doublebuffer wrote on 2023-07-20, 12:59:
I'm new to this hobby and this is kinda harshly put but do you ever get a feeling that you're paying too much for what is essentially worthless junk? I don't pay ebay prices but often I'm still thinking whether there is any sense in hoarding old hardware, but on the other hand it's fun to tinker with and re-live some experiences of the childhood and try out different things that were out of reach back then, not to mention how warm and fuzzy it makes me feel to watch an old computer still boot up. Yet sometimes I have this nagging feeling now that I am getting my 5th or 6th system that needs restoration, that maybe I have gone overboard already. Do you know this feel or should I just stop worrying and learn to love the retro?
I very rarely pay ebay prices for retro gear. In my years of collecting I've only done it twice, on things I really wanted to own and use - a Cyrix MediaGX board (new in box) and a Roland SC55mk2 - and the reasoning behind it was actually using this hardware close to daily instead of putting it on a shelf or stuffing it in a box someware to occasionally play with or just say "oh I have one of those".
....even so things did not exactly go as planned - I don't use the SC55 daily since I only have time to fire up my retro gaming rigs once or twice a week - but when I do you can bet that SC55 gets used - and the MediaGX system has been sitting on a shelf for months due to limited space and actually having better rigs to play around with in the little time I can afford to dedicate to this hobby 🙁 Payed 100$ for the SC55 (shipped) and 55$ for the ECS MediaGX board.
There's one more piece of retro-gear I'd pay close to fleabay prices for - and that's a dual socket A motherboard complete with a pair of Athlon MPs - something I found recently, but was unable to afford at that moment (or even now)
Most of the time I look over classifieds for ads of people selling cheap unidentified or labeled as old and useless or e-waste *stuff. Sometimes there's something useful. Rarely something interesting. Most of the time I go to recycling centers. Stuff as old as XT clas computers and parts can still be had there, paying by KG for them - and sometimes they even work. Other times they're repairable, but lately 50% of the stuff I bring home is beyond my ability to repair. Still worth the gamble considering how cheap they are and how fun it is to scour mounts of old computers for any parts or complete systems I want.
This morning I went HDD hunting. Picked up 9 disk drives - two 1.2gb WD, 3 Seagate in 3,2GB, 4GB and 6.4GB capacities, and the rest are 8, 10gb and 13gb seagate and fujitsu drives, all plucked directly form PC cases. Tested 5 so far and they work well. Out of the 5 one has a couple of bad blocks, but I'm gonna let HDD regenarator have a go at it. Not bad for 20 euro if you ask me.
The rest of my stuff has been acquired from institutions dumping old hardware, donations from friends and family and trading with other collectors.
iraito wrote on 2023-07-22, 08:02:
I think this society is obsessed with usefulness, watching a sport game is useless, reading a novel is useless, painting, playing with your kids, loving another person etc.
But it enriches a part of you that doesn't conform to the mechanical nature of today's society, those useless acts are the most important part of us being humans, i guess the only way to stop these threads is simply to embrace this concept, there's more to life than usefulness, waaaaaay more.
well said
HanSolo wrote on 2023-07-21, 14:50:I read that pretty often in such discussions, but I don't subscribe to this opinion.
Assuming we're not talking about the hobby […]
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TheMobRules wrote on 2023-07-20, 18:02:
With the current prices, I don't think I would have ever gotten into the hobby.
I read that pretty often in such discussions, but I don't subscribe to this opinion.
Assuming we're not talking about the hobby of collecting 3dfx-hardware but building retro computers to play games from the 90's, then this is not expensive at all.
It seems that many only consider the prices of valuable hardware or the 'buy now'-prices on ebay. But it's easy to build a totally usable retro machine without having the feeling of 'paying too much'.
If you have the technical know-how to build and configure and old gaming PC it is indeed trivial, but for the Average Joe who just has a flight of fancy and wants to play that one game he spent a summer on back in grade school it may not be that easy. Most flock to fleabay and alike after finding out the old game they downloaded will not run on modern hardware. I've sold many a few of these machines to such people - who can't or don't want to make the effort of hunting down parts, software, media and then read tutorials on how to setup such systems.
Only a couple of days ago I setup a retro gaming PC for my brother-in-law. He wanted to play Eye of the Beholder, Ultima V and a few other dos and some widows XP era games, but he either couldn't get them running on a modern PC or - his words not mine: "The game just doesn't look right". So I set him up with an LGA775 PC made from parts I had lying around. A pentium dual core e6600, 4GB of ram, a 250GB SATA HDD, a working optical drive (he has quite the collection of repacked bargain bin CDs and DVDs with old games he never even opened) and a Radeon 3850, all packed into a brand new desktop form factor ATX case (CM Elite 361) plus a new old stock Dell 17" CRT monitor. It runs windows XP. All dos games are running trough DOSBOX, and the PC is connected to the internet so he can download offline installers for his GOG collection. Games like Baldur's Gate, Sacrifice and so on run great on XP and look the part on that CRT monitor.
Like you said, a really cheap PC, but it took me a couple of days to build and setup.