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Whats the most rare piece of hardware you own?

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Reply 80 of 104, by enaiel

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Not sure how rare it is, but I have a Sun Sparc Ultra 60 Workstation with an Ultra SCSI External Hard Drive Enclosure lying around. I haven't turned it on in a while, mostly because it weighs a ton!

#1 VIA C3 Ezra-T 1.0GHz / MSI MS-6368 / Voodoo2+ViRGE GX / SBPro2+YMF744+AWE64+SC-7
#2 Pentium III-S Tualatin 1.40GHz / QDI A10T / Voodoo3 3000+GF4 Ti4200 / Audigy+AU8830+SC-50

Reply 81 of 104, by badmojo

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Probably my boxed and complete PAS16 - not a rare card of course but it took me years to find a good boxed example. In the end it was a gift from a generous member here, still blows my mind.

Otherwise I don't do rare - cheap and generic all the way 😁

Life? Don't talk to me about life.

Reply 82 of 104, by Cyberdyne

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GUS ACE, AMD 486 DX4 120 that can do a nice sustainable 3x50=150MHz, NEC XR385, Asus PVI-486SP3 V1.8 with latest B4 chipset. I think Sound Blaster AWE 32/64 cards are not in the Roland/GUS league, so not that rare. Had a few assorted Voodoos and GUS extremes, but really did not have any use for them, and got a excelent price for them. 😁

I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.

Reply 83 of 104, by RaiderOfLostVoodoo

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My rarest piece is probably my Janus card.
It's an ATARI mainboard on an ISA card. Turns your PC into an ATARI ST.
They only made a few thousand of these and many of them are lost forever.
Got it in scrap lot for a rediculous price.

Reply 84 of 104, by shamino

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The rarest/hardest to replace, that actually has enough value to me that I'd want to replace it if I had to, is my Sound Blaster Pro CT1330A (dual OPL2 version). I think a fair number of people here have them, but there's not enough around to have been affordable for a long time. I've had it since new so to me it's sound is definitive for the era.

If minor product variations count, then I have a pre-release Geforce3 card which is probably rarer, but it probably works the same as any other Geforce3.

Reply 85 of 104, by cyclone3d

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shamino wrote on 2022-02-14, 08:16:

The rarest/hardest to replace, that actually has enough value to me that I'd want to replace it if I had to, is my Sound Blaster Pro CT1330A (dual OPL2 version). I think a fair number of people here have them, but there's not enough around to have been affordable for a long time. I've had it since new so to me it's sound is definitive for the era.

If minor product variations count, then I have a pre-release Geforce3 card which is probably rarer, but it probably works the same as any other Geforce3.

I've actually got 2 1330A cards now because I found a second for a price that was too good to pass up... as-in, way below the insane price that they normally go for.

That's happened with quite a few rarer pieces I have.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 86 of 104, by Ltsyrek

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Not really anything exceptionally rare.
- Amiga 1200 with Apollo 68030/50 mhz +68882 50mhz +wifi card
- IBM 5151
- Vodoo 3 3000 PCI
- Avaya ISAPC-00 - PCMCIA slot is quite useful on PCs without PCI. Grants USB stick-like feature (using PCMCIA to CF adapter combined with CF adapter via USB on modern computer) in DOS, W3.1 and W95. It even makes nice PC Speaker imitation of "USB connect/disconnect" windows sound. It is also possible to get wifi with appropriate PCMCIA card (no success yet though).

Reply 87 of 104, by BitWrangler

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Oh talking of Amiga Periphs... I've got this A500 side port HDD that is in a heavy thick steel case suitable as a melee weapon.... I think there's been precisely one single photo of it online ever, by a German company whose name I can't even pull out of the back of my brain right now. Supposedly they only sold a few hundred. I wanna say it was Pro-Tech, but not the same ProTec who was in Markham Ontario and did the soundblaster PCs late 90s.

edit: Oh Promigos probably, I got the Pro bit, 🤣 ,not the exact ones in the BBOAH (There was an earlier hardware site that had it listed but blanking on that name now) but you can see the style of construction and interface unit which is very similar to mine.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 88 of 104, by pan069

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Probably the daughterboard I have for the Gravis Ultrasound Classic. I bought that back in the day, no idea why because its pretty useless overall, but a novel item nowadays.

My Gravis Ultrasound and 16 bit daughter board

Reply 89 of 104, by Shreddoc

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By sheer luck, some random ISA soundcard which rattled around in my storage boxes for 10-20 years, forgotten and barely-known-about, turned out to have a variety of OPL4 chip (YMF704C) on it when I dug it out a few years ago. Since then I've cleaned it up, fixed a loose capacitor. And was (again) fortunate enough that Jazefox went out of his way to specially add my card into his awesome Unisound program - exhaustive Googling across many months, trying out all kinds of leads and candidates, had failed to find working DOS drivers for this niche model of a niche brand's lineup.. so Unisound is literally the thing which gives this card it's modern life. Great, great program.

The same semi-forgotten, long term junk pile of things I never bothered to throw out, also yielded me my current P233MMX setup and Voodoo2 card, at one point. Among quite a few other things. One of the upsides of being a multi-decade PC nerd and occasional IT-guy-for-a-small-office : the ability to build over time a modest hoard of other people's leavings, which pay dividends (of fun and nostalgic rediscovery) years down the track...

Reply 91 of 104, by pixelatedscraps

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Added the following:

IBM Model M SSK boxed
Tseng Labs ET4000/W32p 2MB VLB
Cyrix 5x86-120GP
Asus VL/I-486SV2GX4
Biostar MB-8433UUD-A v3.0

Last edited by pixelatedscraps on 2023-03-07, 22:40. Edited 1 time in total.

My ultimate dual 440LX / Voodoo2 SLI build

Reply 92 of 104, by BitWrangler

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So apparently this Patriot SL4100 system I just dug out with a 100Mhz Blue Lightning "BL3" "DLC3" is currently just one of two known to survive. Though that is until y'all start hunting them out because when I do a full post on it, you're gonna want one. (Think K6-3+ eleventy in one system but 386ish class)

I don't know whether to judge anything by prices but several of my 2D ATI cards went to nutty pricing since my last post.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 93 of 104, by Shponglefan

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I have an Epson Equity III+. I don't know how rare they are, but prior to finding one, I couldn't even find photos of this particular model on the internet.

And given how brittle the plastic is on this old machine, I'm amazed it still has the keyboard and front switch doors intact.

Also in my collection are the IBM Music Feature Card and IBM PS/1 Audio Option with the original boxes, a boxed Game Blaster, an Adlib Gold, and several Gravis Ultrasound Extremes.

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Pentium 4 Multi-OS Build
486 DX4-100 with 6 sound cards
486 DX-33 with 5 sound cards

Reply 94 of 104, by elszgensa

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Not quite one-of-a-kind items but I haven't seen any for sale for years:
- Forte VFX-1 VR headset, CIB. I really need to get that back up and running and compare it to a contemporary set...
- Action Replay PC ISA card w/ accessories.
And a little more common:
- Two Tiger Telematics Gizmondos, one of them boxed. Fun little things, but not as fun as reading up on their Swedish mafia background story.

Reply 96 of 104, by Geri

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I dont think i have anything super rare retro stuff. So instead i list some of my not-so-common retro hardware which i like for some unexplainable reason.

-3dlabs permedia2 pci VIVO with 8mb ram upgrade (winner 2000 office)
-some very nice grey 5.25 inch floppy drive thats very quiet when operating (1.2mb)
-my actual full tower pc case, which i use as my main pc, its probably form like 1997 or so. i refuse to switch to newer cases, because i dont find anything i like
-a soviet oscilloscope i use for repairs sometimes. it has a small tiny green crt phosphore screen.

TitaniumGL the OpenGL to D3D wrapper:
http://users.atw.hu/titaniumgl/index.html

Reply 97 of 104, by ratfink

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Rarest I have now is probably a boxed set of Metabyte 3D glasses... think the name was Eye Scream. And a boxed Metabyte Vengeance Banshee. I guess Banshees aren't rare in themselves, but I never came across this brand in the flesh before or since.

I have a few Wildcat VP cards (760, 870, 970, 990 iirc). I liked the signal quality, far superior to the nvidia cards I had at the time.

Reply 98 of 104, by cyclone3d

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Probably the ES IBM/Cyrix 6x86 and ES AMD K5 chips that I received a few days ago.

After that, I'm not sure, but probably a couple different video cards and maybe sound cards, including the SB Pro 1.0 clone.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 99 of 104, by Sphere478

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file.php?id=148966&mode=viewPentium 1 366mhz The Infamous Golden Tiger/Warrior

Had never even heard of a 366 version, and managed to get it. Probably my rarest part the freeway ultra ss7 mobo is also pretty rare, as is my killer nic pci and bga sdram

Sphere's PCB projects.
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Sphere’s socket 5/7 cpu collection.
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SUCCESSFUL K6-2+ to K6-3+ Full Cache Enable Mod
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Tyan S1564S to S1564D single to dual processor conversion (also s1563 and s1562)