Depends on what drives Retro. For me it's driven by games and past 2010 increasingly more games became dependent on online services which sooner or later drop support for older versions of Windows. Meaning with the exception of DRM-free releases, real hardware retro gaming will and at around 2012 so from that viewpoint the latest hardware that can become functional retro are those supported on Windows 7.

As for stuff that's already there, anything Intel made after Pentium 3 is still too abundant to be a retro classic.
Pre-AM2 AMD however is getting there.
For other hardware, PhysX cards are already desirable, EAX capable Sound Blaster Audigy and X-fi cards also.
For graphics cards, everything high-end up to the Geforce 200 and HD5000 series are also desired. Especially gimmick cards like the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro Dual.

For Intel Arc GPUs, no. I don't think they'll ever get there. Neither will the current AMD and Nvidia card. Gaming/entertainment just became way too disposable for that.

Top of the line hardware and various oddball stuff is and will be in demand.
Just look at the various cases and coolers that were almost ridiculed when new and are now sought after just because they look different.

ATM i would look at the `"red and black" era we are currently recovering from.
What stood out as odd at that time?

bofh.fromhell wrote on 2023-04-24, 13:23:

Top of the line hardware and various oddball stuff is and will be in demand. Just look at the various cases and coolers that wer […]
Show full quote

Top of the line hardware and various oddball stuff is and will be in demand.
Just look at the various cases and coolers that were almost ridiculed when new and are now sought after just because they look different.

ATM i would look at the `"red and black" era we are currently recovering from.
What stood out as odd at that time?

Motherboards with Lucid Logix Hydra and the various forms of Asus overclocking devices such as OC station, OC panel etc?

DrSwizz wrote on 2023-04-24, 13:50:

bofh.fromhell wrote on 2023-04-24, 13:23:

Top of the line hardware and various oddball stuff is and will be in demand. Just look at the various cases and coolers that wer […]
Show full quote

Top of the line hardware and various oddball stuff is and will be in demand.
Just look at the various cases and coolers that were almost ridiculed when new and are now sought after just because they look different.

ATM i would look at the `"red and black" era we are currently recovering from.
What stood out as odd at that time?

Motherboards with Lucid Logix Hydra and the various forms of Asus overclocking devices such as OC station, OC panel etc?

Absolutely 🤣.
I mean just look at the (at the time) ASUS ipanel.
The thing that would briefly freeze the system everytime you pressed a button on it.
Now you can barely find them, and they end up selling for more then they cost new .
Even considering the list of MB's that it fits was pretty short =)

> Motherboards with (...) overclocking

Any motherboard with a BIOS that allows more control than usual might be interesting. E.g. I think some gave you access to some multiplier allowing you to overclock any Skylake CPU regardless of whether it was meant to? Stuff like that.

And moving away from desktops, many people seem to go for notebooks for some reason? Not exactly my area of (long term) interest since there's always some tradeoff that had to be made to gain their portability, but look out for anything high end, unique looking (e.g. Alienware), or with (non knockoff) prestige branding (e.g. Tesla, Virtu, ...).

I wouldn't be surprised if (certain models of) Chromebooks eventually got desirable too, since right now a lot of kids are growing up using them at school. They'd need new firmware enabling some kind of offline experience though, since I doubt they'll play nicely with whichever services Google offers 20 years from now.

Maybe they're already considered "retro" (not by me, I think they're still too new), but I think the Intel Core2Duo and Core2Quad socket 775 platform will become highly collectible at some point. Intel pretty much destroyed anything AMD had to offer when they released the C2D (I myself had an E6600) and those CPUs became extremely popular among performance enthusiasts, so I think the interest will be revived. Probably not for awhile though. Now is a good time to pick up stuff from that era however as it's all pretty cheap.

Chromebook experiences will be super hard to preserve, the apps are glorified bookmarks. Fire up a 1st gen one now and very little works. The "apps" being web sourced have gone down, or upgraded past the chrome version installed. They are frustrating for long term use, the thing you used to do a thing a few months ago doesn't work now, or does it different.

Given the increasing dependency on online services for software, I wonder if we'll see a decline in future retro computing.

A lot of retro computing revolves around gaming, but gaming especially has become dependent on online services like Steam. With Steam removing Windows 7/8 support means that a lot of games will no longer be easily accessible on those platforms, thus diminishing the utility of those platforms.

I believe the XP/Vista era might be the last good era for retro hardware given the still availability of physical media and lack of dependence on online services.

I suspect something similar will happen with future retro console gaming.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-04-24, 15:25:

Given the increasing dependency on online services for software, I wonder if we'll see a decline in future retro computing. […]
Show full quote

Given the increasing dependency on online services for software, I wonder if we'll see a decline in future retro computing.

A lot of retro computing revolves around gaming, but gaming especially has become dependent on online services like Steam. With Steam removing Windows 7/8 support means that a lot of games will no longer be easily accessible on those platforms, thus diminishing the utility of those platforms.

I believe the XP/Vista era might be the last good era for retro hardware given the still availability of physical media and lack of dependence on online services.

I suspect something similar will happen with retro console gaming.

If anything all the "Always online" requirements now means that any games/software that still works w/o being able to "phone home" will keep its value.
And that's especially true for games, as we all know here there's a LOT of old great games =)

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2023-04-24, 12:04:

Hello,

I'm not sure if such a thread already exists so...what do you think will become a future retro classic? Reading posts on this forum it looks like the Pentium 4 to current hardware generation isn't highly regarded but there must be some future classics in the lot!

i think the top end Pentium 4's will eventually be desirable, to some extent they are for maxed out 32 bit systems and they handily crossed over into pcie territory too

not sure about video cards though, there are lots of good ones but are there future classics, pcie has been around a long time

Brawndo wrote on 2023-04-24, 15:06:

Maybe they're already considered "retro" (not by me, I think they're still too new), but I think the Intel Core2Duo and Core2Quad socket 775 platform will become highly collectible at some point. Intel pretty much destroyed anything AMD had to offer when they released the C2D (I myself had an E6600) and those CPUs became extremely popular among performance enthusiasts, so I think the interest will be revived. Probably not for awhile though. Now is a good time to pick up stuff from that era however as it's all pretty cheap.

yes i'd agree with that, especially early quad cores, people do like them and only in recent years did they start falling behind for new games

gerry wrote on 2023-04-24, 15:41:

not sure about video cards though, there are lots of good ones but are there future classics, pcie has been around a long time

The titan cards are an obvious choice, already collectable.
Also pretty much any dual-gpu card.

Personally i grab Quadro cards when I find them cheap.
They seem to be of a lot higher quality then the GTX counterparts and works with regular drivers if you want.
Also many models have more VRAM then the gamer equivalent making some games more viable then they would have been "back in the day".
Plus I have always liked the no-nonsense look of them =)

I don't think computers will have a huge retro scene in the future tbh. Old iPads, phones etc perhaps will fetch a penny, but maybe it will be hard to do anything with them except to play some offline games.

gerry wrote on 2023-04-24, 15:41:

only in recent years did they start falling behind for new games

That's over half a decade that they can't run certain modern games at all because of missing instruction sets, like AVX which was introduced with Sandy Bridge. And they started to fall behind in performance much earlier. Core2 CPUs were still fine for gaming for close to a decade.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-04-24, 15:25:

Given the increasing dependency on online services for software, I wonder if we'll see a decline in future retro computing. […]
Show full quote

Given the increasing dependency on online services for software, I wonder if we'll see a decline in future retro computing.

A lot of retro computing revolves around gaming, but gaming especially has become dependent on online services like Steam. With Steam removing Windows 7/8 support means that a lot of games will no longer be easily accessible on those platforms, thus diminishing the utility of those platforms.

I believe the XP/Vista era might be the last good era for retro hardware given the still availability of physical media and lack of dependence on online services.

I suspect something similar will happen with future retro console gaming.

Opposite, I think. This industry is going down, to buy a game that depends on a service that may or may not be available in the future? Give me break. All digital, same price? I don't think so. The game has become a service and is no longer a permanent asset. I don't see the same value in that proposition.

There's also been a recent, concerted effort to clip of backwards compatibility in this industry for the pursuit of profit. Our computer parts industry suffers because we're being pushed to upgrade every year from limited suppliers at top dollar prices if we want to keep playing the game. Retro will never die because the industry is forcing fans to seek friendlier ways to keep playing the game.

Out of control capitalism is destroying my hobby and people are like, "Well that's just the way it is, man." I know that's not the Vogonite way but I see this complacency enough elsewhere that this gives me pause in revealing my next moves, but here's one I'm seeing already. Decent Gen 3 PCIe M.2 SSD drives, backwards compatibility has been clipped so buy 'dem big capacities up before they're gone for good and all you're left with, "Time to move on, man. Ur an idiot for hanging on."

bartonxp wrote on 2023-04-24, 16:08:

Opposite, I think. This industry is going down, to buy a game that depends on a service that may or may not be available in the future? Give me break. All digital, same price? I don't think so. The game has become a service and is no longer a permanent asset. I don't see the same value in that proposition.

This is what people were saying back when Steam first launched. It caught on anyway and is now the single most dominant sales platform for PC gaming.

And especially for anyone growing up with gaming in the 2000s, this is what they're used to as the norm.

Digital software sales and software-as-a-service models are going to force a level of obsolescence that we haven't seen previously. And I believe this is going to impact future retro computing.

Retro will never die because the industry is forcing fans to seek friendlier ways to keep playing the game.

It won't necessarily die, just be more curtailed compared to what it is now.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-04-24, 16:20:

This is what people were saying back when Steam first launched. It caught on anyway and is now the single most dominant sales pl […]
Show full quote

bartonxp wrote on 2023-04-24, 16:08:

Opposite, I think. This industry is going down, to buy a game that depends on a service that may or may not be available in the future? Give me break. All digital, same price? I don't think so. The game has become a service and is no longer a permanent asset. I don't see the same value in that proposition.

This is what people were saying back when Steam first launched. It caught on anyway and is now the single most dominant sales platform for PC gaming.

And especially for anyone growing up with gaming in the 2000s, this is what they're used to as the norm.

Digital software sales and software-as-a-service models are going to force a level of obsolescence that we haven't seen previously. And I believe this is going to impact future retro computing.

Retro will never die because the industry is forcing fans to seek friendlier ways to keep playing the game.

It won't necessarily die, just be more curtailed compared to what it is now.

Did it really though? I don't use steam, my Windows 7 box is not allowed on the internet anymore, I don't have a Windows 10 machine and have yet to install the OS on my own, not even sure if it can be done entirely offline and even operate entirely offline once installed. I just don't see the point, some of us aren't attracted to an online-only ecosystem that offers no benefit and yet introduces new risks to the norm.

I think the new generation doesn't know how good the past was and is complacent with all they've ever come to know despite knowing it's not ideal, until they read about how happy retro gamers are with their old hardware. So much variety, so much adventure! I think the recent influx of new users into the retro scene, people who never lived the golden era of computer gaming, is evidence that the new model is failing. The new generation is disenchanted with the norm and see us still having fun while doing things differently, we're still happy with our old gaming machines because we don't subscribe to the new way governed by artificial market forces.

I think retro pc/console scene is growing!

Considering that those who currently use old hardware and game have to jump through hoops then I don't see games that require online that can be cracked as being much different except for additional steps to get them working when they can be cracked. For those that bounce off because the client doesn't work and they don't go any further (not even to torrent) then yeah but I wonder how many that would actually be.

It's "just" a matter of getting that information out there and making it as easy as possible to implement as well as providing an environment where they feel free to ask questions on how to do so.

For when you want to legally (DMCA) get games working on your unsupported OS:
https://github.com/vogonsorg/OfflineGames

I'm thinking that the only legal (DMCA) way I can see is a utility or script that crawls your installed games, identifies the game via hash, and then performs an xdelta to patch to the offline version or just installs the steam emu or runs steamless, etc etc.. If automated as much as possible then that removes the number of hoops massively otherwise youd'd have to do it manually for your library and in some cases you'd have to hunt down specific cracks for specific versions of the game which you may not have and may not be able to find.

Speaking of Chromebooks: https://www.engadget.com/chromebooks-short-li … -063314306.html

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-04-24, 12:52:

For other hardware, PhysX cards are already desirable, EAX capable Sound Blaster Audigy and X-fi cards also.

For some collectors - perhaps. But in practical terms, this thing is so pathetic that it's barely playable in games that had support or PhysX flavored effects are practically non-existent. PhysX is better experienced on PCIe board with Nvidia card.

Any KALMX card, except maybe the 750, is highly desirable. I bought a 1050 Ti because it's such a nice piece. Any 4GB/8GB fanless is somewhat desirable.

Rather than jumping down the piracy rabbit hole, whose onerous demands IMO don't compare to compromises in freedom, I'd focus on another angle presenting evidence that the industry is suffering. I thrift frequently and see lots of young, new players taking an interest in old hardware, so much so that now there's now a scarcity greater than what should be expected from a niche hobby, a dwindling supply exasperated by the demands of an audience of consumers that was never considered. I used to find Voodoo2's, Geforce FX's, X-Fi's, OCG platinum DDRs, motherboards in the box, 1600x1200 native resolution LCDs, etc. But now I have to go thrifting at strategic times so that I have a chance at any of the good stuff. I think our new retro gamers are disenchanted because the system obviously sucks on so many levels, heck it sucks hard even outside of gaming, they know it's not right and look towards us elders for answers. They see what we're doing and want to join in on the fun.