I'll kick off with a few new systems that have come my way this year. Before and after I've finished with them 😀

First off I picked up this nice AT desktop case with a socket 7 board & K6, which became a 233MMX with 64MB/Voodoo1/AWE32/XR385 and was sold on eBay.

Then I came across this 5160 in decent condition, only needed a good clean and some caps in the monitor replaced. It got an V20/8087/XTIDE/UMB board/Gotek and Sound Blaster. Thinking about selling this one too as I don't think I will use it.

My favourite this year though is this Tandy TL/2. Not too common in the UK and I've had a blast trying out games on it. It got a 287/2MB EMS/Gotek/EGA and Sound Blaster.

Been a great year on the retro front, in 2016 I plan to concentrate more on playing games and improving my PC games collection.

Not much happened here retro-wise, lately I've been doing more writing and thinking about hardware than actually using said hardware 😊

Dust layers added to computers.

leileilol wrote:

Dust layers added to computers.

Those are just computer tree/growth rings 😉

2015 was a bittersweet year for me. Just like a roller coaster ride, with many ups and downs.............................................

I managed to acquire a small collection of PC hardware from a private seller in February - 2 motherboards, 5 CPUs, a Voodoo 3 3000, a Slot 1 to S370 adapter, 1.6gb WD and 41gb IBM hard drives, and other small items.

The Asus CUSL2-C, Pentium III 800EB and Voodoo 3 were used in The Understudy project which was unfortunately cancelled due to real life issues 😢 . I still have hopes of bringing it back to life again.

The Asus P3B-F and Pentium III 600 Katmai were used in this build; it was intended as a test run only, but everything worked so well that I ended up keeping it assembled. It still runs great to this day 😀

My long suffering, much maligned Soyo P4I-845PE Pentium 4 board finally got repaired in March; it had a terminal case of bad caps rot.

Now in good working order, I set out to rebuild my old 2011 main PC with Windows XP SP3. Once again, everything worked great.

I know P4s are not liked by many here, but that doesn't matter. This was my replacement for the Athlon XP 2000+ I had back then and intend to keep it no matter what 😜 . It's also my test bed for Linux Mint.

I documented some updates to my Asus TX97-XE/Pentium 166MMX PC in October, my oldest, longest running retro build to date.

At this point I'm willing to say that my Socket 7 project is just about done. Playing old favorites like Doom/Doom 2, Descent/Descent II, Duke Nukem/Duke Nukem 2/Duke Nukem 3D, X-COM, Quake, Warcraft 2, Jill of the Jungle, Jazz Jackrabbit and others is gives me great joy and happiness 😁 😊

As for the coming year, I only have two things in mind right now. I'll try to bring The Understudy project back from limbo after the CUSL2-C gets recapped and continue to plan my move to Linux Mint - Microsoft's arrogant attitude with Windows 10 has soured me greatly 😠 . Nothing definite after that. I also hope to get out of the legal issues that have been pestering me since July - and regain much of the time and energy taken from me so far 😐 . Fingers crossed.

2015 was (still is 😁) a good year. I managed to get many interesting PC components, some of them could be considered retro, others not so much. Other than hoarding stuff I also spent quite a lot of time benchmarking CPUs. 😀

Every year I count how much stuff hardware arrived that year... here is a list for 2015:

HW..........................+2015..............total

3dfx.......................... 1 .................. 84
ATi/AMD..................... 15 ................. 92
Nvidia........................ 9 .................. 117
Matrox, s3, etc............ 0 .................. 26

MB........................... 19 .................. 93
CPU......................... 42 .................. 270
__________________________________
total....................... 86 .................. 682

JayCeeBee64 that last beige ATX case is superb.

I acquired too many things this year to list them all, but I'll try to summarize:
- various voodoo 1 cards - Aopen, Biostar, Gullemot, Gainward, etc
- various voodoo 2 cards - some exotic brands like Skywell and Provideo (blue pcb) and many others
- variouse voodoo 3 cards - 2xV3 3000, 1xV3 3500TV, 3xV3 2000
- one A-trend voodoo Rush (my first one)
- one PowerColor EvilKing IV - Voodoo 4 4500
- diamond monster fusion (banshee AGP)

- Abit ST6 i815 tualatin compatible board
- Abit BE6 II i440bx
- MSI 649D PRO (dual 370 board)

- Chaintech GF4 TI4600
- Cyrix 686 PR233
- AMD K6-III+ 400ATZ 1.6v

Less retro:

- pair of identical 7950GT 512MB cards by XFX
- Dual 6600GT on a single board by gigabyte

I do not know what exactly, that I have gotten this year. One thing that I can say. Is that I have nearly managed to get a complete collection of working machines that represent the evolution from mid 80's to the millenia. (286, 5x86-133, P1-166, P2-266, P3-500, P3-933, K6-2-500, K6-3-400) All machines with mixed stuff like G400, V2, V3, GF2-GTS, GF4-ti4200 and such. All well balanced.
I do not have any pictures to post, so I will just write a short list of stuff I for shure know that I got this year.

MotherBoards:
FIC 486 VIP-IO.
Asus P2B-S
Intel SE440BX-2
Shuttle HOT 555a Rev 3.2
Intel D815-EEA2
Asus A7V266-E
ECS K7-SEM Rev 1.0

GFX Cards:
2 x Creative Voodoo2 8mb with SLI Cable
Asus V2740 VIVO (i740 card)
Asus V7700 Deluxe
Powercolor Voodoo2 12mb
Medion Geforce4 ti4200
Medion Radeon 9800XXL
Orchid Voodoo1
Number-9 S3 PCI
CL-5420 VL-Bus
ET-3000 ISA
Various PCI cards that I can not remember

Mem:
Some 72-Pin FPM and EDO in a mix
Some other mem that I can not remember.

Sound Cards:
Anchor 8-bit SB Clone
2 x AWE64 Gold
Yamaha YMF-724
Creative SB-Pci128

CPU:
Pentium-II 266
Pentium-1 166

Then a lot of stuff like 4 AOpen late-90's cases, lots of other things that are gone into the box and then forgotten.
Mostly HDD's and cables.

@brostenen
The Shuttle HOT 555A is a great board! My very first one 😀
Never crashed!!

As for me 2015 had been a great year retro-wise.

-P3B-F, Coppermine 1100MHz, 1000MHz for the 370...
-Matrox M3D!!!
-various Voodoos
and more!

personal-life-wise it was the most horrible year of all time... But 2016 is around the corner and things are looking up 😀

Last year I decided to get things from my wish list and after almost a year I'm nearly there. But it's always hard to get the last parts 😐

The good:
- bigger ISA graphic card collection (missing only Tseng ET4000/w32i 2MB from my wish list)
- bigger VLB graphic card collection (missing just S3 Vision964/968, Trio64)
- bigger CPU collection (missing Cyrix Fasmath 287)
- bigger boxed graphic cards collection (AGP, PCI-Express)
- started collection of selected old boxed games/apps/os's
- too much of everything 🤣

The bad:
- even less space now 😊
- way too much money spent 😦

kanecvr wrote:

JayCeeBee64 that last beige ATX case is superb.

The Antec KS-288 Value Line was one of my better finds. Felt good to rescue it and give it a new lease in life 😎

kixs wrote:

The bad:
- even less space now 😊

Try being confined to a 24' x 24' bedroom with a small closet and you'll know what lack of space really means 😵 . At least I can use part of the garage for storage, but even this is not enough (tries not to trip over the two large boxes in front of the closet door 😅 ).

Arctic wrote:

@brostenen
The Shuttle HOT 555A is a great board! My very first one 😀
Never crashed!!

Well... I like it too. Nice board 😜

Well this year i started collecting pc hardware again. Collected this year:
2 voodoo 2 12mb
Sb awe 32
Bunch of agp graphics cards
Box full of memorysticks

Complete systems
Ibm ps/2 model 30 286
Commodore pc-1
Amd 386 40mhz system
Pentium 166mmx system
Pentium II 350mhz system

I started collecting retro hardware at the very end of 2014, and I only had my now-stored Deskpro 5200MMX. I also had my trusty Athlon 64 and Pentium M laptop, but those were bought new back in the day (not really retro purchases). So, here is my review;

Systems I built/acquired this year:

• Pentium 133MHz + PCChips M535 i430VX motherboard - originally had a Trident 9440 PCI VGA and no sound card... I rectified that with a Virge and a YMF-719 sound card. Old PC I found at my university in 2013, but it was still technically public property, and I did not dare take it home and call it mine until authorized by my professor. Voodoo2 inside 😀
• K6-2 366MHYz + P5MVP3-AT motherboard - Came with no video card and a cheap crappy PCI Crystal sound card whose DOS drivers froze the PC sometimes during boot. Upgraded the processor to a 500MHz one, added a Voodoo3 3000, an AWE64 value and an EWS64-XL with the front panel, and added a Realtek NIC. I also moved it to a NOS ATX case + ATX PSU (supported by the motherboard - ACPI power off and everything). Used to be an old PC in my dad's workplace - got it for free and rescued my old rubber-dome AT keyboard in the process.
• 486 DX-2 66MHz + EXP8449 PCI motherboard - Thisd is when I gave up trying to justify each system as "I need this to play that" and just embraced that I like collecting and tinkering with old PCs. It came with some 8900 Trident ISA video card, an ISA NIC and busted cache. I added an OPTi 82C939 sound card with true OPL3, replaced the TAG RAM chip (cache now works), switched the video card for the old Trident from my Pentium, replaced the HDD for a CF card. I also moved it to my old K6-2's case, as I wanted to use this one for another system.
• Intel 8088 10MHz + TD-20 "Turbo" motherboard - bought the bare motherboard for real cheap (if any brazilians are interested, I think it is still for sale) with the processor and no RAM. It now has 640Kb of RAM, a 16-bit Prime2 Multi-IO card, a CF card (with an adapter) and a bulgarian "Pravetz" CGA clone card. Still no CGA monitor (or even a 15KHz capable VGA monitor), so this thing is, for now, composite only. Since I have no ISA NICs capable of runnin on an 8-bit slot, I have no way of adding an option ROM.... so I'm still using my guetto ROM on RAM loader floppy method. Works fine... until the floppy craps out for some reason and I have to write it again. I also built a nice AT2XT keyboard adapter, and a crude DAC for when I find a monitor capable of displaying 15kHz signals through VGA.
• Duron "Spitfire" 950MHz + PCChips M810L rev 8.0 - Another system I built from scratch, acquiring each component separately. The motherboard was so clean that if the seller stated it was unused I would've believed him. Currently using my Quadro4 980XL despite being overpowered... will replace it as soon as I manage to buy another Quadro4 (MX based, this time). Running Windows 98 and 2000 like a champ.

And a few notable parts not mentioned above:

• AGP Matrox G550 card, possibly for my future Pentium 3
• A healthy stack of ISA sound cards
• DB50XG daughterboard - this thing hopped from one sound card to another. Currently installed on the EWS64-XL's front panel.
• A Roland UM-ONE USB->MIDI interface. And then set up my Pentium M laptop (my dad's old laptop)
• AGP Radeon HD 4650 for my Athlon 64
• TL-866 programmer. Backed up BIOSes, fixed my Virge's overly bright image, tested cache chips, programmed the PIC for the AT2XT keyboard adapter, and so on

Overall, a very nice retro-year for me.

Scoring an NIB SL4KL P3 1GHz Slot1 CPU for $29 + shipping was a good find.