Miphee wrote on 2020-06-07, 10:11:

I just realized that I've been sitting on thousands of dollars worth of acid damaged boards all along.
I bought them for $3-5. Repaired them, and now I'll just upload them to Ebay and sell for $30-50. I'll conveniently hide the damaged and repaired sections of the boards, sell them AS-IS and reject all warranty claims. They work, right? Yes, they are ugly but it doesn't matter does it? No, I didn't take photos of the damaged parts but you should have asked for more photos so it's your fault. /S

C'mon guys, I'm disappointed.

Most people would be just fine with working boards that have already been repaired. Saves a lot of time and uncertainty for the buyer.

Trying to hide the fact that they have been repaired is just dumb.

$30-$50 for some boards, even ones that have already been repaired or need repair is low compared to what they have currently been going for.

Anyway I know it's probably the usual well known "how the market works" but some prices nowdays are becoming "ridicolous" for some components. I know that when things become more and more uncommon and rare people think they are selling "gold" but it's not always that way. I suppose it may be somehow ok that a card already rare back in its time nowdays it's almost impossible to find has some price but not everything from that period. Then I know, none tell us we must buy the card or the components and can skip to the next one will find, but hobbies nowdays are becoming more expensive than essential things.
Sometimes it makes me thinking if I should sell every components I sort of collect and switch to other hobbies, I don't know.. to read books? 😁
Other times it happens I came back to the same hobby and become again looking for mainboards, cards, components.. 😁

386SX wrote on 2020-06-08, 15:41:

Anyway I know it's probably the usual well known "how the market works" but some prices nowdays are becoming "ridicolous" for some components. I know that when things become more and more uncommon and rare people think they are selling "gold" but it's not always that way. I suppose it may be somehow ok that a card already rare back in its time nowdays it's almost impossible to find has some price but not everything from that period. Then I know, none tell us we must buy the card or the components and can skip to the next one will find, but hobbies nowdays are becoming more expensive than essential things.
Sometimes it makes me thinking if I should sell every components I sort of collect and switch to other hobbies, I don't know.. to read books? 😁
Other times it happens I came back to the same hobby and become again looking for mainboards, cards, components.. 😁

I quit the retro console gaming hobby over this, the social pressures literally turned me into a psycho. You can read about my experience here on reddit:

*LINK TO BE INSERTED WHEN IM AT MY DESK*

I was sick of games that sold millions of copies going for $80+ and the gems going for $180. Everyone knew the games were valuable now which meant you couldn't find them cheap from someone who was unaware, and you would have crazies and man children that spend all their time looking for deals to compete against. I sold my whole collection, I realized I would never have the kind of collection people like MetalJesus or AVGN had unless I suddenly became an urbanite making $150k+ a year.

I'm starting to notice others getting into retro PCs and I hate it. I had assumed the skill level and learning curb would keep trend setters out but we have people like LinusTechTips doing some retro stuff and people like 8BitGuy and PhilsComputerLab (Phil, if your reading this your content is great, but it draws attention to the hobby) getting more popular and showing tutorials of how to do stuff.

I run the largest FB Market place for my town, it has around 20k people in it and I've removed all the other PC and game collectors and anyone that tells other people these items are worth money. I rely on people buying the "recycling centers will charge you to get rid of these" line to sell me stuff for peanuts. I just don't care anymore, I will do anything to protect my interests. We need to gatekeep this hobby better. It's getting hard for the average man with a 30k a year salary to keep up.

well it has advantages too, more people getting into retro PCs means more hardware gets saved eventually... I hope.
of course it means things are going to become less scarce for the individual, but the total number of retro hardware in circulation and saved from being scrapped probably increased.

gatekeeping is never the right solutiom imo.

the most annoying thing to me is that a lot of people assume that something is worth a lot just because it is "old". there's these sellers on ebay that literally list every single ISA card for €50-€100 no matter if it's an abundant I/O card or a rare and sought after sound card.

I've been into retro stuff for the last 15+ years, but back then I was preoccupied with different things and a lot of personal issues also simply didn't have money (even though I probably could have gotten so much for free back then, and even then most of what I had collected got thrown out by my parents eventually... I'm still getting sad about that) so I only really started getting more stuff early last year which is funny because since then I've been watching the "market" closely, and prices for some things have simply exploded.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:05:

I quit the retro console gaming hobby over this, the social pressures literally turned me into a psycho. You can read about my e […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2020-06-08, 15:41:

Anyway I know it's probably the usual well known "how the market works" but some prices nowdays are becoming "ridicolous" for some components. I know that when things become more and more uncommon and rare people think they are selling "gold" but it's not always that way. I suppose it may be somehow ok that a card already rare back in its time nowdays it's almost impossible to find has some price but not everything from that period. Then I know, none tell us we must buy the card or the components and can skip to the next one will find, but hobbies nowdays are becoming more expensive than essential things.
Sometimes it makes me thinking if I should sell every components I sort of collect and switch to other hobbies, I don't know.. to read books? 😁
Other times it happens I came back to the same hobby and become again looking for mainboards, cards, components.. 😁

I quit the retro console gaming hobby over this, the social pressures literally turned me into a psycho. You can read about my experience here on reddit:

*LINK TO BE INSERTED WHEN IM AT MY DESK*

I was sick of games that sold millions of copies going for $80+ and the gems going for $180. Everyone knew the games were valuable now which meant you couldn't find them cheap from someone who was unaware, and you would have crazies and man children that spend all their time looking for deals to compete against. I sold my whole collection, I realized I would never have the kind of collection people like MetalJesus or AVGN had unless I suddenly became an urbanite making $150k+ a year.

I'm starting to notice others getting into retro PCs and I hate it. I had assumed the skill level and learning curb would keep trend setters out but we have people like LinusTechTips doing some retro stuff and people like 8BitGuy and PhilsComputerLab (Phil, if your reading this your content is great, but it draws attention to the hobby) getting more popular and showing tutorials of how to do stuff.

I run the largest FB Market place for my town, it has around 20k people in it and I've removed all the other PC and game collectors and anyone that tells other people these items are worth money. I rely on people buying the "recycling centers will charge you to get rid of these" line to sell me stuff for peanuts. I just don't care anymore, I will do anything to protect my interests. We need to gatekeep this hobby better. It's getting hard for the average man with a 30k a year salary to keep up.

I live on a about 25k a year, and I have to say anyone complying about new folks in the hobby driving up price out of what the average folks can afford is nuts.
Aside form a few parts that tend to always be rather high priced like the adlib gold, most parts if not all older parts can be bought by the average Joe if they are good at managing their money and willing to take the time to find good deals.
Remember asking crazy prices does not mean the parts are selling for crazy prices and when it comes to eBay take a good 10-15% off the sold price and you would likely have the price it would sell for on other sites.
Removing listings from a for your for sale site and lieing to the seller about "recycling centers will charge you to get rid of these" so you can get them for free... That is selfish butt hole move.

EDIT

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-06-05, 00:05:

So I went to pickup "a few" systems in a nearby town a couple of days ago. Well by a few he meant 25+ full ATX towers. Somehow m […]
Show full quote

So I went to pickup "a few" systems in a nearby town a couple of days ago. Well by a few he meant 25+ full ATX towers. Somehow managed to shove them all into my Grand Marquis (glad I sprung for the Monroe Gas Magnum HD Shocks a couple months back....) Alot of generic stuff but a few goodies thrown in. Just started working on this beauty:

350W Rosewill PSU
Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI Socket 939
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2GHZ I believe)
3GB of RAM
GeForce 7900GTO 512MB
8GB HDD

Reseated the GPU and reset the BIOS and it fired right up.... into Windows 7. This machine was used way past its acceptable lifespan. I have a 2nd 7900GTO sourced as soon as the dude feels safe leaving his house to ship it and I think I'm going to throw a AthlonFX (or X2, not sure yet) in and a 2nd 7900GTO along with my X-FI ExtremeAudio and have an absolute banger of a DX9C system. Maybe I can finally play FEAR at 1920x1200. Needless to say I'm DBAN'ing W7 (part of my deal with this guy is any HDD gets a secure deletion) back to hole from wence it came and putting XP on it.

That case is such a fucking work of art. Does anyone know who made this? It looks like a Falcon Northwest blue to me but I can't find any pictures of FNW cases matching this design.

In more modern news I'm rebuilding my main system onto 4th Gen Intel since thats at a low price point now and still provides performance similar in gaming to a Coffee Lake i5.

* Customized Red/Black CoolerMaster CM690-II Advanced with 5.25 USB3.0 Bay adapter and a Drawer adapter. Also has a 2.5/3.5 inch X-DOCK Hotswap bay ontop.
* ASUS Z87 Deluxe (has built in ASMedia USB/SATA expander)
* Core i7 4770S w/ CoolerMaster Hyper212 EVO (given for free)
* 16GB G.SKill RiPJAWS X XMP2 2133MHZ
* NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780Ti 3GB CC OC (carry over)
- LG IPS 27" 1920x1080, Dell UltraSharp 17" 1280x1024
* Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium FATAL1TY (PCIe version, 109db/115db 5.1/Stereo SNR. Not far behind a Xonar Essence)
- Sony MDR-7506 Studio Reference Headphones, Sony Soundbar (can't remember the model, nice sounding though with big subwoofer) for speakers, Boom mic.
* 128GB NVME SSD (via PCIe to NVME adapter)
* 1x2TB HDD, 2x 1TB HDD
* Creality Ender3

Apparently new people in the hobby driving up prices has not stooped the average joe with 30K year job from getting 25+ PC's all at once.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:05:

It's getting hard for the average man with a 30k a year salary to keep up.

Keep up? Seems like you had a quite strange attitude then. A hobby is for having fun (and wasting time), not to keep up with others. I don't give a shit about owning rare or expensive stuff. I get what I want to have in my collection, not more and not less.

yep, it's not a competition (though you could argue, that on ebay it kinda is x3)

also that's easy for you to say with several GUS cards in your posession ;p
scnr 😁

I am more about "quantity" anyways, I like saving as much stuff as I can, even if it's just generic stuff that doesn't get a lot of attention.
I avoid paying a lot of money to get that one specific card, that's why I concentrate more on big lots to get a little bit of everything.

derSammler wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:38:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:05:

It's getting hard for the average man with a 30k a year salary to keep up.

Keep up? Seems like you had a quite strange attitude then. A hobby is for having fun (and wasting time), not to keep up with others. I don't give a shit about owning rare or expensive stuff. I get what I want to have in my collection, not more and not less.

I want the kind of collection people like Artex have. I actually don't understand Artexs spending at all, even for someone making a shit ton of money it would seem unsustainable. I'm convinced he is the son of a south American dictator or something.

And no, some items are not affordable to the average person. Anything Roland is $400+ now, anything usable Amiga is $1000+ for a working system, GUS's go for $300+ etc. All the coolest hardware is getting crazy expensive, and I don't think things like the GUS were particularly rare.

anyone probably wants a collection like Artex has... being unhappy if you can't is the wrong mindset though imho.
I for one am happy that Artex saves all those boxes and doesn't throw them out like others often do, and let's us take part by sharing it with us here.

working Amiga 500s while expensive imo go for something like €100-200 here.
sound canvases and the like can often be found under €100 still, I paid less than €50 for most of mine, I paid €50 exactly for my MT32 only last year when they were already going for €200+ on ebay sometimes.
I've also seen several GUS cards go for around €100 but even that I deem too expensive for myself still, hence why I don't have one ^^ (didn't have the luck to find one in a lot yet)

it's a game of patience.

yes, things are going to become rarer, and yet there's always new stuff to be found.
but being unhappy because you can't get this or that... then yes, this probably isn't the right hobby.

if you want to go deep dive on social inequality, be my guest I fully agree with that, but retro computer collecting is probably the wrong space imo because none of what we collect here is essential really.
and anyone who enjoys retro stuff can have access through emulation for next to nothing, which is one thing emulation is really good for imo.

Probably same things happens to every other hobbies. There are people collecting 70's to 90's Lego and their prices are even more absurd. Back in the early 2000 years for the PC hobby only 3dfx stuff had this price trend, with many fan probably not even sleeping to have the rarest card and if you didn't stay focused on your own priorities you easily got yourself convinced into the competition. But other components you could have found for low prices. I remember finding on ebay entire PC 386 or 486 for 30-40 euros functional. Nowdays even a S3 Virge/DX, a card built in numbers probably so high it can't be numbered, has absurd prices.
Ok there're much more expensive hobbies for sure but the trend it's taking make me thinking.

well lego has their own despicable group of people entirely, people that are buying up stock of NEW releases waiting until it is sold out only to then resell it for more on ebay.

S3 Virge cards routinely go for less than €10, and complete 386 or 486 systems can still often be had for less than €50, funnily enough complete systems often sell for less than loose hardware.

to stay somewhat on topic... got this TE430VX with CPU and COAST and a very nice matching green heatsink :3

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:43:

derSammler wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:38:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:05:

It's getting hard for the average man with a 30k a year salary to keep up.

Keep up? Seems like you had a quite strange attitude then. A hobby is for having fun (and wasting time), not to keep up with others. I don't give a shit about owning rare or expensive stuff. I get what I want to have in my collection, not more and not less.

I want the kind of collection people like Artex have. I actually don't understand Artexs spending at all, even for someone making a shit ton of money it would seem unsustainable. I'm convinced he is the son of a south American dictator or something.

And no, some items are not affordable to the average person. Anything Roland is $400+ now, anything usable Amiga is $1000+ for a working system, GUS's go for $300+ etc. All the coolest hardware is getting crazy expensive, and I don't think things like the GUS were particularly rare.

were on earth are you getting those prices?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:43:

And no, some items are not affordable to the average person. Anything Roland is $400+ now, anything usable Amiga is $1000+ for a working system, GUS's go for $300+ etc. All the coolest hardware is getting crazy expensive, and I don't think things like the GUS were particularly rare.

In the US, and on eBay (most expensive place of all), within the past 3 months I've purchased an Amiga 500 with 1084S-D2 monitor for around $300 total, and a GUS Classic for less than $130. Most of the time I look at scrap lots on various platforms, because I've found quite a bit for dirt cheap - ATI Mach64 VLB, Voodoo 3 PCI, ISA IDE cached controller, Cirrus Logic VLB video cards of varying models, Sound Blaster CT1350B, 3rd party Adlib replica from the late 80's or early 90's, a few awesome 386/486 cases with MHz displays, etc. Reselling the excess 'scrap' I didn't want actually netted me a profit.

You just have to actively look, set search alerts, look on local marketplaces, look at recycle centers, etc. You can't just pop on eBay and instantly find something that everyone else wants too and expect to pay $5 for it.

wiretap wrote on 2020-06-08, 17:30:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:43:

And no, some items are not affordable to the average person. Anything Roland is $400+ now, anything usable Amiga is $1000+ for a working system, GUS's go for $300+ etc. All the coolest hardware is getting crazy expensive, and I don't think things like the GUS were particularly rare.

In the US, and on eBay (most expensive place of all), within the past 3 months I've purchased an Amiga 500 with 1084S-D2 monitor for around $300 total, and a GUS Classic for less than $130. Most of the time I look at scrap lots on various platforms, because I've found quite a bit for dirt cheap - ATI Mach64 VLB, Voodoo 3 PCI, ISA IDE cached controller, Cirrus Logic VLB video cards of varying models, Sound Blaster CT1350B, 3rd party Adlib replica from the late 80's or early 90's, a few awesome 386/486 cases with MHz displays, etc.

You just have to actively look, set search alerts, look on local marketplaces, look at recycle centers, etc. You can't just pop on eBay and instantly find something that everyone else wants too and expect to pay $5 for it.

Well put.

That's a nice board you got imi what do you have planned for it?

I'm not sure gatekeeping is really effective in driving down the prices of this stuff, what tends to happen in that case is that people who lack the knowledge but are somewhat aware of the retro computing scene end up assigning arbitrary prices to items and believe they're sitting on a gold mine. So then you get common, bottom of the barrel stuff like Trident and Cirrus Logic listed at > $100, which are items that may be interesting and useful if they were priced reasonably... but they end up rotting there because no one sane would buy those at that price and the seller won't budge with the price because it's "Vintage!! Retro!!1!".

One pet peeves of mine is the price of the SB AWE32s (the real ones, not the SB32): not that I'm even interested in those, but why are they so expensive? Is it because they are "long" cards or something and they look impressive? Many even have the non-authentic FM but still sell for nearly $100! In comparison, I recently got a CT1770 with bug-free DSP AND real OPL3 for about $20... this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

So, maybe being more "open" when it comes to the hobby results in less ridiculous prices for common, low/mid-end items. Of course, you're not going to get a cheap 3DO Blaster or V5-6000, because the extreme rarity and collectable nature of those already drives up the price quite high regardless of how much exposure they get.

Should we start a new "Collecting rants" topic?

TheMobRules wrote on 2020-06-08, 17:44:

So, maybe being more "open" when it comes to the hobby results in less ridiculous prices for common, low/mid-end items. Of course, you're not going to get a cheap 3DO Blaster or V5-6000, because the extreme rarity and collectable nature of those already drives up the price quite high regardless of how much exposure they get.

Which baffles me because 3DO discs read on a standard PC optical drive and 3DO emulation is damn near perfect. Why the hell would you pay so much for one of those 3DO Blasters? Just so you can say you have it? I suppose that's the point I guess. I don't think some buyers realize the discs just work in a PC with 3DO emulation and the need for such an expensive card to play those games is not needed.

imi wrote on 2020-06-08, 17:21:

to stay somewhat on topic... got this TE430VX with CPU and COAST and a very nice matching green heatsink :3

That's a nice board, they are built like a tank! I have the LT430TX, which looks really similar but it has a 430TX chipset. Mine came from a 1997 Gateway 2000 (my first "retro" pickup during the early 2000s), with the exact same green heatsink (AAVID brand I believe).

I was able to flash the Intel BIOS by using the recovery feature in order to have the latest one and get rid of the Gateway branding. Unfortunately it came with the side effect that the on-board ATI VGA does not work due to some resource conflict. Do you know if yours OEM or Intel-branded?

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:43:

I want the kind of collection people like Artex have.

Why? If we all have the same items, none of our collections would be anything special. Be different.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2020-06-08, 16:43:

Anything Roland is $400+ now, anything usable Amiga is $1000+ for a working system, GUS's go for $300+ etc.

I own about 10 devices from Roland and they didn't cost me $400 in total. Only the MT-32 is expensive, which I don't care about, since I got a fully-compatible RA-50 instead. Now for the Amiga, I know they are not that common in the US, but for $1000 you can even get a A3000 or A4000, which are the most expensive ones. You are really exaggerating here. You should be able to get a nice A500 for $100-150 and a A1200 for about twice as much. GUS seems right, but that's a card which is overhyped anyway.