop as the GPU that's in there cannot do a lot of gaming these days (lowest settings gets me 10-15FPS), iFixIt 64-bit screwdriver kit for replacing cartridge batteries, mods, or cleaning, repairing my consoles (Nintendo used the Secure Bit and Tri-Wing screws for their systems), DisplayPort to DVI cable, and cans of compressed air (my brother's computer is so dusty, it's now a steam room).

Bought a new backlight screen, clear shell, and glass screen cover from Handheld Legend.

Srandista wrote:

And the last one with support for soundfonts 😉

I think the Sound Blaster Audigy RX (2013) is the last card released that has a hardware synth with Sound Font support. The X-Fi Titanium was released in 2008.

Finally, after nursing my MSI Z77A-GD65 and i7-3770 for probably over seven years, I bought a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and a Noctua HSF. The i7-3770 and DDR3 1600 weren't cutting it for editing large photos any more. Plus the lack of PCIe lanes is a bummer. I opted for an older Intel system rather than a new Ryzen or Intel platform because I couldn't get anything with lots of PCIe lanes for cheap.

The Motherboard
A SuperMicro X10SRA. Bought new from Newegg with substantial discounts. A little over $200 shipped.

The CPU
Intel Xeon E5-1650v3 6 cores, 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes, and 4 channels of DDR4 of Haswell goodness running at 3.5ghz. Used. $95 shipped.

The RAM
Four 8GB DDR4 2400 registered ECC Kingston sticks for total of 32GB. Used. $100 shipped.

The HSF
Noctua NH-D9DX No idea if this is sufficient. If not, I'll add a fan too it.

Parts should all be here by Friday. I might get a different LGA 2011-3 processor later, maybe a v4 model which supports faster DDR4 RAM.

god Supermicro just make awesome products. I'm so happy with my X9DAE

that's not really an improvement... would've made much more sense to go skylake or newer.

luckybob wrote:

Supermicro just make awesome products. I'm so happy with my X9DAE

Yes they do. This would be my fifth Supermicro motherboard. I have one in my router, one on my VM/storage server, and one colocated (not powered off in five years.) I made sure my workstation upgrade didn't get BMC as they take too long to boot up.

oeuvre wrote:

that's not really an improvement... would've made much more sense to go skylake or newer.

I realize that it's not the latest and greatest, but it fits my needs more than the current platforms on both budget and features.

Here's what I'm getting
Six cores vs four
Haswell-E IPC vs Ivybridge IPC
Upgradeable to a Broadwell-E CPU vs Zero CPU upgrade path
40 PCIe 3.0 lanes vs 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes
Four channel DDR4 2133/2400 vs Dual channel DDR3 1600
Up to 1TB max RAM on the SuperMicro vs 32GB max on the MSI Z77.
Workstation POWAH vs consumer weaksauce board.

Not and improvement? For that I condemn you to use an iPad mini for all of you computing needs for a month. Muahaha. 😈

On paper it sounds like an improvement. But with the processor your selected, other than more cores, it actually doesn't perform much better than what you have right now. More cores doesn't automatically equal significantly better performance.

it also sounds a bit like epeen to me.

oeuvre wrote:

On paper it sounds like an improvement. But with the processor your selected, other than more cores, it actually doesn't perform much better than what you have right now. More cores doesn't automatically equal significantly better performance.

it also sounds a bit like epeen to me.

And Skylake as you suggested won't perform much better than Haswell or Broadwell. It's not all about IPC. I need more RAM and more PCIe on a budget so I can have all my cards in one PC instead of two to transfer files and also handle the workload. RAM will help with editing 500MB to 1GB photos, which is painfully when my current PC starts to swap. I'll probably upgrade to 64 or 128GB if I need to. The 32GB is just a test to see if it is enough.

I laid out my reasoning for this budget upgrade, with a little humor, and I get accused of epeen. Shaking my head.

Should've gone for a quad 486 with 96 ISAe lanes.

Pat 4 of my Ryzen upgrade shopping. I was originally going to stick to my Agility OCZ III, but then I checked online to compare read/write speeds with modern SSDs..

NVMe and M.2 don't really make too much sense for a normal desktop user so I stuck with a budget SATA3 2.5" instead.

starting my socket 775 build. think i'm off to a good start. still waiting on some of the other components.

nos xfx nforce 780i sli motherboard.

nos antec p180b case. i had an opportunity to get the silver p180 but, that meant a 2 hour drive to los angeles and i'm super lazy.

wirerogue wrote:

starting my socket 775 build. think i'm off to a good start. still waiting on some of the other components. […]
Show full quote

starting my socket 775 build. think i'm off to a good start. still waiting on some of the other components.

nos xfx nforce 780i sli motherboard.

xfx.780i.sli.jpg

nos antec p180b case. i had an opportunity to get the silver p180 but, that meant a 2 hour drive to los angeles and i'm super lazy.

antec.p180b.jpg

Ah yes, antec made a lot of refrigerators back then. I remember them fondly 😀.

some of this might be retro, and it is for retro use, but the capture card isn't really retro, so posting it here ^^
hope this is going to help my capturing plans.

Kramer VP-211N
Kramer FC-31 UXGA to DVI-D Converter (kind of redundant now that I got the right capture card, but I'm sure I'll find a use for it)
Extron SW2 VGA DA2 AF
and the PEXHDCAP60L which I also scored on ebay for a good price 😀

Just today I solved a problem with my main desktop, which wouldn't turn on properly. The funny part was that I've been forcing the PC to turn on by removing the front panel and then pressing the power button 😜 I then found out that the cause of the problem was that I had the PC plugged in to a power surge, so I transferred the plug to a wall-mounted outlet, and it doesn't show the problem anymore. I guess that's why some people do not recommend power surges to plug things like computers into, but they seem to work fine for me.

Bought a new 850W PSU for my main PC, 2.5" to 3.5" drive adapter, 100 blank CD-R discs so I can convert all of the audio cassettes then burn the CDs for iTunes, and a 480GB SSD for my Original Xbox 1.6b that I'll be modding with a custom shell.