Unknown_K wrote on 2022-03-07, 22:44:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-03-07, 13:39:

Unknown_K wrote on 2022-03-07, 07:11:

I like SCSI cards mostly for all the old vintage tape and MO drives I have lying around.

Which MO drives do you have laying around?

A bunch of 5.25" 1.3GB internal and external drives, a couple 3.5" Fujitsu external 130MB? drives, a few 2.6GB 5.25" drives, and a 20+ disk 5.25" HP jukebox. I also have some IBM PS/2 WORM drives and media (rare).

I think that strange or uncommon media could deserve a thread of their own. Most of us know there's more out there than just 3.5in and 5.25in floppy drives, but there's countless more obscure ones. The subject does feel a little bit under-exposed here on vogons even though it could be seen as part of the retro experience.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-03-07, 22:46:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-03-07, 19:03:

The model number is SK-2885 btw.

That's a nice looking basic keyboard. I see why you picked them up. I would have been tempted as well, if in the same position.

Having typed on one for a few days now, I'm already very pleased with them. For a basic keyboard it has everything I need of it, except perhaps compatibility with ps/2, which I presume these don't have but could be worth it to test at some time.
This was definitely a good deal right there.

Actually today I visited another couple second hand shops and got really lucky with there being several old systems available complete with graphics cards, harddrive, memory, etc, for a good price. I bought several items in total so I have to have the items send as it was too heavy to carry. Should arrive in a week 😀

Tetrium wrote on 2022-03-08, 18:24:

Unknown_K wrote on 2022-03-07, 22:44:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-03-07, 13:39:

Which MO drives do you have laying around?

A bunch of 5.25" 1.3GB internal and external drives, a couple 3.5" Fujitsu external 130MB? drives, a few 2.6GB 5.25" drives, and a 20+ disk 5.25" HP jukebox. I also have some IBM PS/2 WORM drives and media (rare).

I think that strange or uncommon media could deserve a thread of their own. Most of us know there's more out there than just 3.5in and 5.25in floppy drives, but there's countless more obscure ones. The subject does feel a little bit under-exposed here on vogons even though it could be seen as part of the retro experience.

Yeah, we could set it up as a horror experience, MCed by an evil twirly mustache top hatted BOFH "Hahahaaaa, you thought you had a DSSD 360kB disk, fool! Hahaa, that's only single sided, you get a measly 120kB on it n00b, muhuhahaaaaaa"

edit: hey, if we all threw a buck in a crowdfunder maybe we could get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_de_Lancie to do the cutscenes.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-03-08, 18:33:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-03-08, 18:24:

Unknown_K wrote on 2022-03-07, 22:44:

A bunch of 5.25" 1.3GB internal and external drives, a couple 3.5" Fujitsu external 130MB? drives, a few 2.6GB 5.25" drives, and a 20+ disk 5.25" HP jukebox. I also have some IBM PS/2 WORM drives and media (rare).

I think that strange or uncommon media could deserve a thread of their own. Most of us know there's more out there than just 3.5in and 5.25in floppy drives, but there's countless more obscure ones. The subject does feel a little bit under-exposed here on vogons even though it could be seen as part of the retro experience.

Yeah, we could set it up as a horror experience, MCed by an evil twirly mustache top hatted BOFH "Hahahaaaa, you thought you had a DSSD 360kB disk, fool! Hahaa, that's only single sided, you get a measly 120kB on it n00b, muhuhahaaaaaa"

edit: hey, if we all threw a buck in a crowdfunder maybe we could get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_de_Lancie to do the cutscenes.

🤣!
I think I'd actually be more infatuated with them instead of horrified 😜
I actually did try out all kinds of weird custom formats using several programs, I think one was fdformat.

HanJammer wrote on 2022-03-08, 00:50:

I totally understand people were throwing out 90s clone PCs in the early 2000s - I don't understand same applied to Amigas as these were less popular, mostly used by fanatics as you called them

Not all. I knew at least one person back in 1995 that already had their Amiga 500 sitting in a corner gathering dust because it was "junk", but this person was never a fanatic. Also other people I knew that were fanatics and still sold off their Amigas for peanuts (later regretting it of course).

I don't believe that using or keeping vintage or outdated hardware was as widespread in the late 90s and early 2000s as it is nowadays.

Tetrium wrote on 2022-03-08, 18:24:

Unknown_K wrote on 2022-03-07, 22:44:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-03-07, 13:39:

Which MO drives do you have laying around?

A bunch of 5.25" 1.3GB internal and external drives, a couple 3.5" Fujitsu external 130MB? drives, a few 2.6GB 5.25" drives, and a 20+ disk 5.25" HP jukebox. I also have some IBM PS/2 WORM drives and media (rare).

I think that strange or uncommon media could deserve a thread of their own. Most of us know there's more out there than just 3.5in and 5.25in floppy drives, but there's countless more obscure ones. The subject does feel a little bit under-exposed here on vogons even though it could be seen as part of the retro experience.

I don't just collect MO drives, I have a bunch of different tape drives (DLT, AIT, Travan, QIC, DAT, LTO, etc) and removable media like ZIP, Jazz, Bournouli, Syquest 44mb, etc.

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-08, 08:42:

That appears to be a YMF-719 based card. Those are supposed to be pretty good: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/audician-32-plus […]
Show full quote

HanSolo wrote on 2022-03-07, 20:56:

I knew nothing about the card but it had 'Yamaha OPL' written on it and came with box, so for 15 Euro shipped I had to take it 😀

That appears to be a YMF-719 based card. Those are supposed to be pretty good:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/audician-32-plus.html
Nice find at any price, for 15 all the better. Kleinanzeige?

Oh, a Phil's-video I haven't watched yet. Thanks! 😀
Yes, that's where I got it from. (For the non-german readers: that's something like Craigslist). I bought most of my stuff from there in the last years.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-03-08, 09:02:

The box will probably have value to a collector if you don't want it.

Compared to others I'm a small-scale collector, but I like to have the original boxes. They are a lot nicer to look at than the naked cards 😀

devius wrote on 2022-03-08, 19:48:

HanJammer wrote on 2022-03-08, 00:50:

I totally understand people were throwing out 90s clone PCs in the early 2000s - I don't understand same applied to Amigas as these were less popular, mostly used by fanatics as you called them

Not all. I knew at least one person back in 1995 that already had their Amiga 500 sitting in a corner gathering dust because it was "junk", but this person was never a fanatic. Also other people I knew that were fanatics and still sold off their Amigas for peanuts (later regretting it of course).

I don't believe that using or keeping vintage or outdated hardware was as widespread in the late 90s and early 2000s as it is nowadays.

Back then in the actual pre-2000 years, very few people had the foresight to realise that, eventually, almost every piece of pre-2000 hardware would be treasured as a rare and valuable relic from a time when only a small minority were enthusiasts.

With the hindsight of two decades, it seems very obvious. But back then, we were all too busily immersed in the fine detail of the crazy & burgeoning scene. To mentally zoom out and foresee "the exciting vintage market of the future!" was simply not done.

HanSolo wrote on 2022-03-08, 20:31:

Oh, a Phil's-video I haven't watched yet. Thanks! :) Yes, that's where I got it from. (For the non-german readers: that's someth […]
Show full quote

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-08, 08:42:

That appears to be a YMF-719 based card. Those are supposed to be pretty good: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/audician-32-plus […]
Show full quote

HanSolo wrote on 2022-03-07, 20:56:

I knew nothing about the card but it had 'Yamaha OPL' written on it and came with box, so for 15 Euro shipped I had to take it 😀

That appears to be a YMF-719 based card. Those are supposed to be pretty good:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/audician-32-plus.html
Nice find at any price, for 15 all the better. Kleinanzeige?

Oh, a Phil's-video I haven't watched yet. Thanks! 😀
Yes, that's where I got it from. (For the non-german readers: that's something like Craigslist). I bought most of my stuff from there in the last years.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-03-08, 09:02:

The box will probably have value to a collector if you don't want it.

Compared to others I'm a small-scale collector, but I like to have the original boxes. They are a lot nicer to look at than the naked cards 😀

I like original boxes too .. they dont like my lack of free storage space 🙁

So I sell them if they are collectable, at least someone wil lget to enjoy them and they wont be taking up space I dont have 😁.

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-03-08, 20:35:

devius wrote on 2022-03-08, 19:48:

HanJammer wrote on 2022-03-08, 00:50:

I totally understand people were throwing out 90s clone PCs in the early 2000s - I don't understand same applied to Amigas as these were less popular, mostly used by fanatics as you called them

Not all. I knew at least one person back in 1995 that already had their Amiga 500 sitting in a corner gathering dust because it was "junk", but this person was never a fanatic. Also other people I knew that were fanatics and still sold off their Amigas for peanuts (later regretting it of course).

I don't believe that using or keeping vintage or outdated hardware was as widespread in the late 90s and early 2000s as it is nowadays.

Back then in the actual pre-2000 years, very few people had the foresight to realise that, eventually, almost every piece of pre-2000 hardware would be treasured as a rare and valuable relic from a time when only a small minority were enthusiasts.

With the hindsight of two decades, it seems very obvious. But back then, we were all too busily immersed in the fine detail of the crazy & burgeoning scene. To mentally zoom out and foresee "the exciting vintage market of the future!" was simply not done.

As it is said, Hindsight is great but totally useless after the fact !

I wish I had kept all my old machines, I had an amazing 486 DX2 66 box that I would dearly love to still have along with a really nice Vic20, oh and a Coleco Vision with the Atari 2600 module .. god I wish I still had that little machine.

HanSolo wrote on 2022-03-08, 20:31:

For the non-german readers: that's something like Craigslist.

It's called "classified ads", space cowboy! 😉

On the whole "nostalgia in hindsight" issue: I still somehow regret I sold my original 4 MB Matrox Mystique - although back then I was young and needed the money and that thing is still pretty worthless today.

But I kept my parent's Oktek Jaguar V budget 386, among other things, all those years. Mostly because by the time my clan decommissioned things, they were already too obsolete to even bother selling them.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-03-08, 20:41:

I like original boxes too .. they dont like my lack of free storage space :( […]
Show full quote

HanSolo wrote on 2022-03-08, 20:31:

Oh, a Phil's-video I haven't watched yet. Thanks! :) Yes, that's where I got it from. (For the non-german readers: that's someth […]
Show full quote

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-08, 08:42:

That appears to be a YMF-719 based card. Those are supposed to be pretty good:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/audician-32-plus.html
Nice find at any price, for 15 all the better. Kleinanzeige?

Oh, a Phil's-video I haven't watched yet. Thanks! 😀
Yes, that's where I got it from. (For the non-german readers: that's something like Craigslist). I bought most of my stuff from there in the last years.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-03-08, 09:02:

The box will probably have value to a collector if you don't want it.

Compared to others I'm a small-scale collector, but I like to have the original boxes. They are a lot nicer to look at than the naked cards 😀

I like original boxes too .. they dont like my lack of free storage space 🙁

So I sell them if they are collectable, at least someone wil lget to enjoy them and they wont be taking up space I dont have 😁.

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-03-08, 20:35:

devius wrote on 2022-03-08, 19:48:

Not all. I knew at least one person back in 1995 that already had their Amiga 500 sitting in a corner gathering dust because it was "junk", but this person was never a fanatic. Also other people I knew that were fanatics and still sold off their Amigas for peanuts (later regretting it of course).

I don't believe that using or keeping vintage or outdated hardware was as widespread in the late 90s and early 2000s as it is nowadays.

Back then in the actual pre-2000 years, very few people had the foresight to realise that, eventually, almost every piece of pre-2000 hardware would be treasured as a rare and valuable relic from a time when only a small minority were enthusiasts.

With the hindsight of two decades, it seems very obvious. But back then, we were all too busily immersed in the fine detail of the crazy & burgeoning scene. To mentally zoom out and foresee "the exciting vintage market of the future!" was simply not done.

As it is said, Hindsight is great but totally useless after the fact !

I wish I had kept all my old machines, I had an amazing 486 DX2 66 box that I would dearly love to still have along with a really nice Vic20, oh and a Coleco Vision with the Atari 2600 module .. god I wish I still had that little machine.

Also hindsight of course, but in the early 90's I got a hint. At one of my first jobs as a software developer I worked for this guy, and one day he starts telling me that he found and bought an IBM System/370 (I think it was that one), like NOS. He was super excited about it and told me how much time he spend working on it etc. Pure nostalgia. However, being young and foolish, it didn't click that one day I would be him. To me he just bought a bunch of old junk, why buy that if you can buy a 486 or even a Pentium! Yeah, I think I get it now...

For the Yamaha ISA sound card, coincidentally yesterday I bought full version of this card. It was quite cheap (around 17 USD including shipping on a local auction server), although it's untested. Seller's pic:

elcrys wrote on 2022-03-08, 21:11:

For the Yamaha ISA sound card, coincidentally yesterday I bought full version of this card. It was quite cheap (around 17 USD including shipping on a local auction server), although it's untested. Seller's pic:

Very nice, you've got the wavetable. That is less common, these days.

In fact, with the 718/719 being one of the best-performing mainstream ISA soundcards at any price, I am surprised in general that they are still available for non-sucky prices.

HanJammer wrote on 2022-03-08, 00:50:

I totally understand people were throwing out 90s clone PCs in the early 2000s - I don't understand same applied to Amigas as these were less popular, mostly used by fanatics as you called them and Commodore was already dead so they should be rather sought after even them... It's not like they could replace them with anything else...

For many people the C64 and Amiga 500 were just gaming consoles to which they didn't have any emotional connection. So they replaced them with a PC when that became the new gaming platform.
And let's not forget that this is pre-internet era where it wasn't as easy selling stuff like today.

devius wrote on 2022-03-08, 19:48:

HanJammer wrote on 2022-03-08, 00:50:

I totally understand people were throwing out 90s clone PCs in the early 2000s - I don't understand same applied to Amigas as these were less popular, mostly used by fanatics as you called them

Not all. I knew at least one person back in 1995 that already had their Amiga 500 sitting in a corner gathering dust because it was "junk", but this person was never a fanatic. Also other people I knew that were fanatics and still sold off their Amigas for peanuts (later regretting it of course).

I don't believe that using or keeping vintage or outdated hardware was as widespread in the late 90s and early 2000s as it is nowadays.

There were 2 or 3 "slough of desponds" through the years in the Amiga realm, where it looked like **everything** had gone down the crapper... long term vendors closing, old hands fading away, the n-th company to buy the Amiga IP and not have a clue what to do with it, or even that it meant anything... etc etc but now it kinda looks sorta stable for the longer term now it's survived at least one more fatal blow than Rasputin did.

Today's pickup is the last Rage-based card I will add to my retro-equipment: ATI Rage Fury Maxx.

It's been over 20 years since I bought a new ATI/AMD-based discrete video card, but there was a time when I wouldn't buy anything else. The 1st video card I owned as part of the 1st (and last) OEM PC I bought was an integrated ATI Rage Pro inside a Compaq Presario (whatever AMD-based model was available in the last quarter of '98 with a K6II@380MHz).

The first discrete video card I bought within 6-8 months of the Compaq for my 1st PC build with an Asus P2B with a Pentium II@400MHz as the base was an ATI Rage 128 Pro. I remember being very insistent toward my co-worker helping me with the build about sticking with ATI. After this one, some kind of Radeon from "Sapphire" would be the last ATI card I would ever buy new.

Bottom photo from top left up-down to the bottom right:

Rage Pro Turbo/XPERT98 PCI 8MB
Rage LT Pro AGP 8MB
Rage XL AGP 8MB
Rage 128 GL/XPERT128 AGP 16MB
Rage 128 Pr0/Rage Fury Pro AGP 32MB
Rage 128 Pro x2/Rage Fury MAXX AGP 32MB x2 (64MB)

(I also have an ATI Rage 128 VR integrated on a FIC-6130 motherboard and a Rage 128 Ultra not shown in the photos.)

When I started collecting people in the hobby would use IRC to chat along with websites for specific machines (which are still around).

Anyway those people would get all kinds of cool machines and upgrade them and after a bit get bored and give or sell them for little (since they were still considered not worth the shipping back then). I picked up some nice gear for little over shipping that way and since I am a lazy packrat/hoarder I still have them.

People who got in early and hoarded stuff like 3dfx cards, Amiga hardware, boxed DOS games, top end cards are probably looking at some serious money now. I just grabbed a few examples of what I wanted but wish I would have gone nuts if I had more storage space.

A decade ago I used to think "If the worst happens, at least I've got a couple hundred bucks worth of scrap in my basement." Now it's like "Holy freaking crap, there's thousands of bucks in my basement." Though if some ghost of BitWrangler's future had showed up and moaned "fill totes with vooooodoooooos" a few years ago I'd probably have told him to screw off I was tryna sleep. Annnnnd what have I done to sort all that crap out since I've been on here.... well not much, got re-enthused and added to it a bit 🤣

Bought some things that for me are starting to fit into a weird "twilight zone" era of retro-ish stuff that doesn't really feel retro but is actually over a decade old.

Picked up two 2011 HP ProBooks - a 6360b and a 6560b and one matching dock. Sold as-is, no hard drives, no power cords, not much description, and I got it all for 40$ CDN.

I already had some power cords and another 6360b, so since these looked to be in really good condition I figured the worst case scenario was that I got good parts machines and a dock for the one I had. Turns out both work great and I turned my existing 6360b into a parts machine to upgrade these ones!

Both were base models - i3-2120m w/4GB of RAM and Intel graphics - I was hoping the 6560b would be the one with the discrete Radeon chip but no luck, but still.

Went ahead and upgraded the 6560b to the i7 from my existing 6360b, upgraded both to 8GB of RAM, SSD's installed (although I had to update the BIOS and set the SATA speed to 3GBps to get an SSD to work in the 6560b), batteries hold almost full charges, dock works, everything. These will run anything from XP on up with HP provided drivers, support serial, parallel, and PS/2 connections over the dock, and honestly run 11 pretty well if you bypass the requirements.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-03-09, 02:04:

A decade ago I used to think "If the worst happens, at least I've got a couple hundred bucks worth of scrap in my basement." Now it's like "Holy freaking crap, there's thousands of bucks in my basement." Though if some ghost of BitWrangler's future had showed up and moaned "fill totes with vooooodoooooos" a few years ago I'd probably have told him to screw off I was tryna sleep. Annnnnd what have I done to sort all that crap out since I've been on here.... well not much, got re-enthused and added to it a bit 🤣

I missed the boat on cheap 3dfx hardware but I did manage to buy out a large lot of PowerVR PCX2 boards from a recycler some time ago. When these because valuable, maybe then I can trade one for a Voodoo 4 or 5. 😀

I have a Voodoo 1, Voodoo 2 (SLI), Banshee, and a PCI and AGP Voodoo 3 3000. But no Voodoo 4 or 5! I am so ashamed to call myself a collector.