SOme people here are having very nice finds! Enjoy! 😁

fitzpatr wrote:

Today I visited a man's "Basement Sale" where he had a bunch of PC stuff. Primarily laptops. I was able to get a Voodoo Banshee and the two Socket 7 coolers for $4 Canadian!

Then he pointed out this Mediavision Audioport Parallel Sound Adapter. It is reminiscent of a Covox. It has 8-bit sound and has a small speaker, headphone out and mic in!

The right HSF is actually a s370 Intel stock HSF (not that it matters, it's only a name thingy) and I actually like these heatsinks a lot. Typically I'd switch out the fans for something a little bit less loud and it's a pretty beefy common heatsink that will fit any s7 that has components blocking larger more beefy heatsinks.

I really like the Banshee! Not much to tell about it 😜

Munx wrote:

1€ Diamond monster 2!

Came with driver CD and passthrough cable, though its only the 8MB model.

P_20170716_103118.jpg

Nice one! Even if it is the 8MB variant 😀

meljor wrote:

Munx wrote:

1€ Diamond monster 2!

Came with driver CD and passthrough cable, though its only the 8MB model.

P_20170716_103118.jpg

Nice! Want to double your money? 🤣

Munx wrote:

meljor wrote:

Munx wrote:

1€ Diamond monster 2!

Came with driver CD and passthrough cable, though its only the 8MB model.

P_20170716_103118.jpg

Nice! Want to double your money? 🤣

Sorry, I tend to stay away from too-good-to-be-true deals 🤣

Haha, 🤣!

Deksor wrote:

I've found all of this in a garage sale. I paid ~25€ for all of this : […]
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I've found all of this in a garage sale. I paid ~25€ for all of this :

IMG_20170716_131544.jpg

An Aztech sound card with an OPL3 chip and an Oak piece of crap

IMG_20170716_131531.jpg

Two 3Com etherlink III cards.

Not looking so great for 25€ ? Wait ! There's more !

IMG_20170716_131515.jpg

Eight PCI 3Com etherlink with most of them having boot roms. Sweet ! I needed some more of these.

Now let's see what we have next ...

IMG_20170716_131435.jpg

TEN freaking voodoo 3 3000 !! 🤣
One of them misses it's bracket, 2-3 of them have a little bit of rust on them and some of them are missing one or two caps, but hey that's still looking pretty good !

But there is still one thing left

IMG_20170716_131452.jpg

A Diamond EDGE 3240 (so an NVidia NV1 !) 😲 . I thought I'll never ever see this in my life. However I just have the card, I don't have the joystick port adapter, the Saturn connector bracket ... But that's still an awesome find !

I did buy some other things such as a boxed sidewinder joystick (there is no manual or driver CD that came with it though), a PCMCIA ethernet card, but I was lazy ^^

Now I'm going to test all of these. I don't think I'm going to keep all of them (who would need 10 3Dfx voodoo 3 ?), I'm planing on exchanging them with some other sweet stuff ^^

Those ISA NICs are nice as well, but of course those Voodoo 3s were the steal here, along with the NV1!
I regret having seen an NV1 for sale some years ago, but can't rewind time. Enjoy yours 😀

I got a combo (Athlon 1.1Ghz) along with nice 4:3 LCD monitor for about $20. Its specs are all over the place (different RAM modules), probably previous owner was leaving some old parts and adding new ones along the way, but I cleaned it up and installed XP SP2 on it and works great.

MOBO: Asus A7N8X-X (nforce2 FSB400/333)
CPU: AthlonXP 1100Mhz
RAM: total 1,5 GB (3x DDR DIMM)
1. 512MB DDR400 CEON
2. 512MB DDR266 Jetram
3. 512MB KVR 400x64C25 Kingston
Video: GeForce FX5200 (128MB)
HDD: WD 80GB
CD/DVD1: Sony CDR/RW CRX1611 (2001)
CD/DVD2: LG DVD/RW GH22NP20 (2009)

I'm looking to get and put a SounBlaster Live in it at least. Should probably take the slower RAM DIMM out as well. Any other recommendations?

xp might be too heavy for this, especially if You remove part of the memory; i would go win 98; is it going to even speed up after removing the old module?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Based on google image results the G400 and G400 max appear to have nearly identical PCBs.

G400 has 5ns memory. Ask seller for closeup shot of memory IC. Problem solved. Also ask for back picture. G400 MAX is 'G4-MMDHA32' (two M's).

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

BTW.. does anyone think Voodoo prices will ever go back down to where normal people can afford them? I can't for the life of me understand what's driving prices to the point where a V4 4500 sells for $123 on eBay. I'm really hoping I'll live long enough to see V2s go back where they were a few years ago. There can't be enough interest to sustain a market like that, my basic understanding of economics dictates that a high price/low target audience item economy like that is very prone to a crash.

Price and demand has no correlation. It's supply and demand. I have talked to a local recycler a lot. He said during the crash of '08 and the subsequent rise of gold prices, he had a lot of gold scrappers basically buy old hardware in bulk to extract gold when vintage prices were worthless. So during the crash and up until around 2013 (when the US economy recovered/gold prices tanked), a whole slew of older hardware was destroyed, eliminating much of the supply. I go in to the local recycler about every week and poke around. I actually put a lot of 'decent' items on the side and tell him they will sell for about $X on eBay. In return, the items I find and want (meaning I have to pry machines open), he discounts a lot.

As for why is the V4-4500 going for $123 (I assume we are talking about the 2x V4-4500's on eBay ending yesterday)? V4-4500 had a very limited production run, IIRC they are lower supply than V5-5500's. That one is a PCI variant, so it's even rarer. Going for $123 is actually a good deal (the item was actually not labeled correctly), as the last V4-4500 PCI (from Switzerland) went for $211.

The other recent V4-4500 was AGP, but had full box set in good condition (which is extremely supply constrained). That went for $177, which was actually okay (bare V4-4500 AGP from Switzerland went for $175). Even on Amibay, a fully boxed V4-4500 AGP goes for like 200 EU. I'm slightly bitter about that one, cause I was one of the higher non-winning bids. 🙁

dexvx wrote:

Price and demand has no correlation.

Yeah they do, supply and demand both affect price, an increase in demand typically increases prices, a decrease in supply will increase prices, on the corollary a decrease in demand tends to decrease prices and an increase in supply will do the same thing.

Gold scrapping destroyed a lot of old hardware which permanently reduced the supply, but right now it seems that Millennials are getting to the age where they are starting to feel nostalgic about things from their childhood so they have been buying up older video games which has increased the price of those drastically but it may be effecting computers also.

dexvx wrote:

G400 has 5ns memory. Ask seller for closeup shot of memory IC. Problem solved. Also ask for back picture. G400 MAX is 'G4-MMDHA3 […]
Show full quote

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Based on google image results the G400 and G400 max appear to have nearly identical PCBs.

G400 has 5ns memory. Ask seller for closeup shot of memory IC. Problem solved. Also ask for back picture. G400 MAX is 'G4-MMDHA32' (two M's).

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

BTW.. does anyone think Voodoo prices will ever go back down to where normal people can afford them? I can't for the life of me understand what's driving prices to the point where a V4 4500 sells for $123 on eBay. I'm really hoping I'll live long enough to see V2s go back where they were a few years ago. There can't be enough interest to sustain a market like that, my basic understanding of economics dictates that a high price/low target audience item economy like that is very prone to a crash.

Price and demand has no correlation. It's supply and demand. I have talked to a local recycler a lot. He said during the crash of '08 and the subsequent rise of gold prices, he had a lot of gold scrappers basically buy old hardware in bulk to extract gold when vintage prices were worthless. So during the crash and up until around 2013 (when the US economy recovered/gold prices tanked), a whole slew of older hardware was destroyed, eliminating much of the supply. I go in to the local recycler about every week and poke around. I actually put a lot of 'decent' items on the side and tell him they will sell for about $X on eBay. In return, the items I find and want (meaning I have to pry machines open), he discounts a lot.

As for why is the V4-4500 going for $123 (I assume we are talking about the 2x V4-4500's on eBay ending yesterday)? V4-4500 had a very limited production run, IIRC they are lower supply than V5-5500's. That one is a PCI variant, so it's even rarer. Going for $123 is actually a good deal (the item was actually not labeled correctly), as the last V4-4500 PCI (from Switzerland) went for $211.

The other recent V4-4500 was AGP, but had full box set in good condition (which is extremely supply constrained). That went for $177, which was actually okay (bare V4-4500 AGP from Switzerland went for $175). Even on Amibay, a fully boxed V4-4500 AGP goes for like 200 EU. I'm slightly bitter about that one, cause I was one of the higher non-winning bids. 🙁

I still can't believe there are THAT many people out there actively looking for a Voodoo card. A couple thousand maybe?

I tend to believe there are still far more Voodoo cards than people wanting them.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I did get the nice SCSI stuff from the system (and two smaller items he was also selling). […]
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I did get the nice SCSI stuff from the system (and two smaller items he was also selling).

I used to have a couple of Plextor drives in a SCSI PlexTower. Plextor was the optical drive to have in the 90s and early 00s.

Allright so all the cards are working ! Even those that are missing caps. The NV1 seems to be fine (I didn't try any accelerated game however I installed the windows drivers and sound and video worked properly. However the audio jack connector might not be good as the right speaker didn't work at first and when I moved the cable, it crunched a little bit before working properly)

The Oak piece of crap works ... but is even worse than what I first thought 🤣 : I can SEE the POST picture being drawn

The 2 ISA 3Com are working fine and don't have any problems. They are just a bit dusty and that's all

I didn't test all the PCI 3coms. The ones I tested were OK but there is one problem on almost all of them : the ethernet connector is a bit loose. The solder joints on the sides are fine, but the PCB is ripped from the rest of the card 🤣

Something I also bought and that I forgot to mention : a Xircom Ethernet 10/100+Modem56 PCMCIA card. I had 4 PCMCIA 3Com cards, but they didn't fit in any of my retro laptops. this card on the other hand fits in my Toshiba 210CDS and that computer detected this card right when it booted. I didn't take the time to look for drivers but I'm pretty sure this card will work perfectly and this is really good too !

Got myself a Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CDT for 5€! Works perfectly, though it needs a new CMOS battery.
Pentium 1 (75MHz?), 40MB RAM, 810MB HDD. Came with neither a battery (thank god) nor its external
floppy drive. Also had a Zoom 56k PCMCIA modem inside, though without its cable. It could use some cleaning 🤣

Too bad you didn't get the battery with it, you could have repacked it with new cells.

ooooooooooh pretty.

https://www.shopgoodwill.com/auctions/NIB-3df … d-41485123.html

You should post that to the auctions thread.

jesolo wrote:

Bought this Creative Labs Sound Blaster 1.5 (CT1320C) locally for about US $120 (including postage). Considering what they go fo […]
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Bought this Creative Labs Sound Blaster 1.5 (CT1320C) locally for about US $120 (including postage).
Considering what they go for on eBay these days and the fact that I got this with the original box and manuals, I think it was a fair price (although, I originally didn't want to go above $100).

Haven't yet tested this, but this sound card looks brand new (doesn't appear to ever have been used).
Even came with the CMS upgrade chips (still sealed).

Love it!

Picture is little blurred and i still have same question.
What "replaced" cards ale photograped at box under AdLib?
Unknown "VOICE INPUT" card look same as from original Sound Blaster 1.0 magazine ad.
DIGITIZED VOICE OUTPUT card (replacing Game Blaster photo from SB 1.0) i can not identify too.

Finally, a second Creative Voodoo 2 12MB, and now my SLI system is complete.. Unfortunately on a Socket 7 system with a Pentium MMX 233, but it is what it is. No FPS gains whatsoever but I can play Quake 2 at 1024x768 so screw it, it was worth it.

liqmat wrote:

ooooooooooh pretty.

https://www.shopgoodwill.com/auctions/NIB-3df … d-41485123.html

Yea... that might kerplode.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I still can't believe there are THAT many people out there actively looking for a Voodoo card. A couple thousand maybe?

I tend to believe there are still far more Voodoo cards than people wanting them.

Lets take some forum user statistics. Many are probably non-active, but if you register for those sites, you must have at least SOME interest in vintage hardware/software/whatever.

Vogons has about 30K registered users. 65 online/19 registered now (about 2:1 lurker ratio).

VCFed has 32K registered users (I'm sure there's a massive overlap). 265 users online now/25 registered (10:1 lurker ratio)

Amibay is 18K registered users (yes, more overlap with the above 2), 3K active. 271 online/40 registered (about 6.5:1 lurker ratio).

i486_inside wrote:

dexvx wrote:

Price and demand has no correlation.

Yeah they do, supply and demand both affect price, an increase in demand typically increases prices, a decrease in supply will increase prices, on the corollary a decrease in demand tends to decrease prices and an increase in supply will do the same thing.

Gold scrapping destroyed a lot of old hardware which permanently reduced the supply, but right now it seems that Millennials are getting to the age where they are starting to feel nostalgic about things from their childhood so they have been buying up older video games which has increased the price of those drastically but it may be effecting computers also.

Price is set by supply and demand. If you're talking solely about price and demand, they have zero correlation. You might have very little demand for an item (e.g. F35 Lightning), but the price could be sky high because there is so few supply of it. On the opposite... air has huge demand, but price is free due to supply.

I'm one of those Millennials being referred. However, if it was solely to play older games, there are tons of re-mastered games on GoG and Steam that can run relatively well on modern hardware. However, even if a game did require Win9x, you can go the easy route by buying video cards and systems that are in plentiful supply or use emulators. The price for rarer stuff, IMO, is solely for collector's purposes. I sold 2 of my defective Diamond Monster 3D II's off eBay, and both buyers were just looking for a relatively clean/well kept device just for display purposes (I PM'ed them confirming that they were aware they were as-is).

dexvx wrote:

Lets take some forum user statistics. Many are probably non-active, but if you register for those sites, you must have at least […]
Show full quote

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I still can't believe there are THAT many people out there actively looking for a Voodoo card. A couple thousand maybe?

I tend to believe there are still far more Voodoo cards than people wanting them.

Lets take some forum user statistics. Many are probably non-active, but if you register for those sites, you must have at least SOME interest in vintage hardware/software/whatever.

Vogons has about 30K registered users. 65 online/19 registered now (about 2:1 lurker ratio).

VCFed has 32K registered users (I'm sure there's a massive overlap). 265 users online now/25 registered (10:1 lurker ratio)

Amibay is 18K registered users (yes, more overlap with the above 2), 3K active. 271 online/40 registered (about 6.5:1 lurker ratio).

I did make a graph a while ago on Vogons and its activity (iirc I kinda figured out a somewhat useful way to calculate the amount of activity by registered users and postcount) and activity here was picking up.

But anyhow, in addition to what's already been brought forward, I could add that there are new retro hobbyists coming in all the time and every one of them will need at least some hardware to work with. This used to be like this even back when I started (and that was some years before I even knew about Vogons), but the biggest difference back then and now, is that back then the hardware was on the streets and later it could be bought very easily. Tons of people had an old computer they would eagerly want to part out if you asked them nicely. There was more than you could carry, at times.
Trade between hobbyists was mostly high-end stuff, even Voodoo 3 wasn't considered high-end (perhaps because it was still too new and because these were not hard to find being sold on second hand websites for like €5 or even for a can of beer or something).

Old collectors will not always part with their items, some will simply disappear , with all their stuff getting MIA. New stuff would crop up on second hand markets all the time and in old rigs noone wanted anymore, so new hobbyists had ways to "get into the game" in a relatively easy way.

But the second hand markets of course dry up at some point. Heck, I figure at some point even 3.5in floppy drives will not be that easy to find anymore (second hand sites will have them, but I'd need to either travel farther distances instead of getting on my bike to the seller, as there's way fewer sellers now).

At some point the (shall I say?) ordinary commonfolks won't all have 3 old rigs in their attics anymore and people who do have a large stash they want to get rid of, will probably ask more money for it since people keep getting better informed about what this stuff is selling for these days.
It's not impossible, but it's way WAY harder these days then it was like 10 years ago, let alone how much more money it costs these days.

As long as new people keep getting into this hobby, they will want the hardware. Settled hobbyists (those who basically have what they need) will perhaps want "new" stuff to try out or may need to replace broken parts. But these settled hobbyists will also sell stuff they don't want or need anymore, maybe even repair stuff that was basically already declared dead, soldering iron ready to go!

Another thing which I noticed mattered a lot here in The Netherlands, is that people won't put their computer on the streets anymore (or only very occasionally), but tend to get them recycled. It means less of the stuff will remain with the people, but will disappear outright. It results in having to do more work for similar results (no more dumpsterdiving, or with less results).

So there's less out there with the common folks (I just call them that to get my point across, don't mean to insult anyone or anything but it's late and I want to go to bed 🤣!), part of this is already scooped up by collectors now, but these are likely to keep at least part of their collections, part of the collections will get lost. For instance by disasters (fire/flooding), by damage from use or because it is forgotten or thrown into the bin by mistake or because the owner doesn't think the part is valuable in any way (lots of good working stuff ended up in the bin, which ended up in garbage bags and no dumpsterdiver probably found these ever again), so instead of the prices being mostly "pay for the trouble", supply and demand will start to take effect as some sellers will also try to overprice their items.

There's a couple more factors, like commercial institutes requiring replacement parts or something, and the smelt-for-gold also took its toll. Laws also took their toll (especially the recycling laws).
The recycling is kinda ironic, one of the reasons I started dumpsterdiving is because I disliked the throwaway-economy we had back then, "why toss out this perfectly fine working computer? It still functions, but is only a bit slow". It was tossed out by people who didn't care, but I still cared. Lucky me, it was quite an adventure!

appiah4 wrote:

Anyone know if this is a nice system to get? Cleaning and upgrading it could be a nice project, it's an AT board with PS/2 conn […]
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Anyone know if this is a nice system to get? Cleaning and upgrading it could be a nice project, it's an AT board with PS/2 connectors.. Can get it for cheap, but the case needs a lot of cleaning.

So this PC came in the mail. It's a project that just kind of dropped on my lap like a puppy in the rain.. Not sure what to do with it at this point, It's a nifty quirky and very nice system, but I already have a 233MMX with a Voodoo 2 SLI and don't need this.. I will probably clean this system, install DOS, Win 3.11 and games on it then sell it off. It should be fun for a while. I sorted its parts out and here are what I found inside:

• Acer AT Socket 7 Board with PS/2 connectors instead of AT connectors
  165W High Power AT PSU
• Pentium 166MMX (It's the Ceramic PGA type, which I will replace with my PPGA 166MMXas I'm guessing this one is more collectible..)
• S3 Trio64V2/DX with 1MB RAM
• Addonics SM-718 (Yamaha YMF-719B-S OPL) ISA Sound Card (An OPL ISA card with SB Pro compatibility that I will replace for my 486 buildwith an unused ES1898F Non-OPL ESS SB16 compatible Sound Card I have lying about)
• Realtek 10/100MB NIC
• 32x CD-ROM (Forgot to check the make and model)
• IDE Hard Drive (Forgot to check the make, model and capacity, I will harvest it if it's a small drive I can use with my 486 build and replace with one of many 20GBs I have lying about.)

Bought the SAMSUNG S24C450 (submodel: S24C450BW) 24" 1920x1200 monitor, with great support of exotic DOS resolutions by VGA cable! Thanks goes to PhilsComputerLab for making his video on YT channel about this display!

It was very hard to find one, but the best thing is that a got it "A" grade, so without any scratches or damage!

Did some testing and it works perfectly on 720x400 or 640x350. The scaling is perfect and its very hard to see any distortions. Gosh, I'm so excited 😁 I recommend it for everyone! But remember - it's a TN panel so the viewing angles are a bit narrow, but if You sit perfectly in front then theres no color differences.

If you want to buy one then be sure to get the S24C450BW because there are other submodels with 1920x1080 panels! When I was buying it, the shop sent me the 1920x1080 and I had to send it back to get the proper one.

Doppler wrote:

Bought the SAMSUNG S24C450 (submodel: S24C450BW) 24" 1920x1200 monitor, with great support of exotic DOS resolutions by VGA cabl […]
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Bought the SAMSUNG S24C450 (submodel: S24C450BW) 24" 1920x1200 monitor, with great support of exotic DOS resolutions by VGA cable! Thanks goes to PhilsComputerLab for making his video on YT channel about this display!

It was very hard to find one, but the best thing is that a got it "A" grade, so without any scratches or damage!

Did some testing and it works perfectly on 720x400 or 640x350. The scaling is perfect and its very hard to see any distortions. Gosh, I'm so excited 😁 I recommend it for everyone! But remember - it's a TN panel so the viewing angles are a bit narrow, but if You sit perfectly in front then theres no color differences.

If you want to buy one then be sure to get the S24C450BW because there are other submodels with 1920x1080 panels! When I was buying it, the shop sent me the 1920x1080 and I had to send it back to get the proper one.

I watched his video as well, and some of my flat panel displays, minus my NEC MultiSync 1530V don't have support for 4:3 with the VGA just only the DVI or HDMI ports, but I have a 19" Widescreen Dell monitor from 2013 that has 4:3, 5:4, and 16:10 aspect ratios under the menu, and a 22" ASUS monitor that has a 4:3 ratio for the VGA, plus integrated auto aspect ratio for the DVI and HDMI ports, and with integrated speakers and webcam, it's a gamers dream come true.

Tetrium wrote:

I did make a graph a while ago on Vogons and its activity (iirc I kinda figured out a somewhat useful way to calculate the amount of activity by registered users and postcount) and activity here was picking up....

Great points here. I think this is an interesting discussion that deserves its own thread - maybe one of the moderators could open a new thread and moves these posts into it? I'd like to discuss topics of price, availability and scarcity of retro hardware as well but I know that sometimes other members get upset when we complain about current prices in the "bought these retro hardware" or the "ebay auctions" thread 😵