First post, by acl
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi
TL;DR
I've been collecting retro stuff since the late 90's ... and i'm really considering to stop.
Just to clarify, i'm not talking about throwing away everything. But just stopping adding things to my collection.
I think i'm about to reach my goal, even if the goal itself was never strictly defined. And i don't know what to do next.
Did you personally experienced this feeling ? How did you handled that ?
The long story
I'm in my mid 30's and i've been interested in hardware since i was 10yo (97/98).
I started by collecting everything that was at reach. Old computers from family, things found in trash etc...
Unfortunately, i had to dump a lot of things when i moved to my first small apartment (RIP SS7 motherboards)
A few years ago, i restarted my collection. First with a 2005 dreambuild PC.
Then this later expanded to "one config for every 1/2 years period from 1996 to 2010 plus all ATI flagships for this era and some random cool parts".
So the scale went bigger.
And i recently felt that collecting was kind of removing part of the fun. I was sometimes overwhelmed by the amount of hardware to test, clean and repair.
And then having little to no time to use them.
And more and more i felt kind of "snob" by reading some topics of retro enthusiasts trying to revive hardware i considered crap. An in fact they seemed to have a lot more fun than me, while i was trying to score the absolute best period correct parts. Just to test them once, run a few benchmarks and store them "for later". Knowing that later will be never since i will focus on another part next... And yes, you can definitely do boring stuff with an Athlon+9700Pro and have fun with a Celeron+FX5200 (well, probably not with an FX5200, but you get the idea)
I'm now considering a few of options :
- (Of course) play my games
- Create technical online contents/reviews
- I'm not really a video creator but i gave it a try during the #GpuJune2 event (check it out ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axlZv9zkyE4)
- Honestly, this was time consuming, my English accent is bad and i finally switched to speech synthesis)
- I'm considering either articles, of (a few) videos in French + Subs
- Setup retro gaming events at my work
- I'm thinking of bringing a given retro rig at work for like a week. With a paper sheet for description and instructions.
- Organizing challenges, hi scores etc...
- I work in a quite large tech company and some of my colleagues are quite interested i that era too (and i know i can trust them to be extra careful with the hardware)
- Finish all my side projects i left on the side (software and hardware)
- An unfinished homebuilt Z80 computer is on my workbench for like 5/6 years
- I started to work on a RaspberryPi "retro companion" box. A self contained thing to be plugged to a retro computer via RS232 Serial, providing Storage, PPP to Ethernet, Web/BBS browsing.
I that something you experienced ? Is there something "after" collecting ?
I'm really interested in your sought and advices !
Thank you
"Hello, my friend. Stay awhile and listen..."
My collection (not up to date)