Errius wrote on 2020-06-30, 21:56:

I wish eBay would let me have more than 100 saved searches on my account though.

Just create multiple eBay accounts. This also allows you to compartmentalise searches, e.g. one account for old computers, one for music, one for video games, one for books, etc.

Are you allowed to have several accounts according to Ebay TOS ? If so, can you link multiple Ebay accounts to the same Paypal account ? I would guess that Ebay might frown upon the practice for fear it might be used for shill-bidding .

I think many of you are correct in that there are some junkers/recyclers that have had a huge impact on the steep recent rise in prices though even on Ebay you can still find great bargains as "cyclone3d" has said: you have to be patient ! specially in the US (where prices are typically double to triple compared to Europe). Have won a few very good working boards and parts at very good prices in last 6 months off Ebay but am very specific about what I wanted and do not search out dozens of items, just the few I really want. Also got a few local/non-local non-ebay great purchases too. Think many computer sellers are no different than used auto sellers, some will sell you a fair deal and others want gold for their junk.

darry wrote on 2020-07-01, 01:08:

Are you allowed to have several accounts according to Ebay TOS ? If so, can you link multiple Ebay accounts to the same Paypal account ? I would guess that Ebay might frown upon the practice for fear it might be used for shill-bidding .

NO, since Ebay and PayPal are both owned by same big corporate embrella am sure that would raise all kinds of flags. Even though they are now seperate entities (instead of Ebay owning Paypal) as of 2015 the Ebay shareholders now own Paypal under a sub corporate embrella... technically same shareholders own ebay and paypal so you figure it out ;p
However: if you set up a diff Ebay account that never used Paypal and you could link it to some other address, etc am sure you could create more than one... but once the Credit card info was obtained am sure it would soon raise some flags (do not know anyone with a personal CC with diff real name and addy then where they live).
Added: I should clarify that if you have legal business you can have separate Ebay account from your personal account though things may get really tricky with PayPal as they only allow one personal and one business account and they cannot use same banking, etc as the personal.. as for personal accounts NO you cannot have multi thru Paypal....that is all I know

This is just my opinion, but if someone uses their time, energy and funds to search for things, maybe clean them and test them (and possibly repair them), then resell them and deal with customers, I don't care what they charge... no matter what it is.

EDIT: Leaving this here for posterity, but I realize this isn't an accurate comparison, I only half thought this through and typed it anyway... There are people (possibly many of you here) who make as much in a single work day as a retro PC reseller makes on a good MONTH. You'd likely be offended if someone told you that you should just work for less money so more people could make use of your services, even though SOME people will pay you a lot more.

People can buy low and sell high on the stock market, or do ANY kind of work that involves being opportunistic, or any kind of job that pays well and doesn't require long hours or a degree, and this is completely accepted (even encouraged!). But if someone has spent most of their life working with computers which are now considered "retro", they are apparently bad people if they take time away from watching television and use it to find PC parts they can resell for profit.

I really enjoy playing with old hardware, teaching others about it and looking for odd-ball items, but it most certainly isn't a necessity. I don't feel like anyone is being deprived if they can't afford to play Glide games on a Voodoo 5 5500. There are wrappers, emulators and other things that can very closely simulate 98% of what we do on this site (hence the name VOGONS). The most valuable PC items rarely provide any significant improvement over some other more common ones. Once people get obsessive about having 100% accuracy, period-correct builds, or having "that one thing" they had\wanted as a kid, it is no longer about experiencing computers as they once were... not even close! Back in the day, hardly anyone was this obsessive about WHAT HARDWARE they used. We all just got the best we could afford and enjoyed it for a year until it was obsolete and we did it again. If you think you need incredibly specific parts to enjoy this hobby (authentic voodoo 2 SLI, four different rare sound cards in one PC, etc), then it has turned into some kind of perfectionist obsession and is no longer a representation of what it was like to "compute" when this stuff was new. If you insist on doing things this way so that your built\collection is "perfect", it's only natural that you will have to either spend a lot of time searching or spend a bunch of money to pay someone ELSE who has spent the time to search.

The same goes for classic cars, baseball cards, stamps, coins... whatever.

A person isn't losing anything tangible if they never get to drive down the road in 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO without a Babe Ruth rookie card and an 1804 silver dollar in their pocket. Doesn't stop those from being worth absurd amounts of money to certain people.

Similarly, no matter how much time I put into this, I highly doubt I will ever own a Cyrix 586 133Mhz, a Voodoo 5 6000 or a boxed Adlib Gold... and it doesn't bother me a bit. Less rare items aren't somehow exempt from this illustration just because you want them. 🤣

I get your point, and I can't contend it except for the fact that a free market economy argument only works in an efficient market with adequate depth on the supply and demand sides, as well as symmetric market information on both sides - a market where the supply can be drained/controlled by the affluent few does not constitute one. No offense to anyone, but someone deciding to buy up all Voodoo 5 cards available on the internet and doing so, then causing the prices to inflate by 10000% is not how wages work, for example, so your allegory is wrong from the start.

appiah4 wrote on 2020-07-01, 06:58:

I get your point, and I can't contend it except for the fact that a free market economy argument only works in an efficient market with adequate depth on the supply and demand sides, as well as symmetric market information on both sides - a market where the supply can be drained/controlled by the affluent few does not constitute one. No offense to anyone, but someone deciding to buy up all Voodoo 5 cards available on the internet and doing so, then causing the prices to inflate by 10000% is not how wages work, for example, so your allegory is wrong from the start.

Sorry, I shouldn't have made the wage comparison... that was just a random partial thought. Not fully formed and only barely relevant. 😀

As for the control of the market... again, it doesn't really matter, does it? If some billionaire buys up all the 3dfx cards no matter what they cost, we'd just have a lot of enthusiasts with sudden influxes of cash who would either learn to appreciate Glide wrappers or they would realize how good 3dfx's competition was and why there are millions of equally performant nvidia cards available for almost nothing. No one would be hurt by this. Once the billionaire dies or gets over his obsession, there would be thousands of cards available again for pennies.

If you were suggesting that the affluent few are already controlling things, then I guess I'm not seeing that. I certainly don't consider myself affluent, and yet I find rare hardware constantly. It just takes time and a willingness to spend some money when the opportunity presents itself. If people have no time to look or money to buy because of some extreme circumstances... I don't know what to say. You have to do something to get something. Also, assuming that old PC hardware even requires a "supply" in the first place isn't really realistic. These are luxury items afterall.

If someone does this with a necessary item (toilet paper, food, water...), yes, it's despicable. With a Voodoo 5? No.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2020-07-01, 07:07:

Assuming that old PC hardware even requires a "supply" in the first place isn't really realistic. These are luxury items.

If someone does this with a necessary item (toilet paper, food, water...), yes, it's despicable. With a Voodoo 5? No.

I find this stance disagreeable as well, for different reasons, but I don't want to derail the argument with economic theory 😀

appiah4 wrote on 2020-07-01, 07:11:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2020-07-01, 07:07:

Assuming that old PC hardware even requires a "supply" in the first place isn't really realistic. These are luxury items.

If someone does this with a necessary item (toilet paper, food, water...), yes, it's despicable. With a Voodoo 5? No.

I find this stance disagreeable as well, for different reasons, but I don't want to derail the argument with economic theory 😀

Fair enough. Sorry for the rant. It's late and I felt like typing for some reason. 😀

To go any further would be to start dabbling in politics and religion and that's not what I'm all about, so I'm going to extricate myself from this thread and go back to reality. Cheers! 😁

Prices are in parts too high, albeit I have bought some semi-pricey stuff and it has joyed me so much that the dollars are quickly forgotten. I'm not interested in 3dfx hardware but I can, in parts, understand the giddy gold mining. Maybe a "fanatic" Quake3 player's urge is not fulfilled until his screen is finally drawn by a V-5500 or even -6000.

My favorite buy was a 140$ set containing a late era 486 board+cpu+ram+CF which introduced me to the world of 486s, which I had skipped in the early 90ies.

Nonetheless prices for a socket 7 board in the 3 digit region are a bit idiotic.

darry wrote on 2020-07-01, 01:08:

Errius wrote on 2020-06-30, 21:56:

I wish eBay would let me have more than 100 saved searches on my account though.

Just create multiple eBay accounts. This also allows you to compartmentalise searches, e.g. one account for old computers, one for music, one for video games, one for books, etc.

Are you allowed to have several accounts according to Ebay TOS ? If so, can you link multiple Ebay accounts to the same Paypal account ? I would guess that Ebay might frown upon the practice for fear it might be used for shill-bidding .

I have seven accounts, all linked to the same PayPal address and have never had a problem. It's true however that only one or two of them are in active use at any one time. Typically I start a new account every couple of years and retire the old one for use as a search mule.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2020-07-01, 06:53:

This is just my opinion, but if someone uses their time, energy and funds to search for things, maybe clean them and test them (and possibly repair them), then resell them and deal with customers, I don't care what they charge... no matter what it is.

I don't think anyone would have a problem with this, if you put the work into it and charge for that, also if that's the case you probably wouldn't notice it being resold anyways if it was cleaned/repaired, but the items that I noticed it on were 1to1 resold without any "trash to treasure" treatment.

I've seen cards gone off ebay for a good price and pop up shortly after on amibay for double the amount with the same amount of dust on the card still there for example.

a different thing would be if they found it in some obscure warehouse sale hidden away somewhere and bring it into the market, but then again, you wouldn't even notice that, but buying it off one common market place and reselling it on another for a lot more is simply no value added.

...and I highly despise the stock market, don't get me started on that :p

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2020-07-01, 07:07:

If some billionaire buys up all the 3dfx cards no matter what they cost, we'd just have a lot of enthusiasts with sudden influxes of cash who would either learn to appreciate Glide wrappers or they would realize how good 3dfx's competition was and why there are millions of equally performant nvidia cards available for almost nothing. No one would be hurt by this.

This assumption is wrong though. Even just from reading the thread here should be proof enough that people are actually annoyed by these price hikes so I don't see how you can say that it doesn't matter just because this hobby isn't essential to living. It does deprive people of money, which in turn does buy stuff essential to living.
Obviously one could then consider to just exit the hobby altogether, but then the reason why a hobby would get into extra decline is because of scalping. Seems that it would hurt the hobby as a whole, and thus probable that it would hurt individuals executing this hobby.
And someone buying these cards at all costs is not gonna happen anyway. The only example of this that I can think of, is of that guy trying to buy up all (working) Voodoo 5 6k cards and those cards were already so rare that a list of all the owners in the world was relatively easy to create and maintain. It's not really realistic to have such a bilionaire. Scalpers are far more common and also more realistic.

Once the billionaire dies or gets over his obsession, there would be thousands of cards available again for pennies.

This is one heck of an assumption though. It seems improbable to me that this would be the outcome.

amadeus777999 wrote on 2020-07-01, 07:26:

Prices are in parts too high, albeit I have bought some semi-pricey stuff and it has joyed me so much that the dollars are quickly forgotten. I'm not interested in 3dfx hardware but I can, in parts, understand the giddy gold mining. Maybe a "fanatic" Quake3 player's urge is not fulfilled until his screen is finally drawn by a V-5500 or even -6000.

Some of the cards were never really cheap, including the Voodoo 5 cards. If someone really wants to play Quake 3 on a v5 in 2020, then I would have a harder time understanding why such a person would want to complain about their prices seeing these cards were kinda never like €5 each afaicr. Afaics Quake 3 doesn't even support glide natively anyway so why would one even want to play Quake 3 with a card which speciality which makes it stand out from other contemporary cards, is glide support? That's kinda like wanting to get a Ferrari just so they can drive it to the local grocery store when basically any 4 person motorized cookie can would suffice 😜

Nonetheless prices for a socket 7 board in the 3 digit region are a bit idiotic.

The only s7 boards (I'm considering just the standard s7 and not the ss7 boards in this particular example) that I can think of right of the bat that could reach such prices are perhaps some ATX Asus s7 boards? I'm not even sure but regardless that seems rather excessive to me.

And it's not even the prices, it's also that often you'd have to pay a premium for untested junk where this should have been the other way around 😜

Tetrium wrote on 2020-07-01, 10:40:

Some of the cards were never really cheap, including the Voodoo 5 cards. If someone really wants to play Quake 3 on a v5 in 2020 […]
Show full quote

amadeus777999 wrote on 2020-07-01, 07:26:

Prices are in parts too high, albeit I have bought some semi-pricey stuff and it has joyed me so much that the dollars are quickly forgotten. I'm not interested in 3dfx hardware but I can, in parts, understand the giddy gold mining. Maybe a "fanatic" Quake3 player's urge is not fulfilled until his screen is finally drawn by a V-5500 or even -6000.

Some of the cards were never really cheap, including the Voodoo 5 cards. If someone really wants to play Quake 3 on a v5 in 2020, then I would have a harder time understanding why such a person would want to complain about their prices seeing these cards were kinda never like €5 each afaicr. Afaics Quake 3 doesn't even support glide natively anyway so why would one even want to play Quake 3 with a card which speciality which makes it stand out from other contemporary cards, is glide support? That's kinda like wanting to get a Ferrari just so they can drive it to the local grocery store when basically any 4 person motorized cookie can would suffice 😜

Nonetheless prices for a socket 7 board in the 3 digit region are a bit idiotic.

The only s7 boards (I'm considering just the standard s7 and not the ss7 boards in this particular example) that I can think of right of the bat that could reach such prices are perhaps some ATX Asus s7 boards? I'm not even sure but regardless that seems rather excessive to me.

And it's not even the prices, it's also that often you'd have to pay a premium for untested junk where this should have been the other way around 😜

I agree .

By the time the Voodoo 4 and 5 came out, Glide was practically irrelevant. The only practical use I see for them now is as faster Voodoo3 replacements . IMHO, lack of Glide was not even really a deal breaker after the Voodoo2's heyday so, from a practical gaming perspective, I do not see the point of going beyond Voodoo2 SLI or a Voodoo3 as far as 3dfx hardware is concerned . What Glide exclusive or Glide preferential game pushes the enveloppe of a Voodoo3 ?

That said, there is nothing wrong with wanting a Voodoo 4 or 5 for whatever reason, I just do not see what they bring to the table that a much less expensive earlier Voodoo 2 or 3 (for Glide) combined with an ATI or Nvidia GPU (for D3D and OpenGL) can't do just as well or better .

Tetrium wrote on 2020-06-30, 20:33:

But this has basically always been the case so that in itself is no reason why the prices have gone up the last couple years.

I'm not claiming that's the reason for the prices. Just pointing out that it's not always hobbyists who want this hardware.

EvieSigma wrote on 2020-06-30, 20:52:

Some otherwise worthless and obsolete hardware (Alpha processor based workstations and servers come to mind) are sold at artificially inflated prices to businesses who can't afford to upgrade a 20-something year old piece of hardware that absolutely has to have a computer running either a discontinued OS or an old version of an OS that can't run on more modern CPUs.

Yeah, that's a thing too.

As for Voodoo cards, I thought I would need a V5 to fully enjoy games from that time. Turns out, a V3 does the trick just fine, along with a 1.2GHz Tualeron (originally 400MHz P2, then 500MHz P3, then 800MHz P3 with a different M/B). Going strictly period-correct seems like a foolish concept to me.

TechieDude wrote on 2020-07-01, 11:42:

As for Voodoo cards, I thought I would need a V5 to fully enjoy games from that time. Turns out, a V3 does the trick just fine, along with a 1.2GHz Tualeron (originally 400MHz P2, then 500MHz P3, then 800MHz P3 with a different M/B). Going strictly period-correct seems like a foolish concept to me.

Period correctness is a concept that came about after the fact when people wanted to have a machine be representative of a certain time period .

In real life, except when buying a complete new machine, hardly anything ever was or stayed "period correct". People often re-used older monitors and peripherals when upgrading to a new machine . Even after buying a completely new machine they often upgraded parts like RAM, video cards CPUs, etc over the months/years . Additionally, at the time of a game's launch, the hardware available did not necessarily allow the said game to run at it's full potential; using later hardware could be beneficial .

Period correctness is a concept that is nice if all you want is a machine that is a snapshot of a given moment in time, museum style .

In practice, if you actually want to run software/games that span a few years, the approach is sub-optimal, unless you actually can manage to have a period correct machine for each year of the time span that you are addressing. IMHO, a much better and practical approach, from a usability point of view, is to base your hardware build decisions on the software you want to run and choose your components so that they allow comfortably running the more demanding/newer applications/games that you have in mind while still working properly with less demanding/older ones . Obviously, you can't cover all time in one build, but planning that build based on what it is able to do, rather than a specific year, makes more practical sense, IMHO .

darry wrote on 2020-07-01, 12:20:

Period correctness is a concept that came about after the fact when people wanted to have a machine be representative of a certa […]
Show full quote

TechieDude wrote on 2020-07-01, 11:42:

As for Voodoo cards, I thought I would need a V5 to fully enjoy games from that time. Turns out, a V3 does the trick just fine, along with a 1.2GHz Tualeron (originally 400MHz P2, then 500MHz P3, then 800MHz P3 with a different M/B). Going strictly period-correct seems like a foolish concept to me.

Period correctness is a concept that came about after the fact when people wanted to have a machine be representative of a certain time period .

In real life, except when buying a complete new machine, hardly anything ever was or stayed "period correct". People often re-used older monitors and peripherals when upgrading to a new machine . Even after buying a completely new machine they often upgraded parts like RAM, video cards CPUs, etc over the months/years . Additionally, at the time of a game's launch, the hardware available did not necessarily allow the said game to run at it's full potential; using later hardware could be beneficial .

Period correctness is a concept that is nice if all you want is a machine that is a snapshot of a given moment in time, museum style .

In practice, if you actually want to run software/games that span a few years, the approach is sub-optimal, unless you actually can manage to have a period correct machine for each year of the time span that you are addressing. IMHO, a much better and practical approach, from a usability point of view, is to base your hardware build decisions on the software you want to run and choose your components so that they allow comfortably running the more demanding/newer applications/games that you have in mind while still working properly with less demanding/older ones . Obviously, you can't cover all time in one build, but planning that build based on what it is able to do, rather than a specific year, makes more practical sense, IMHO .

Agreed, for a museum, a period-correct build actually makes sense. For other things, it's better to just build it the way it's more convenient for you.
There is nothing wrong with having a Pentium MMX with USB2.0, if that's more convenient.

Tetrium wrote on 2020-07-01, 10:40:

the Voodoo 5 cards. If someone really wants to play Quake 3 on a v5 in 2020...
That's kinda like wanting to get a Ferrari just so they can drive it to the local grocery store when basically any 4 person motorized cookie can would suffice 😜

Excellent comparison ! I dropped Voodoo at 2 because the Nvidia GF256 came out about same time as Voodoo3 and NV was much more game compatible and better priced overall, by the time Voodoo 5 came out it was competing against Geforce 2's which were nearly 1.5x faster in pix's and had double the mem bandwidth. That was the death of Voodoo......they just could not compete at that point.

Nonetheless prices for a socket 7 board in the 3 digit region are a bit idiotic.

The only s7 boards (I'm considering just the standard s7 and not the ss7 boards in this particular example) that I can think of right of the bat that could reach such prices are perhaps some ATX Asus s7 boards? I'm not even sure but regardless that seems rather excessive to me.

And it's not even the prices, it's also that often you'd have to pay a premium for untested junk where this should have been the other way around 😜

Agree ! The big name boards are the ones that seem to be that way the most, like if Asus: they can tag an extra $50 or more. There are some decent good S7 boards that are still reasonable but seems the recyclers/resellers focus heavy on specific named boards thinking they are the golden sheep !

speaking of scalpers and people buying up stock, when I look for Amiga machines on the local classifieds I find like 3 sellers that each sell multiple machines, some 10 or more... sure feels like they bought up every Amiga they could find and are now reselling them at a high markup, because why would a collector get 10+ Amiga 500s and then sell them all? ^^

imi wrote on 2020-07-02, 01:53:

speaking of scalpers and people buying up stock, when I look for Amiga machines on the local classifieds I find like 3 sellers that each sell multiple machines, some 10 or more... sure feels like they bought up every Amiga they could find and are now reselling them at a high markup, because why would a collector get 10+ Amiga 500s and then sell them all? ^^

Why would you have to be a scalper to buy up multiples of machines you like?

Ten or 20 years ago when freecycle was decent you could put up an advertisement looking for obsolete computer systems and get all kinds of replies. Once you went to the place and picked up what you went for the people generally asked you why you wanted that junk to begin with and started to rattle off any other gear they wanted gone to see if you would take it as well. Most people had some old relic you wanted and then probably dug up a C64 or something common that you took for a space (hey its free and you are there already anyway). Hell sometimes a quick stop for a 486 board and you ended up with a trunk of items some of which you already had.

I have for example 5 Apple Quadra 950's or variants mostly because I love that machine and kept lucking into spares for free or close to it back when nobody wanted to pay to ship one. It had nothing to do with buying up all the stock around or waiting until they were worth some money (they are desirable these days). It was more about saving them from the trash they were going to get dumped in unless somebody wanted them and frankly I did. If I eventually get tired of them I might just sell them for the going rate and get some of my money back from all the stuff I purchased to play with that are currently worthless.

Over the years I have traded a few spare C64s for items I wanted and still have 3 or so in the collection.

Tetrium wrote on 2020-06-30, 20:31:

You can't blame it on the buyers. Ar at least not fully.

I rephrase that. If buyers refuse to pay the overinflated reseller prices then the market corrects itself and prices go down.
People don't work like that, that's why they get into bidding wars 20 days before the end of an auction.
BIN is the same. If 100 people refuse to pay 3x price but 1 buyer doesn't then it was worth it for the reseller. 100 no and 1 yes is still a yes.
It will only get worse as pre-2000 scrap sources are slowly drying up.
People who think ahead are already stocking up on newer but unwanted post 2004 systems and components, resellers don't care about those for now.