digger wrote on 2022-02-04, 22:05:

I have such nostalgic memories about computer fairs back in the day. That's where you'd always go to get good deals, before onli […]
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HanJammer wrote on 2022-02-04, 21:01:

I remember when they came out and I always joked about these drives with my friends when we were visiting so called "Grzybowska" - a local computer market here in Warsaw.

I have such nostalgic memories about computer fairs back in the day. That's where you'd always go to get good deals, before online shopping went mainstream. And there was always such a fun vibe there, with so many other visitors who shared a love for computers, and the many stands with their wares, often with speakers playing music and computers running impressive PC demos, all to attract customers walking by.

It's crazy to see one taking place outside like that, though. Over here they were always held indoors, or at least the ones I know of. Usually in convention centers and such. This was probably to prevent theft (you had to buy tickets to enter the fair), but also simply because people just never trusted the Dutch weather to be so cooperative. 😅

Over here, the most popular computer fairs were the bimonthly PC Dump Dag at the RAI in Amsterdam, and the annual HCC Dagen at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht.

Perhaps the pandemic of the last 2 years made me long for such events even more. But even once everything opens up again, such computer fairs are probably never coming back. It may have been worth it back then, but there's just no competing against the thin margins of on-line retail nowadays.

On the other hand... Well, I don't know... Nostalgia is a powerful thing. Maybe such a fair could attract enough visitors on that alone.

PC Dumpdag has been gone for a long while now, I still miss it 😒
I also visited HCC dagen once or twice, I remember having bags of junk I got from there. Iirc that's even where I got some of my more obscure hardware from including the ActionMedia II (which is essentially some obscure and huuuge ISA TV card which has drivers for windows 3.something at the most).
But PC Dumpdag was where it was at, it being much more frequent. Got so much good stuff from there at a reasonable price ^^

I definitely miss it. But it's probably gone for good alas 🙁

Thanks for sharing those pictures!

It must have felt like a golden age in those years. I mean, it was just a few years after computer technology from the west became so widely available there, right? It looks like a vibrant user-base sprung out of that almost overnight.

I just realized that this subject (nostalgic pictures from computer fares, trade shows and stores, ads from old computer magazines, old TV commercials, etc) deserves a topic of its own. So I just started one.

Bought this IWill P54TSW2 socket 7 board with onboard ultra wide SCSI and an interposer.

Found the manual on one of the archived web pages and it doesn't have separate fsb and multiplier settings.. just a single jumper block where you move a single jumper to select the CPU Mhz.

The forum software killed the quality... Might upload a good pic later.

Edit:
I used the same pic, cropped with Affinity Photo, and saved at 85%, which is what I was told would keep the forum from butchering the quality... And look, the size is smaller, even. The forum software has serious issues with picture compression. Seems to be worse when the pic is a png.

sirotkaslo wrote on 2022-02-04, 06:56:

The MSI pro266td master-lr.

Damn, that board has been on my wishlist for quite a while. Nice score! 😁

Voodoo2 out of the rusty gateway works! ran 3d mark99 three times at 800x600 on my pentium 450 box. trying to locate my sli cable right now as i now have 2 perfect matching cards!

Just won a machine for 62€ on Ebay.
Sellers pics:

I think you can guess which part in that machine got my interest. 😁

Nice catch, @RaiderOfLostVoodoo! It's good to see that some good deals on eBay can still be had sometimes, if you pay attention. 😉

By the way, I remember Diamond being the most premium brand of 3dfx Voodoo cards (at least in Europe), right up until they merged with S3. I remember being baffled about that decision, since that prevented them from manufacturing and producing NVIDIA or ATI/AMD graphics cards later. Such a waste of such a strong brand.

My first 3dfx Voodoo card (a Voodoo 1), was in fact a Diamond card. It was an OEM edition, which came in an antistatic bag, with the VGA pass-through cable and a CD-ROM in a paper sleeve. No box, no frills, and well-priced. And it was all I needed. 😁

I have no idea what happened to it, now that I think about it. 🤔

digger wrote on 2022-02-05, 11:25:

Nice catch, @RaiderOfLostVoodoo! It's good to see that some good deals on eBay can still be had sometimes, if you pay attention. 😉

Interestingly it even had "3dfx Voodoo" in the title.
Starting bid was 49€. I placed my initial bid of 49€ days ago, so the seller can't withdraw the auction or increase the starting bid. Had that a few times. Seller placed something for 1€ to get attention, then raised the price to rediculous amount. So I'll always nail them down now, if I find something cheap.
13 minutes before the auction ended, someone did bid 61€. I placed a 71€ bid last second and won the auction for 62€.
Didn't expect it to go so cheap. I've seen Voodoo1 cards go for 70-80€.

Here are the specs:
AMD Sempron 3000+ (1,79 GHz)
AC Silencer Ultra
ASUS K8V-VM
1GB Ram (2 x 512MB) CL2.5.4.4.8, PC3200
Sapphire Radeon HD4350, 512MB
Diamond Monster 3DFX Voodoo1, 4MB
Seagate Barracuda, 7200 Rpm, 80GB
HL-DT-ST DVD Ram GSA - H10A
Floppy 3,5
250W PSU

Worthless garbage. At least it has a HDD. If I buy machines, they're usually without HDD. So I'm happy about every HDD I get.
I will put a Core 2 Quad into the case and sell it as an office machine on a locals site. Cheap office machines run well these days, due to Covid. Years ago they trashed their old computers because they were only using their stupid smartphones. And now the need them back. I love it!
Probably gonna sell board and GPU individually.
Definitely gonna keep the Voodoo!

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-04, 14:52:

About 1 in 5 SX33s will do 50mhz, most of them do 40. U5-S will do 60mhz.... the joke however was, that the storage speed would be so impressive, that gigabyte huge lookup tables would return a result faster even than a pentium FPU, which isn't listed here https://dougx.net/gaming/coproc.html#timings but gives you an idea of how slow FPUs are for being "fast".

I got the joke (I think). However there is throughput, and there is latency. A massive array of HDDs could perhaps match old PC RAM bandwidth, but surely not latency.
What one could do is pre-record the entiere Quake run as VRAM snapshots of each frame and just stream that from the array to video card directly. No need for Blu-ray discs.

Interesting how that machine had a much more recent Radeon HD4350 graphics card in it, but the Voodoo1 was kept in there besides it. That implies that the previous owner was into retro gaming. Which makes you wonder why they didn't realize the worth of the Voodoo card alone when they sold this rig. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

digger wrote on 2022-02-05, 15:32:

Interesting how that machine had a much more recent Radeon HD4350 graphics card in it, but the Voodoo1 was kept in there besides it. That implies that the previous owner was into retro gaming. Which makes you wonder why they didn't realize the worth of the Voodoo card alone when they sold this rig. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't know. This is too much of a patchwork PC to come from a retro enthusiast. Voodoo 1 in a mainboard without ISA and W98 support with a HD4000 series graphics card which lacks the power to run XP era games. Probably just someone emptied his basement and threw in the case all the junk hardware he had. Happens all the time.

Btw tomorrow will be my town's monthly vintage flea market. Wish me luck!

GPU ain't too terrible for first half of XP gaming, wouldn't go quite all the way for AA titles. Parts span 3 decades maybe though voodoo from 90s, board and CPU from noughties, PSU might be 2010s... though anywhere from 08 to 18 and maybe they're still for sale somewhere.

The seller I bought the last two GPUs from had a Monster Fuzion for sale so I added that to my collection too, along with a MX440 which I oddly didn't have.

Monster Fuzion

Diamond always made classy looking GPUs

Prolink MX440

A very tidy looking GPU, never seen a Hot Pink GPU cooler before but it will look great !

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-02-05, 15:48:

Btw tomorrow will be my town's monthly vintage flea market. Wish me luck!

Oooh, that sounds like fun. Let us know how it went, even if you don't end up buying anything. 🙂

digger wrote on 2022-02-05, 16:15:

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-02-05, 15:48:

Btw tomorrow will be my town's monthly vintage flea market. Wish me luck!

Oooh, that sounds like fun. Let us know how it went, even if you don't end up buying anything. 🙂

Wish we still had Flea markets here, the one we had stopped with the outbreak and they are still not allowed to start it up again.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-05, 16:17:

digger wrote on 2022-02-05, 16:15:

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-02-05, 15:48:

Btw tomorrow will be my town's monthly vintage flea market. Wish me luck!

Oooh, that sounds like fun. Let us know how it went, even if you don't end up buying anything. 🙂

Wish we still had Flea markets here, the one we had stopped with the outbreak and they are still not allowed to start it up again.

Each year on King's Day, April 27th (used to be Queen's Day on April 30th until 2013), we're supposed to have the Vrijmarkt ("Free Market"), in which the whole country effectively becomes a flea market and people are allowed to lay out their wares on the street and sell them without a permit. Needless to say, the Vrijmarkt didn't take place the last 2 years. (And pretty much all other King's Day events were cancelled too. It's usually quite a festive event.)

I remember buying some computer hardware and software at a Vrijmarkt during Queen's Day when I was younger. You can find some gems during those days if you look in the right areas. Some towns and neighborhoods tend to have better Vrijmarkten than others, so it's about knowing which ones to visit. I'm not an expert at that myself.

Fingers crossed that we may finally have a King's Day with a Vrijmarkt again this spring. 🤞

I really do hope that the world can get back too some normalcy quickly, things here in Australia are better but Omicron is being a dick and getting the pollies scared.

digger wrote on 2022-02-05, 15:32:

Interesting how that machine had a much more recent Radeon HD4350 graphics card in it, but the Voodoo1 was kept in there besides it. That implies that the previous owner was into retro gaming. Which makes you wonder why they didn't realize the worth of the Voodoo card alone when they sold this rig. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

He was aware of it.
Title of the auction: "PC from Hardware Paradise with 3DFX Voodoo1 and more"
Hardware Paradise seems to be the shop which originally build the machine.

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-02-05, 15:48:

I don't know. This is too much of a patchwork PC to come from a retro enthusiast. Voodoo 1 in a mainboard without ISA and W98 support with a HD4000 series graphics card which lacks the power to run XP era games. Probably just someone emptied his basement and threw in the case all the junk hardware he had. Happens all the time.

Yeah, I think so as well.
Seller probably did some research and noticed that his old Voodoo sells for 50-80 bucks. So he did throw it into the case, with all the garbage, hoping he would get rid of the other stuff this way.
But it didn't really go as planed. He got a normal price for his Voodoo and basically gave away the other stuff for free. Should have sold the Voodoo on Ebay and offer the other stuff on Kleinanzeigen (Craigslist in Krautland). A local tinkerer would have probably paid 10-20 bucks for the other stuff.

RaiderOfLostVoodoo wrote on 2022-02-05, 12:24:

digger wrote on 2022-02-05, 11:25:

Nice catch, @RaiderOfLostVoodoo! It's good to see that some good deals on eBay can still be had sometimes, if you pay attention. 😉

Interestingly it even had "3dfx Voodoo" in the title.

I suppose most people only search in the graphics-card category and not for a full system. Nice catch!

Some new stuff:

Two Socket 3 boards

A few Socket 7 boards

Bunch of random cards

Big Chungus