Grem Five wrote on 2024-04-12, 14:11:

I go 4 hours east there is a free geek and things are way more plentiful.

I forgot about that kind of thing because I am too far away from one, but yeah there's organisations like that and those that build PCs for the less affluent, and some of them sell off surplus donated parts, frequently "stuff that is too old to use" so actually the good shit 🤣

"ReBoot" is one we've got in Ontario, kinda like Habitat for Humanity for PCs.

theelf wrote on 2024-04-11, 23:17:

Here in spain is very easy to found whatever you need, from a Xt motherboard to CRTs, sound blaster cards,whatever

looks like i need to take a trip to spain!

Depends on if you are looking for something specific or just whatever. For whatever, there are a lot of late Windows 98 - early XP era junk (Pentium 4, Athlon XP) and various parts for them, though still mostly the common junk. So if you want to build a Celeron D troll PC with Sound Blaster SB0570 and FX5200 64bit, you can generally do that free or close to free.

For older stuff, if you still want something generic/common, TNT2-M64, Trio64, Trio3D, Virge variants, random PCI NICs and sound cards, Socket 370 and maybe Slot-1 CPUs, that's also an easy find. For ISA/VLB stuff, it's much rarer. The most common thing you'll find are modems, Trident graphics cards and ESS sound cards.

P1-P4 era notebooks are also not excessively uncommon, but they are generally in questionable condition.

But if you are willing to spend and not take chances with "dumpster diving", local trading sites always have some nice listings and not everything is priced unreasonably. But if you want something that is generally known for having value for collectors, you need a ton of luck to find it cheap and be the first to find it like everywhere else.

Depends how far I want to drive. There does tend to be very rare not so desirable stuff that pops up every once in a while locally but I’d have to drive further than I care to for most other things.

Out of the regular romanian posters from here, I think I drew the shortest stick compared to @Socket3 and @Robert B's findings 🤣

Quite hard nowadays. You can still find vintage pc's on second hand websites (our version of Craigslist) but these people also know eBay and ask eBay prices for their hardware.

I have a friend who has a friend who works in recycling. He calls sometimes if he found interesting hardware. I have to pay of course but his pricing is acceptable.

Non x86 hardware like Amiga or Atari have become very rare and pricey. Amiga 500's are easier to find, but Amiga 1200 or higher have become quite expensive.

In Queensland, Australia it’s illegal for eWaste centers to sell any electronics. The government has safety concerns with powering on old hardware. The only option are garage sales and eBay. I did manage to find a Gravis Ultrasound PnP and a late 486 board for $5 at a garage sale, but I think that was complete luck (I should have taken a lotto ticket that day). I only started this hobby about 5 months ago so I don’t know if old gear is dwindling down but I’ve manage to find everything I need on eBay. You just stay away from gear that has crazy prices. You can often find good deals if you’re quick.

Used to be fairly easy-- there is a BOEING in town, and every so many years, they would liquidate at BOEING Surplus-- but that stopped being a thing in the mid 2000s. 🙁

That said, there is an upcomming "Free e-waste disposal" event happening at the local metropolitan area between the 17th and 18th. I intend to go see what gets dropped off. Might find treasure.
(Crosses fingers)

It's not that bad in France.
Sure there are overpriced stuff in classifieds. Probably by some sellers that got inspired by the crazy "buy it now" prices from eBay. But you can still find nice parts for reasonable prices... if you search carefully and if you're patient.
But genuinely rare/sought after parts are expensive like everywhere else (ex : MPU-401, GUS, Voodoo5, "ultra" GPU variante)

On the other hand i bought a 100+kg lot full of isa sound cards, Isa/vlb graphics, s7/ss7 motherboards, MFM drives for around 250€. I managed to get some Voodoo cards for free. GF3 boxed for 7€.

On the average, the prices seems lower than elsewhere (at least half from eBay US/world prices)

Generally it tends to be very like the RandomStranger described for generic stuff. They can be easily obtained for free (s370, socket A, generic Pentium systems, ATI rage and GeForce MX...)

For sought after parts you just need to be smarter than the other buyers.
Using search alerts on 3dfx or GUS will not help you because you will find sellers that know what they are selling and will have competition with other buyers.
Having alerts on more generic terms an carefully looking the picture is far more rewarding.

I started looking locally at trift stores and it was really disappointing, went to several and couldn't find anything, luckily about a year ago I found a electronic recycling center and they allow me to look into the bins whenever I want. Was there yesterday and found a Voodoo 3, a Geforce 4 MX 420, a Creative DVD decoder card, a Cyrix MK II 300 and a single board pentium 4 computer all for $14.

I'm in Southern California. Orange County to be more precise. I've only ever looked on eBay and Craigslist. Is there anyone from the area with advice on better places to look?

Practically nothing in 5 stores today, apart from recent keyboards, mice and monitors, and a DVD drive. Bought a game though EA Formula 1 2002.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-12, 02:45:

I think perhaps the Covid lockdowns had a hand in this, people with a ton of free time and cash to throw at building that retr0 rig from their childhood, higher demand drove prices higher and a lot of the kit around got bought up, now the lockdowns are over we are dealing with the economic fallout from that which has driven prices higher again along with crazy inflation, higher postage and import costs due to backed up shipping.

And YouTube - there's enough retro content on there, and once you've watched a few videos from the big channels, YouTube will suggest more retro content to you...

... and then everybody wants a Tualatin PIII with a Voodoo card.

Provocative thought: I think the next 18 months are going to be a great opportunity for picking up late XP-era hardware pretty much everywhere. There are tons and tons of Sandy/Ivy Bridges with matching GPUs and whatnot still in active use, and the fact that they cannot officially run Windows 11 is likely to cause them to get tossed.

As for older stuff, the question really is - where is the supply coming from? Very few people have had Voodoo 2s sitting in their parents' basement for 20 years.

One thing I would suggest - there are lots of e-waste/recycling/etc non-profity places out there that tend to refurbish 5-8 year old systems, put Linux on them, and e-waste the rest of what they are given. Sometimes also sell some parts. Might be worth talking to their management and get them thinking in a 'retro mindset' if they aren't already - i.e. do a quick scan of all machines they receive to see if anything has real retro potential and should be resold. The thing is, especially in DOS/Windows land (Mac world is simpler), it's a bit of an art to know what is desirable retro hardware and what (often the very next generation of the same thing) is effectively e-waste that removed what made the previous generation so retro desirable.

And interestingly - I had a discussion with our IT provider at work. They used to (maybe still do) rent a lot of HP thin clients, and I'm pretty sure that at least some of the older models they offered happen to be those that are highly desirable for DOS gaming. They had no idea that there was a vibrant market on eBay for some of those thin clients, so hopefully I encouraged them to explore reselling those...

In India the situation is worse than anywhere else. Retro computing is virtually unheard of. I am yet to find someone who has retrocomputing interest. It is extremely hard to even find a decent s478 board. Being a heavily populated nation with little space, most homes dispose off the older PCs and the same are lost forever in some recycling centers.
Recently after much struggle managed to find and visit a PC dealer who said to have older boards. He even claimed earlier to possess P3/ISA boards which I instantly sensed as bollocks.
When I visited the place all I saw was a few racks of boards (mostly core2duo boards and very few 775s). With some digging was able to find one k8m800 board. Also wanted to get a s478 board but that was not booting up.

Managed to source some retro parts earlier from a far away city, but the prices were on par with ebay if not worse. Got few parts from there as have to deal with the nasty Indian customs while importing.

UK: For Commodore and Spectrum stuff, the scene is thriving - eBay UK's vintage computing section is full of Amiga parts and whole systems, also fairly easy to find an Acorn, Amstrad or BBC Micro.

PC stuff, not so easy. A small selection of hardware is there but people want allllll the money for it. Reasonably priced full systems are harder to come by, individual mainboards and parts are fairly common but you need to check regularly to get a bargain.

I live in what is effectively rural north-eastern Onterrible and just like you I can't find a thing locally. I will order everything online. I use the FleaBay equivalents from numerous countries and have accounts with forwarders in Taiwan, Brazil, Russia, Japan, Germany, China, US and UK. I am looking for specific parts and will pay the somewhat unreasonable prices of Fleabay, but not outright scam prices (I'm looking at you, 275€ for a VLB graphics adapter).

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-11, 19:05:

i live in central canada and since everyone here upgrades so fast and throws the rest to ewastes, it makes it particullarily hard to find good stuff, sometimes i will get lucky and get something for free from a friend or family member but generally speaking nothing ever comes up in the wild at thrift stores nor garage sales. odd post on facebook market place or kijiji for retro parts but there is abit of luck involved. i have a friend who has access to an ewaste through a local university and the things he finds is insane.

I live in the Edmonton area as well and feel ya. I check out FB Marketplace and don't find much on there anymore, and when I do, it is over priced. I have had a bit of luck looking at Value Village sometimes, found a bunch of sealed CD-R's, a MS Internet Keyboard, 4 IDE CD Burners recently, but generally they don't have anything. I really wish you could go to the local eco-stations, like we have in Stony Plain and Spruce Grove and grab stuff that people get rid of, but nope, that is illegal.

It's almost impossible to find modern hardware where I live, let alone anything "retro". It's just not all that popular in my neck of the woods, and it sucks. 😀

I've had ads out on local Craigslist for months, looking for ANY 80's, 90's, early 2000's era computers in ANY condition, and I've only got a couple inquiries. One was a really good one, for some old IBM 5150's and Mac Classics, but I have no idea if it will pan out. When I've tried placing "Looking For" ads on Facebook Marketplace, 99% of all the responses I get are people looking to charge crazy amounts of money for whatever they have, both modern and retro. In those cases, If I wanted to do that, I would just shop on eBay. So I don't so Facebook at all anymore.

What I get I either have to really search for and hope for the best, or stumble across a lucky find on eBay or some other similar online marketplace.

These days? Very, rare. Several years ago, you could occasionally find stuff in the thrift stores, if you went frequently enough to get lucky. I managed to snag some Windows 9x and XP machines, but haven't gotten around to doing anything with them because I've been busy with more modern pursuits.