It just feels good to have history in your hands, and a quiet system without much fans blowing, only the noise that comes out of the speakers due to the bad soundcard signals.

badmofo wrote:

I've never even seen a LAPC-I listed on eBay, very rare indeed.

From time to time I've gotten carried away and spent big bucks on retro stuff (which for me is > $100), and I've always felt a little bit dirty afterwards. The components I enjoy the most are the ones I've found for free or for a few bucks at markets, etc.

Sometimes though you just have to just suck it up and pay the money. If it's an item that is almost never seen for sale anywhere, for example, and the last one was 5 years ago or longer. Then when another one (or sometimes the same one) comes up again you have to pay the asking price or be the high bidder because you know there may not be another one available for years. Paying the money now spares you the agony of searching for another one just because you think you can save a few bucks, which you usually can't on really rare items anyway because either the seller knows what he has or at least one other bidder does.

For me, it's about nostalgia and the desire to have what I couldn't get when I was younger. I always get a real kick seeing old computer hardware come to life again and work as it should (as well as seeing old DOS games & programs run flawlessly again).

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

For me, it's about nostalgia and the desire to have what I couldn't get when I was younger. I always get a real kick seeing old computer hardware come to life again and work as it should (as well as seeing old DOS games & programs run flawlessly again).

^^^THIS^^^

Looking back, I had it very good as a child. I was the only one with a home computer until at least the 6th grade, but I ALWAYS was looking at magazines showcasing the latest and greatest hardware.

My interest peaked with the Pentium 2 era. Hence why I like the p-pro through p3 era the most.

I think the experience of tinkering and playing around with legacy hardware is almost as fun as playing games on it. There's just so many possibilities that could be built now that we could never have been able to build back when this stuff was new, or even just a few years old.

m1919 wrote:

I think the experience of tinkering and playing around with legacy hardware is almost as fun as playing games on it.

Totally!

I have to admit it. When I really want to play a game, I do just play it in DOSBox. Like 2 years ago when I played all the Space Quest games, one after the other.

Playing with the hardware is more a totally different hobby for me.

When I was younger and I was in a more stable living situation, I used to be pretty big on collecting oldschool hardware and playing games on it. I mean, I had a couple 486s, some Apple II stuff, some Mac Classics, and even an IBM PC Jr at one point!

When tensions started building in my parents' marriage though, I had to ditch some of my old gear (including that PC Jr, which was a rather foolish decision on my part considering how much they're worth 😜), and now I just have a stash of random Wintel parts at my grandparents' place 4.5 hours away, and a disorganized collection of SNES and Genesis carts here. 😜

I like emulation because even though it may not *quite* have that oldschool feel to it, it doesn't require as much equipment, it's cheaper (the legality of ROMs is questionable, but it's not like anyone really cares), and it allows you to play games in higher resolutions than originally intended (atleast in the case of N64 and GameCube emulation).

m1919 wrote:

I think the experience of tinkering and playing around with legacy hardware is almost as fun as playing games on it.

This is very true for me. The 90's was a wild frontier. Everyone coming out with different sound cards, MIDI modules, video cards, etc. Now sound cards are almost irrelevant, wavetable modules are out and video card companies have been reduced to two primary players.

We also have the benefit of hindsight. If you want the perfect legacy PC, it is in your grasp to build it. In some cases this means building a PC similar to what you had, but in others it is building what you could never afford and always wanted.

valnar wrote:

m1919 wrote:

I think the experience of tinkering and playing around with legacy hardware is almost as fun as playing games on it.

This is very true for me. The 90's was a wild frontier. Everyone coming out with different sound cards, MIDI modules, video cards, etc. Now sound cards are almost irrelevant, wavetable modules are out and video card companies have been reduced to two primary players.

We also have the benefit of hindsight. If you want the perfect legacy PC, it is in your grasp to build it. In some cases this means building a PC similar to what you had, but in others it is building what you could never afford and always wanted.

So true. Yet "perfect" tends towards "many forms of perfection" ie many perfect Retro rigs 🙄

There are a few reasons for me. I suppose number one is nostalgia. I'm a slave to nostalgia. 😵 The days of Windows 3.1 and later the heyday of 3dfx were happy times for me as a kid, and so even though I can never get back to that 'place,' it's nice to have reminders around. I think we got our first computer when I was 3, so I grew up with them, and I have to say there's still something about using DOS, floppy disks, etc. that I enjoy.

Another related reason that a few people have mentioned is because when I was little the computers my family had were always cheap to begin with and practically obsolete after a little while, so I never even knew what it was like to play my favourite games at a decent frame rate, never mind at a decent resolution. It's cool to now be able to put together what would have, at the time, been a totally badass PC. The one thing I find annoying/unfortunate is that the prices for old hardware seem to be shooting through the roof, had I thought it possible I'd definitely have made sure to at least cannibalize old computers for parts; I have manuals and driver disks for Disney Sound Source, SB 16 and AdLib still kicking around but no hardware.😒 They're obviously rare because people just threw out their old computers en masse, which brings me to my next point, I'm a treehugger and I don't want to see things clogging up landfills. Better to keep things for a long time than to keep buying the new iThing every few months. It also preserves a little bit of history.

And finally, another reason is that I already have a whole bunch of the games and other applications I want to run on floppy disks, so I wouldn't see the point in downloading them to play on an emulator... And anyway, it's much easier to be able to just type in 'darklands,' for example, and start playing.

m1919 wrote:

I think the experience of tinkering and playing around with legacy hardware is almost as fun as playing games on it. There's just so many possibilities that could be built now that we could never have been able to build back when this stuff was new, or even just a few years old.

Actually, I found building these systems even more fun then gaming on them. I got too many rigs as it is 🤣

The one thing I find annoying/unfortunate is that the prices for old hardware seem to be shooting through the roof...

Yes I noticed this first hand. When I started collecting hardware (over 10 years ago...sheesh, does time fly!), 486's were dumped onto the streets in large numbers and Pentium 2 stuff (anything ATX basically) was still expensive second hand. It was the time where Athlons and Netburst were very new.

It seems to come in waves. At first new hardware is ofcourse new and second hand stuff is only slightly cheaper then the stuff in the shops.
Then it disappears from the shops (or gets hard to find) but remains expensive second hand (kinda like the oldest Intel quad cores are now, still expensive).

And at some point stuff gets very cheap second hand (like Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 stuff is now. A lot of sellers and very few buyers).
And then at some point there comes the generation that starts to become scarce (like Pentium 3 stuff is now, at least here in The Netherlands. It's becoming noticeably more scarce then P4/axp).

And finally theres the stuff that's long forgotten and hardly available (like AT stuff) and even the general public generally know it's "rare".

I've always found this "wave" to be very interesting. If you want to buy into a particular generation of hardware cheap, then it's best to buy it when the price is low. If you wait till longer, the choice of hardware you can buy starts to become smaller (pardon my bad English 😅 ) and you start to need a lot of luck to source particular parts cheaply.

This is also one of the things that, at least in my opinion, make collecting old hardware interesting 😀

It's some kind of evolution.

Back then, it was kinda simple:
Pentium 4/Athlon was new, Pentium 3 was second hand stuff, Pentium 2 was older and Pentium 1 stuff and older was getting trashed.
Now theres like over 2 times as many generations of hardware to deal with!

Kudo's for the people who know their way around hardware across all these generations! 😁

Tetrium wrote:

a lot of stuff

I noticed the same thing about 'waves'

I was checking ''old'' quad core price a couple months ago and let it be because they are still very expensive.

P4 generation is what you find in the garbage all over.
This being said I found more p3 than p4 this year!!

I needed a small computer to record AV for my consoles and maybe play some games on my CRT TV. I got a nice very clean IBM Thinkcentre M52 for 25$. Its small form factor with p4 HT 3.4Ghz. ( It could take a pentium D) Very nice machine for dirt cheap!

Collecting computer is just so fun, At this point i pretty much have at least a machine from every generation of PCs. Beginning with a Tandy 1000. I Still dont have a 286 but i have a mobo ( untested ) Ill need to work on this one eventually 😁

Yes, the "wave theory" holds true for other things too. I collect games, both PC and boardgames, and the generational sequence Tetrium describes is almost identical. And used/vintage cars seem to follow a similar pattern as well. Though with cars it seems to follow a strong demographic trend - "hot" vintage cars tend to the ones that 40-50 year olds liked when they were kids, so the the center of attention moves slowly forward through the decades.

Generally it seems the best time to dip into a market is when an item is both plentiful yet outdated. Wait too long and it becomes outdated enough it's a collectible almost by definition, but if it become scarce, for whatever reason, values rise and collector take even more interest.

That's true, I used to see Pentium and 486 gray/beige box PCs sitting out for garbage pickup all the time; unfortunately though at the time I knew nothing about hardware, even though I already was interested in old computers and liked old games. I suppose I'm just kind of surprised that this stuff has become so scarce so quickly, as the generation of hardware I'm after is between 10 and 20 years old (486 to Pentium II, at least now that I've finished my Athlon XP Voodoo5 rig 😁), but 99% of people have no reason to hang onto an old computer. Fortunately thrift stores, at least in my area, don't seem to have caught on to the fact that old computer hardware is valuable; I also collect vinyl records and now some thrift stores have even started picking out the good ones to sell online for higher prices (and if anyone's stupid enough to pay $7 for Breakfast in America by Supertramp then they probably deserve to get ripped off), but old computer stuff still seems cheap when it turns up. I lugged (literally, I don't have my driver's license yet 😵 ) home a 386 PC last year for $4 but unfortunately ditched it when I moved. 🙁

With regards to consoles, my first was SNES and that was in 2001, so playing them hardly even seems retro to me. 😒 It is a little irritating to have to blow repeatedly on the game cartridges but I would much rather play those with the actual controller than on the keyboard.

It seems to me we're at the end of the cheap PIII era, and near the peak of the cheap P4 era. So that raises the question, is there a good reason to buy P4 gear now?

I'm not sure there is. Windows XP lasted long enough and was compatible enough that anything we do on P4 hardware we can do on Core 2 hardware even better. The 2000s were boring in computer hardware compared to the 90s. The fact that the P4 sucked doesn't help either. But then, the valuable stuff is always what people don't save. So who knows?

Hatta wrote:

It seems to me we're at the end of the cheap PIII era, and near the peak of the cheap P4 era. So that raises the question, is there a good reason to buy P4 gear now?

I'm not sure there is. Windows XP lasted long enough and was compatible enough that anything we do on P4 hardware we can do on Core 2 hardware even better. The 2000s were boring in computer hardware compared to the 90s. The fact that the P4 sucked doesn't help either. But then, the valuable stuff is always what people don't save. So who knows?

IMO, the only P4 gear worth buying is the Socket 603/604 P4 based Xeon stuff, the other regular P4 stuff has no real appeal, unless you want to build a really fast Windows 98 rig.

The P4 are worth buying if you need a decent computer for a specific task on a small budget. Just like i did with the Thinkcentre M52, im pretty happy about it.

Hatta wrote:

The 2000s were boring in computer hardware compared to the 90s. The fact that the P4 sucked doesn't help either.

Totally agreed. The only reason I would buy a P4 machine would be to be able to run RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 well. 😒 And there wouldn't be much point in doing that since I could run it better on a newer computer anyway.

Up until a few years ago, Socket 478 machines worked well as cheap websurfing boxes, but ever since HD video became popular and websites and browsers started increasing in complexity, the socket 478 platform has become kinda useless. 🤣 It's too new of a platform for running most retro games, and too old for running newer games. 😜

I'll just say that the only reason I built a Pentium 4 rig for retrogaming very recently was because I could actually find Pentium 4/Socket 478 boards with ISA slots. Can't say the same for Athlon XP/64, sadly, even if they're otherwise far superior architectures to Intel's NetBurst travesties.

In practice, having an ISA slot (with DMA support, of course; 875P/ICH5 and prior should allow that) means I can have a proper DOS sound card like an AWE32 installed, while the system is still old enough overall to support Win98SE usage (so long as you either install no more than 512 MB of RAM, or pay up the $21 for that RAM limitation patch). At the same time, it's plenty powerful for WinXP-era gaming up through 2005, especially when paired with a graphics card like the GeForce 6800 Ultra.

Long story short, instead of having to keep a Win9x gaming system and an XP gaming system, I can have both in one computer. Keeps things tidier around the house, especially when family members complain that you have way too many computers already.

And before you bring up running XP-era games on my modern desktop in its Q6600/8800 GT/Win7 64-bit glory, there are still a select few that really don't like anything past XP. Sometimes it's just something really subtle (such as Battlefield: Vietnam having totally missing sound effects if you run it on Vista/Win7; even ALchemy won't fix that) which really bugs me and can't be fixed short of running an older OS.

The catch, of course, is that you're not going to find a Socket 478 motherboard packing ISA slots being sold just anywhere. You generally have to head to eBay and pay a surprisingly high price for such hardware, especially if it's based on the 875 chipset rather than 845.