tikoellner wrote:Probably.
I think this retro hobby is in large part driven by the desire to build the largest and most powerful nostalgia bomb possible. But each one has his own bomb.
You hit the nail on the head there with that one, yep.
Each of us have our own initiatives with older hardware.. some are collectors, some are builders (like me) some are explorers that like playing with stupidly obscure hardware most folks have never seen and seek rare impossible-to-find configurations.. but.. For me, my "drive" and goal with "retro" hardware is to build multiple different "The most powerful machine possible of their respective era" by combining what would of been obscenely expensive and "unobtanium" hardware during the time when they were originally sold as new in the world, but today could be had for a pittence if we hunt and are patient.
So far I have several machines like that.. I've come up with what I think is the fastest ever possible native-stable windows 98 se era machine... (Athlon-XP @ 2.5 ghz + Geforce 6800 ultra + SB Live)
I have another one that's very nearly the fastest possible ever ms-dos gaming machine.. capable of VESA modes up to 1280x1024 @ 60 FPS in real mode ms-dos with wavetable midi music support. (1.8 ghz AthlonXP mobile + Geforce 2 ultra).
I have a really fast 486 with a 133 mhz Kingston CPU, 64MB ram, fast cache, and a caching VLB hard drive controller with 16MB onboard.. and a fast hard drive in it, and VLB video card and wavetable audio.. etc.
And here pretty soon in 4-6 months I'll be retiring one of my "older" from 2008 machines from 8 years of daily usage and "active service" and devoting it to only random/occasional windows XP gaming.. I7-920 @ 4.4 ghz + two heavily overclocked and water cooled GTX-470's.
Likely going to be dedicated to windows XP 32-bit for older XP games. So yeah see.. I even have machines like that last one that I'll probably be considering my "fastest DirectX-9 era gaming machine possible" sort of.
I also own a working 386 for very old games.. and that's my computer line-up so far. That's what I'm in to, building extremely exotic top-end-of-their-era machines at different stages in computing history. I'm very near to the point I have everything covered. This i7 will fill the last "gap" in my lineup between the Win98 machine and my modern system.