Dosbox with MUNT, SC-55 Vi Plugin, Yamaha SYXG software synth and 86Box (an improved fork of PCem) have saved me lots and lots of money! 😁

I already built my favorite 486DX2-66 and Pentium II 400 machines classic category, but Dosbox and 86Box have keep me occupied more than these actual machines, purely on the basis of convenience.

Too bad, opportunistic businesses have tapped into and penetrated this emerging vintage PC computing hobby too.

There are occasional good prices for these classic products. And like it or not, eBay is the only place with the largest inventory of classic PC items.

xplus93 wrote:

Yeah, throwing out stuff and regretting it is one of the worst feelings. My entire collection from when I was a kid is gone. Only thing that's really left is an LS-120 drive. Later on I got rid of a quadro4 accidentally. That's not even considering the things I passed on buying. Sadly regret plays a bit of a role with collecting.

As for anybody who thinks 486 gear is drying up with the recyclers then you are mistaken. When I worked a job that took in recycled equipment we got couple of those systems every week in both stores. I had to sit there and watch them go right in front of me to otherwise I would have been charged with theft.

Yes you need a second man to go in and purchase them for you. But since you were the inside man you would have first dibs at seeing what was incoming to target.

I grabbed the last few LS-120 when they were being discontinued as a SKU at Fry's they went from $150 down to $50 so I grabbed them all. One of them I accidentally fried connecting it the wrong way when I moved it to another case.

Then I find out they released a LS-240 later which I thought why bother? They were competing with Iomega and CD-roms and DVD-roms just got introduced. They should have jumped to a LS-1200 if it were possible to leap frog and save themselves. The only good thing was it could still read older 1.44MB and 720KB micro floppy disks but I don't think it could handle the 2.88MB ones that also died out.

Unknown_K wrote:

I used to see Amiga 2000's for $50-100 plus shipping all the time, but that was ages ago when I actively collected Amiga machine […]
Show full quote

snorg wrote:

Price inflation frustrates me too. I used to see listings on E-bay for Amiga 2000 and 3000 desktops for $200-$300 all the time, now they're going for $600 or more.
I have no doubt overpaid for some of my items (286, 386 and 486 specifically) although nothing like $200 for a single motherboard or $500 for a system. Compared to the days of being able to get a curbside 486 or pick up in a thrift shop for peanuts, $50 for a system board is pretty pricey. Am I also guilty of using my systems not nearly as much as I should? Yes, most of the time they are sitting in the closet. I think I'm going to try and narrow my collection down to 2 or 3 "must have" systems and put the others up for sale for something reasonable, so someone else can enjoy them.

Regarding my own personal Amiga quest, I realize I'm probably just going to have to settle for Amiga Forever running on a raspberry pi, along with the Amiga 500 I managed to get my hands on. And sure enough, no sooner did I manage to get one did I start to see listings for $400 and $500 for Amiga 500 as well. Some of that could be being driven by the coming Vampire add-on, which is suddenly making these older systems attractive once again.

I used to see Amiga 2000's for $50-100 plus shipping all the time, but that was ages ago when I actively collected Amiga machines. These days I have all the Amigas I need (A1200, A2000, A3000, A4000, A500, A1000) and I got them cheap. Don't feel the need to sell them even if I don't use them that often because replacing them would be too expensive.

This is a hobby to me and I don't pay "going ebay rates" for anything outside of commodity Chinese parts. I collected old 8bit/Amiga/Mac/PC gear when nobody else wanted any of it. You could find whole C64 systems on freecycle back then. I purchased 75+ mint boxed Amiga games for a few bucks a piece because literally nobody wanted them. Sure I have too many extra 386 and 486 motherboards but if I didn't snag them they would have been recycled a long time ago.

Prices are going up because new people are entering the hobby and outside of a bunch of old time hoarders there isn't that much of a supply anymore. People mention recyclers but they pretty much snagged all the 486 boards and CPUs that exist in their stream a long time ago. Things are over priced when they don't sell. If I can sell a Picasso any day of the week for $20M then it is not over priced. I do think some sellers are only selling to the extreme high end of the market and it takes a while to sell but they eventually do sell their stuff. The cheap gear that probably needs some work throws people off, but I go after them because they can usually be fixed cheap enough. Recapping or fixing blown tracks is a needed skill these days unless you want to pay somebody else to do it for you (which reflects ebay working condition pricing).

I don't think the upward pricing trend is going to keep people out of the hobby, but it will influence how big and expansive their collection will be. Some people will have to resort to bartering and trading instead of flat out buying which isn't a problem. Of course if some outfit starts slabbing 3dfx cards (for example) in tamper proof plastic with "ratings" on them and selling them as retirement funds then you know the hobby is screwed and you need to sell out and get out fast.

You think someone will actually be selling Voodoo cards encased in solid acrylic at some point? I really hope we don't see some nonsense like that, you wouldn't even be able to use it. I do know that comics and baseball cards get the "put it in a plastic baggie and lock it in a display case" treatment but I don't know that retrocomputing has a broad enough appeal.

snorg wrote:

Unknown_K wrote:

I used to see Amiga 2000's for $50-100 plus shipping all the time, but that was ages ago when I actively collected Amiga machine […]
Show full quote

snorg wrote:

Price inflation frustrates me too. I used to see listings on E-bay for Amiga 2000 and 3000 desktops for $200-$300 all the time, now they're going for $600 or more.
I have no doubt overpaid for some of my items (286, 386 and 486 specifically) although nothing like $200 for a single motherboard or $500 for a system. Compared to the days of being able to get a curbside 486 or pick up in a thrift shop for peanuts, $50 for a system board is pretty pricey. Am I also guilty of using my systems not nearly as much as I should? Yes, most of the time they are sitting in the closet. I think I'm going to try and narrow my collection down to 2 or 3 "must have" systems and put the others up for sale for something reasonable, so someone else can enjoy them.

Regarding my own personal Amiga quest, I realize I'm probably just going to have to settle for Amiga Forever running on a raspberry pi, along with the Amiga 500 I managed to get my hands on. And sure enough, no sooner did I manage to get one did I start to see listings for $400 and $500 for Amiga 500 as well. Some of that could be being driven by the coming Vampire add-on, which is suddenly making these older systems attractive once again.

I used to see Amiga 2000's for $50-100 plus shipping all the time, but that was ages ago when I actively collected Amiga machines. These days I have all the Amigas I need (A1200, A2000, A3000, A4000, A500, A1000) and I got them cheap. Don't feel the need to sell them even if I don't use them that often because replacing them would be too expensive.

This is a hobby to me and I don't pay "going ebay rates" for anything outside of commodity Chinese parts. I collected old 8bit/Amiga/Mac/PC gear when nobody else wanted any of it. You could find whole C64 systems on freecycle back then. I purchased 75+ mint boxed Amiga games for a few bucks a piece because literally nobody wanted them. Sure I have too many extra 386 and 486 motherboards but if I didn't snag them they would have been recycled a long time ago.

Prices are going up because new people are entering the hobby and outside of a bunch of old time hoarders there isn't that much of a supply anymore. People mention recyclers but they pretty much snagged all the 486 boards and CPUs that exist in their stream a long time ago. Things are over priced when they don't sell. If I can sell a Picasso any day of the week for $20M then it is not over priced. I do think some sellers are only selling to the extreme high end of the market and it takes a while to sell but they eventually do sell their stuff. The cheap gear that probably needs some work throws people off, but I go after them because they can usually be fixed cheap enough. Recapping or fixing blown tracks is a needed skill these days unless you want to pay somebody else to do it for you (which reflects ebay working condition pricing).

I don't think the upward pricing trend is going to keep people out of the hobby, but it will influence how big and expansive their collection will be. Some people will have to resort to bartering and trading instead of flat out buying which isn't a problem. Of course if some outfit starts slabbing 3dfx cards (for example) in tamper proof plastic with "ratings" on them and selling them as retirement funds then you know the hobby is screwed and you need to sell out and get out fast.

You think someone will actually be selling Voodoo cards encased in solid acrylic at some point? I really hope we don't see some nonsense like that, you wouldn't even be able to use it. I do know that comics and baseball cards get the "put it in a plastic baggie and lock it in a display case" treatment but I don't know that retrocomputing has a broad enough appeal.

I hope not as well. But if it were to be encased it would be a manufacturer sealed box that was undamaged. Then the new buyer would at least know once they opened it and removed the Voodoo card it should be in pristine condition ready to be installed for legacy gaming. But then who knows if someone will come out with a true Voodoo 5 emulator for XP and we won't be needing those except for show.

There's been slabbing in plastic for console games and hardware for years now...and I want to stab all of those idiots in the head when I see it happen. I'm sure some moron will do the PC hardware slabbing for special items. It's all about the money for the people who seal their stuff up, not about what's actually in the box.

senrew wrote:

There's been slabbing in plastic for console games and hardware for years now...and I want to stab all of those idiots in the head when I see it happen. I'm sure some moron will do the PC hardware slabbing for special items. It's all about the money for the people who seal their stuff up, not about what's actually in the box.

The only items that I find suitable for that today are G1 Transformers but most people here probably don't appreciate the original and are used to the Michael Bay version. But if I were to get two of the same item in pristine I'd admittedly want to play around with it. Unfortunately what cost $20 for Optimus Prime or Megatron now goes for over a $1000 in some cases. I wish I had a time machine. 😈

senrew wrote:

There's been slabbing in plastic for console games and hardware for years now...and I want to stab all of those idiots in the head when I see it happen. I'm sure some moron will do the PC hardware slabbing for special items. It's all about the money for the people who seal their stuff up, not about what's actually in the box.

Yeah but if it is buried inside a solid hunk of acrylic resin, how would you even know it was working? You'd never be able to test it.
You'd just have a nice shiny block of acrylic plastic with a Voodoo card entombed in it forever.

snorg wrote:

senrew wrote:

There's been slabbing in plastic for console games and hardware for years now...and I want to stab all of those idiots in the head when I see it happen. I'm sure some moron will do the PC hardware slabbing for special items. It's all about the money for the people who seal their stuff up, not about what's actually in the box.

Yeah but if it is buried inside a solid hunk of acrylic resin, how would you even know it was working? You'd never be able to test it.
You'd just have a nice shiny block of acrylic plastic with a Voodoo card entombed in it forever.

As someone who watched several smashing videos and has smashed stuff out of anger in the past, I bet I can break open a "tamper-proof" acrylic plastic shield, then we'll have that problem taken care of. 😈

I'm not talking about an acrylic box like they put certain items in the store to prevent shoplifting.

I'm talking about something like this:

Good luck smashing that open.

snorg wrote:

I'm not talking about an acrylic box like they put certain items in the store to prevent shoplifting. […]
Show full quote

I'm not talking about an acrylic box like they put certain items in the store to prevent shoplifting.

I'm talking about something like this:

headphone-amp-audio-design.jpg

Good luck smashing that open.

Wow, complete with engraving. If you have something like this in your house your kid will have +1 story about their weird dad/mom to tell in school 😀.

snorg wrote:

I'm not talking about an acrylic box like they put certain items in the store to prevent shoplifting. […]
Show full quote

I'm not talking about an acrylic box like they put certain items in the store to prevent shoplifting.

I'm talking about something like this:

headphone-amp-audio-design.jpg

Good luck smashing that open.

I could smash that open.

Smashing that open without destroying (or at least severely damaging) the contents though is another story.

snorg wrote:

I'm not talking about an acrylic box like they put certain items in the store to prevent shoplifting. […]
Show full quote

I'm not talking about an acrylic box like they put certain items in the store to prevent shoplifting.

I'm talking about something like this:

headphone-amp-audio-design.jpg

Good luck smashing that open.

Damn. I bet it cost more to seal that then the item. 😦

OK so I just took a look at what they had listed right now. Look like they have one or two nut jobs setting prices on some parts. Often with sellers like this you have many listers and etch will set his/her own prices. They only have to reach a quota for the month or something so they sell one or two items for a crazy price.

But the f you look closely your find a lot of well price items.

1.75ghz sepron 2.35
http://m.ebay.com/itm/282591935642?_mwBanner=1
Terratec Promedia 13.50
http://m.ebay.com/itm/271976441888?_mwBanner=1
G450 16.50
http://m.ebay.com/itm/272526210336?_mwBanner=1
Msi TNT 2 9.18
http://m.ebay.com/itm/282582286504?_mwBanner=1

Then there is crap like this
Ati 9000 for over 100$
http://m.ebay.com/itm/New-ATI-Radeon-9200-Mul … 5%257Ciid%253A5

350 for a sk7 board?
http://m.ebay.com/itm/Gigabyte-GA-586ATX-Sock … c%257Ciid%253A8

The solution is simple - Clones, reproductions and emulation.
The main problem with western hobbyists is that they are too lazy to search for cheap hardware on yard sales, junk yards and recycle centers. I only payed one hardware piece in my collection more than $50 and that's my boxed SW1000XG.
Not to mention there are also those who would rather destroy what they would discard than have someone obtain it for peanuts (as they wrote in the forum before).

Stojke wrote:

The main problem with western hobbyists is that they are too lazy to search for cheap hardware on yard sales, junk yards and recycle centers.

I respectfully disagree with you here.

Stojke wrote:

Not to mention there are also those who would rather destroy what they would discard than have someone obtain it for peanuts (as they wrote in the forum before).

You still remember who actually wrote this? This is rather counter-productive. Many collectors got their stuff due to it being given to them rather than taking it to be recycled. I even got an ES motherboard that way! He was basically saying "What you don't take, I'll bring to the dump tomorrow" and this board would probably not have existed anymore for me to experiment with (and thus I know that i820 boards with 3 RDRAM slots are truly unstable, even when using those CRIMMs).
I'd rather give stuff away than have it taken to the dumpster, this hobby probably wouldn't have existed if it weren't for people having put the effort to advertise their "junk" for anyone to take (for peanuts or for free).

If everyone would've considered 16MB graphics cards obsolete and basically worthless, everyone would've binned their (just an example here) Voodoo 3s and these would'be been MUCH harder to find these days.

Stojke wrote:

The solution is simple - Clones, reproductions and emulation.
The main problem with western hobbyists is that they are too lazy to search for cheap hardware on yard sales, junk yards and recycle centers. I only payed one hardware piece in my collection more than $50 and that's my boxed SW1000XG.
Not to mention there are also those who would rather destroy what they would discard than have someone obtain it for peanuts (as they wrote in the forum before).

Problem with recycling centres is that most Western countries have contracts with recyclers who take everything at a fixed price, just yesterday a friend of mine saw 6x workstations being discarded from 2014 like garbage, dual Xeon 8 cores 2.4 GHz with SLIl Nvidia and iirc 32 gb ddr3. Discarded like garbage! Those recyclers clean them lthem and sell them for 500-1000 a piece... It's not that we are lazy, it's becoming rare due idiocy of people not caring what happens with stuff from their boss or are not allowed to take them because of regulations. And yard sales? In my region they are rare and are rare to find something useful due eBay or local second hand websites, it takes a lot of times visiting and searching those flea markets and rarely worthwhile.

Stojke wrote:

The main problem with western hobbyists is that they are too lazy to search...

The main problem with eastern hobbyists is they are judgemental. That includes me! I try to battle this cultural quirk, but it still slips under the radar from time to time.

Stojke wrote:

You still remember who actually wrote this?

He knows who he is, but i believe he wrote it mostly out of spite 😀

Tetrium wrote:

Problem with recycling centres is that most Western countries have contracts with recyclers who take everything at a fixed price ...

Not gonna lie, but I believe its their right to sell what they bought, even if it was for free. Its a reason more to run an recycle busyness. Many recycling shops here only recycle for obtaining working hardware at a cheap price so they can resell. I have one recycle shop I go to and we trace 1.5:1 as he values all retro gear (older than DDR1) as secondary materials and not computer electronics. So I give him 1.5 boards (in kg/class) for 1 of his boards I pick. I believe you could for some sort of a deal for old computer parts at most recycle centers.

alexsydneynsw wrote:

The main problem with eastern hobbyists is they are judgemental. That includes me! I try to battle this cultural quirk, but it still slips under the radar from time to time.

You're right, sorry 😜 😁

Stojke wrote:

Not gonna lie, but I believe its their right to sell what they bought, even if it was for free. Its a reason more to run an recycle busyness. Many recycling shops here only recycle for obtaining working hardware at a cheap price so they can resell. I have one recycle shop I go to and we trace 1.5:1 as he values all retro gear (older than DDR1) as secondary materials and not computer electronics. So I give him 1.5 boards (in kg/class) for 1 of his boards I pick. I believe you could for some sort of a deal for old computer parts at most recycle centers.

never said it was but thats just how it goes nowadays. Its good stuff gets properly recycled, however sometimes stuff gets thrown away even it still works and often people would happily give a second life at home (or at work for that matter)as per my example. those computers that were thrown out at my friends work is just 1 of many example of companies getting rid of their often perfectly working hardware. At my work we replace all our computer hardware thats replacable every 4 years, because thats easier and costs less then to maintain and upgrade them were possible (maintance is usually the problem were hardware starts failing and people not being able to work on their computer that day). I can understand the reason but its a waste of recources, i also understand that most of that stuff gets cleaned up fixed were required and sold to third world countries where they can still run them for another 4-10 years.

Stojke, just a headsup, but you messed up your quotes.