feipoa wrote:

Seems like you are having more success at starting this topic than I did more than 5 years ago. How does your wife feel about your retro hobby?

My wife thinks this hobby is ridiculous and would love nothing more than to see it all gone. I also think it is ridiculous, but I enjoy it anyway.

You worded it better though and yea weird how its getting more attention then it did years ago.

gdjacobs wrote:

So, Senrew, you're gonna keep her around for a while? 🤣

As long as she doesn't ask me to get her started with a Neo Geo collection 😀

My wife is cool with my hobby, but has no interest in it herself. And I'm pretty frugal with the spending, so that's not an issue. I could have much worse hobbies, from her standpoint. This at least is safe, keeps me home and close to the family, and is easy to break away from when there's family time.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Errius wrote:

Apparently most video game players are female nowadays. The Sims franchise is a big deal largely because of women.

I don't mean to sound chauvinistic, but isn't it because The Sims is like doll-house? I wonder how many women enjoy Call of Duty or Total Air War.

Women tend to prefer games like for instance RPGs and The Sims and stuff, but through my gaming career I've known too many kick-ass female gamers for them to have been a fluke.

Trust me, they're out there. Many choose to not to mention their sex though because they don't feel like being harassed all the time.

Tetrium wrote:

Many choose to not to mention their sex though because they don't feel like being harassed all the time.

Definitely this.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I wonder how many women enjoy Call of Duty or Total Air War.

Concerning CoD, female players make up between 25 and 30% of the fanbase today.

Like most mine hates my "useless old things" That is partly I suspect as it doesn't fit in with her idea of décor though.
I just say I can be here tinkering with these or down the pub, this way you know what I'm getting up to!

She's not into computers at all though so only sees them as a tool so no emotional attachment, can imagine this also being a big factor.
She does enjoy playing Mario Bros (I've got a snes emulator on the xbox) as she played that as a child so holds some nostalgic value for her

She also doenst get my lesser hobbies of lego (she didn't have this as a kid)
but ok with my model trains (I make puzzles up where she has to arrange carriages in certain formations)
I'm thinking of getting her to build a PC and see how she enjoys that when we get the time

senrew wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

So, Senrew, you're gonna keep her around for a while? 🤣

As long as she doesn't ask me to get her started with a Neo Geo collection 😀

If she does that, send her my way will you please... 🤣

senrew wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

So, Senrew, you're gonna keep her around for a while? 🤣

As long as she doesn't ask me to get her started with a Neo Geo collection 😀

Give her a 161 in one cart... and a CMVS, thats the cheap was to go.

chinny22 wrote:

She also doenst get my lesser hobbies of lego (she didn't have this as a kid)

My wife didn't really have hobbies as a kid either and certainly doesn't now, it's a bit sad really! I'd be in terrible shape mentally if I didn't have fun side projects to think about while dealing with lifes never ending chores.

chinny22 wrote:

...She also doenst get my lesser hobbies of lego (she didn't have this as a kid)...

LEGO! 🤣

Wouldn't expect my S.O. to show my level of interest in a typically male hobby, nor would I really want a woman who does (with all that it entails). I'm not particularly into her "girly" manga or chinese light romance literature either but she has her hobbies, and an 'inner world', and on the bottom line our personalities are more than compatible enough. She can appreciate some of the more creative aspects of oldskool PC shenanigans however.

I was surprised to learn recently that Rollercoaster Tycoon was the best-selling PC game of 1999. This was the year of CS, Q3, AQ2, UT, StarCraft, Tiberian Sun. So who was playing RT? It must have been the girls.

Kids. RCT is more of a smart teens game.

It was cheap, easy to play and just about any computer could run it.

My situation is a bit different......

My relationship was sort of built off the fact we are both retro, and both interested in older things, though more of a musical nature (rock music from the 60's-early 90's) than technology, though she has been quite excited and happy at me gifting her vintage movie player hardware which I rebuilt, but we still have a lot of catching up to do.

She gave me a mancave, is (for the most part) supportive of both my hobbies and external sources of money (music), and she does have a small shred of "gamer" to her in that she enjoys playing Mario and Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat type games with me and occasionally wants to try her hand at pieces of vintage tech that mean something to her.

She has hobbies of her own and I'm planning to get us a house sometime in the next few years so that she can have HER own room too. Her big things are photography, decoupage, historical music research, cooking (which we both kind of share). Our hobbies collide once in awhile, my building guitars and her decoupage for instance.

About the only rift we have is over the purge I'm planning this spring. Part of so much activity upgrading things is because I'm trying to finalize my "spares & leftovers" so I can release some of those old parts to the wild (and focus on gaming and development and music production on my old hardware rather than constantly replacing this and upgrading that), along with some other things, so some other vintage computer/vogons people can make use of it. I"ve been collecting Vintage PC hardware for over 15 years now and have a LOT of 286/386/486 era stuff and some 8088 era stuff laying around, and I don't plan to use all of it, just keep 3 backup items of each type per vintage machine in case something blows (so I can learn to fix what breaks myself). I think part of it is the hectic schedule we have this time of year (my workload at work goes up, we have my birthday, valentines day, her birthday, and several other family member's birthdays all within the span of Jan-through March), the fact she does not realize I've been funding ALL upgrades by selling other hardware off, and the remainder is going into savings for the house. My goal is by summer to have the closet COMPLETELY cleaned out and organized in my man cave so I can start storing things there like my tools and spare parts without it all being a big heaping mess like it is right now. Biggest problem is we have so many interests people gift us all sorts of stupid trinket shit through the year and therefore clutter. The Local Charity thrift will be seeing a LOT of me in the next year - she just needs to see results to be happy about things again.

Errius wrote:

I was surprised to learn recently that Rollercoaster Tycoon was the best-selling PC game of 1999. This was the year of CS, Q3, AQ2, UT, StarCraft, Tiberian Sun. So who was playing RT? It must have been the girls.

😮 It was? And it even beat UT and Tiberian Sun?