It's like having a time machine. A lot of people like to go back and find out what it would have been like to have a system with all the parts they never could afford when they were new and that are relatively cheap now.

I find the pace of technological change means you don't get a chance to do some things before the tech concerned is long obsolete.

Cars are the same.

It's about the happy memories as a child / teen. Reliving them.

Reliving the strict conventional memory situations? 😀

Also, there's something about early AMIBIOS..

I often think about what I would do differently If I had it all to over again. I would avoid tape-backup like the plague, and probably go with zip drives until CD-Rs became affordable. And avoid K6-2 anything.

For me it is reliving some of my past (DOS gaming and my C64), checking out some things I liked but could not afford at the time (vintage analog video capture and editing high end systems), and trying some new things (Amiga, Mac, Apple II, Atari 800, etc).

Some hardware I could never afford to play with got dirt cheap (IBM PS/2, EISA workstations, large variety of add-on cards) so it is fun.

The 90's were a time of great tech revolutions, lots of it hype, and I was a poor student so didn't have the cash to gets hands on with most of it. Now I can.

Also I take great pleasure in sitting in front of a computer that has no internet access. Nothing popping up to distract you, just the command prompt and me. There's magic in them beige boxes!

Unknown_K wrote:

checking out some things I liked but could not afford at the time

That is true. We can now get "the best" for reasonable money and check out what me "missed".

That, and emulation isn't perfect... though DOSBox is far ahead in emulating a DOS system than anything emulating the N64 does faithfully, relatively 😀

though there is still that 'win95-2000' gap we can't really emulate well yet, often the big motivation for building a retro 9x rig.

Heh, leileilol, would you be referring to a certain animated mouse cursor tail in the AMIBIOS?
My dual PPro machine has it 😀

Retro computing lets me play with stuff I was drooling over and couldn't afford when new. It also lets me experience hardware that wasn't necessarily available to the general consumer base at the time, like most higher-end multiprocessor setups.

The searching and building up stuff. The computers you always wanted but couldn't afford. The games you didn't get to play in your outdated computer. The reliving of a particular period of your life, etc.

Another important reson IMO is finding people with your same tastes.
A community like Vogons where you can share your thoughts and talk about your hobby is a very important reason why I also got into this. It gives you the opportunity to share and socialize with people that shares your same hobby: Showing off your computer setups, benchmarks, etc.

In my case, mostly to play certain games or utilize certain pieces of software that do not work properly on modern systems or emulators.

Problem solving 😀 Getting these older systems and software working always involves a healthy amount of it. For the engineer mindset, this is fun. I'm sure there's plenty of us who have spent more time building/upgrading our systems than actually playing games on them.

I never had a PC back in the days, my PC experience started with a Celeron 1700 and Radeon 8500. I was always curious when it came to older PCs, I wanted to know what it's like. Then, in 2009, I got a 386SX-40 for $3 and -bang!- I found out it was way cooler than I expected.

Games today are either too easy or stupid or have adds or suck money from you. A lot of them are made to maximize income, a lot of them can be walked through with no effort. It's not cool at all.

And as you look at older games, they are totally different. They were made "By gamers for gamers". Awesome titles, original ideas, not "Click your way through to level 60" crap. And it's cool to store ERAS of older games on a single hard drive. I'm a pirate, sorry for that, I just don't want to pay money to some gog website, which is by no means connected with original software developers.

I'm not against all modern games, I had fun with Diablo III and Skyrim, but if they are the of best... I don't want to know what the average looks like.

I'm not into retro/vintage hardware myself, but as a developer, I kinda like the fact I can apply this library of knowledge I have rotting in my brain somewhere. Additionally, developing against old systems is easier these days (even if all you do is try to get some old game running again) than back then; more information is available, tools are more powerful, etc..

i enjoy it for a number of reasons: i could not afford a maxed 486 back in 1993. I much prefer older games and rpgs. Its good stress relief like any hobby and gives you an outlet to find like minded individuals who also have great memories of the 486 era and games like day of the tentacle and ultima 7. Of course there is nostalgia..

Glide
Building and configuring cool rigs from parts that were way out of reach back in the day
Rendition
Building progress-proof sanctuaries to ensure vintage games can run free of threat
Glide
Dosbox for everything else!

Besides the usual reason I mainly enjoy it for experimentation and collecting. As for the games these days they are what some of us have been calling for years "face roll" especially some of the online multiplayer titles.

On the side, older systems are great for testing different ideas when it comes to modding before applying them to newer but costly modern systems. Things do get exciting when there is something that everyone else doesn't have in my hands 😉 That is the joy that many here enjoy.