feipoa wrote:

ElementalChaos wrote:

It is still plenty possible to get old hardware for cheap or free. eBay isn't everything. Go to thrift stores...

Are thrift stores in your municipality really selling old computers? I haven't seen a computer in a thrift store for at least 10 years. Where I live, they go straight to the recycler when left at the thrift store.

In my area, I sometimes see older computers for sale at Value Village, on the other hand I've heard of some Goodwill stores refusing to sell computer hardware for legal reasons, so I guess it depends on the store policies as well as the e-waste laws of the county you live in.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

feipoa wrote:

ElementalChaos wrote:

It is still plenty possible to get old hardware for cheap or free. eBay isn't everything. Go to thrift stores...

Are thrift stores in your municipality really selling old computers? I haven't seen a computer in a thrift store for at least 10 years. Where I live, they go straight to the recycler when left at the thrift store.

In my area, I sometimes see older computers for sale at Value Village, on the other hand I've heard of some Goodwill stores refusing to sell computer hardware for legal reasons, so I guess it depends on the store policies as well as the e-waste laws of the county you live in.

I see old computers at Value Village as well. But I haven't seen anything older than a P IV for at least 3 years.

No computers at goodwill, but then again the one that is in my area prices most stuff like it is brand new so I almost never go there.

Salvation Army also sells computers, but they always want about $200 for a junky P IV setup. Umm... just no.

So, is it the right time to sell my V5? (Still has the box but not much else)

Dominus wrote:

So, is it the right time to sell my V5? (Still has the box but not much else)

Hell Yes!

Prices have never been higher, set a reserve for $500 just in case.

Unless you are in immediate need of some extra cash, I'd personally wait for the prices to continue their upward trend.

Dominus wrote:

So, is it the right time to sell my V5? (Still has the box but not much else)

The right time is when you need the money otherwise dont expect the price of an iten with decreasing availability and no production to not keep going up..

The right time is when you need the money otherwise dont expect the price of an iten with decreasing availability and no production to not keep going up..

+1

Hmm... thinking about it. We are moving soon and cutting down on stuff would be near. This and a V2 are my last retro hardware... so maybe keep it? I'm so undecided... and sorry, didn't mean to derail this thread in the direction the OP is complaining about 😉

Dominus wrote:

Hmm... thinking about it. We are moving soon and cutting down on stuff would be near. This and a V2 are my last retro hardware... so maybe keep it? I'm so undecided... and sorry, didn't mean to derail this thread in the direction the OP is complaining about 😉

V5, do as you please, but sell the V2 to me, obviously 😀

appiah4 wrote:

Dominus wrote:

Hmm... thinking about it. We are moving soon and cutting down on stuff would be near. This and a V2 are my last retro hardware... so maybe keep it? I'm so undecided... and sorry, didn't mean to derail this thread in the direction the OP is complaining about 😉

V5, do as you please, but sell the V2 to me, obviously 😀

Are you a V2 "nut"? (I'm not following the retro part of Vogons that much) I'm not selling either right now and if I do, I'd probably go where the "Retro Hardware Prices... are NUTS!" 😀
(but for reference it's a Miro Hiscore² 3D - somehow you don't see many of those)

I need a Compaq PSU for my Prolinea but it uses non-standard AT pins. Found one on ebay and made an offer. He wants $40 + shipping. No thanks

It's too bad that there aren't adapters around that allows you to use a standard AT PSU with the Prolinea 5100 systems. And my understanding is that system requires 3.3V-3.4V as well, right?

Also, have you checked the capacitors for leakage and used a multimeter to check the voltage on the +/- 5V, +3.4V, and +/-12V for any voltage dropouts? It could also be a fuse (and I digress if desktop PSUs have inline fuses).

Dominus wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Dominus wrote:

Hmm... thinking about it. We are moving soon and cutting down on stuff would be near. This and a V2 are my last retro hardware... so maybe keep it? I'm so undecided... and sorry, didn't mean to derail this thread in the direction the OP is complaining about 😉

V5, do as you please, but sell the V2 to me, obviously 😀

Are you a V2 "nut"? (I'm not following the retro part of Vogons that much) I'm not selling either right now and if I do, I'd probably go where the "Retro Hardware Prices... are NUTS!" 😀
(but for reference it's a Miro Hiscore² 3D - somehow you don't see many of those)

Hehe, nah, I'm nut crazy about V2s, I'm just in the market for an affordable 8MB V2 for my K6-2 PC so that I can move my 12MB SLI setup to a more deserving box..

cyclone3d, I wasn't aware of a place called Value Village in Huntsville, is it worth checking out? Been to a bunch of flea markets in NE Bama and have yet to find any bounty. Goodwill's about the same unless you're in need of keyboards and the like.

I lived in the halcyon days of this hobby - at the expense of people thinking I was nuts - I started in 2001, back then, there was no Vogons (to my knowledge), and even the vintage computer forums would laugh me out the door for souping up 486's and 386's.

My post will be not much complaining - and more of a retrospective, with some nostalgia.....

But god man - the thrift shops?

Ever been paid $5 to take 3 IBM EduQuest 486's home from the Salvation Army Thrift?

I remember walking into little downtown Opelika shops and walking out with stacks of x86 PC's for the cost of a Papa John's large Pepperoni Pizza!

Coming home from high school with a backpack full of expansion cards, hard disks, mice, game controllers.

One reason I was able to prolong my Compaq collecting for awhile? New-Old-Stock still good 80's Tadiran Lithium cell batteries for Compaq Deskpro 286/386! Southern Electronics was really an undervalued resource for me at the time.

I swear in retrospect, it felt like it was raining "Decript old PC's" everywhere! My shed was a sea of beige faceplates and dark grey drives! Packard Bells stretching the length of my workbench.

Then the mid 2000's came along, and I started to see prices on XT's go up - so spending $45 on a PC was not that bad of a deal. But it was not as ideal as I was nabbing 486's for like....$3-10 at the local thrift shops. So I started focusing on XTs and ATs for awhile.

Then the late 2000's came around, I'd moved to Seattle. Is it just me or does it seem this hobby is more popular in the deep south? All those years in East Alabama, people would randomly pop up on VCF and Uncreative Labs and most of them were from Alabama/Florida/Georgia/Virginia/Kentucky/Tennesee.......

When I first moved to Seattle - man - we had the Boeing surplus store, which I missed out on. RE-PC carrying piles upon piles of ISA cards (though they're doing that again now, and Motherboards, at least in Tukwila they are), I picked up 2 9-pin monitors in the span of 3 months, dug up a 386 AT Clone at a pawn shop, bought 486's by little local companies like Holt Office Systems and Cat Computers......

Then the 2010's started up and suddenly I'm on I.T. projects mentioning I mess with this old stuff, and suddenly it's not like "BWAHAHAHAHA! What are you doing with that old Boat Anchor? How many doors in your house do you need to prop open, My cellphone is faster...yadda yadda" - now it's like "DUDE!!! You have a Tandy 1000? I wish I had one of those. Do you have Space Quest."

And at the same time I saw the vintage AT desktops I like to mess with dissappear. That Gateway 2000 was the last one I saw, and it was $40 originally, they marked it down to $10. Most places here now scrap CRT monitors, anything computer and beige, I witnessed a very nice 1970's hobbyist computer or terminal at Goodwill shrinkwrapped to die about 4 months ago.

Meanwhile, E-bay drove the prices up on this stuff, because that's how everyone prices it out now. First came the hoarders that would get all the same crap I was selling for $15-40 on E-bay, and charging like what....$315, $150, $560? That started even in the late 2000's, we all throught these guys were nuts, and some of them were, they kept these machines on there for years, never being bought, and getting made fun of on the various forums I hung out on at the time.

But now, those guys are seen as a bluebook for these things.

And it messes up the mainstream perception of the activity too. For example, I have news tickers on my browsers, and every few months I get some damn article telling me those vintage videogames/computers are worth a huge chunk of money - and their figures are in the bloody clouds. Yeah, I'm going to get $1500 for my Atari 2600? That's where a lot of the insane pricing comes from is the mainstream media. What I find hilarious is later on they'll post another article telling you "15 things to dump from your life" and whats on it "your old computer!" so basically, you're telling me to scrap that $50,000 PC? HAH.

I always thought an offical bluebook - like auto collectors, guitar collectors, gun nuts, and so on have to provide an official guideline would be useful.

Sometimes I think I really should make a thread with all my builds and weirdness and stories though, so much details I could dive into that would turn this post into a page.

Prices are indeed nuts. Though prices on 386/486 era hardware are still going up, I have made notice, that they do not rise that fast anymore. Unless it is the obvious parts, as GUS and so on. Those will allways rise. I am more like talking about ISA and VLB cards. What I have noticed, is that P4/AthlonXP are starting to take off little by little. Children/teens of the 00's are growing up, and kids/teens of the late 80's or eraly 90's are old geezers now. Yeah... I am one of those. Get off my lawn retro-hipsters. We lived through the Dos era and we were there man'. (reminds me of that old hippie/woodstock one-liner)... 😁

Seriously.... When looking back at the 80's and first half of the 90's. The time felt like the computerworlds answer to the hippie era.

Anyway.
A couple of month's ago, I suddenly had an urge to figure out what my collection of Playstation2 games are worth. Well... I was more like interrested in how rare the games that I have are. And the only one that are special is my Futurama game. I read that it was not really sold in that many copies. And back in 2007, I bought it for some 15 US Cents. It was sold in mint condition, as nobody wanted to play that game at all. I have allways been a fan of futurama, and I just had to have it. It is however not an easy game.

Back to the pricing thing. The way it is going up these days are mind blowing. And to be honest. Nobody really want to buy at those pricing. So I really see this hobby as something that are going to be for a select few. Those are the rich ones, and then a few that are lucky to get hardware from their family. As someone mentioned. Amiga's are indeed way beyond the reach of most people these days. Personally, I had to sell 6 vintage and/or retro machines, (P-2 and P-3 era machines, all 440BX chipset) in order to be able to buy my two Amiga's (500 and 600). I still have my Socket-370 and AthlonXP machines.

Regarding people joining our hobby in the future. All I can say, is that what is in working condition 40 years from now. Will be given to my children. Imagine an Amiga600 or an 486dx4-120, running in 2058? Imagine how many will be running at that time? What they will be worth is a complete different story. As long as my children will be able to play Doom on era correct hardware, then I am a happy champ.

I tried to start my 6 year old with playing Paganitzu, but it seemed too difficult for her. I've heard similar stories and I think it unlikely that anyone's kids will have significant interest in these old games played on old hardware.

feipoa wrote:

I tried to start my 6 year old with playing Paganitzu, but it seemed too difficult for her. I've heard similar stories and I think it unlikely that anyone's kids will have significant interest in these old games played on old hardware.

Ohh... I don't know. 😉 My daughter is 9 and my son is 7.
My son love to play: Super Cycle (C64), Great Giana Sisters (Amiga+C64), Hugo the troll (Amiga), Atari PacMan (C64) and Lotus-II (Amiga). My daughter love to play: Anything MS-Dos FPS (mostly Doom), Great Giana Sisters (Amiga) and Hugo the troll (Amiga).

Yes. Sometimes the games are simply too demanding, yet they keep wanting to play those games over and over.

Wife doesn't want the kids playing violent games, so we're sticking with Tetris for now. I have some games on my TI-89 she'll probably like, but I'm not ready to say good night to my calculator. I've had that since 1997 or 1998 and bought it the month it was released.

feipoa wrote:

Wife doesn't want the kids playing violent games, so we're sticking with Tetris for now. I have some games on my TI-89 she'll probably like, but I'm not ready to say good night to my calculator. I've had that since 1997 or 1998 and bought it the month it was released.

I can fully understand that argument, if we are talking about Doom-4 or Duke Nukem Forever. Return to castle wolfenstein and newer, as well as Unreal Tournament. Yet the first Wolf3D or Doom1 ??! That I do not get. My son even played Injustice Gods Among Us on my Ps3 today. That game is not something I find that violent. Shure the superheroes kick each others ass, yet it is in no way near a game like Dead Island or something like that.

Personally, I dislike rules like "No violent games". As there are a difference between children. Some children are mature enough to watch stuff like Aliens, at the age of 15. Other children will have really horrible nightmares at the age of 17, after having watched Aliens. I am more a kind of "lets look at how mature my child is" kind of man.

Looking at what parents have feared throughout the years. Then as an example. The stories of "Pipi Longstockings" was feared by parents back in the 1940's when they were originally released. Parents feared that children would run wild, because she was a wild and independent child. They feared that children would commit crime and fight with weapons and stuff. That did not happen at all. Fast forward to the 90's, and parents feared that children would develop mental illness and become murders by playing Doom when it first came out.

It has allways been like this, and it will allways be like this. You know... The fear parents have, when children do something a bit more extreme. So I fully understand why your wife have banned violent games. I fully understand her thought and the pattern behind her concern. I just do not have the same opinion and concern as she has. You know... It's a bit complicated to explain.