The covid wave of online activity is gone, and the nostalgia wave I think is starting to move onwards from the subject of this forum. It's an unavoidable reduction in activity.

I know I am slowing down on retro stuff at the moment, the world is moving so fast with AI that I am focusing on that, but I think there will be a large uptick in new software for retro machines due to AI which I am very excited to see.

Also with the way companies are going with locking down their games and there cost I'm sure people will come back for the more simple times 😀

We are all getting older, so it makes sense that retro hardware moves on. Windows XP is like 25 years old now, 🤣, for me retro is really Win 98 and older.

Retro fans or this forum may die sooner or later, but spirit of retro community never dies

We are always here regardless of forum activity, and still chasing after some retro stuff in 2026!

I'm planning to build AM2NF3-VSTA or ALiveDual-eSATA2 AGP rig nowadays, however I couldn't find one of them

Oh there's still plenty of new signups- just this time, they usually flog some slop and bail. Dead internet theory is here.

leileilol wrote on Today, 11:25:

Oh there's still plenty of new signups- just this time, they usually flog some slop and bail. Dead internet theory is here.

Hope to you don't aim at me

For many years I'm following visitor of Vogons and I'm a member for three years

Personally I'm slowing down 😀

But Vogons as a forum still feels very much alive to me. It feels like there's always new projects hitting milestones - Emulation gets better, Games get bugfixed, features added to games, ect.

You can only talk so much about the same stuff , so it is only natural things appearing to be slowing down...

* im 40 and stopped playing games almost enterely (i only fire up something when friends come over)
* crazy prices of retro parts
* scarcity of not so common hardware (especially in my country)
* unreliability due to age
* been there, done that
* i got almost all the things i wanted in my bucket list.

These, among other things, are the reasons and i dont think im the only one apparently.

In the last years my interest shifted to preserve things that are useful in the day to day on a way to prevent hoarding, if i got something i can see an use case, then i save it. Nobody will convince me that a Commodore 64 or even a 486 its still useful today...

I know I'm personally slowing down on projects and therefore don't have anything to contribute much. The build threads are often newer hardware these days too - I feel like there used to be more focus on 386 / 486 / early Pentium, which personally interests me more. There seems to be an increase in old men yelling at clouds around here lately too which doesn't interest me.

One of the biggest hurdles is there is only so much one can do and afford. I don't have the biggest of collections, and yet I find it increasingly tiresome to keep much of what I own fully functional. The majority of Youtube channels on 'classic computing', although responsible for making the hobby more accessible to newcomers, also try to push people into creating some sort of fake demand for items that either I, or probably some of my fellow vogoners already owned 16 years ago, or are a niche item with no real-world application other than pumping benchmark scores (hello, P55C Tillamook? 5x86 133?)

Only one can talk so much about the same capabilities of xyz graphics card/sound module, right?

With age come priorities, and personally I couldn't be bothered to i.e rebuy a Voodoo5 5500 Mac for 1000$ when I got the same card for 10$ in 2011.

At some point and beyond the hardware aspect (which is not even the main focus of Vogons), it can become draining to just drive the majority of your time/mental resources towards a single hobby. For the better of us, interests can change over time, and many of us can go on to study a career-start a family-take up a sport-move to another country-etc, something which doesn't mean we must totally give up on the hobby but rather look at it all with fresh eyes.

badmojo wrote on Today, 13:06:

I know I'm personally slowing down on projects and therefore don't have anything to contribute much. The build threads are often newer hardware these days too - I feel like there used to be more focus on 386 / 486 / early Pentium, which personally interests me more. There seems to be an increase in old men yelling at clouds around here lately too which doesn't interest me.

Have they become grumpier, or are there simply more of them out there? That is the question, mojo 😜

I'm still here, reading a lot of the topics. But I also feel like this forum is often a place for Q&A and a lot of the questions have already been answered over the years. We now know what the best Nvidia and ATI drivers for each generation and operating system are. Vogonsdrivers has grown with all kinds of drivers for obscure hardware as well.

There is less opportunity to stumble upon some hardware no one has ever seen before and having to hunt drivers down. So I think it's just natural that activity is also slowing down a bit.
The fact that old hardware gets progressively more expensive and the AI bubble making a lot of modern things way more expensive as well probably doesn't help it, too. I wouldn't start collecting retro hardware in 2026 anymore, if I had to start from scratch again, and probably just go the emulator route.

I've got nothing much to post because I'm starving for retro playtime. Always real life BS going on, and stuff I have to get done. Some things turn into huge timesinks.

schmatzler wrote on Today, 13:28:

The fact that old hardware gets progressively more expensive and the AI bubble making a lot of modern things way more expensive as well probably doesn't help it, too. I wouldn't start collecting retro hardware in 2026 anymore, if I had to start from scratch again, and probably just go the emulator route.

Yeah it's a bit sad that any "entry level" retro gameable rig, 8088 to P4/SocketA is about $500 to put together from scratch. Even if you score a system unit for a couple of hundred, you still probably need cards and drives to flesh it out. I know there are still bargains out there, but if you want to get going inside a month or two while the enthusiasm is high, you're gonna spend more. Plus you can easily blow another couple hundred on "n00b mistakes". Just in the past couple of years, P4 stuff which we were figuring out how to slow down and get DOS sound on, has gone from "Find one anywhere for $20 to free" to hundreds. I am typically "riding the notch" between obsolete and frontier of retro, and it's seeming to be in the sandybridge/ivybridge/haswell period now. AM2/3 also. So those don't go back that far, XP stuff, some do 98, but then I guess they'll need to run the heftier emulators like PCEM to stretch further back. Anyway, that's the area for generally cheap machines at the moment, even core 2 seems to have bounced and be on it's way back up. A decade ago I was still amazed that 486 were getting sought after.

A lot of stuff crammed into a decade back in the day, but this last decade seems to have done a speedrun on that in retro even, in terms of retro appreciation seeming to bound forward 2 years per year and cram in 2 decades in a decade... if you know what I mean. Anyway, it has to hit the brakes or it will run into current, though that wall seems paper thin at the moment, with people getting better than 5 years out of a machine.

NeoG_ wrote on Today, 10:35:

The covid wave of online activity is gone, and the nostalgia wave I think is starting to move onwards from the subject of this forum. It's an unavoidable reduction in activity.

yes true, as others said - if retro means a specific era then time moves on further and it falls away

leileilol wrote on Today, 11:25:

Oh there's still plenty of new signups- just this time, they usually flog some slop and bail. Dead internet theory is here.

Maybe there are more 1 question or short term members though i remember that too (though i have only been member since 2020, i had lurked for years before). i wonder if some are actual post & run bots though.

keropi wrote on Today, 12:31:

You can only talk so much about the same stuff , so it is only natural things appearing to be slowing down...

i guess with an aging out of members and a specific topic scope its natural, its true that many posts are just the same "how do i" and "what agp is best" etc things again and again, though that's still fun. It might also be that retro isn't retro anymore, i mean that hardware isn't really the issue now - i notice myself i have tended to emulation, vms, gog, patches and use a small subset of the total hardware i have, and no longer care to optimise really - its powerful enough when you enjoy a game or run an application, and i'm fine to run things on win 7 if it works there, even if natively it's "supposed" to be on win 9x or DOS.

Perhaps in some ways the problems of very old games on new systems is kinda solved and as both the interest and the pool of available old hardware diminishes its inevitable

badmojo wrote on Today, 13:06:

There seems to be an increase in old men yelling at clouds around here lately too which doesn't interest me.

i dabble in a spot of yelling at clouds at times, or at least pointing out that the clouds are gonna cloud no matter what we as specific niche enthusiasts want, think or do

and maybe many are getting actually older too! and perhaps partly its just that prices are up everywhere for new and old stuff so for hardware hobbyists things aren't having much fun

also, while it natural for people to stop posting for all kinds of reasons, there are some recent leavers who were long term contributors and seem to have gone and that seems like a shame too

One thing I’ve seen, having been in the “old computer “ scene since the 90’s is that originally you had people trying to continue to use very old equipment in a modern environment and were looking for ways to keep their 8088-386 as their daily driver if that can be believed. Back then you still had folks in poverty getting a free pc that was very old, ending up in the vintage forums because they expected and did only use that machine for a time.
I used old equipment on the then modern web successfully through about 2016 when everything broke hard.

Thats why Calmira and some other interesting projects exist as they were historically useful for something other than nostalgia.

As the modern web walled things off it made things increasingly more difficult to use old bare metal for pseudo modern purposes and also the reverse (hence this forum)

If anyone remembers uncreativelabs and bravenet there used to be honestly a lot of web rings and active forums that tangentially or directly were old computer related even if their topic didn’t appear to be.
That set of forums represented a much larger vintage pc base of users and I know dozens of folks who actually got off the bus 20-25 years ago when things were much more active and widely popular than now as the world moved on from them.

As time has marched forward the places people actively discuss topics like these has become much more consolidated and diverse and we’ve lost an immense number of knowledgeable folks and spaces .

The little pandemic bump in my mind was just a bump in a slowly eroding scene.
When you get down to it,
The commercialization of retro into a mainstream has actually paywalled the kid discovering real obsolete tech and taking it from a recycler to ask about online. (How I ended up here).
Things are so locked down now that my story is much more impossible to occur organically.

I’m hoping this hobby doesn’t go the way of toy trains or tin toy collecting (both of which are in decline) but based on the video game system market, I would say we are getting there.

Living wrote on Today, 12:38:

Nobody will convince me that a Commodore 64 or even a 486 its still useful today...

Up until 2016 my parents business was based around a high end computer photography system from 1987. Other proprietary high end software they had from 1993 that no longer has a modern equivalent we had emulated and hacked around to keep it working.

We would still be using it if disability, older grandparents needing care and other life events would not have occurred.

Sadly getting supplies and raw materials for making self printed fabrics, large cloth poster material, ceramics and other commodity materials has become extremely difficult, the selection at wholesale for production is about a tenth what it was even 15 years ago, the price has grown far beyond what any consumer would pay for spot work, let’s face it a big 3’ tall cloth wanted poster isn’t an archival artistic item justifying a massive cost but that is how it’s treated now.

The number of school, industry and .gov entities running old equipment to provide bespoke proprietary functions is less than 10 years ago but it’s still a thing in industry.

I don't engage with retro hardware threads as much anymore. Many topics that pop up nowadays have been discussed extensively in the past, and a simple forum search would often provide the answer.

At the moment, the gaming threads here are more fun for me. Reading about other people's experiences with certain titles has led me to broaden my horizons, and try a few games that I had neglected before.

A positive note on the hardware side, is perhaps TheRetroWeb having things curated has diverted a lot of questions into lookups of what's already available there.

Living wrote on Today, 12:38:

Nobody will convince me that a Commodore 64 or even a 486 its still useful today...

I mean, let's face it, it was never about usefulness. Us in the retro community, we don't actually play with this type of hardware because we find it "useful", we do it because it's fun . 😁

Getting back to the actual topic, I sometimes have to take some time off from retro stuff because life happens and I have a wife and daughter that I need to take care of.
Plus, I also have other hobbies, such as photography, playing the piano, etc.

However, I'm always lurking in the shadows, always keeping an eye on new posts & discussions. 😀