Joakim wrote on 2025-02-09, 19:01:

I always wondered who it is that buys gear for these prices.. like 300$ for an old sound card with very specific purposes. collectors? for bragging rights?

I mean most oldies on this forum give the impression they would never pay these prices but still prices go up? Is there a new consumer base?

i sometimes wonder if its youtubers competing for a rare item to do a video on! well, there are sometimes very few examples of specific items left so a few youtubers could actually cause the price to rise among each other let alone as an after effect of a popular video

In eBay auctions there are always two guys in the end... the third offer is usually 20-30% lower.

gerry wrote on 2025-02-10, 18:28:

Joakim wrote on 2025-02-09, 19:01:

I always wondered who it is that buys gear for these prices.. like 300$ for an old sound card with very specific purposes. collectors? for bragging rights?

I mean most oldies on this forum give the impression they would never pay these prices but still prices go up? Is there a new consumer base?

i sometimes wonder if its youtubers competing for a rare item to do a video on! well, there are sometimes very few examples of specific items left so a few youtubers could actually cause the price to rise among each other let alone as an after effect of a popular video

I've always wondered how YouTubers get their hands on some hardware. Best example I can think of - couple YouTubers doing things on PowerBook G4s in the last couple of years and they had mint condition examples. The titanium G4 was famously famously fragile, I don't know how you get your hands on a mint condition one today, especially a 1GHz. (I got a decent condition 867MHz on eBay, but definitely not mint...)

I've also seen some YouTubers doing NOS full PC builds with... late 1990s stuff. Can't be easy to find a full system worth of NOS period-correct parts from that era.

I think the cost of living is starting to really affect everyone. Lot of Super 7 boards and cards are not selling as quick anymore...

I'm in my 40's now building my first 386 machine. In 20 years' time, someone in their 60's will be building their first 386 machine. I don't think interest in PC hardware will ever decrease. One thing is for sure, the hardware is not being manufactured anymore, prices will only go up. Cost of living will impact that from year to year but at the end of the day prices will 100% go up.

Think of all the people who haven't entered the hobby yet. We're only a small percentage of the pool that are participating in the hobby at this current moment. A lot of people later on who are retiring will want to relive their childhood. My advice is to buy your hardware now before prices get too crazy.

For me, I've got most all the retro hardware I want. There are still a few unicorns out there I would like to have and also run across weird or new stuff every once in a while that is cheap enough for me to pick up.

I'll be selling a lot of the extra I have as well as giving some of it away for others to enjoy.

Prices on certain things have gotten crazy, such as AWE32 cards and some video cards.

SS7 boards have gone way up in price, especially for the better ones.

zuldan wrote on 2025-02-11, 04:29:

I'm in my 40's now building my first 386 machine. In 20 years' time, someone in their 60's will be building their first 386 machine. I don't think interest in PC hardware will ever decrease. One thing is for sure, the hardware is not being manufactured anymore, prices will only go up. Cost of living will impact that from year to year but at the end of the day prices will 100% go up.

Think of all the people who haven't entered the hobby yet. We're only a small percentage of the pool that are participating in the hobby at this current moment. A lot of people later on who are retiring will want to relive their childhood. My advice is to buy your hardware now before prices get too crazy.

I would guess that the total number, after all "leavers and joiners" who will be building a 386 or similar will be smaller in a few years than now

I also think that interest in vintage PC hardware may decrease in terms of total number of participants in the next decades as fewer people have direct experience (either in their life or by connection with previous generation). In terms of intensity of interest i think that might still by high for those who are into it, like it is for radio enthusiasts who may be rebuilding a radio made decades before they (or their parents!) were born

What i don't think is that it will make hardware cheap though, its disappearing too fast compared to the pool of interested buyers

VivienM wrote on 2025-02-11, 03:26:

I've always wondered how YouTubers get their hands on some hardware. Best example I can think of - couple YouTubers doing things on PowerBook G4s in the last couple of years and they had mint condition examples. The titanium G4 was famously famously fragile, I don't know how you get your hands on a mint condition one today, especially a 1GHz. (I got a decent condition 867MHz on eBay, but definitely not mint...)

I've also seen some YouTubers doing NOS full PC builds with... late 1990s stuff. Can't be easy to find a full system worth of NOS period-correct parts from that era.

maybe they just spend thousands on the stuff on the basis that views over time will more than replace their spend, or maybe some youtubers exist because they have a special advantage regarding the stuff, e.g. they know of someone who had a PC shop back in the day that still has lots of NOS laying around - either way they have conditions most regular folk wont have

Also, i think the videos can be fun but suspect that 10 mins after finishing filming themselves raving about voodoo whatever and capturing the usual games the object itself is basically never used again, may even go on ebay to be sold at a loss (compared to acquired price - but not compared to youtube revenue), maybe they sell it to the next youtuber! it would be interesting to know if any of these guesses are true

gerry wrote on 2025-02-11, 15:57:

VivienM wrote on 2025-02-11, 03:26:

I've always wondered how YouTubers get their hands on some hardware. Best example I can think of - couple YouTubers doing things on PowerBook G4s in the last couple of years and they had mint condition examples. The titanium G4 was famously famously fragile, I don't know how you get your hands on a mint condition one today, especially a 1GHz. (I got a decent condition 867MHz on eBay, but definitely not mint...)

I've also seen some YouTubers doing NOS full PC builds with... late 1990s stuff. Can't be easy to find a full system worth of NOS period-correct parts from that era.

maybe they just spend thousands on the stuff on the basis that views over time will more than replace their spend, or maybe some youtubers exist because they have a special advantage regarding the stuff, e.g. they know of someone who had a PC shop back in the day that still has lots of NOS laying around - either way they have conditions most regular folk wont have

Also, i think the videos can be fun but suspect that 10 mins after finishing filming themselves raving about voodoo whatever and capturing the usual games the object itself is basically never used again, may even go on ebay to be sold at a loss (compared to acquired price - but not compared to youtube revenue), maybe they sell it to the next youtuber! it would be interesting to know if any of these guesses are true

I've definitely seen some YouTubers in retro Mac land in particular selling the same hardware to each other. There's a rare quad-processor DayStar Mac clone in particular that's made the rounds...

Maybe its the just the Nigerian prince who has got tired of asking people to take his money and instead fills his palace with amazing retro rigs.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2024-11-10, 18:52:

leileilol wrote on 2024-11-10, 14:00:

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-11-10, 13:38:

i hate emulation i think its so stupid. completely ruins the experience. i dont care that you are too lazy/too broke to experience the game on original and intended hardware. in my opinion and this is only an opinion, games should only be enjoyed on period correct hardware.

as an owner of much "original and intended" hardware, having completed period games on period hardware during their "original and intended" periods, and a past contributor to two emulators, involving my prior experience of those periods to have them emulate better....

fuck this hobbyist gatekeeping shit.

The way that people in their early 20s today who are interested in this hardware got into it was largely through emulation first

Yeah, my first experiences with old games and software was via VirtualBox (so not even an emulator, I was just virtualizing Windows 2/3/95 and it for some reason actually worked) and Project64. For many people that's plenty, but there's a small pipeline from emulator to real hardware for the people who are interested in the underlying system that made the software what it was. I do think there's an experience to a dedicated piece of hardware running that software that does feel different to emulation (especially when the emulator/virtualization suite isn't all that accurate, like Project64 wasn't), and if you're like me with low-end systems (I only capitulated and got a Ryzen box last month and it's a 2700X; even then that's mostly a development and video editing box, and before then I was reliant on a laptop that's about i5-6600K/GT 640 levels) emulation is a slog at best with pretty bad input latency. 86Box runs at maybe 40-50% speed and Ares runs at ~33% speed on that not even that old i7 from 2020.
Ultimately, I think there will always be some sort of draw to hardware that isn't AMD64 (or at least, first-gen AMD64 for its historical value and earlier), whether it's modern things like Blackbirds or Altras or Orions or whatever's going on with RISC-V, or stuff from or before 2003. Or modern stuff that functions as if it's stuff from before 2003 (that is, retro stuff, which is the term I personally use to refer to that sort of hardware where the stuff manufactured back then I think of as "vintage" instead); I think projects like the ITX-Llama and NuXT and Renovation SSI are probably the future of the hobby to be honest, especially if either someone comes along and makes a CPU on an FPGA and hooks it up to one of those PGA adapters or DM&P makes a Pentium II or even Athlon equivalent Vortex86. That's actually kind of what I've bought that Ryzen box for, so I can work on a project using super-cheap (like $15) FPGAs. Should come in less (maybe significantly so) than the original part does on the used market, and offers a more long-term reliable option for people who aren't absolutely dead-set on the original hardware but don't want to just use an emulator, can't use period wrappers, or want to repair arcade cabinets or the like.

Currently warming a little to that view, about new retro hardware, since I almost got shot in the face again yesterday with an exploding cap 🤣