I got into it after thinking about it for a looooong time. After that came eying EBay auctions for parts and computers until I finally just did it. Since then I went through old stuff from my family and coworkers that they would throw out and from getting specific parts off of EBay. It showed me again much much I enjoy tinkering with these things and how much joy it brings me to run old games.

For me it's a private thing that also gets carried outside out of necessity for getting help, information and parts. I'm here because of that but I then realized how many people are into the same thing and how much knowledge there is! Granted I did some of the maturing (hopefully) already before I got into it, but it's my thing. For me and it just brings a lot of joy into my life. No need for outside appreciation, even though it's fun to share every now and then. It's re-living my old memories and those are mine and it's only a thing I can experience it in a way I do. That's why I chose the hardware and time period that I did and I'm, for example, oblivious to a Super Nintendo or other consoles.

badmojo wrote on 2020-01-21, 23:35:

I'm 42 so entering the well documented 'mid life crisis' phase

It's becoming obsolete to call it a 'mid life crisis'. We are on a brink of series of scientific medical revolutions that will increase human life duration to 150-200 years. So you're free to plan at least 100 years ahead. I personally will make a hidden stash of retro hardware to dig out in 2100!

I was out of the hobby for few years, but now I'm back. Never used the old hardware for gaming though. It was fun in 90's, but now I prefer modern games with complicated plot and/or hard decisions to make, few examples being Frostpunk, Witcher 3, The Wolf Among Us etc.

My motivation includes a wish to impress other people (by obtaining rare sound cards, making builds in nice AT cases), also I code a bit, perhaps my most known works are PX Player and SSI-2001 MIDI drivers. Also I take interest in researching and documenting rare sound cards and middleware sound libraries, so this side of my hobby makes me somewhat similar to Cloudschatze, Great Hierophant, FGB, gerwin and easyjohn. Also, amassing knowledge about DOS sound cards allows me to... right, impress other people with that knowledge.

I know it is not healthy to rely on others opinion that much, but it is even less healthy to pretend I don't want to impress people.

I had some of rare soundcards: LAPC-I, IMFC, Tecmar ARPA, Omni Labs Audio Master, TB Multisound Classic - but ended up selling them all, because hoarding is not attracting me that much, plus I move around often.

Anyway, most of my time spent on this hobby was either in DosBox, coding or inspecting games for music and executable code related to sound, or in Google Books prowling for information. I am not much of a hardware tinkerer, and I don't think I need more than one retro machine.

I'm glad there are people out there who are obsessed with digging up obscure and now mostly irrelevant information. So much of that knowledge was from before the Internet was popular, and so you can only get what was written in books or text files passed between BBSes. Condensing all of that to something cohesive and easier to find means it can be consumed by others without them having to be archaeologists.

I can be a bit of a head-in-the-clouds type, but I like to think we have the tools to recreate the entire 80s/90s computing scene. That is, with FPGAs and microcontrollers to stand in for ASICs, and the technical ability for people to share knowledge so easily, we could build all the parts to clone XTs, ATs, and beyond from scratch. I would imagine, with machine shops for hire and 3D printing, we could probably even start manufacturing structural or mechanical things at small scale. Who knows, maybe a new-new-stock 360K 5.25" floppy drive is feasible. Why? Well, why not? It's old tech, but especially if the logic parts were smaller and running at a fraction of the power, is there really nowhere that a 16-bit microcomputer running at 33MHz on a familiar architecture would be useful? If nothing else, it's amusing.. 😀 It doesn't seem sensible to consider something useless just because it's old.

Whew. That was a tangent.

bristlehog wrote on 2020-01-24, 10:47:

It's becoming obsolete to call it a 'mid life crisis'. We are on a brink of series of scientific medical revolutions that will increase human life duration to 150-200 years. So you're free to plan at least 100 years ahead. I personally will make a hidden stash of retro hardware to dig out in 2100!

I hope you're right about that but even so such life extensions will likely only be available to the wealthy, at least at first. So feel free to plan 100 years if you also plan for getting rich 🤣