"Anything" in the range of
[ late486, Socket7 ]
is appreciated with a strong focus on the Socket4 Pentium and DX4/DX5 era.
I used to work a few years in a computer shop and the hardware started to get more and more streamlined & boring with the socket'd Celeron line gripping the market.
Also, even though I grew up with the C64 and Amiga, latter is of miniscule interest to me despite some awesome titles like MajorMotion & TechnoCop.

The first machine in my house was actually a 286 and I have blurry memories of playing some games on it. My first PC that was mine was a 486 dx4 100 so thats about the cut off for me. Windows 95 and later is a must have really.

I've spent plenty of time working on XT in 1990s, so fed up enough (at least for a moment). On the other hand, Pentium with its PCI and DIMMs is "too fresh" for me. So, 286 and 386, perhaps a bit of 486, meaning the "era" is 1986-1995, DOS + DOS4GW.

I pretty much draw the line at hardware that provides no benefit over modern hardware... though sometimes there are exceptions, so I guess even that is changing as time goes on.

There is some otherwise useless "modern" hardware that I got rid of several years ago because it was still worth a little bit of money, but it would be neat to have it in my collection now. Like a complete in box EVGA 8800GTX purchased new in 2006, a relatively uncommon low profile Sparkle Geforce GTS 250 "Green" edition, complete in box. They'd probably just get squirreled away in a closet somewhere because they don't do anything that my current rig couldn't do 20 times better... but I see now just how uncommon it is to find these and I regret selling them for cheap in a garage sale just to make a little bit of space.

... then again, money was worth a lot more then, so the value probably hasn't changed that much.

^They can do something, that modern hardware cannot anymore.
They work on Windows XP/7, still.

That's something that seems to be missed these days, even in the retro communities : Modern hardware is no longer backwards compatible.

BIOS and CSM are dying off. VGA BIOS on graphics cards will disappear. V86 already is partially broken (VME in Ryzen).
Anything before Windows 8 won't boot anymore. OSes without a certificate won't boot anymore.
No DOS anymore, no Windows 98 anymore, not even in safe mode.

Edit: Or in other words, we're entering a new era of personal computing, for the better or worse.
These old useless graphics cards and slow Celeron or Atom mainboards we used to make fun of will be highly sought after in a few years.

When children born in the 2000s will have developed nostalgic feelings for GTA 3, Portal, Doom 3 and Skyrim etc..
Just like us now who want to play with a real C64, TRS-80 or a hot-rod 486 PC, they will seek out for compatible hardware.

However, unlike us, they will have a hard time finding suitable hardware when the time has come.
Things like Pentium 4, Core2Duo, Intel i3 or a Geforce 5200 or 7300 aren't really much more than old scrap to most people now.
They get shred en masse and won't be collected. Understandably. Because there's no need to right now.
The current OSes don't run well with them anymore and Windows XP is EOL and there's better hardware for it (still!)

Sure, old computers weren't much different in the past. However, they were distingushable, at least.
A C64 wasn't a PC, it was a home computer, so it had special status to people. They knew it's worthless, but also somehow unique.
So a notable amount of them were kept as decoration pieces, as mementos, were sold as antiques..

A, say, Geforce 7300 doesn't have that feature. To a layman, it's just some random e-waste. A budget graphics card, with PCIe, like any other.
Judging by the look, there's no information that says "this card still has VGA BIOS and runs with 32-Bit OSes". Nope.
It's just a piece of PCB, not much different to a piece of electronics found in a broken washing machine.

That's something that makes the difference of collecting vintage hardware back then and now.
A VGA card out of 486 PC looked much more primitive to a Geforce 256 or an ATI Radeon 9600.
It had a different conector, too. The components were "on the wrong side".
All these hints helped distinguishing old hardware from recent hardware.

But PC hardware from the 2010s doesn't look much different to PC hardware from the 2020s.
Unless you're a PC aficionado sort of, I suppose.

This makes creating a Windows XP/Vista/7 in the future much more difficult than building a Windows 98 PC right now.
Because the currently produced hardware for Windows 10/11 will be going to wipeout all the 2010s hardware.
Because, people still using the 2010s hardware are doing so on Windows 10/11 - they don't realize it will be special in the future.

Graphics cards made in the 2010s, with VGA BIOS and VESA VBE still intact, will work the same -on Win 10/11- as the upcoming hardware lacking them.
Because Windows 10/11 don't need them, really. UEFI, neither - it will use GOP, not VGA/VBE BIOS (BIOS/CSM) or UGA (UEFI 1)
- Which in turn 2010 graphics cards are compatible with, too. So there's a point of transition no one seems to notice.

Same goes for motherboards. Firstly, the lack of BIOS compatibility is a big show stopper (CSM removed from UEFI).
But even with the right motherboard, CPUs are becoming incompatible themselves. On purpose.
Windows 7 support was sabotaged in later i-series processor. Skylake was the limit, I vaguely remember.
So it's not possible to use Windows 7 (or XP) anymore, even though the X86 instructions, MMX, SSE, x87 and so on are still available, technically.

AMD did something similar, not just with Ryzen which had a broke VME support, but also through the removal of 3Dnow! instructions.
That's something that happend in the late 2000s already, by the way, and used to be unthinkable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DNow!

Originally, each new CPU generation stayed compatible with the previous one, as far as the instruction set goes.
Even if functions were proprietary or deprecated, they still were around for not breaking software compatibility.
Even if performance was bad or if instructions had to be simulated by microcode or via BIOS.

For example, the 286 LOADALL was absent in the silicon of 386+ processors, but emulated at the BIOS level.
386 PC BIOSes started providing an exception handler that simulated the 286 behaviour, so 286 software didn't break.

Edit: Or another example. Power supplies (PSUs). I've got a bunch of rusty old ATX 1.x power supplies in the cellar, still.
Originally, I stored them in a box, because I had no time taking them to a recycling place.
Now, I consider cleaning them and storing them in the attic, so I still can refurbish them in the future, once needed.

In my whole life, it never occured me that I would one day collect those worthless ATX PSUs!
Personally, I always drew the line at AT power supplies, merely, for powering pre-Pentium systems.
I never expected those cheap ATX PSUs to becoming incompatible in the future.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-12-28, 22:12:

^They can do something, that modern hardware cannot anymore.
They work on Windows XP/7, still.

Sorry, I had already thought of that and I guess I should have specified what I meant.

There is still plenty of hardware that people run these days that supports 7 and XP. This is just my personal opinion, but I consider anything that support DX12 to be "modern". That means anything from GTX 4xx and Radeon HD 7xxx and up. That means you can go back 12+ years and still run modern software, as long as it's fast enough.

Retro enthusiasts like us appreciate having all this varied hardware to get a very specific experience in a specific set of games from a certain year (or even part of a year)... and yet, you can use almost ANY hardware released in the past 15 years to run any games from the DX9-DX12 era (2004 through today basically), and all you have to worry about is "forward" compatibility (speed, DX version support) because backward compatibility has been almost entirely maintained. There may be very specific titles that are broken on certain devices but they are probably fixed by running different driver versions.

I think the main reason to bother with a modern-ish XP system is to regain support for hardware accelerated DirectSound3D which was lost when Vista hit the scene. For that reason, you'll want to keep some video cards with XP support (anything up to the GTX 980 Ti and I believe at least some of the Radeon 2xx series) which are, again, still very common and still being used. Rare hardware is not needed for these builds at all. A person could grab an Intel 2nd - 4th gen Optiplex or Thinkcentre off the curb, throw in a $20 SSD and a $30-$60 GTX 6xx, 7xx or 9xx and their choice of sound card with DirectSound3D drivers and they now have a monstrously powerful and capable XP gaming machine that only the oldest games may have issues with.

This makes most hardware from the interim period feel a lot less interesting, and I think the only thing that will drive the retro demand for those items (PCI-E Geforce 6000 through GTX 5xx series for example) in the future will simply be the rarity of them once they eventually become scarce (obviously boxed\sealed items will be desirable much earlier for people who collect that kind of thing), or the nostalgia of physically owning a specific PC that you remember. There will be almost no tangible or practical gain from running specific hardware from this era versus just running the best hardware that supports the OS\game you want to run.

For running CRTs you'll also want to hang onto Nvidia Maxwell cards since they are the last\fastest cards with DVI-I (VGA), so that is one thing to keep in mind, but this is practically the same hardware that you'd keep for an XP machine.

The problem we've run into with newer stuff becoming "retro" some day is that the useful lifetime of a computer has reached completely ridiculous levels compared to how short lived everything was in the 90s. Plenty of people would still be content to play games on an Ivy Bridge i5 with a GTX 750 Ti these days, and there are plenty of non-AAA games still coming out that will work fine on this level of hardware. If things were like this years ago, that would be like if the vast majority of games released in 1998 were totally playable in CGA\EGA\Tandy modes on an 8088 or 286. We've massively stretched out this "era" of hardware, which means that sheer volume of hardware available to run games from this era makes demand for any of it very low.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-29, 00:32:

The problem we've run into with newer stuff becoming "retro" some day is that the useful lifetime of a computer has reached completely ridiculous levels compared to how short lived everything was in the 90s. Plenty of people would still be content to play games on an Ivy Bridge i5 with a GTX 750 Ti these days, and there are plenty of non-AAA games still coming out that will work fine on this level of hardware. If things were like this years ago, that would be like if the vast majority of games released in 1998 were totally playable in CGA\EGA\Tandy modes on an 8088 or 286. We've massively stretched out this "era" of hardware, which means that sheer volume of hardware available to run games from this era makes demand for any of it very low.

That's really close to my "modern" gaming rig. I have an i5 paired with a Geforce GTX 650 Ti Boost OC, which I built as a lower mid tier rig back in 2013. The latest Microsoft flight simulator was the first game that I wasn't able to play due to the specs! It's really nice to be able to get that must out of it, but it's a bit frustrating that, apart from better graphics, an upgrade would just allow me to play one more game that I'm interested in.

amadeus777999 wrote on 2022-12-28, 10:06:

"Anything" in the range of [ late486, Socket7 ] is appreciated with a strong focus on the Socket4 Pentium and DX4/DX5 era. I us […]
Show full quote

"Anything" in the range of
[ late486, Socket7 ]
is appreciated with a strong focus on the Socket4 Pentium and DX4/DX5 era.
I used to work a few years in a computer shop and the hardware started to get more and more streamlined & boring with the socket'd Celeron line gripping the market.
Also, even though I grew up with the C64 and Amiga, latter is of miniscule interest to me despite some awesome titles like MajorMotion & TechnoCop.

My 4 Retro PCs to Rule the Golden Years - COMMENTS - SUGGESTIONS

Everything goes I guess, but it's really more entertaining if you have a practical way to get stuff on and off it (big part of the reason I flipped my 286 after fixing it, on top of it having no particular emotional value and an annoying case design that makes it incompatible with inline IDE-CF adapters)...

In general I get stuff to experiment with it, not to really "use" it, see the six 3DS consoles I've used to own and now consider one of the least interesting platforms...

Jo22 wrote on 2022-12-28, 22:12:

Graphics cards made in the 2010s, with VGA BIOS and VESA VBE still intact

Got burned with that in 2021, when I bought an RX 550 for a (free before cost of driving to local business) Optiplex 755, the box did say "UEFI" on a sticker but I thought it meant "compatible", not "exclusive"...

It's actually VGA but not VESA compatible, so I could see the whole boot process including the text-mode F12 boot menu, but not run the setup which is 800x600 only!

While buying it I also asked the shop if I could open the box to see its size (1 bracket but still blocking the next card), I grudgingly bought it, then imagine my surprise when I found out the computer was BTX (whose existance I had totally forgotten) so the extra thickness was a total nonissue!

RX 550 is too new means lost vintage compatibility. Try to stick to cards that still have XP support as a reference. UEFI started much earlier keep in mind yet, few years ago, I reflashed pair of Asus HD7750 cards to UEFI using Asus provided utility and this both worked on pre-UEFI boards and UEFI computers.

Cheers,

This is kind of a random thought, but has anyone tried putting together the absolute best "worthless" XP gaming system possible? Like, a machine that has the least valuable, least desirable parts you can find and yet performs better than any XP systems from the mid 2000s?

There are millions of Radeon HD7470\HD6570 and other cards in that range that are literally flooding into landfills and scrap heaps from all of the Dell and HP workstations that are being scrapped... yet, if you look at the specs they are at worst every bit as good on paper as mid range Geforce 7000 series or other comparable cards. Even with 64bit DDR3 memory they will have similar bandwidth to something like a 7600GS. The 64bit GDDR5 models have almost as much bandwidth as a 7800GT. @_@

And I'm sure the architectural improvements make them significantly better in some situations.

So, what is a PC that absolutely no one would buy to use for Windows 10 these days, but is still really common and cheap? I'm thinking something like a Core 2 Duo based Optiplex would be a good candidate to drop one of these old cards into for some XP goodness. For that matter, if you can find one of the Optiplex 9010 systems that have these GPUs in them already, you should be able to put XP on it directly without having to do anything weird since they are Ivy Bridge based. I don't think Optiplex 9020 systems would be as easy to get running though.

Just fine any corporate desktop box from the late 00s. Non upgradeable, shitty form factors, crap parts, good luck finding drivers etc, but still will be faster than any XP era pc.

Sorry to get a little philosophical, this thread made me ponder. Reading though it, a common motive seems to be recreating an experience from back in the day, both in hardware and software - mostly games. As it seems though, because when I thought about it, for me personally it is more nuanced. The hobby for me is a combination of two interests; 'restoring old computers' and 'video games'. The process of buying an old computer and subsequently cleaning it, fixing problems and properly setting them up is very entertaining to me. But I felt that once the machine is 'done' I need to find something to do with it - just putting it on the shelf didn't feel right. The thing, naturally, would be running old games.

Initially I indeed tried to recreate a period of my youth where I was messing around with old 386/486 hardware that at that point was considered junk (think '96) and therefor readily available for free. But this time exclusively with IBM hardware because I find IBM hardware cool (so professional).
What I found out though, is that the games I used to play on that hardware at that time, run like shit. After trying to play through a mission of C&C on a 486 and seeing it take more than two hours, simply because it slowed down so much, I quit. Eh; experience rendered authentically, but not very satisfactory.

I don't see the point in re-experiencing games in a frustrating manner; it better run smooth. Back in the day I had no choice, but now I do. I still had a some games I wanted to revisit from that era, but ended up doing so on much newer hardware than I had at the time (finished C&C on a PII-333). So, now there is this weird duality, where I still like to mess around with hardware from a period I have fond memories of (I bought another IBM 486 last week 😜), but won't play the games I used to play on it anymore. I'm trying to convince myself that that's okay 😉.

I guess most people here either gravitate towards hardware or games; you get interesting hardware and find something to run on it, or you want to play certain games and try to find supporting hardware. In the latter case you can draw a pretty sharp line to what era of hardware you still want to use. In the former its less clear.

you're no unicorn. i can spend literally days to weeks of concerted effort setting up a retro build and working thru issues to get the absolute best result. when i play a game the fresh nostalgia lasts for about an hour or so and then i get bored--because i've played and finished the game before.

Blavius wrote on 2022-12-29, 23:04:

Sorry to get a little philosophical, this thread made me ponder. Reading though it, a common motive seems to be recreating an ex […]
Show full quote

Sorry to get a little philosophical, this thread made me ponder. Reading though it, a common motive seems to be recreating an experience from back in the day, both in hardware and software - mostly games. As it seems though, because when I thought about it, for me personally it is more nuanced. The hobby for me is a combination of two interests; 'restoring old computers' and 'video games'. The process of buying an old computer and subsequently cleaning it, fixing problems and properly setting them up is very entertaining to me. But I felt that once the machine is 'done' I need to find something to do with it - just putting it on the shelf didn't feel right. The thing, naturally, would be running old games.

Initially I indeed tried to recreate a period of my youth where I was messing around with old 386/486 hardware that at that point was considered junk (think '96) and therefor readily available for free. But this time exclusively with IBM hardware because I find IBM hardware cool (so professional).
What I found out though, is that the games I used to play on that hardware at that time, run like shit. After trying to play through a mission of C&C on a 486 and seeing it take more than two hours, simply because it slowed down so much, I quit. Eh; experience rendered authentically, but not very satisfactory.

I don't see the point in re-experiencing games in a frustrating manner; it better run smooth. Back in the day I had no choice, but now I do. I still had a some games I wanted to revisit from that era, but ended up doing so on much newer hardware than I had at the time (finished C&C on a PII-333). So, now there is this weird duality, where I still like to mess around with hardware from a period I have fond memories of (I bought another IBM 486 last week 😜), but won't play the games I used to play on it anymore. I'm trying to convince myself that that's okay 😉.

I guess most people here either gravitate towards hardware or games; you get interesting hardware and find something to run on it, or you want to play certain games and try to find supporting hardware. In the latter case you can draw a pretty sharp line to what era of hardware you still want to use. In the former its less clear.

Yeah, I feel pretty similarly.

To some extent I like to recreate the experience of using the original hardware for the most authentic experience of computing at the time or playing certain games, and that involves interacting with the hardware itself (everything from the building process, to the keyboard, mouse and even the feel and sound of the power switch)... but I may also want to experience the same software on the best machine that could possibly run it, without any compromises. A good example would be playing games that loaded lots of FMV from CD-ROMs as you played. An authentic retro PC would have the ideal CD-ROM drive that would have the best balance of speed and noise to give you a good period-correct experience. On the other hand, in 2022 you could have an almost all original PC but instead load all of the data on solid state storage with zero load times OR spin-up time.

I enjoy the old machine and the old hardware tremendously... but I also enjoy seeing the games run their best. So, I think this is why you see so many different machines being built. Some are geared more toward nostalgia or curiosity about the hardware, and others are geared toward the software.

I would also add that a third "layer" of retro computing would be running emulators or modern ports for the most modern and accessible experience without some of the quirks and limitations that existed originally. Not everything can be emulated, but the things that can't are often very niche, like Aureal A3D, various wavetable or FM synths, hardware-specific graphical features, etc. And, as I mentioned earlier, all of that stuff basically ended by the time Windows Vista and DirectX 10 were released. Beyond that point all hardware will effectively provide the same experience if performance is high enough. Which is why I think the "golden era" for having a unique gaming experience on original hardware is from the early 1990s through about 2005 or so. Before the early 90s, DOSBox can pretty much run anything without many compromises. And after that, pretty much any modern hardware will run anything without any loss of features.

(Sorry, I ended up rambling a bit... hope this makes sense.)

Blavius wrote on 2022-12-29, 23:04:

I don't see the point in re-experiencing games in a frustrating manner; it better run smooth. Back in the day I had no choice, but now I do. I still had a some games I wanted to revisit from that era, but ended up doing so on much newer hardware than I had at the time (finished C&C on a PII-333). So, now there is this weird duality, where I still like to mess around with hardware from a period I have fond memories of (I bought another IBM 486 last week 😜), but won't play the games I used to play on it anymore. I'm trying to convince myself that that's okay 😉.

I think you're in good company here. 😁

I'm very much the same way. While I enjoy building and experimenting with old hardware, when it comes to enjoying games, I want things to work as smoothly and comfortably as possible. If that means playing games on a much faster PC than I would had originally, so be it.

As you say, there isn't much in point in experiencing things in a way that is frustrating if the intent is to enjoy the games themselves.

I started gaming on a 386 IBM PS2 that only had pc speaker sound. After that I had a generic pentium machine, but I don't remember the specs, as I was a kid and a guy at my dad's work built it for us. I do remember that my graphics card came with Destruction Derby, but I didn't notice anything different with 3d acceleration. I doubt that I had anything like a voodoo in it, probably an ATI Rage something or rather.

The cool thing about retrogaming is that I can now experience DOS gaming like the rich kids did back in the day. Some of the stuff that I've picked up would have costed thousands of dollars back when it came out. All I had to do was wait over 20 years. Lol.

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-10-16, 16:18:

I'm curious as to which computer eras people typically collect and/or use.

I'm a retro-gamer... Mostly played consoles... Got my first Console at 3 years old (Atari 2600 in 1983) and have kept / reacquired most of the original stuff I had over the years + consoles I never had but wanted to try... Nothing beats playing an original game on original hardware... With that philosophy in mind... I've also kept my PCs.

#1 (late 90s)
AOpen AX59 Pro
AMD K6-2+ @ 600Mhz
1x Crucial 256MB PC100 ECC
3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
Startech PCIUSB7
Realtek 10/100 LAN card
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
OS: Windows 98

#2 (early 2000s)
Tyan Tiger MPX
2x AMD Athlon MP 2800+
3x Crucial 1GB PC266 REG ECC
nVidia Quadro FX (Flashed as GeForce FX 5950 Ultra)
Startech PCIUSB7
PCI SATA Raid card (used for SATA drives)
Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value (want to upgrade to Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS)
OS: Windows XP

#3 (mid 2000s)
MSI K9N SLI
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ EE
2x Crucial Ballistix 2GB DDR2 800
2x nVidia GeForce 9600 GSO
OS: Windows XP 64-bit

#4 (2010)
MSI 890FXA-GD70
AMD Phenom II X6 1090t Black Edition
4x Corsair Dominator 4GB DDR3 1333
2x AMD Radeon HD6870
OS: Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

Current (2019)
MSI X570A-Pro
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
2x Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 3200
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition
OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

Also running a Server 24/7 for all my needs (game hosting, ftp, torrents, dlna, etc.)

First Iteration was an old mATX board with a Duron 950 and a 1 TB drive running on Windows 2003 Server... Then, when I got my first serious job... I went bananas...
(around 2007)
Tyan Thunder n3600b (S2927)
2x Opteron 2212 HE (upgraded later to 2x Opteron 2356)
2x Crucial 2GB DDR2-800 REG ECC in single channel config (upgraded later to +6x Crucial 4GB DDR2-800 REG ECC in Dual Channel for a total of 28GB)
LSI MegaRAID PCIe (x8) with 4x Western Digital Red 3TB drives in RAID5 (Total of about 8.2 TB volume)
OS: Windows Server 2003 (Later migrated to 2008 and then 2019 Essentials)

Current iteration
Tyan Tomcat HX (S8030)
AMD Epyc 7282
4x Crucial 8GB DDR4 3200 REG ECC in Quad Channel config (optimal for the CPU)
Same WDC Red drives connected directly to the motherboard, RAID5 is now handled by Windows itself
OS: Windows Server 2019 Essentials (not upgrading to 2022 Essentials caus of the new hardware limits of 1 Socket / 10 cores)

Congrats for making it to the end, you deserve a potato.

I used to collect up to Socket 775 but now I'm feeling like I don't need S775 and S754 and may sell those off. If I do that, Socket A will be my cutoff.