I won’t go below 486 PCI, I remember having to deal with io cards back in the day and have zero desire to ever revisit that.

My favourite era is Core2 and I have a lot of boards and parts collected.

I do have a fully kitted out Amiga 1200 and a Vic20.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-10-16, 16:21:

I do have a fully kitted out Amiga 1200 and a Vic20.

I've always been curious about the Amigas, having never owned or used one. How do you find it compares to DOS era machines? Is an Amiga worth having?

Leaves early DOS era machines in the dirt, the Amigas problem was Commodore and the Monkeys running the company.

The hardware though was amazing for the time, took pcs a few years to catch up.

As for having one, they are rather expensive to buy even more so if they have upgrades or are in fully working order.

I’m glad I have mine but if you want a taste you can always try WinUAE which is a great emulator.

Probably down to 8080.
But I'm not looking for anything there, actively looking for PC1640 and up.

I'm up for adopting anything smaller than a minicomputer I guess. Though in era, I doubt I'd go earlier than mid 70s. 8080, 6800 class up really. But I won't pay much for anything. Entire 8 bit collection at the moment is just a CoCo2, and 6800 and Z80 CPUs, and maybe some S100 boards if they turn up again. I am not finding the CoCo2 that interesting, maybe need to expand it and put OS9 on it for kicks. Got some Amiga stuff A1200 and 2xA500, but they don't get out much, seems like I'm always looking for that 8x4ft desktop to have the ultimate Amiga setup, set up. (They kinda sprawl, you can't stick the system unit under the desk and use a compact keyboard, well unless you got a "big box" paradoxically.) Then PC I've got from 8088 to i7, gaps include 386DX and PPro. I guess I have optimum fondness for 486 class, super7 and socket A. I like PC/XT class quite a bit, pure pure DOS machines. 286/386 slow 486 kinda feels like an era where things sucked at GUI. Maybe it's my Amiga streak.

Started home computing in 1982, so guess it's mostly what I grew up/older with. With maybe a feeling like I want to fill a gap with a "serious" CP/M machine from ~1980-1985 timeframe. But about the only thing I'd spend "serious" money on would be a big box Amiga, but I gotta get a deal still. I don't even like paying more than $50 for a modern part, (Single used part, think that's as high as I have been recently, for an X6 1090T) and for retro, generally do my accumulating before stuff gets to stupid eBay prices, though there's lucky finds still, like a banshee for under $15, a pile of slocket stuff for $30 etc. I don't know if I'm really actively looking for anything, I stay out of pay anything frenzy mode and browse frequently to see what turns up. Don't think there will be a top end cutoff per se, though I am currently dropping my personal divider of retro vs modernish usage down at dual core, but that might go to quads plus soon.

To me it is not a question on how far back my limit is. More a question on how new I want to go. Yes, I have a few Socket478 and SocketA for Win98, but that is about it. Uhhhh... And a Mac Mini Core2Duo with Geforce GFX to play a couple of XP games on.

Anyway.
I have my own Commodore64's that I have build with a solder iron. Then I have Amiga's and 486's and one single 286 and one Pentium-166. My Amiga's are one tricked out 1200, one tricked out 600, two revision 8a.1 Amiga500's were one is upgraded/modded to be an Amiga500-Plus, and then an revision 6a that I have build into a PC case.

I am mostly into 1980's era and first half of 1990's. But I also have a few boards and a full manual (with schematics in and service paper work) from an old 1970's style NCR accountant machine. Those boards are cool, and the mem board is one of those with ferrite beed's and arranged in some kind of mesh or something.

But yeah. I love 8bit machines to death. There is something special about them. Amiga's are cool as well, and so is 486 machines.

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-10-16, 16:36:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-10-16, 16:21:

I do have a fully kitted out Amiga 1200 and a Vic20.

I've always been curious about the Amigas, having never owned or used one. How do you find it compares to DOS era machines? Is an Amiga worth having?

Amiga AND AtariST are always worth owning. Sure they are way different than Dos based machines. But they are so nice.
Personally I am into Amiga. And for games, they are to best when we are talking games from 1988('ish) to around 1991/92.
It is when you dive into other Amiga stuff than just gaming, and try productivity stuff, you really see how special they are.

In my opinion 486DX2 is when PC start to be an amazing gaming machine. Pentium1 era is when PC become a truly planetary star in a gaming/multimedia. From Pentium2/3 to forward start to be too “mainstream” and lost all fascinating. 386 are’nt powerful enough for nice game, Contemporary Amiga was much much better, the overtake was DX2 cpu.

For me the oldest x86 machine I would collect is a 286.

I've got a NuXT to try out 8088/V20 stuff but its just too slow to run the games I want.

mwdmeyer wrote on 2022-10-16, 20:52:

For me the oldest x86 machine I would collect is a 286.

The 80186 is fine, too, performance wise. Not far from the 80286.

It's a bit like the 8085 of x86. Half a microcontroller, or SoC (System on a Chip), by todays language.
If external chips are used, a 99% IBM PC compatible can be built.

mwdmeyer wrote on 2022-10-16, 20:52:

I've got a NuXT to try out 8088/V20 stuff but its just too slow to run the games I want.

I feel your disappointment, yi have an 4,77 MHz XT PC, too.
It great to see things working in real time, but not for playing games.

A full 8086/NEC V30 system is much nicer (PC1512, PC1640, Olivetti M24..)
Especially if memory is interfaced over 16-Bits.
I think there's at least one modern XT motherboard with an 8086 and 16-Bit ISA slot.
The 16-Bit extension isn't fully AT-Bus compatible, of course.
But simple things may work.

Alternatively, you may like to have a look at the S-100 commune.
S-100 was the dominant bus system in the CP/M days. 🙂

http://www.s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pa … CPU%20Board.htm

IBM Model 30 is true 8086 machine and install VGA card in it instead of MCGA.

Cheers,

Anything pre-x64 is retro in my book. Basically anything that won't run any arbitrary modern software you find out there, regardless of how fast it can do it.

This means Windows XP is where I draw the line. Anything that can run Windows 7 x64 acceptably can also run modern Linux acceptably, so I don't really consider the Windows 7 era "retro" in any meaningful sense other than that it's older.

But true "retro" to me means it either is or maintains an acceptable amount of compatibility with the MS-DOS era, which almost everything up to about 2000-ish that runs Windows 9x or earlier does.

I have a couple of 286 machines, but what I really love is a good fast DOS computer, a 486 or Pentium.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-10-16, 16:39:

As for having one, they are rather expensive to buy even more so if they have upgrades or are in fully working order.

I’m glad I have mine but if you want a taste you can always try WinUAE which is a great emulator.

Having looked on Ebay, prices do seem a bit scary. Though they do pop up locally from time-to-time, so maybe I'll see if I can find a local deal.

And I suppose I should take a look at emulation. Might be a good way to decide if I want to invest in the real hardware.

brostenen wrote on 2022-10-16, 17:48:

Amiga AND AtariST are always worth owning. Sure they are way different than Dos based machines. But they are so nice.
Personally I am into Amiga. And for games, they are to best when we are talking games from 1988('ish) to around 1991/92.
It is when you dive into other Amiga stuff than just gaming, and try productivity stuff, you really see how special they are.

Given the Amiga's reputation in the tracker music / demoscene, I've always been curious about them for that reason. I was big into tracker music and demos back in the day, but never used or worked with an Amiga.

Maybe I'll grab one one day and find out what they are all about...

I recently quit with anything under a 286 and refuse to buy anything made by IBM prior to 1992.... just my opinion as the clones were so much better. Never cared about latter resale price, just care about ease of setup/working on ;p

I'm just into my 40's so perhaps it's an age thing, and even though my first real computer was an 80286, I don't have much interest in much of anything prior to the 486DX2. Additionally growing up in the US there of course wasn't much exposure to Amigas and the like. I love reading about and emulating these systems that I wasn't real wise to when I was younger, but not too keen on buying into them.

As for the other end of the range - yeah perhaps it's Windows XP, and less so for specific games or game technologies, but just for how Windows in general worked at that time, was fast, and got out of your way. I'd still say I prefer Windows 2000 in this regard..

I have a P1 223 mhz dual os install dos/95 machine to cover most of my needs from 1986ish to 1997 and a pentium 3 98 rig to cover everything from 97 to 2000ish. I've also got an Amiga 500 for a bit of variety from PC compatibles , but the 1081 monitor for it needs some work done.

I used to have a commodore 64 , but I had to declutter all my other stuff(consoles) and the c64 wasn't being used that much so it had to go as well , though I did enjoy loading games from tape since it was super novel to me , though I also had a floppy drive.

I spent alot of time with XP as a daily driver OS so I'm not as excited by it.
I find the stuff I spent time with when I was a kid alot more fascinating , like win95 and win98.
And also stuff I never got the chance to interact with like MS-DOS , Workbench or Commodore Basic.

I honestly wouldnt mind mucking about with an Apple 2 or a DEC PDP-8(good luck getting one of those) but I have to draw the line somewhere , and to minimize my setup into 3 systems and 2 monitors so it can all be crammed onto one desk , I've settled on 1985-2000 , any stuff post 2000 doesnt really intrest me as much since after the graphics card and sound card wars of the 90s things became alot more static with the likes of Matrox , Adlib , Gravis Aureal , S3 , 3DFX, Rendition , Tseng etc vanishing off the face of the earth which meant alot less hardware variety to play with.

I've got two lines: For "using" the line is Intel Triton chipset, notably because of its integrated IDE controller supporting up to four IDE devices. For "collecting" the line is 80386DX, the first IA-32 CPU.

The island is small and humid (Taipei just got 1105.5mm rainfall in 48 hours this weekend); one has to be either very rich or in a rural village with farmland to be able to keep many unused vintage computers in working orders. Places like Computer Reset is simply unthinkable.

I used to draw the line at Pentium 4, now it's Core2Duo...

I find XT 8088 based machines interesting and have a few NOS motherboards for this era. I'm not really interested in 286 or 386 machines most likely as I never had one back in the day. My first PC was a 486dx2-66 and I now have quite a variety of 486 based hardware.
I think I like the XT era as it's close to what I grew up with in the 80's. I also have Apple 2e, c64, speccy, amiga, etc.

As far as drawing the line at collecting hardware, I would say anything past C2D or C2Q is getting a bit boring, but who knows what I may find interesting in a few years.
If I can tinker around with the hardware and play with overclocking a bit then it's more likely I'll be interested enough to purchase some, especially the later stuff.