King_Corduroy wrote:

It's the impatient people with more money than brains who have made this hobby into a market.

HEY. 😢 🤣

Miphee wrote:

That's a huge generalization. [..] Few guys have the opportunity or patience to wait for something useful to turn up. [..] So are these guys all brainless because they want to buy the things needed for their hobby in their lifetime and not maybe 10 years later when a good opportunity turns up?

^^ What he said.

It's a bit of a FOMO thing for me. I see near-enough to exactly the model OEM PC, or the same case (etc.) I had back in the golden days, and I think, OK... when am I going to see this again? I would love to be one of you guys paying $10 for a fully-functional 486, but it's more important to me to have the 486 I want, rather than any 486. How much is that difference worth? I don't like to think about it. 😒

I admit: I'm a hoarder. I buy and gather too much hardware and big box software in my home. So much in fact that I know I'll never be able to utilise most of them. Family, work and modern era computing takes most of my free time. And tragically I'm way too lazy to sell away retro stuff that I know I probably won't need.

In my opinion my main problem is that while I'd LOVE to play old games I think I've grown too lazy for them. Past few years every single time I managed to build or repair any computer unit, install fresh OS and then when it would finally be the time to install and play some games, I grow tired of that particular project. The system is up and running but I already want to switch to the next project (because there are dozens of them waiting). As much as it pains me growing old has made mere tinkering with hardware and OS more precious to me than actually playing. And I'm not even 40 yet!

I dunno... maybe DosBox, ScummVM or some other form of emulation would be the best way for me if I'd truly want to experience those classic old games again. And I should get rid of most of the hardware stuff... But I'm still a pack rat. Can't help it. 🤣

I've mostly just gotten the hardware to play the retro games I enjoy most (RPGs). So I've got two retro systems set up, ready to use, and use one of them for almost everything. The other one gets used rarely, and I've got a few other retro systems in storage. Games drive my hobby. As long as I've got games to play, I'll keep retro systems around. So no, I've not given up on the hobby. 😀

Not given up as such, I simply don't have the space or budget these days to do much on the collecting front.

With that in mind I've simply had to change my approach regarding what retro stuff I do. At the moment I'm trying to re-learn COBOL which I haven't touched since college back in the mid 90's. A bit of an up hill struggle but I'm getting there.

I started on this venue about 4 yrs. ago and up to this point only have (3) systems. Mainly this is due to the prices going
"bonkers" and my refusal to play along. Nowadays I take my chances and try to visit flea markets and goodwill type stores
and see what I can find which up to this point has been only games.

Currently thinking about giving the retro stuff a break and putting together a "stud" Ryzen rig, ironically never built a
modern rig before. Now if I can talk myself into letting go the "cash" to do it!

When I started this hobby, I wasn't into retro computing per se. I simply had no money but wanted to build computers and that's what took me to the streets. or at least partially it was.
Later on I had found a good amount of parts, but the stash of available parts had many gaps and this is where for me the moneyspending started, to fill in the gaps.
And as I was working with these parts and this hardware, I started falling in love with it basically and my interest in it got deeper and it took me down a road which was what I wanted to experience.

At some point I enjoyed building the systems more than using them for gaming. The gaming was more a stability test.

So for me the using of old parts came first and the retro bug bit me later 😜

It's kinda a shame that these parts are seen more as investments by many, like a stock exchange. This was never my thing. And even though I don't like it, it was probably just unavoidable anyway.

Can't see me giving it up completely any time soon (been in & around the hardware side of IT for 35 odd years), but I badly need to get back to my original interest in vintage & general/modern computer hardware which was assembling only those components which I needed for either my own or others specific builds. Lately however, as it has become increasingly difficult for me to complete these builds, I've taken to numerous semi-random purchases just because I could - my last one of a couple of S7 boards is a perfect case in point; it's a area I have no real interest in but they were cheap and seemed decent.

Having already done something similar with my modern hardware, getting rid of much of it and keeping nothing newer than Broadwell for my main system, it's probably time to now start on the vintage side of things. Between now and the end of the year I'll decide on a few builds and some select / nostalgic parts to keep and dispose of the rest.

Then the plan would be to spend some more time on what remains - either in use, improving my inventory / catalogue of the same or in a bit of connected light research. In terms of new vintage purchases, I'll probably limit that to trying to find complete & original systems instead of creating my own builds, although I would still like to try one more EISA system if I could.

Having just complete a build that is both practical and aesthetically pleasing, I've arrived at a tentative one-out-one-in policy. If I want to buy a new "toy" I need to get rid of one that I already have. Since I'm only really interested in portables, this is probably considerably easier than for people dealing with full-on desktop computers and a ton of peripherals.

It also helps that my wife would murder me if I lugged a bunch of beige boxes into our current home.

So, yeah, defs not giving up on the hobby, but the next place we'll live is bound to have a workspace for me (and a study for the wife) so that I can keep the clutter out of our living space.

All I'd say is anything with sentimental value keep, no questions asked. How many people here say "I wish I'd kept my first PC or some hardware component" The fact you got back into this once means good chance you may do again.

Sometimes I'm in the hardware camp, building PC's just for the sake of building them.
Overtimes I just want to play a game, which can be annoying as thats the moment the best suited PC decides to have problems and i start to think maybe I should look into this dosbox thing people are talking about.
Or something else will come or or frustrate me and I wont touch them for months on end, but as long as I have the space I'll keep a hold of the stuff. I did a big clear out in 2011, sent 286's upto P3's to their graves for only 2 years later to get back into it, I've learnt my lesson.

everyone should just use windows 95 daily

oeuvre wrote:

everyone should just use windows 95 daily

I did till about 3 years ago when the web broke hard, could no longer get webmail and a bunch of sites broke.

I think "the hobby" is a bit of a narrow definition. We have varying interests and for me its not collecting everything.

I'm not a collector per se, I consider myself a "user". I only buy what I'm going to use and wear out. I dont see the point in spending top dollar collector prices on what is ultimately perishable hardware. I get what I can get and I use that to play games and write programs.

I started getting sucked in on my 486 build, wanting to optimize every part to the hilt, but quickly realized that I was wasting excessive hours trawling eBay and looking at things that were stupid expensive. A socket 7 (pre AGP) board can be had with a cpu and ram for $20 and it will demolish the 486 all while being much easier to build and maintain. I admit theres a bit more 486 stuff in the pipeline for me, but mostly because a fellow user offered me a great deal :p

The way I see it now, we were lucky to have 1 PC in the 80s and 90s, and in those days we looked for every trick we could to optimize what we already have. There's a lot to be said about spending time with what you already have, reading the chipset manual, the cpu developers manual, and digging in. I'm finding the knowledge gain far more rewarding and lasting than just repetitively building new pcs and then moving on the the next.

oeuvre wrote:

everyone should just use windows 95 daily

Tbh I think this is what was the beginning of the end for me 🤣. Tried to use my Packard Bell every day as a daily driver and god it made all my old hatred of how slow and painful it was to use back in the day come welling back up and made me remember why I threw it out and upgraded to a Pentium 4 in the first place. 🤣

My W95 PC is a P166 MMX with like 64MB RAM -- it's super zippy! 😁 Then again, I'm not trying to watch YouTube videos with it...

I was scanning images, printing documents, managing an excel spreadsheet (which actually was fine), taking photographs with a few early digital cameras (which were a bit finnicky to use except the Mavica ones) and the images took FOREVER (well not forever but long enough to where it was annoying) to load up into any program either to view or to edit and if it was to edit, god help me. It was choppy as hell.

What I was using was my Packard Bell Corner PC with a Pentium 200MMX Socket 7 with 32MB RAM and an 8MB Matrox Mystique with Windows 98SE (this might have been part of my woe but it made networking and PNP more tolerable plus I was able to get USB working under SE)

Nah, It's like a classic car. Love our 74 beetle, it's easy to drive, easy to maintain but no wish to daily it, modern car has better acceleration and more comfortable.
Retro PC's are good for nostalgia trip, don't even mind tying up basic documents on it, but the nostalgia quickly wares off if your trying to do anything productive.

I haven't given up, but I've not been on here in months because my six year old nephew introduced me to Lego Dimensions, and then I thought that I'd heard Breath of the Wild was incredible - so I bought a second hand Wii U.

It mostly killed my retro gaming stone dead, as I'm 120 hours into BoTW (since February). I will return to it in the nearish future, and have a desire to progress in Redguard.

I think my retro collection is mostly complete (I still have a 486 build to do to run the old Ultimas). Anything before the 486 can probably run just as well in DOSBox, and technologies such as composite CGA have too few games that are actually worth bothering with.

I've also made the decision that I won't pursue any further CRT displays (I still have two CRT monitors and a CRT projector). Yes, the SNES probably looks a bit better on a real CRT than a TFT TV, but a CRT TV is huge, even the Sony PVMs are incredibly deep, unless I find one of the particularly bijou monitors to play on (might happen).

So far as consoles go, it's true that more consoles than not have interfaces to HDMI displays. The Wii U has native HDMI, and the Gamecube and Dreamcast have native options, with ones arriving for the PS1/PS2 in future.

Had a bit of a hiatus for 4-5 years due to health issues. Being back on vogons I seem to have come through some sort of time warp whereby computing history of the late '80s to early '90s had been turned on it's head with some sort of revisionist account. It'll take time but I think we can correct that.

Looking back I almost can't believe I used Win95/98 for at least seven years straight. All I remember is blue screens and re-installs. It seems much more benign today when I am only playing games for a couple of hours at a time. Use it as a daily driver again? God no, but for games ranging from the golden decade between 93 to 03 it is perfect.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Had a bit of a hiatus for 4-5 years due to health issues. Being back on vogons I seem to have come through some sort of time warp whereby computing history of the late '80s to early '90s had been turned on it's head with some sort of revisionist account. It'll take time but I think we can correct that.

I would love to hear what opinions you found to have changed for the more inaccurate..