Artex wrote:The thing is, does the value actually go up on this stuff? I know the Roland stuff holds value pretty well, but I don't know if it's true for the rest of the hardware of this generation.
The 3D Blaster VLB that was sealed sold for less than the one that was open and in mint condition, so that sealed stuff always sell for more isn't always true. I think for software, sealed stuff keeps value better than for hardware. Hardware is something tangible which people want to see and feel physically, not just imagine through a box.
It is supply and demand. Something being rare doesnt mean it's worth a lot of money. I'm sure there are tens of products that came out in the 90s that are more rare than the Neon250, but sell for almost nothing. I've actually started to think it through why people are so interested in the Neon250. I mean, beside the SGL compatibility there isn't much going for it! The SGL compatibility is also unknown and might not work very well in many games as it was never tested in the reviews and nobody has come forward with it since.
Then again there are ONLY two games in the whole SGL library that would really benefit from a Neon250, given that its SGL performance is better than the PCX2. Those two games are Tomb Raider (ability to run in 1024x768, making it the superior version) and Cybertroopers: Virtual On. The PCX2 can't keep up the framerate in that high resolution in Tomb Raider and the same happens in some areas of Cybertroopers. Tomb Raider runs in DOS on a special PCX1 or PCX2 executable (depending on what you have), the only game using PowerSGL Direct, which is similar to statically linked 3DFX games. The chance of the game working on a Neon250 is rather slim in my opinion. That leaves Cybertroopers: Virtual On, a good game, but which is incredible hard to find on PowerVR. There are many other SGL games that could benefit from more performance than what you get from the PCX2, but with those games you have options to get better performance and equal or higher resolutions with Glide/Direct3D (ie, Metal Fatigue)
Does value go up? For some of the stuff it will, but knowing what will increase is a good guess as mine. Roland stuff haven't increased in the last years, except for intelligent MIDI cards which has increased from 20 dollars up to 100+ in the last two years. Then again, software like SoftMPU might eventually get the price lower again, so selling your excess MIDI card at the moment seems like a good time. Yamaha MIDI devices which in my opinion sound superior to Roland in many games was for a long time very low priced due to a certain Chinese seller. Now it is still low prices compared to what you get, but the price should increase here imo! Then we had the surge on AWE64 Gold some moths ago. Hard to explain why, but prices are down again to normal levels. Personally I think that the prices of Voodoo 5 cards are artificially high. Then again you have stuff that makes no sense, like boxed Apocalypse 3D (PCX1) card that was sold for 300 euros, but the same card as NEC 3DEngine doesn't sell for more than 10-20 euros as boxed..... Brand awareness does matter...