I am actually getting noticed on some Danish forum's now, that I have build a machine-park this big.
When my 486-rig is finished, I have from 486-class to P-III class systems, with a K6-II and K6-III thrown in the collection.
So this basically makes me have nearly all 90's classes of most used system in my collection.

Getting back to peoples reactions.
I am beginning to get feedback's such as "Awesomme project you have" and "When will the museum be open".
None in a negative sence. People really want to feel the nostalgia again. They just do not feel they have a need for owning old hardware.
If I play these card's right. People will start to ask me for more demonstrations and I have even had an offer for free 486 Cpu's.
I am currently waiting for an Intel DX2-66 and an AMD DX2-80. (possible more CPU's) The only thing that I had to pay for it.
Was an evening, for him to come around and play some old games, on these processors that he will be shipping for me.
I told him that a free night of gaming, comes with free coffee.... 😁

tametick wrote:

I think in a decade people will look at early android/ios the same way, these are still advancing rapidly

The mobile platform had a similar thing 5 years ago when you had Tizen, Maemo and Meego, promises of Ubuntu (still) Firefox and Facebook OSes, the list goes on. Now what do we really have?Android which is homogenised despite other manufacturers trying to make their mark on it etc, Windows Mobile and iOS. Not quite the same thing. The growth isn't as furious. And remember that IBM were not the ones making big waves - it was Dell, Compatible, Xeos etc who were pushing boundaries plus all the other little guys like Panrix. No one is gong to have forgotten the names Google and Apple in 20 years.

brassicGamer wrote:

tametick wrote:

Well there's new retro gear being added to the market all the time: every year new hardware becomes >10 years old (or whatever your definition for retro is) :p

In a decade your modern PC will be a retro system 😀

I guess I'm taking mainly pre- Pentium era because not all homes had computers back then (not that all do now but you know what I mean). In 1990 a 16MHz system was entry level and by 1999 we had 1GHz PIIIs. I don't believe any decade will match the 90s for diversity of component manufacturers, variety of hardware options (ISA, EISA, MCA, VLB, PCI) or sheer progress. And don't forget all the proprietary technologies because these are the kinds of things that will be lost to time unless people take an interest.

1990's was also the ms-dos games golden age, the birth of 3D, soundcards, cd.rom and consumer internet, did I miss something?

BBS's, Amiga-games, IPX/ODI-Gaming, MUD-Gaming and Tapestreamers perhaps?
Not to mention widespread piracy on the PC-Platform in Europe, wich none gave a shit about until the end of the 90's.

Yep, the 90's alone justify one or two retrorigs. Or at least interest in the evolution of personal computers, because this decade was fantastic.

soviet conscript wrote:

...sitting there with that beige block in front of me staring into the CGA monitor and experiencing the delay between screens as the 4.77mhz 8088 draws each screen. For a few hours I'm 10 again. No bills, no job, just me and my game and that feeling is absolutely priceless. It's also a feeling I could never get sitting at my Windows 7 machine looking at a widescreen LCD monitor and running DOSBox.

Very well put. I think the point of a retrorig is to try and recreate those times and relive these gaming memories in the most authentic way possible. However DOSbox is incredibly convenient and if you care more about the games than about the hardware, I find it's a great compromise. I would love to own an XT with a CGA or EGA CRT as It would send me back to my childhood again, but since my only "retro" rig is a socket 7 machine in a modern ATX case hooked up to a 21" Trinitron CRT, I find that I actually prefer the convenience of playing old games on my modern rig through DOSBox on my IPS LCD. If all you want is to play some games, I don't really see the point in hooking up a retro PC to an LCD - you might as well go DOSBox on your modern rig.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Yeah I have begun to question the whole thing too, I mean I like doing it but it really serves no point and looking at piles of disused computers in my storage room makes me very unhappy...

I get what you're saying - there's a fine line between hoarding and collecting. You can't keep everything because it just takes too much space physically and mentally, and also.. what exactly is the point of it? I got rid of a lot of stuff last year because I moved countries - old computers, game consoles and games, midi modules, synths, etc. There's a few items that I regret getting rid of, but I had accumulated so much over the years that it wasn't manageable anymore - it was really cluttering me. The difficult thing is trying to separate the treasures from the junk - I got caught up in the whole decluttering thing and got rid of a few items I should have kept. But I don't regret doing it as overall I find it's much easier to manage owning less stuff.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Also the rise in popularity and thereby prices is really starting to turn me off the whole thing...

I hear you too. I just don't get how some items can go for so much money on ebay... Sometimes I remember some of these "treasures" I shouldn't have sold and think "maybe I should buy it back". Then a quick look at ebay generally puts me off it... I mean am I really going to spend 188 euros on Maniac Mansion for PC when I actually paid probably the equivalent of 50 euros for it in 1989? It's a shame the value of most "retro" stuff now appears to be so grossly inflated...

Actually funny... Starting out with something, then getting a complete different collection in the end.
I have sold some SS7 stuff off, because I wanted to have older systems.
Now it's all about having one system of each CPU platform (generally speaking) with the main focus being Intel.
Man... I love my SS7-AMD platform's as they were what I had the most fun on.
Just that I find my self spending more time on the Intel platform.

I am mostly questioning what I have, to the point of realizing what I really have a need for instead.
Not questioning retro-computing in general. Just love building up my collection of running machines now a days.

brostenen wrote:

I am mostly questioning what I have, to the point of realizing what I really have a need for instead.

That was also my issue. My journey began with building a few set machines. But I kept changing sound cards, or other aspects of each and every machine and it simply wasn't working for me. Also you have to have multiple cases, power supplies, drives, peripherals...

So now I just have one single retro PC (Super Socket 7) and several test benches. That way I can quickly put something together, whatever the situation demands 😀 I usually don't have a sytem on a bench for very long. Most of the time it's for a YouTube video project, like reviewing a gadget or something like that.

As others already have previously stated I do understand if most people don't see any reason to build and use old retro rigs. It's a hobby: it doesn't need to have a huge purpose behind. If gaming is the main purpose you can pretty much emulate 95% of the old games without problems through DosBOX. But you can't get that feeling of old hardware without the actual old hardware.

I got bitten by retrobug three weeks ago. At that moment I had a P90 and a 386 plus one box full of old hardware in the attic collecting dust. Now I have 386, P90, P200 and PII-450 and those two latter are now under active building phase. Luckily I had enough stuff so I could build a DOS era machine pretty easily. But I do wish to build a proper Win95/98 era machine in due time also... 😀

tincup wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

It's similar to what others have already said, to me it's not just about using the rigs, it's even more about actually building it. I've even built computers I barely ever used after the project was finished.

So true.

maybe it's like working on old cars. Years spent fiddling, researching, planning, building and correcting - for something you might take out on the road for a quick spin only every once in a while on a sunny day..

I've actually used this exact comparison when explaining my hobby to people who knew nothing about this ^^

For me the point of having a retro gaming machine or two... or ten, is because I enjoy the hardware mainly. I build the computer and just enjoy the troubleshooting and ability to make it work.
Once its up and running it only gets turned on occasionally but I still enjoy it a whole lot more than playing the games in DOSBox, it feels more... correct? I don't know if that is the right word.
In short, there is no substitute for the real thing.

I was also asking myself this question over the past few weeks, as I contemplated how I would use a 2001 Pent 3-based Dell system in conjunction with my current setup (which includes a '98 Satellite laptop specifically for DOS gaming needs).

However, upon reading this thread, and (unfortunately) combined with the proprietary PSU going out on said Dell last week, I found a reason to make a new build using said system's parts plus a standard board and PSU. Much the same as it is for many others, it's simply because building such vintage systems, while often impractical, is no doubt fun and poses interesting challenges about parts compatibility that the builder must address. Not to mention, given others do the same for consoles, cars, LPs, and so forth, why not also apply the vintage collection hobby to computers, too?

As for using them...certainly, there is DOSbox and emulation galore for playing the games, but I find the experience of having to use the system fully - setting Blaster variables in autoexec.bat, enabling/disabling CPU caches to make sure certain games run at the right speed, changing discs to load the appropriate games' CD music and then hearing the drive spin, even just watching 3D Maze run slowly on said '98 laptop due to the low performance of the integrated video chip - far more interesting than simply playing some games.

Additionally, I find DOSBox's OPL3 emulation (or really, software FM in general) crisp and quite applaudable, but too perfect too. The little idiosyncrasies of hardware FM chips such as the behaviour of various DACs and the 49716Hz->44100Hz undersampling on some laptop-oriented OPL3s provide additional life to the music.

Under the workbench 4 retro rigs sit fully built and operational:

486 handles games that need a slow cpu to run smoothly, and benefit from a real vanilla S3/SB environment
P200 is museum for the 1990's golden age of point and click adventures
P933/V2-SLI/Rendition handles games that lack a 3D wrapper (Rendition) or play nicest in period correct Glide/CPU/Ram environment
E6700/7900GTX is home to mighty XP and a selection of games that never translated properly in W7, and dual boots into W98SE as well, for rocket sledge super hi-res modded W9x happiest stuff

They are linked by a KVM-audio cable and plugged into the VGA socket of my main 24" widescreen. On a separate plug strip, so the retro wing can be toggled completely off an out sight and worry.

I'm really happy with the set up since emulators don't exist for everything and I prefer to run cycle limited games on a period cpu than disabling cache and other tricks well known around here.

Close at hand is a barebones case and spare parts boxes for when the mood strike to assemble a temporary 'prototype' build or test bed. Basically everything fits under the bench, with a few file boxes of less interesting/purely backup stuff in deep storage...

Fun!

You can get win98 working properly on a core 2?

/\ As long as the chipset has drivers for it, yes. Win9x will only use one core, though, but a single core of an E6700 should be faster than the fastest P4 around.

Any tips one what is the latest motherboard/chipset that supports win98 with appropriate drivers? It's a lot easier to get functional used core2s than p4s 😀

laptops/netbook suggestions are also fine as long as drivers for sound/networking/directdraw etc work. this may be easier for me to keep around than a full tower desktop...

I can only point you to another thread here, where one user had both Windows 98 and 8.1+ on a single PC.

The "best" chipsets (as in least troublesome) for a late Windows 98 build are probably i875P and i865G/P(E).

Not all Socket-775 boards with these chipsets support Core 2 Duo CPUs but at least some do.

tametick wrote:

You can get win98 working properly on a core 2?

Yes - if the board has W9x chipset drivers you're good. As I've posted elsewhere I use RLOEW's memory patch to get it running with all the extra ram you'd want on a modern/XP system - in this case 4gb system and 512mb video. So far everything plays nicely together. Only downside for me is that I needed to use an mATX board for my build, and the best overall mobo I found (BIOSTAR P4M890-M7-TE) doesn't do dual-channel ram. Obviously not an issue for W98 but cuts down on the raw performance in XP.

Going back to the OP's original question, if simply playing DOS games were my main interest, Dosbox might undermine my reto rig resolve. But since my interest really lies in early W9x 3D and CPU/ram issue games, original equipment is still king.