torindkflt wrote:

My nostalgia suffers from severe OCD, which demands that the recreation be as close as I can humanly get to the original system.

I find that very interesting. I was already 23 years old when I got my first computer, a used AST 486SX/25. I'm pretty sure I gave it away to a friend, but I really can't remember what I did with it. Anyway, I wouldn't want to recreate it. It struggled with games even then.

My 2nd PC was an AMD 486DX4/120 that I built when I was 24. I know I gave that one away to a friend, but in hindsight I wish I had kept it. Still, I have no desire to rebuild or recreate that one either. I can't even remember what make/model motherboard I used in it. Anything that PC might still do for me today is covered by either DOSBox or my 3rd PC, which I still have.

My 3rd PC was a P200 non-MMX that I built when I was 25. Although, I have been steadily modifying and upgrading it over the years. Just last year while playing around with the CPU jumpers, I accidentally discovered that the Tyan S1563S motherboard can support a P233 MMX; something that the specs and documentation say it can't do. So, I had to upgrade it to a P233 MMX! 😲

Back around the time I was doing all this stuff, I was heavily nostalgic about the game system I grew up with: the Atari 2600. I was on a mission to get all the old games I had when I was a kid. I was hitting thrift stores and garage sales all over the place trying to find cartridges. So, this makes me wonder if that drive towards nostalgic preservation is caused by positive early childhood excitement. Like I said before, I really have no desire to rebuild the PCs I started with in my 20s. Even my 3rd PC isn't safe from tinkering; it's only got about half of the original parts I used to to build it initially. It's a far better PC now than when it was my daily driver.

How do you feel about the PCs you've used in your 20s? Do you feel any need to preserve those systems?

I don't know if you guys have the same, but somehow my memories sometimes are a little distorted about the requirements. I.e. windows 98 runs fine on 32 meg, but I install at least 256. I realized this some weeks ago while installing a computer wit 1 gig and win98 would not install. Or to big harddisks, put there a 250 gig and and wonder why the f... do I get an error SU0013.

The hardest part if finding drivers. I have a nice big stash of old drivers, but sometimes it's not there, so I have to download. The hardest is to find drivers from hardware manufactures that does not exist any more.

So an that after all the trouble, eventually I get a nice running Win98 machine to play some games... than I start a game, play it for 5 minutes, get bored, start the next game, play it for 5 minutes, get bored, go to bed. Or end up playing Battlefield 4.

KT7AGuy wrote:

How do you feel about the PCs you've used in your 20s? Do you feel any need to preserve those systems?

In this regard, I really only feel the need to preserve the two computers I custom-built, only one of which I still have, thus another recreation is in the works assuming I can ever find the correct style of case for it. Yeah, I will also admit to a desire to re-collect a couple of laptop computers I've used over the past ten years, but not an absolute need. Besides, one seems to be hard to find with the same specs, and the other is still recent enough to be a bit higher than I'm willing to pay right now. I imagine as time passes and they begin crossing the line into "vintage" territory, my desire to reacquire them will grow stronger.

I dunno, as weird as it sounds, I seem to have recently developed a "gotta keep them all" mindset when it comes to my electronics, especially computers, even if doing so means re-purchasing stuff from eBay. I still have every smartphone I've ever owned despite multiple opportunities to sell one or more for cash. 🤣

KT7AGuy wrote:

I find that very interesting. I was already 23 years old when I got my first computer, a used AST 486SX/25. I'm pretty sure I gave it away to a friend, but I really can't remember what I did with it. Anyway, I wouldn't want to recreate it. It struggled with games even then.

How do you feel about the PCs you've used in your 20s? Do you feel any need to preserve those systems?

Right now I find myself very interested in building a gaming PC that fits when I was about 20 years old, so it's kind of borderline with respect to that point. I still have the motherboard I had back then, but as I recall it has a couple serious issues so I've shied away from actually digging it out and trying to build a usable PC out of it.

Last weekend I settled on building a PC out of my subsequent motherboard, a super 7 board that I got when I was 23 or so. I decided it was the most flexible and practical setup, but I don't feel as excited about it. It can do everything the prior PC could do, but maybe you're onto something with the age factor. Stuff I had in my teen years to very early 20s is more nostalgic, perhaps.
I think there's another reason which is indirectly the same point. My late teen to early 20s years is when I played PC games the most heavily and was the most aware of new releases (including games that I never ended up playing, but would like to). So when I think about what hardware I want to put together, it tends to be something that "feels" right for that time period of games.

Going back to the earliest extreme, my family's first x86 PC, which we got when I was in early teens, was a terribly underpowered Wang brand 386SX-16. That was when the huge world of IBM-compatible PC games finally opened up to me. Most of the games I tried to play on that computer were meant for "real" 386s and were made frustrating due to choppy frame rates. Kids today would call it completely unplayable, but when it's the only PC you have, you learn to do the best you can with it.
It is long gone, but if I found one of those today, I think I'd have to get it and play around with it. If nothing else, it was great for Ultima 6 and I never did finish that game. It would also be funny to see if I can still win dogfights in XWing with the old 386SX handicap in effect. Probably not.
I'd also like to open it up and see if I could find any way to overclock the thing. Remembering how badly I struggled with the performance of that computer, I think I'd get some deep satisfaction out of pulling that off, even though it would be a useless achievement at this point in 2016.

Our next PC was a notoriously broken PCChips 486 which was nice and fast, but unstable in games so it just ticked me off.

That socket-7 PC from age 19-20 or so was the first truly *good* x86 PC I ever had, plus the fact that I got so into PC games at that point, and was even studying a lot of programming with it, so I guess those all contribute to me remembering it so fondly.

The biggest problem for me is not knowing what I want to accomplish. Also, I guess I enjoy building and setting things up as much I enjoy playing.

i know its old but i struggle with patience and over complicating the simple task of building a retro rig. its simple unless you complicate. ex: you don't always need period correct parts if your just trying to game. stop buying and hoarding build it already. are you a gamer or just like to benchmark? pick one and enjoy.

Let's re-open this conversation then!

Probably the hardest thing for me is time. Never enough time to get to all the projects I have lined up.

I've been busy buying some rather interesting hardware and software over the last few months and I just don't know how I'll find the time to actually do anything with it soonish. Oh well, we shall see if that changes...

I usually get torn between period correct hardware and hardware that will allow me to play a period's games satisfactorily..

I also don't have a huge collection so I don't usually build with ideal components; my PII slot system has a PIII-450, my MMX system has only a 166MHz, my Tualatin runs on a Celeron 1300.. I want to change all of these to what I really want them to be (PII-450, MMX 233, Celeron 1100A) but parts are hard to find cheap where I live. Yeah, finding cheap retro parts. I guess that's the thing.

@appiah4 Being period correct also means that some parts are going to be a bit mixed, like you already have. I mean heck my dad was running a SLI Voodoo2 setup in a Pentium 166 MMX with 32MB of RAM, and that was with a low spec Cirrus Logic graphics card (1MB vram!). I played and completed Half-Life on that machine. That's just how it was back then!

agent_x007 wrote:

In my case, it's all about "what will be next project"... when I didn't completed testing the current one 😒

^this
Already working on my current project while my old ones aren't finished and planning for the next one already....
Other than that it's the first boot that I always worry about. Will everything work, will it be stable won't the rig lose its smoke 🤣

Back in the early 2000s when I was tinkering with older PCs, the hardest part was finding the parts and/or the cash for upgrades. My goals then were always the same, to get my systems running as fast as I could possibly afford, with the latest software that they can run.

Nowadays however, having amassed a large collection of older PCs since then, I'm finding the hardest part is deciding on which systems to focus my time & efforts on. I'll get a PC up and running nicely, albeit maybe with some quirks in certain cases, but then my attention will be drawn to another system that I can have fun with instead. At the end of the day I'm then left in a quandry with regards to which PCs I should setup with which parts. Ie. I'd put a particular graphics or sound card in 1 PC, then later decide that I'd prefer it in another PC instead. I also would not leave the original PC deprived of it's working status, so I'll reconfigure that with other parts etc and the cycle goes on an on.

As for actually gaming and/or using retro software packages on these systems, I can barely find the time. 🤣

That's me exactly... Are you me?!

The hardest part for me is settling on one part list. I love the feeling of making a system better, faster, stronger, more compatible. At some point, a system can't easily be improved with meaningful results. My current system (which will be used for streaming DOS games) is about as far as I can go. But I must continue to tinker...

I am student, so for sure it is finding money to buy stuff for. So I am building retro rigs from things I found at scrapyard and that is hard since in CZ computers took off heavily around Pentium 3 era and older stuff was not so common. Finding any Super Socket 7 board took me almost 5 years. 😁

For me it's a combination of time and motivation. I'll have bursts of motivation where I'll get right into the nitty-gritty of testing different hardware and games, making ol hardware do things it was never really meant to do, getting everything set up nice and clean - and then there'll be weeks where I just don't have the patience for any of it.