A lot of parts and systems are cheap enough where you can mix and match parts and do testing just like you used to read about in the magazines but could never afford to do when the stuff was new. Of course, like with any hobby, there are rares that now sell at inflated prices simply because you hardly ever see them for sale anymore or because there weren't a lot of them produced in the first place. They would be comparable to a Action Comics #1, 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle, or 1895-S Morgan dollar.

bjt wrote:

Pure nostalgia for me, I am fully aware of it! Also, the nature of games means that while visual and audio technology has moved on, the gameplay of many old games is just as good or even better than new releases.

The thing is that in so many cases the gameplay is just as good regardless of whether you're running the game on DOSBox or running it on some special combination of hardware that you spend too much time and money putting together.

In that regard, the analogy with audiophile enthusiasts who insist on spending thousand of dollars on magical cables and tube amplifiers is rather appropriate. 😄

Jorpho wrote:

In that regard, the analogy with audiophile enthusiasts who insist on spending thousand of dollars on magical cables and tube amplifiers is rather appropriate. 😄

I agree to some extent, or maybe a better comparison would be with vinyl enthusiasts... they love the tactile experience of records, even though the audio is higher fidelity on CD. In the same way we love the experience of CRT monitors, old Sound Blasters & ball mice even though the experience is "higher fidelity" on a modern PC with LCD and laser mouse.

I don't think it can be explained easily. The old car analogy is probably the most suitable one.
Part of me feels like I'm preserving history or something, somehow learning about old tech and how it works is interesting. It really is studying computer history to a certain degree and it is interesting compare with modern trends.

KT7AGuy wrote:

I've been to lots of antique car shows. I like cars. I understand the different makes & models and what makes some more specia […]
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I've been to lots of antique car shows. I like cars. I understand the different makes & models and what makes some more special than others.

My girlfriend, however, does not understand the different makes & models and what makes some more special than others. To her, a '65 Mustang is pretty much the same as a '57 Chevy and they all do the same thing as a Toyota Corolla.

So, (and I mean no disrespect), I think you might have the same attitude towards a possible vintage hardware gathering as my girlfriend does to an antique car show. It's not a bad thing. I feel the same way about her long-distance marathon running conventions. To me, the thousands of shoes on display all do the same thing and I'm unable to discern the differences, nor do I care.

Just like any old car can get on the road and drive, so can pretty much any old PC run Quake. It's when you look under the hood that you find the magic. If you look under the hood and can't see the magic, maybe it's just not something for you.

But surely there is a substantial difference here? I can't say I've spent much time at antique car shows at all (I guess the Studebaker museum might count?), but I can extrapolate that a '65 Mustang will have eight years of development over a '57 Chevy, and that its mechanical components – even when not in motion – will tangibly reflect substantially different constructions and design philosophies, and that the Toyota Corolla will be considerably more streamlined and hence not nearly as interesting as modern automobile demands have shifted considerably. If you look under the hood of a 486, you see fans and cables and silicon, just like in any off-the-shelf i7 you can get today. If you ignore the numbers printed on the components there would be no distinguishing "magic" of any kind. (Well, if you ignore the fancy new heatsinks and cooling systems, anyway.)

The same goes for shoes – there's no way to convey the feeling of a shoe; you just have to put it on yourself and feel it on your foot, I guess, and it would be much too impractical to have all those different shoes shipped to one's location. I ... guess the closest analogy would be a CRT? Maybe a nice vintage keyboard? There's really nothing else you can't adequately convey with a Youtube video, except maybe hard drive rumble?

Jorpho wrote:

...eight years of development...

Ya what?! 8 years evolution of the PC during the 80's and 90's saw incredible advancements. Standards coming and going, exponential speed / capacity increases, etc. It was exciting and challenging, and getting the most out of your hardware / software required knowledge and skill that bordered on hacking.

Personally I do the retro computer thing because:

- I like the hunter gathering aspect of tracking down the parts I want.
- I spent most of my teens making do with second hand cast-offs, and now I can get all the hot hardware I dreamed of.
- it's a great hobby for those with young kids; I don't have to go anywhere and they can join in.
- it gives me an excuse to break out the soldering iron from time-to-time.
- and at the end of the day, when modern life has finished with me, I can plonk myself down in front of my non-internet connected retro PC and truly relax into a familiar little world of my own creation. Each component has a memory attached, I put it all together, and I can do with it whatever I choose. Play a favourite game, listen to some MIDI tunes, or just sit and watch the little blocks move as I defrag the HDD 🤣

KT7AGuy wrote:

And the same arguments you just made about computer components can still be applied to cars. For example, if you ignore the stamped numbers on an engine, there isn't really too much distinguishing them either.

Let's expand this comparison to a Harley Davidson biker rally. It's the same comparison again. How many damn cruisers can you possibly see before they all start to look the same?

I figured vintage cars had considerably more distinctive internals than that. I'll just have to take your word for it.

Ya what?! 8 years evolution of the PC during the 80's and 90's saw incredible advancements. Standards coming and going, exponential speed / capacity increases, etc. It was exciting and challenging, and getting the most out of your hardware / software required knowledge and skill that bordered on hacking.

Oh, I can at least see some appeal in the wacky, unstandardized museum pieces of the early 80's that bear no resemblance to what you can get nowadays, sure. At least that looks distinctive, sometimes. But beyond that, for all the speed/capacity increases and shifting standards and esoteric knowledge, no matter how you slice it, in the end one pin grid array looks pretty much exactly the same as any other pin grid array. I wouldn't have to zoom in very far on a picture of a 9600 ISA modem card before it became indistinguishable from a zoomed-in PCI-E SB Audigy ZS.

And if you zoom in far enough on an engine block, it looks like the exhaust pipe!

Jorpho wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

There's nothing objectively better about any of it!

You could say that some of the older hardware does in fact have certain obscure capabilities that newer hardware lacks – but then you'd have to explain that almost no one seems to even bother running any of the software that makes use of those capabilities. Even the people restoring old cars take them out for a spin and show them off on occasion.

"Look! This is a period-correct 1996 machine! Top-of-the-line hardware! Nothing in here that was available after January 1997! I spent three years and hundreds of dollars meticulously tracking down each component! I use it to collect dust. But doesn't it just look so rectangular?"

This one really made me lmfao 🤣!

However, I did manage to pull off to impress one of my own parents by talking about her slow computer (she started complaining about this on her own accord while she was visiting me) and how it needed more memory (it already had like 6GB or so and like 3TB harddrive space).
Then I showed her how fast a sub-1GHz single core machine could be with nothing more than a 16 MEGAbyte graphics card and something like 256 MEGA byte of system memory and a 20TB...err I mean GB harddrive.

It was on the desktop much quicker then her own system was and much more responsive. And she also noted how silent it was (unlike old cars which will sometimes can make my ears bleed (older motorcycles are worse though)).

It shut down faster as well, in a few seconds.

Only thing was that its optical drive decided to misbehave and it still needs to be switched out with a working unit.

Jo22 wrote:

I'm in the same situation. I also like 70s tech, eventhough this was before my time. I dunno why. Perhaps these are symptoms cau […]
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clueless1 wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

Yes - but for someone like me, that doesn't fully encapsulate it since I was born three or four years after the era which I'm most interested in (286-Pentium). There's something other than formative emotional attachment in it for me at least.

Now you have me curious. How did you get into retro hardware? Did someone introduce you to it, did you come across it on your own? I'm trying to put myself in your shoes...I can't see myself being that interested in computers from the late 60s. 🤣. Although, I could more realistically see myself being interested in music from that era, because older siblings listened to that.

I'm in the same situation. I also like 70s tech, eventhough this was before my time. I dunno why.
Perhaps these are symptoms caused by an overdose of too many old sci-fi movies ?
Maybe I shouldn't have watched Westworld, Silent Running or Space 1999 in my early childhood.. 😁
About that music part.. Yup, I agree. But back in school this was risky to tell somebody.
If you admitted to someone you didn't dislike your older relatives (or even parents *gasp*) music,
they looked down on you. Why is the world so strange ?

Same thing about actually liking to learn new stuff at school.

Why would anyone even dislike doing homework and why was this so much talked about?
If you don't even like learning, then why bother going to school anyway?

KT7AGuy wrote:

I maintain most of my old computers because old flight sims and late-90s games run better on them; EAW and RB3D in particular. […]
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I maintain most of my old computers because old flight sims and late-90s games run better on them; EAW and RB3D in particular. There are many games that actually run better on modern systems with enhanced graphics and gameplay. Sadly, many others do not. For those, I prefer to just use an old Win9x system and enjoy them the way they were meant to be played.

I maintain my Pentium MMX system for Archimedean Dynasty, EF2000, and MechWarrior 2 (3dfx version). It's also very good for running old DOS stuff.

I've stopped trying to explain this hobby to others. I get raised eyebrows and confused looks. My advice is just to not mention it at all. At best, you confuse people. At worst, they think you're a weirdo. Nothing positive comes from mentioning this hobby to folks who do not, will not, and cannot understand. During the 90s it was pretty common to see a joystick on somebody's computer desk. Nowadays, people think it's weird. They fear what they don't understand.

Heck, even I don't understand why some folks here collect the things they do or the reasons why they do it. I especially don't understand the under-30 folks who enjoy this hobby. Without the nostalgic aspect of the whole thing it just makes no sense to me. Ultimately, it's just a hobby. Your motivation and reasons for engaging in it don't have to make sense to anybody but yourself. I mean, some people collect these horrible things and display them in special cabinets:

... and then there are these guys:

I just cannot make my brain comprehend those two hobbies at all, but the folks who enjoy them aren't hurting anybody and it makes them happy. So, do what makes you happy and share it with people you like who can appreciate it. 😀

And I can certainly relate to this.

In a way I don't think that I have to explain it till they really understand. Just like I don't fully understand what's so interesting about cars and fishing.

The funny thing is, for me ot wasn't about retro or nostalgia back when I started at all.
It was more about wanting to learn more about computers, having more computers and this stuff was tossed on the streets en masse and was basically all for free. That and I don't like tossing stuff just because it's old, even though it's still useful. So I started looking for ways to use them and the best way for me was to play older games on them.

I only started appreciating the stuff I never used or owned myself when I started finding stuff like 486's and seeing the differences compared to ther stuff or stuff that's from another era. Especially if there were simularities. And I just found this stuff interesting in a way and I guess I just like to tinker, figure out stuff.

I do feel nostalgic, but that alone wouldn't be enough of a drive for me to actively persue retro computing. I guess to me it's also a part curiosity and mystery.

And another reason was that I wanted to collect 'something', but also wanted the thing I collected to not take up too much space (i failed in this department 🤣) and the collection actually be useful. A collection of rare paintings or statues does basically nothing except sit around and taking up space. Computer parts, I could build a system from these parts.

Ow and sorry for the minor rez 😊

Very interesting subject, I don't think it's possible to explain this hobby properly to others so I don't bother. By the same token I won't judge anyone if he/she has a hobby that I fail to understand.

Obviously nostalgia is part of this, but it's definitely not the only thing (or the most important). There are also the following aspects:

- I love old games (90s in particular), not for nostalgia, I just happen to enjoy the approach to gaming of that era considerably more than the current output (less hand-holding, better level design, more variety, and better quality even in some cases where old games lack some polish). Of course there are exceptions, but I find this to be the most common situation in my case.

- I love tinkering with old hardware and (hopefully) making it work, it generally has lots of different options/configurations and I find building old PCs strangely "threapeutic".

- There's also the "building a rig with components you could've only paid by selling a kidney back then" aspect (this is the more nostalgia-related reason). For example, I remember salivating over the "Ultimate 1998 build" in PC gamer which had a P2-450 and V2-SLI 😲 I find the fact that I can (and shortly I will 😊 ) build such a PC really fascinating, it's like completing a task that has been pending for years!

If it was just the retro-gaming, I think stuff like DOSBox is really mature by now and along with remastered releases of old games it covers that aspect well. But combined with my love for old hardware, having these old machines and actually using them for retro-gaming is a blast!