It's gotta be the DAC, the phosphors, the mechanical clunks, clacks and all the electrical whines you can muster. Also the cramped fingers you have when manually setting a bunch of jumpers in a row nonstop, as well as degunking your mouse ball / wheels and having a novelty cloth pad for them on. Cheap Mitsumi CD-ROM drives were a popular common OEM pick and they get really whirry.

The BIOS setup is the icing. Award Modular are generally consistent with their text bios looks for at least 18 years so that helps the schrodinger effect. The only thing that really changed is the fading energy star logo early on ~1995, so apart from that little detail, an Award-biosed modern rig could be presented more convincing as a 486VIP rig 😀 bonus if you've got a bios splash feature that can be rewritten to fake old specs/dates, and somehow can mod off a vintage AT case to modern ATX standards (sans front USB, front sound)

Yar I just like playing with the hardware - it's not just a means to an end. I do game on my old stuff too but getting the hardware just so is at least 50% of the fun, if not more. I'm always looking for an excuse to break out the screwdrivers and old hardware provides endless opportunities for tinkering.

It's all about the smell. There's something about that sweet smell of vintage PC hardware...

It's the whole experience-
-sourcing and building the hardware just like you did back in the day (except with more knowledge/experience then back then)
-hearing the sounds of bootup and seeing it on a real CRT 😀
-experiencing the delays of the old, slow hard disk, before the game starts
-playing the game at real, actual speeds and performance (emulation always seems...emulated, no matter how perfect)
-hearing real OPL/MIDI sounds
-when done gaming, flicking the power switch instead of Start->Shutdown

I'm more in it for the gaming than the hardware, but I do love both. Now that I've gotten sucked back into the Ultima world, that's where most of my free time is going.

Hard drive rumblings.

That's pretty much it, really. Everything else is imagination, aside from maybe a CRT display, and the pain of hauling those around is not something I am likely to miss.

I freely admit that I have played more DOS games in DOSBox than on real hardware 😊

For me I enjoy playing with the hardware more, the games just give a context / benchmarks. One day that might change, but I simply do not have to time to play games these days 😢

Nobody mentioned nostalgia yet? Nostalgia about using the exact same keyboard/monitor/home computer as when you were 10/15/20 years old

konc wrote:

Nobody mentioned nostalgia yet? Nostalgia about using the exact same keyboard/monitor/home computer as when you were 10/15/20 years old

The monitors that I had in the beginning were just cheap low quality things mostly. Heck, I used Hercules and mono VGA monitors mostly because I couldn't afford color ones (1990-1995). In short I'm not nostalgic about them, so, no thanks. 🤣

Ball mice are similar. Thanks a lot, I'll take my MS Sidewinder X3 any day.

But I *really* miss my clicky keyboards of that era. I used Focus 2001 keyboards till they disappeared from the market (1992-1998?) and they were lovely.

ElementalChaos wrote:

near indistinguishable from the real thing to the casual observer?

I guess the simple answer is that we're not casual observers, and we DO distinguish 😀

ElementalChaos wrote:

CPU and RAM: These parts always work in the back stage, you never really actually "see" them. Many CPUs are flexible and can slow themselves down to the speed of older CPUs. There is no difference between a Pentium with both caches disabled and a 386-SX until you look inside the machine. Schrodinger's CPU?

For me as a programmer, there IS a difference. Pentiums support various instructions that 386es don't, and they have very different performance characteristics.
On average you may be able to get a Pentium to perform in the ballpark of a 386, but at a lower level you'll see that some parts will run faster than on a 386 while others run slower.
Then of course there's the lack of an FPU in the 386.

What clueless said mostly + nostalgia
Emulators just seem soulless, Happy to use them for console games as only ever owned an original Xbox so no real memories.
But Firing up my P3 to play a Win9x game with all those parts I always wanted.
Firing up my 486 to play a dos game that actually works fine on the above P3, but doesn't feel right
Plus the building of the computers in the 1st place.

I'm still the proud owner of our very 1st PC, I swapped out the Floppy for a gotek, which only lasted a day as it just wasn't right without the floppy seek sound on startup.

I also just like the idea of keeping these old machines "alive"

A proper power switch that switches mains voltage
CRT scanlines & phosphor bleed (gotta be a shadow mask for me too)
High frequency CRT noise, static, monitor degauss noise on startup
CRT gradual cathode heating/fade up & frame collapse to point on power down
THe way old monitors change resolution, none of this temporary blanking
Clicky keyboards with tall keys, none of this low-profile nonsense
Logitech ball mice without scroll wheel, the way they feel in the hand
HDD, CD & Floppy drive noise
Old joysticks & Gravis Gamepad
Old SB pop & hiss
Crap old 2 channel PC speakers

Some of these are best left in the past but for me the input and output devices (CRT, keyboard, mouse, joysticks) have to be legit 😎

clueless1 wrote:

It's the whole experience- -sourcing and building the hardware just like you did back in the day (except with more knowledge/exp […]
Show full quote

It's the whole experience-
-sourcing and building the hardware just like you did back in the day (except with more knowledge/experience then back then)
-hearing the sounds of bootup and seeing it on a real CRT 😀
-experiencing the delays of the old, slow hard disk, before the game starts
-playing the game at real, actual speeds and performance (emulation always seems...emulated, no matter how perfect)
-hearing real OPL/MIDI sounds
-when done gaming, flicking the power switch instead of Start->Shutdown

bjt wrote:

A proper power switch that switches mains voltage CRT scanlines & phosphor bleed (gotta be a shadow mask for me too) High freque […]
Show full quote

A proper power switch that switches mains voltage
CRT scanlines & phosphor bleed (gotta be a shadow mask for me too)
High frequency CRT noise, static, monitor degauss noise on startup
CRT gradual cathode heating/fade up & frame collapse to point on power down
THe way old monitors change resolution, none of this temporary blanking
Clicky keyboards with tall keys, none of this low-profile nonsense
Logitech ball mice without scroll wheel, the way they feel in the hand
HDD, CD & Floppy drive noise
Old joysticks & Gravis Gamepad
Old SB pop & hiss
Crap old 2 channel PC speakers
Some of these are best left in the past but for me the input and output devices (CRT, keyboard, mouse, joysticks) have to be legit 😎

Shponglefan wrote:

It's all about the smell. There's something about that sweet smell of vintage PC hardware...

Yes, YES, YES !!

I see beige people... with CRT monitors as heads...
The people in beige come to get me...

Well, if you want to play old games you should play them like they were meant to. No emulators, TFT's or other modern nonsense. I wouldn't even swap a modern USB radio to a 60's car. Period correct is the way to go, even going as far as to use (original) floppy disks to install all the games. 😊

ElementalChaos wrote:

What is it that draws people to real hardware?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus

Don Draper could be talking about a retro pc in his sales pitch to Kodak, well worth watching if you haven't seen it.

This is a tricky question. Different people feel differently about hardware and what is purist nonsense to one is essential to other. Personally I'd say it's all in the sound cards and clicking and whirring sounds of power source, HDD and floppy. At the moment I can live without CRT monitors since I don't have any. I can happily replace them with TFT screens (if you don't remember the superiority of CRT you can't miss it, right?). Also I don't miss serial mice with their rubber balls at all. IMO they are necessary evil and I'd replace them with optical PS/2 in a heart beat even with XT/AT builds if I could.

But I want to hear that floppy seek sound when I boot to DOS. And I want to hear AT power source whirl and hum. I like my SB card's tiny hissing "quality" in use. And the clicking noise of old mechanical keyboards. Mmmmm. So yeah, you might say I'm very auditive nostalgic. I don't mind so much of the graphics authenticity or the ghastly ergonomics as long as it all sounds right. 😀

Scali wrote:

On average you may be able to get a Pentium to perform in the ballpark of a 386, but at a lower level you'll see that some parts will run faster than on a 386 while others run slower.

This

bjt wrote:

CRT scanlines & phosphor bleed
THe way old monitors change resolution, none of this temporary blanking

and this

are the most important things to me for keeping old gear around.

ElementalChaos wrote:

I think these play the biggest role. CRTs really cannot be beaten when it comes to retro stuff.

Our opinions here differ vastly. It seems lots of vogoners prefer CRT monitors - not me. Personally I see CRT monitors as giant headache inducing vomit boxes. Yes, I love the look and the noise they make, but after 20mins in front of one, I can't move to an LCD faster. Quality wise, it seems most people forget there are LCDs with good image quality and LCDs with shit image quality - just like CRTs. In fact, lots of CRT monitors I've come across (with some notable exceptions in my collection) have had blurry unfocused images and bad geometry. Same for the CRT monitor i used as a kid ->

tayyare wrote:

The monitors that I had in the beginning were just cheap low quality things mostly. Heck, I used Hercules and mono VGA monitors mostly because I couldn't afford color ones (1990-1995). In short I'm not nostalgic about them, so, no thanks. 🤣

^This has kind of been my experience in ways. My first computer came with a 14" "Logics" VGA color monitor. A cheap little piece of crap, witch could barely display 1024x768. It was blurry, the image was always off-center, color reproduction was mediocre, black was gray (the tube was dark gray when turned off completely so yeah) but I loved it to death - until I got a little older. Sitting at the computer gave me headaches and was nausea inducing, and I could not figure out why. Needless to say, I saw my first LCD as a blessing - but that was in 2007, and it was a great 19" Iiyama MVA LCD with gorgeous colors and good response time.

For me it was always having made something out of metal and plastic parts that, after lots of thinking, thinkering, patience and TLC, ended up going alive after pushing a single button and getting to the desktop 😀.

It's also the sounds and the smell (though the smell does partially dissipate in due time) and the looks of seeing these parts looking so simple, small and crude in a way.

I don't miss the continuous whining of old harddrives, but the coffeegrindersounds of old floppy drives and harddrives is something I would kinda miss not hearing anymore.

I haven't used CRT's in a number of years now, at some point they took up too much room and I ended up only using a couple on my testbench.