Shagittarius wrote on 2022-10-18, 16:24:

I'm a little weird, I tend to go for the things I didn't own or couldn't afford at the time. […]
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I'm a little weird, I tend to go for the things I didn't own or couldn't afford at the time.

Examples:

I had an XT machine , but my friend had a 286. So I collected a 286.
I had a DX4/100 which was ok but I couldn't afford a Pentium at the time, so I collected a P-90
I had Amigas, but I couldn't afford accelerators, so now I have Amigas with accelerators.

This makes perfect sense to me. It's fun to be able to go back and discover hardware that we missed the first time around.

I never any Tandy computers growing up, but was always curious about them. Now I have 4 of them. 😁

Personally, my line starts the era when the personal computer market began. A lot of different architectures, vendors, hardware were created at the time and some became standards still used today. This is also valid for game consoles.
Then my line ends at around earlier 2000's when graphics/sound APIs became standardized. There were of course many changes since but nothing revolutionary, just the regular evolving.
Between the starting and ending lines, my favorite is the 90s because it was the transition era between software having full hardware access to software relying on stardardized APIs to work.
On PCs I think we could say it was the transition from DOS to Win9x.

While there are alot of great non-IBM PC compatible x86 systems, it's hard to beat what you can do with the PC architecture. So what I will about to say about PC architecture, you can find non-PC gems in the same time-frame, and really nothing at all after that I'd bother with. So there are a few non-compatible systems if you like you can put your effort into from the classic PC era, but you'd have to have some kind attachment, otherwise why? My focus probably will always be on the PC, because it's the thing you can do the most with, even though I am a general tech enthusiast, and have learned to appreciate all of it.

To keep it simple, I'd say: x86 and ISA
Break compatibility with 16bit code and ISA, well, I'd probably draw the line. 32bit or 64bit extensions are ok. But not ISA capable at all, or breaking BIOS compatibility, the interest drops. This isn't a super strict rule. I mean, it doesn't have to have ISA slots, and it doesn't have to be a DOS system. PCI-only or Windows-only is ok. But just think about it, systems as of late diverge from the simplicity of that "x86 and ISA" formula and what just worked, that interest is gone. So most people would see this as a 1981-2001/6 timeframe and they'd be right. (Or in the modern range, probably up to 2015 if you want one system that does everything and still ok with some legacy options still built in, but you can see these options are disappearing)

Just pick your favorites in that range--there are alot of options.

Shagittarius wrote on 2022-10-18, 16:24:

I'm a little weird, I tend to go for the things I didn't own or couldn't afford at the time.

Fortunately for me, I started buying stuff in the 2000s, and most of that stuff is pretty cheap now, except for some of the premium CRTs. Unfortunately, I'm also interested in earlier stuff like the C64 and Amiga, which are a bit outside of my budget.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-10-18, 10:09:

Ahhh another person of culture I see .. you too like old shareware tat too !! […]
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Ensign Nemo wrote on 2022-10-18, 09:51:

What is or isn't a retro experience isn't a matter of how old something is to me. Keep in mind I'm talking about my own subjecti […]
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TrashPanda wrote on 2022-10-18, 05:21:

Windows Xp is 21 years old(2001) ...What exactly do you consider old enough to fit the retro tag ? […]
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Windows Xp is 21 years old(2001) ...What exactly do you consider old enough to fit the retro tag ?

Say we take Windows 98 ...its only 3 years older than XP ..how about Windows 95 thats 6 years older than XP, Time is a funny thing and I think some people dont realise that we are now closer to 2050 than we are to 1980, for me anything before Core 2 is old enough to hit that retro tag ..anything before the Pentium 75 is now old enough to be a museum piece.

We could go back even further .. Windows 3.11 is 1993 what makes 93 any more retro than 2001 ..its less than 10 years difference, again I think its that peoples idea of time is a little skewed and we forget just how old XP actually is.

What's comforting to me is that in a few years Core2 will be in that retro area and I will be able to pass on all the tinkering knowledge I have from my collection, its going to be a fun time for sure, the Core2 era was pretty crazy.

What is or isn't a retro experience isn't a matter of how old something is to me. Keep in mind I'm talking about my own subjective experience, not just how much time has gone by. Personally, XP feels fairly modern to me. Apart from a couple of games, I have been able to run almost every game from that on my Windows 10 computer. For me, a lot of these games feel modern apart from having worse graphics.

I'll contrast why the pre-XP era feels more retro to me.

First of all, it introduced a lot of hardware that allowed for a lot of creativity. Game developers were able to experiment with more advanced digitized sound and 3D graphics for instance. CD games were also introduced. It's fun going back to the "pioneers" so to speak. Because the technology matured at different times, you had games that were more advanced in some areas (e.g., sound) but more primitive in others (e.g., graphics). I find these juxtapositions interesting. Games like Star Trek 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites would be good examples. By comparison, I feel like a lot of hardware matured during the XP era and hasn't changed greatly since then. I got my first widescreen monitor during this time, and while a variety of aspect rations have been introduced, the change doesn't feel the same as going from 4:3 to widescreen. After digital audio and higher capacity media were introduced, most improvements in sound have been small and incremental.

For some games, there are no modern day equivalents that come close to reproducing the experience. For example, the first two Jagged Alliance games were mind-blowing. To this day, I haven't found any game recreate those experiences as well as the original JAs did. There are some series that started back in the 90s, but over time, their modern versions have strayed further from the original experience. For example, the original X-COM games are more complex than any of the modern XCOM games. The Civilization games have also become more and more modernized as well. I still see new 4X space games that claim to capture the Master of Orion 2 experience. There's also Starflight, Star Control II, and a bunch of others that come to mind.

The culture and atmosphere changed quite a bit from the DOS-Win 98 era to the XP era. I'm really nostalgic for the Shareware era. I still like to pick up those old Shareware CDs and see what's one them. Games also felt more like a labor of love back then, as they made by small teams that were very passionate about their games (remember the old 200 page manuals?). In the 2000s, the teams creating games grew larger, and it felt more corporate in a way. That's not all bad, but for me, it lost some of the magic. Later on, I mainly played games that I bought at a large chain store, and later Steam. I missed the fun I had with trading Shareware games with friends or grabbing them from CDs.

Ahhh another person of culture I see .. you too like old shareware tat too !!

I collect it, I just cant ignore a good old DOS/Win 3.11 shareware collection CD, also recently bought a huge number of PC magazine CDs/DVDs from 97ish through to 04, no idea why they were selling them off but I couldn't resist. The huge amount of old drivers, patches and software makes them invaluable for retro tinkering.

I too remember the old manuals . .still have my manuals from CIV II Gold along with dozens of other big box games from that era, my favourite being the manual from Klingon Academy, such a fun manual to read.

Half the fun is just finding stuff on them. It's like a treasure hunt for me. I assume that you prefer having physical copies of the shareware CDs and DVDs? Did you check the internet archive for those disks? Did you find some that aren't available there?

For example, here's the PC Gamer collection:
https://archive.org/details/pcgamer-cdroms

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-10-17, 09:46:

WinUAE is a good alternative if they just want to see if they want to take the jump, would let them check out all the software and trackers, its no replacement for real hardware but UAE is damn near as close as you can get.

This is what I'm planning to do. After looking into hardware options and the relative cost, unless something comes up cheap, I'm going to hold off on going the h/w route.

And who knows, emulation might satisfy that Amiga curiosity to the point that h/w becomes a bit moot.

At First post. I try not to venture too far from socket 5/7 otherwise my collection would grow too much 🤣.

It’s kinda interesting though, because I didn’t really grow up with that, while socket 5/7 was going on I was still playing with macintoshes. I never really got into PCs until pentium 2 and my first computer that I owned was a pentium 4. It was at that point I started building them. But by 2010 I was out of the game again. I didn’t really get back into them until I started retro building around 2020. I played with some socket 5/7 stuff around the early 2000’s and remembered them fondly, so that became the focus of my retroing.

the "not meh" line I draw is between PCI and AGP4X. My 'collecting' is involuntary.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2022-10-18, 20:23:

Half the fun is just finding stuff on them. It's like a treasure hunt for me. I assume that you prefer having physical copies of […]
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TrashPanda wrote on 2022-10-18, 10:09:

Ahhh another person of culture I see .. you too like old shareware tat too !! […]
Show full quote

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2022-10-18, 09:51:

What is or isn't a retro experience isn't a matter of how old something is to me. Keep in mind I'm talking about my own subjecti […]
Show full quote

What is or isn't a retro experience isn't a matter of how old something is to me. Keep in mind I'm talking about my own subjective experience, not just how much time has gone by. Personally, XP feels fairly modern to me. Apart from a couple of games, I have been able to run almost every game from that on my Windows 10 computer. For me, a lot of these games feel modern apart from having worse graphics.

I'll contrast why the pre-XP era feels more retro to me.

First of all, it introduced a lot of hardware that allowed for a lot of creativity. Game developers were able to experiment with more advanced digitized sound and 3D graphics for instance. CD games were also introduced. It's fun going back to the "pioneers" so to speak. Because the technology matured at different times, you had games that were more advanced in some areas (e.g., sound) but more primitive in others (e.g., graphics). I find these juxtapositions interesting. Games like Star Trek 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites would be good examples. By comparison, I feel like a lot of hardware matured during the XP era and hasn't changed greatly since then. I got my first widescreen monitor during this time, and while a variety of aspect rations have been introduced, the change doesn't feel the same as going from 4:3 to widescreen. After digital audio and higher capacity media were introduced, most improvements in sound have been small and incremental.

For some games, there are no modern day equivalents that come close to reproducing the experience. For example, the first two Jagged Alliance games were mind-blowing. To this day, I haven't found any game recreate those experiences as well as the original JAs did. There are some series that started back in the 90s, but over time, their modern versions have strayed further from the original experience. For example, the original X-COM games are more complex than any of the modern XCOM games. The Civilization games have also become more and more modernized as well. I still see new 4X space games that claim to capture the Master of Orion 2 experience. There's also Starflight, Star Control II, and a bunch of others that come to mind.

The culture and atmosphere changed quite a bit from the DOS-Win 98 era to the XP era. I'm really nostalgic for the Shareware era. I still like to pick up those old Shareware CDs and see what's one them. Games also felt more like a labor of love back then, as they made by small teams that were very passionate about their games (remember the old 200 page manuals?). In the 2000s, the teams creating games grew larger, and it felt more corporate in a way. That's not all bad, but for me, it lost some of the magic. Later on, I mainly played games that I bought at a large chain store, and later Steam. I missed the fun I had with trading Shareware games with friends or grabbing them from CDs.

Ahhh another person of culture I see .. you too like old shareware tat too !!

I collect it, I just cant ignore a good old DOS/Win 3.11 shareware collection CD, also recently bought a huge number of PC magazine CDs/DVDs from 97ish through to 04, no idea why they were selling them off but I couldn't resist. The huge amount of old drivers, patches and software makes them invaluable for retro tinkering.

I too remember the old manuals . .still have my manuals from CIV II Gold along with dozens of other big box games from that era, my favourite being the manual from Klingon Academy, such a fun manual to read.

Half the fun is just finding stuff on them. It's like a treasure hunt for me. I assume that you prefer having physical copies of the shareware CDs and DVDs? Did you check the internet archive for those disks? Did you find some that aren't available there?

For example, here's the PC Gamer collection:
https://archive.org/details/pcgamer-cdroms

Ive had a brief look there but its nice to have physical discs in the mix too.

Thanks for the linky, will spend some time there since I did like PC Gamer back in the day

I've had an 8088, 80286, 386 and 486 before its before my time and honestly I just don't enjoy them, my bottom end is Pentium, as far as top end, I think Phenom II is as new as I'd go for now because it does do good for Windows XP games paired with my HD4790, but if it needs more power odds are it works on my Ryzen

Ive had a brief look there but its nice to have physical discs in the mix too.

Thanks for the linky, will spend some time there since I did like PC Gamer back in the day

The Internet Archive has a ton of great stuff, but it can be a nightmare to navigate and download stuff from. If you plan on bulk downloading files and are comfortable with the command line, I'd highly recommend looking into their command line tool. Here's the intructions for downloading files:

https://archive.org/developers/internetarchiv … i.html#download

I find that the search command is also helpful when you have found something that you want to download. I use it to test the queries that I plan on using with the download command:

https://archive.org/developers/internetarchiv … cli.html#search

As far as PC hardware goes, the first PC I owned at home was an 8088/Turbo XT machine, but I did go a little further back and build myself a PC based upon an IBM 5160 motherboard with 256KB RAM (later upgraded to 640KB). So not really any early PC cut off. I've got nothing against more modern PCs either, for instance my current main day to day PC is a gaming build from around 2013, so in a year or so that'll start to enter retro territory for playing 2010s games. 🤣 But on a serious note, I'm in no hurry to build up a PC collection of anything post-Core 2 era.

As for non-PC hardware, it's hard to say where I'd draw the line there. I only ever experienced a Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga & Sinclair ZX Spectrum whilst growing up and I've collected all of those, as well as digging deeper into many computers that I never had as a kid but fascinated me later on. The oldest computer (by release date) that I own is my Sinclair ZX81 and I wasn't even born yet when that was originally released!

Basically if the price is right I'll give it a go, which is why my last purchase was a bit of an obscurity - a Sharp MZ-700. Not a very capable machine and all games on the system had to suffice with ascii-style characters only. Up until earlier this year I'd never even heard of the Sharp MZ-700, it simply just took my fancy. On the flip side I recently decided not to purchase a TRS-80 Model 1, as it was just too pricey for my tastes and it's limited capabilities.

As one of the younger guys here, I would go out of my way to collect hardware from pentium 2 to pretty much the core 2 duo. but even then the core 2 duo is kinda too new for me and on the other end I have a mild interest in socket 7. I still have the k6 system I found months ago that was covered in dirt and mud but I still have no room to clean up and restore it. I had an interest in used thin clients with pci cards and good win98se support, but I missed out on that and those are no longer available. I did inherit 2 VIC-20s which I swapped the keyboard from the dead unit to the working one but I have no joysticks or ram expansions for it. I did get an SD2IEC but without a ram expansion most games I could try wouldn't work. I don't feel that compelled to really take it out of the closet and try playing around with it. that era is just way too old for me I guess. Like DOOM is probably my cut off point in terms of age of games but on the other hand I do play some arcade classics like centipede or dig doug from time to time.

retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2022-10-20, 21:45:

As one of the younger guys here, I would go out of my way to collect hardware from pentium 2 to pretty much the core 2 duo. but even then the core 2 duo is kinda too new for me and on the other end I have a mild interest in socket 7. I still have the k6 system I found months ago that was covered in dirt and mud but I still have no room to clean up and restore it. I had an interest in used thin clients with pci cards and good win98se support, but I missed out on that and those are no longer available. I did inherit 2 VIC-20s which I swapped the keyboard from the dead unit to the working one but I have no joysticks or ram expansions for it. I did get an SD2IEC but without a ram expansion most games I could try wouldn't work. I don't feel that compelled to really take it out of the closet and try playing around with it. that era is just way too old for me I guess. Like DOOM is probably my cut off point in terms of age of games but on the other hand I do play some arcade classics like centipede or dig doug from time to time.

VIC-20 RAM expansions are plentiful and pretty easy to get hold of for not a lot of money. The VIC-20 also has some pretty decent classic arcade ports, so it's well worth investing some time & money into the system and you already have the SD2IEC which should pretty much play everything with the addition of a 32K RAM expansion, including cartridge-based games - where the majority of the best games are to be found.

If you get a modern 35K or above RAM expansion cartridge, you can even play DOOM too.

ATX. Too much pain to go AT or earlier, although I do have a 486 I picked up years ago but don't use. Don't "collect" anything higher than S775 for Intel or 939 for AMD, and don't run anything higher than WinXP (apart from a dedicated emulation rig running Win7).

PTherapist wrote on 2022-10-20, 21:22:

Basically if the price is right I'll give it a go, which is why my last purchase was a bit of an obscurity - a Sharp MZ-700. Not a very capable machine and all games on the system had to suffice with ascii-style characters only. Up until earlier this year I'd never even heard of the Sharp MZ-700, it simply just took my fancy. On the flip side I recently decided not to purchase a TRS-80 Model 1, as it was just too pricey for my tastes and it's limited capabilities.

Aww, the good old MZ-700! My first Personal Computer! 🙂💙

It was the first Sharp MZ with colour, it had more memory than the MZ-80K/A and a faster CPU.
However, it's still software compatible to this one.
The datasette is compatible, too. The monoaural speaker is similar to the PIT in the IBM PC.

The text generator has two SHARPSCII fonts, European and Japanese.
The western MZ-700 has the European.

Games can use the symbols/glyphs in the Sharp font to draw "ASCII Art" graphics long before it was cool.
Snake the game existed for it, too, long before the Nokia hype.

I could be wrong, but I think this 8-Bit Personal Computer was quite popular in Germany, UK and Australia (?).
In Japan it had good sales, but was just one machines among many.

Some people also ran CP/M on that computer,
by using a homebrew floppy controller.
The Z80A was fully capable of running this. The computer had 64KB, too.

PTherapist wrote on 2022-10-20, 21:22:

As far as PC hardware goes, the first PC I owned at home was an 8088/Turbo XT machine, but I did go a little further back and build myself a PC based upon an IBM 5160 motherboard with 256KB RAM (later upgraded to 640KB). So not really any early PC cut off.

Though it's probably good to draw the line at XTs at least if you are a casual or low budget collector, as trying to cram enough upgrades into a first gen PC to make it useful is a pain the butt with it only having 5 slots. You tend to need spendy combo cards. Though if you have other machines, there might be a case for keeping it a "pure" early machine and just using booters and stuff that works off floppy and in low RAM. I don't know if mine is going back together right, I got it while my vintage sensitivity was low and they were practically being given away as too obsolete to bother with, and I hacked it up a bit, and redistributed parts. I keep wondering though, if the literal box truck load the dude had when I grabbed it ever got sold, or otherwise disposed of, or whether it is all sitting in a storage unit in the region. He had expansion chassis and 8" drives and lots of 5150s.

Earliest: specced out 386DX (1990ish)
Latest: P4/S939 (2005)

Earlier and later than that just don't interest me.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-21, 04:16:

PTherapist wrote on 2022-10-20, 21:22:

As far as PC hardware goes, the first PC I owned at home was an 8088/Turbo XT machine, but I did go a little further back and build myself a PC based upon an IBM 5160 motherboard with 256KB RAM (later upgraded to 640KB). So not really any early PC cut off.

Though it's probably good to draw the line at XTs at least if you are a casual or low budget collector, as trying to cram enough upgrades into a first gen PC to make it useful is a pain the butt with it only having 5 slots. You tend to need spendy combo cards. Though if you have other machines, there might be a case for keeping it a "pure" early machine and just using booters and stuff that works off floppy and in low RAM. I don't know if mine is going back together right, I got it while my vintage sensitivity was low and they were practically being given away as too obsolete to bother with, and I hacked it up a bit, and redistributed parts. I keep wondering though, if the literal box truck load the dude had when I grabbed it ever got sold, or otherwise disposed of, or whether it is all sitting in a storage unit in the region. He had expansion chassis and 8" drives and lots of 5150s.

That's exactly what I'd probably do if I ever managed to acquire a 5150 (highly unlikely) - leave it near stock with minimal ease of life upgrades, probably just add a Gotek. The XT is indeed a bit easier as a PC collection starting point. As well as the extra slots for convenience, they're all pretty easy to upgrade the RAM to 640KB too.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-10-21, 02:57:

Aww, the good old MZ-700! My first Personal Computer! 🙂💙 […]
Show full quote

Aww, the good old MZ-700! My first Personal Computer! 🙂💙

It was the first Sharp MZ with colour, it had more memory than the MZ-80K/A and a faster CPU.
However, it's still software compatible to this one.
The datasette is compatible, too. The monoaural speaker is similar to the PIT in the IBM PC.

The text generator has two SHARPSCII fonts, European and Japanese.
The western MZ-700 has the European.

Games can use the symbols/glyphs in the Sharp font to draw "ASCII Art" graphics long before it was cool.
Snake the game existed for it, too, long before the Nokia hype.

I could be wrong, but I think this 8-Bit Personal Computer was quite popular in Germany, UK and Australia (?).
In Japan it had good sales, but was just one machines among many.

Some people also ran CP/M on that computer,
by using a homebrew floppy controller.
The Z80A was fully capable of running this. The computer had 64KB, too.

It's a pity these systems aren't more popular, it'd probably be possible to get something like the Pi1541 working with the MZ-700 today.

With regards to popularity, they seem to pop up fairly often on eBay here in the UK, so somebody was certainly buying them. I'm not entirely sure what market they were aimed at though, as by the time they were released in the UK they were up against fierce competition from all sides from the likes of the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Dragon 32/64 etc, even the imports like the VIC-20, C64 & Atari 8-bit range were outselling it.

I'd love to get hold of it's successor the MZ-800 someday, but those are quite rare it appears.