Some early MT-32 titles such as Heart of China utilize glitches that are present in the 1st generation modules and were corrected in second gen units (as well as the CM-32L). The old units can be differentiated by the absence of a headphone jack.

In 2008 I paid $1,250 for a mint in box PowerBook G4 17" purely as a collectible. I knew it would lose value, but if I waited another five years for prices to hit bottom the chances of finding one complete in the box would be zero. It's probably only worth about $500 today but in another ten years it will be a rare find and potentially worth much more, though I'll probably hold onto it - it's a beautiful design. I probably booted it once or twice and it's been on a shelf ever since.

SiliconClassics wrote:

In 2008 I paid $1,250 for a mint in box PowerBook G4 17" purely as a collectible. I knew it would lose value, but if I waited another five years for prices to hit bottom the chances of finding one complete in the box would be zero. It's probably only worth about $500 today but in another ten years it will be a rare find and potentially worth much more, though I'll probably hold onto it - it's a beautiful design. I probably booted it once or twice and it's been on a shelf ever since.

You need to charge the battey once every 10 years or so or it will be hard to charge agan, at least with the laptop. I would do it every 5 years or perhaps even every other year just to be sure (I'm assuming they are Lithium cells).

Don't charge the battery to 100% but to ~80% and keep the battery outside the computer if it's removable then the battery should be as good as new even in 20 years time. 😀

gdjacobs wrote:

Some early MT-32 titles such as Heart of China utilize glitches that are present in the 1st generation modules and were corrected in second gen units (as well as the CM-32L). The old units can be differentiated by the absence of a headphone jack.

Ah, I remember something. When playing Ultima Underworld with MUNT, I remember had to choose the correct version of ROM dump, otherwise the footsteps sound wrong.

What I don't remember is where did I get all those dumps though. 😉

Not that you could say, even if you could remember...

Skyscraper wrote:

You need to charge the battey once every 10 years...

Thanks, that's just the excuse I need to pull it out of mothballs and tinker with it for a few hours 😀

that's what she said.

gdjacobs wrote:

Not that you could say, even if you could remember...

I thought Roland has allowed MT-32 ROM dumps to be shared?

They may have released the ROMs into public domain accidentally, but it's controversial.
newsflash: mt32 roms are now in the public domain

gdjacobs wrote:

They may have released the ROMs into public domain accidentally, but it's controversial.
newsflash: mt32 roms are now in the public domain

I see.

I swear I once found a Munt download link with complete ROM dumps. Sadly I don't remember it anymore. Argh.

One of the expensive things was very long ago, i did not have idea about the prices, what is good, what is high end, rare and such...

Par of G. Skill DDR400 x2 1GB - 35 euros for them.....
EPoX 8RDA+ Pro - 20 euros
ATi FireGL x3 - 30 euros

Recently a year ago i did buy MSi GEforce FX5950 Ultra for 12 euro, is not much, but still i did want to pay only 5 euro..

Definitely the CM32-L. It was over 300 euros.. I winced and shut my eyes when I bought it, but it was fully boxed, mint condition, and had the fixed ROM. I could only justify it on the basis that at least I'll never need to buy another one.

After that, probably the hxc floppy emulator, and the Music Quest clone card. I got a fairly decent deal on the Powermac G5 so that's not in the painful stakes.

Maybe about $100 for the stax sr-5 headphones. I guess a few items in that range.

I once paid >€150 for a sealed Diamond 2MB 16 bit ISA graphics card.

$150 shipped for an AWE64 with the original 28MB upgrade board along with a Yamaha SW60XG.

Considering that the AWE64 upgrade board and the SW60XG are pretty impossible to find, and when one does pop up the price is insane, I think I got a pretty good deal.

$100 for Voodoo4 4500 AGP. It has been more expensive, then whole PC in which it is...

The most expensive item I can recall buying for an old computer item is $199 for a SuperMicro P3TDE, which is a dual Tualatin board based on the ServerWorks ServerSet III HE-SL. It contains dual-channel SDRAM, 6 PCI-X slots and 1 AGP 2X/Pro slot. I think this is the only non-VIA, dual-Tualatin board with AGP and PCI-X. Anyway, when I received it, it contained two Coppermine CPUs and powered up in this condition, but would not start-up with the Tualatins installed. The manual specifies "Single or dual Pentium® III FCPGA 500 MHz-1.40 GHz FCPGA processors with a 512K L2 cache at front bus speeds of 133 and 100 MHz", so I couldn't understand why the Tualatin's didn't work. After much goofing around, the board stopped turning on with any CPUs, even after recapping. I bought the board on eBay, but unfortunately, waited 6 months before testing it. I had even bought a specific EATX case for it.

It is pretty depressing that my most expensive purchase was a lemon.

Stuff that's sold "as is" with no returns sometimes sits in the corner for months (or in the case of one laptop, years) before I look at it.

Only a few years back i was offered a Voodoo5 5500 pci mac edition (flashed for pc) from another local 3dfx collector complete in box for 80 euro's. I knew it was very reasonable but i didn't see the extra value of the box at that time (or the mac card) and i mostly bought bare 3dfx cards. I also already had the voodoo5 pci and agp so at first i thanked for the offer and didn't take it.

2 days later i bought it anyway thinking i could always sell it for the same price or higher...

Now i have way more boxed items and the voodoo mac is my favorite item. I declined a recent very good offer for it of over 350 euro, but it's not for sale. 80 euro is the highest i ever paid for a component but looking back it was dirt cheap.

To date, I don't own a Voodoo5. If anyone is unloading for a sub-reasonable amount, PM me.