It wasn't "retro" when I started. 😜

leileilol wrote on 2022-07-07, 22:02:

It wasn't "retro" when I started. 😜

Exactly 🤣

leileilol wrote on 2022-07-07, 22:02:

It wasn't "retro" when I started. 😜

Yep I think this is the case for most of us. Computers were simpler and life was simpler. It's not a time machine but it's close.

leileilol wrote on 2022-07-07, 22:02:

It wasn't "retro" when I started. 😜

My first computer was an Apple II+, which I hated because it was already the early 90s, and I used BBS's on a 286. But I eagerly ditched all the old stuff for modern hardware because "why would I ever want this again". Even had a PS/2 model 25 at one time someone gave me that went to a thrift store (DOH!) but at that time it was junk to me.

So maybe you simply kept your old systems and I'm the odd one for pitching my old stuff for the new shiny computer, only to want what I had 25 years ago for nostalgia. That's what I was asking. I became interested again in what I used many years ago and had to obtain it again.

I just regeretted getting rid of old stuff for decades and then about 10 years ago I think I saw an IBM PS/2 P70 for like £30 about 3 hours drive away and that's the PC my dad used to bring home from his office at weekends and I just had to have it. Now I have loads of junk/retro goodness 😀

Well... After my 286, 486, multible levels of Pentiums and Celerons I still looked that my brand new AMD Athlon motherboard had an ISA slot for DOS gaming. But after that I just started collecting computers that could run DOS games.

The inability to play late 90s Windows games on any emulator that existed in the 2000s. Earlier stuff was no problem - there was VDMSound and of course DOSBox. It was that period c. 1995-99 that was the problem. Of course, once I started buying retro computers, I just never stopped. (It helped that this stuff was so cheap 10+ years ago.)

Past me, back when I was in school and had no real money, just accepted any old computer I was offered and I used them for my computer needs. When I bought a brand new computer in 2004 towards the end of high school instead of throwing out all these obsolete 90s PCs I just packed them away. Though the CRTs, due to their bulky nature, I expect haven't survived storage. The computers and parts all went into a spare room at my parents house (big house, many spare rooms) but the CRTs, being effectively ewaste you had to pay to get rid of at the time, were just sealed in plastic bags and stacked in an old leaky rat infested shed.

Fast forward 10-15 years and now I have a room stuffed with retro computers at my parents house and I actually almost kind of miss inserting my Windows 95 CD whenever I glance at the control panel. So I guess nostalgia and easy access to retro computer hardware at no cost is what got me into it recently. Dosbox and Virtualbox just aren't the same.

Like others, it was modern when I started.

For PCs the crunch came when i upgraded from Pentium 100 with an SB16 clone to a PCI-only socket 370 and found there was no sound in DOS games. So that's when I properly became aware of hardware issues going forward. And more or less from that point I started to run multiple PCs to be able to run software (games) with different (older) requirements.

When I was very young and getting "into computers" in the mid to late 90s I was given a bunch of cast-off 386 and 486 systems by relatives/neighbors/etc. and also had a lot of the computing "for Dummies" books with DOS and other things I would play with on them.

So I guess another "it was modern when I started" or at least they were just old computers rather than retro.

Current retro and even vintage computers are what I grew up with.

Started upgrading and then building computers when I was about 12.

I was a huge PlayStation fan back in the 90's, got into PC gaming early 2000's and sold my PS1 and all my games. Around ~2010 I started missing my favorite PS1 games and that was the start of it all, it went like this:

First I started using PS1 emulator (ePSXe) and downloaded games from the net. PAL versions as they were what I had back then as an european, didn't yet know the difference between NTSC and PAL.

I was happy for a while, but then I noticed playing PS1 games while sitting in front of my PC monitor felt wrong to me. Solution: I hooked up my TV to my PC as second monitor. Also around here I realized PAL sucks and went NTSC.

All was good until around 2015 when the snowball really started to gain momentum: the quirks of emulating had slowly started to bother me, not only did emulating PS1 games started to feel inadequate, the same feeling started creeping into software emulation in general. At the same time playing old PC games on my modern PC had also started to bug me; awful resolution scaling, games that could use resolutions like 1440x1080 without shrinking the UI to microscopic didn't look right to me, 4:3 resolutions on my 16:9 monitor left black bars on the sides and I can't stand stretched graphics or UI. Even using wrappers started to feel a bit iffy.

That was that, I had started to require authenticity I just couldn't get without jumping into the rabbit hole.

It started with Windows XP, when many good old games suddenly wouldn't run anymore. To be fair, I experienced the same thing with Windows 9x, where certain DOS games like this one just refuses to run. However, with Windows 9x, such case is more the exception rather than the rule, not to mention building a DOS system was quite easy during that era. Windows XP, on the other hand, was as useless as Windows NT or Windows 2000 as far as games are concerned. It was also the time when many hardware manufacturers didn't support DOS anymore. However, I had, uh, other interests during that time, so not being able to play certain games didn't really bother me.

Fast forward to 2005-2006, when I became interested in computer games again. At that time I really got serious about playing computer games again, especially old games like Jane's USAF and European Air War. Not only such games were problematic on Windows XP, but they were also designed for 3dfx graphics hardware. Mind you, fanmade patches to run old games on modern O/S were not as well-known as they are today, nor were GLide wrappers. Also, it took something like Intel Core 2 Duo to run hi-res 3D texture mapped DOS games in DOSBOX, so building a retro system was the obvious answer.

At first, my most visited forum was 3dfZone, but the forum was (and still is) very slow, not to mention it only answers questions about 3dfx. But then I accidentally found a nice little forum called "Vogons," and the rest is history...

I got back into it a few years ago when I dusted off my old PC and wanted to replay some DOS and Win9x games from my childhood. IIRC, I first came across Phil's videos while researching sound cards, and that led me to this place.

After that, I kind of started re-building all the PCs that I ever owned, while upgrading them with nicer components. Basically, adding stuff that I wish I had back in the day.

It was a lot of fun to take that trip down memory lane together with everyone else in this great community.

leileilol wrote on 2022-07-07, 22:02:

It wasn't "retro" when I started. 😜

And the opposite for me. The my first daily drivers were already scraping the border between hopelessly obsolete and retro when I got them. As a village in a post-communist country there wasn't really a culture (or money) to support IT as a hobby. Everyone around me had PCs from 286 up to 486 well after PIII was already on the market. Those with a non-MMX Pentium could call themselves lucky. My PC was a 386 that came free from a recycling center. Parent's logic around the time was that those old rigs are "good enough for kids to play".

And throughout the early-to-mind 2000s, similar era machines from that recycling center became my playthings even after I had a modern (but still low-end) PC in high school. While trying to keep up with the then modern games, I disassembled and reassembled those old PCs, switching out parts, trading them with friends who still used them as second/hobby PCs.

I had an Amiga 500 I had kept around since childhood. Around 2010 I got interested in getting it up and running, then started buying accelerators and expansions. For a long time my retro computing was an Amiga only affair.

Then around 2016 I started buying old mechanical keyboards. TWhen I had a few of those I decided to build a retro PC to use them with because I already had some hardware lying about like a Voodoo 2 12MB, a Matrox Mystique and some CPUs. I bought an AT case and a PCChips Socket 7 mainboard. Then I started building my first retro PC and eventually finished it.

While doing that I realized that in my country retro PC hardware were still selling for next to nothing, way below eBay prices, so I started hoarding up. Once I had a pile of hardware I started building more PCs. In the meantime I picked up modest repair skills. Eventually I set for myself the goal of putting aside a working computer for every 3-year period between 1984-2000. This goal is now accomplished and I plan to use these computers to play games on when I retire. The rest is history.

eesz34 wrote on 2022-07-07, 21:43:

What was the point/event that made you decide to intentionally obtain and run old hardware?

there was no single point in time more a general consequence of time passing

as a rule i just didn't throw out something if it worked and combined that with accepting free cast offs (that were just old-ish not vintage at the time) and buying the occasional things while it was cheap

over the years it ended up being a vintage computer collection

I have thrown things out at points in life (and regretted doing so!) and i have bought things since (i realise mostly not really needed to enjoy the use of the computers on reflection!) but mostly it's just stuff i kept from new or received/acquired over the years without really aiming to get specifically vintage/retro things

COVID-19

For me retro gaming also matches what was current in my youth (the P1-P3 era). For years I had kept two P3 machines around, bought for next to nothing in 2005 or so, originally to use a router (+ spare). Unfortunately I got rid of one of the two during a move, but I still kept the one machine, and most expansion cards from old PC's that had passed through my hands*. Eventually I also bought a Voodoo 3 when they were still cheap, because I wanted to compare a few games in Glide vs Direct3D mode.

For me the impetus to actually take everything and build a proper machine again was discovering the existence of the Sound Canvas, back in the day I never knew something like that existed, but once I saw a video on one, I just had to buy one and play my old games again with improved midi sound. That then grew into buying various ISA sound cards because they all have one issue or another. And toying with CPU upgrades, installing an SSD - it's fun to see how far a platform can be pushed.

*Of course I sold a number of them back in the day to pay for upgrades; Voodoo 2, Kyro 2, Geforce 3... don't know what I did with the azt2030 from my old P1-166, but if I'd still had it, it would have saved me a lot of sound card buying.