dormcat wrote on 2024-09-29, 22:36:

Glad to see younger folks here. As a photographer, however, I remember the frenzy of lomography a few years ago (that destroyed many good E-6 reversal slide films by developing in C-41 formulae) and the more recent surge of old compact camera using CCD sensor (with much smaller scale though). The much steeper learning curve of retro computing (all you need are compatible batteries and film cartridges / memory cards for a working film / CCD compact camera; the rest is just point and click) unavoidably limits its popularity.

I would say that's entirely true only for retro-computing up to, oh, about the XP era, though. Anything newer is... basically... very similar to setting up a brand new system. Installing Vista or 7 vs 11 is... not that different.

That being said, I will note that smartphone concepts seem to have entered people's brains, e.g. you hear people wanting to 'factory reset' laptops. And... yes, Win8+ does have a reset mode now, but traditionally, you 'reset' a Windows machine by pulling out the restore media (or Microsoft disc), formatting the partition, and reinstalling. So yes, if you have smartphone brain, retrocomputing has a significant learning curve. Maybe I just take it for granted because I'm old and... frankly, the emotional stakes are so much lower (it's not like I'm breaking the expensive family computer if I can't get the OS running/happy on a retro machine).

And the final observation I would make - non-PC-compatible platforms have much higher learning curves and just general dependencies. Look at vintage Macs for example - anything from the beige era requires unique monitors (or adapters), unique peripherals, some exotic ways to get data into the thing, etc. Mostly things that haven't been made since about 1999. Not to mention the classic MacOS is... quirky... in various ways that are not logical if you didn't grow up using it. It's funny - back in the day, the Mac would have been much, much simpler to unbox and get up and running and be productive with, but today, a retro 98SE system, say, is much easier to get up and running than a beige Mac.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-29, 23:01:

But... unless you have a near unobtainium i865 C2-capable motherboard

Funny how something available brand new 5 years or so ago is now considered unobtainium.

Namrok wrote on 2024-09-29, 16:39:

I think interest in retro hardware peaked? I think a lot of people (including myself) got a bit carried away during COVID. IMHO some of the pressure on the market from that has come off. For example, I've been eyeballing a Voodoo 3 on ebay for years and years now. And I think, just from casually keeping an eye on it, that the sale price I see has slowly crept down from $200+ to $150-ish? I donno, maybe I'm imagining it.

I think you're right. The pandemic definitely triggered a spike in interest since a lot of people suddenly had more time on their hands for hobbies 'n other things.

I've also noticed prices ease on certain hardware just in the last year. For example, a couple Roland SCC-1 cards sold for about ~$300 (USD) on Ebay. It wasn't that long ago they would sell for much more.

On the flipside, some hardware like GeForce 4 and FX cards seemed to have climbed up in price. I wonder if this reflects a greater interest in 2000's era hardware in comparison to earlier decades.

well, they're the phil cards. with enough seo and algo, you can turn trash into desirable. Wait until someone develops a fixation on CentaurHauls to make every WinChip an underdog along with outrageously rare Windows Sound System cards from AWARD-WINNING PRESTIGEOUS GAMER HEADSET MAKER Turtle Beach

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-09-30, 00:27:

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-29, 23:01:

But... unless you have a near unobtainium i865 C2-capable motherboard

Funny how something available brand new 5 years or so ago is now considered unobtainium.

Funny yet logical - presumably something (pandemic? YouTubers?) triggered interest in these boards, and the people who bought them are going to be retrocomputing enthusiasts/collectors so they're not exactly flipping them on eBay.

There are other things that are unobtainium yet apparently used to be super-common, like those HP thin clients, I forget the model number, the model that's really really good for DOS. eBay is still full of cheap other thin clients, the ones that aren't anywhere near as good. Frankly, I think some retro YouTubers have enough of a following that if they do a video on a given thing that was super-duper-plentiful on eBay, that's it, those things are gone.

zuldan wrote on 2024-09-29, 11:20:

A Voodoo 2, 15 years ago cost about $40, they now go for around $300. In a few years from now $300 will be considered a

bargain.

I got my Voodoos (except the V5 5500) from scrap boxes on ebay and such 15-20 years ago...I wouldn't have payed more the 10 EUR for a V1, V2 or V3 2000/3000...and I wouldn't pay more the 20 EUR today for the naked card. Prices are absolutely insane today.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-29, 15:29:

But yeah, I leave a lot of that social media alone, if I look on youtube, it's for what has been done with a particular thing, rather than getting worked up about what the latest new old thing is by catching every latest video.

Recently I discovered Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" (-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ41hqlV0Kk) for me (it is three years older than me), I love 80s music and the cool music videos from back then - they don't look so super-ultra-high-professional such these days and for sure are real analog videos w/o computer animation (and if, you can clearly divide them from the real takes) . ...and then I discovered a video where two young people watching this video and comment (a bit) on it and watched it myself, because I thought OK, maybe they have some kind of analysis...but they were talking some slang which I just understand at 20/30% before and after watching the "Young Turks" video themself - most time you just see two people with headphones watching a video. Long story short - this is weird and this is what many people do on YT...producing useless stuff and wasting their (and others) time. Watch it yourself if you want to waste your time (-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCXKaFD7WnA).

Namrok wrote on 2024-09-29, 16:39:

For example, I've been eyeballing a Voodoo 3 on ebay for years and years now. And I think, just from casually keeping an eye on it, that the sale price I see has slowly crept down from $200+ to $150-ish? I donno, maybe I'm imagining it.

As said above...this is insane.

Namrok wrote on 2024-09-29, 16:39:

I do question whether there will be interest in retro hardware from the 2010's. I wasn't a kid then, but it all seems so boring. And hardware will be the least of their problems trying to re-experience the software of their childhood. Most of it was service based, and those will be shut down. It's gonna suck wanting to "go back" as a child of the 2010's, because there will be nothing to go back to. Nothing to share with your own children.

That's the question. I stopped playing new games when they started to require internet connection (except Half-Life 2...man, it's Half-Life, but I wasn't happy with Steam). I loved to have diskettes, CDs, DVDs or (legally) downloaded files (complete installers) and if there were patches, you could download these also as complete installers.

leileilol wrote on 2024-09-30, 00:35:

well, they're the phil cards. with enough seo and algo, you can turn trash into desirable. Wait until someone develops a fixation on CentaurHauls to make every WinChip an underdog along with outrageously rare Windows Sound System cards from AWARD-WINNING PRESTIGEOUS GAMER HEADSET MAKER Turtle Beach

Maybe I can do this with very useful 56k soft modems, analog TV cards, Realtek 10M and Fast Ethernet NICs, 4MB FPM/EDO, 16/32 MB SDRAM, 128/256 MB DDR RAM, GF2 MX, GF FX 5200, Rage Pro and other really, really rare PC hardware I just own "a few" parts of... xD

kind regards
soggi

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-29, 23:11:

That being said, I will note that smartphone concepts seem to have entered people's brains, e.g. you hear people wanting to 'factory reset' laptops. And... yes, Win8+ does have a reset mode now, but traditionally, you 'reset' a Windows machine by pulling out the restore media (or Microsoft disc), formatting the partition, and reinstalling. So yes, if you have smartphone brain, retrocomputing has a significant learning curve.

Now this raised a new question: Which make and model was the first computer that advertised system restore partition by default (not the function provided by Windows)? IIRC this practice started around mid-2000s.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-29, 23:11:

And the final observation I would make - non-PC-compatible platforms have much higher learning curves and just general dependencies. Look at vintage Macs for example - anything from the beige era requires unique monitors (or adapters), unique peripherals, some exotic ways to get data into the thing, etc. Mostly things that haven't been made since about 1999. Not to mention the classic MacOS is... quirky... in various ways that are not logical if you didn't grow up using it. It's funny - back in the day, the Mac would have been much, much simpler to unbox and get up and running and be productive with, but today, a retro 98SE system, say, is much easier to get up and running than a beige Mac.

Backward compatibility has always been highly valued in x86 communities, but not quite so in Apple's. After all Apple has changed its CPU design four times: 6502 > 68K > PPC > x86-64 > Apple Silicon. Any version of OS X or macOS drops supports to computers about six years old; itself is only supported for about three years. I'm not deciding right or wrong here; it's just the Apple's userbase has a very different mindset and value about backward compatibility.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-09-30, 00:31:

On the flipside, some hardware like GeForce 4 and FX cards seemed to have climbed up in price. I wonder if this reflects a greater interest in 2000's era hardware in comparison to earlier decades.

I presume those cards are primarily acquired for 98SE systems. I think the GF4 was basically the default choice for a high-powered 98SE AGP setup; the FX, well, had its dreadful reputation back in the day so I would presume supply is somewhat lower, but folks like Phil have done a good job promoting that lineup as a good 98SE option. Interesting that the ATI 9700/9800 seems mostly ignored.

In terms of greater 'interest' in 2000s-era hardware, I would only note three things:
1) In terms of 'peak nostalgia potentia', that is probably around... 1996-1999. That's the period when many, many families first got Windows machines, and in my view, pre-Voodoo gaming was largely driven by people using computers purchased for other purposes to play games. Fewer people had DOS/Windows PCs in, say, the early 1990s, therefore smaller base of people with nostalgic personal experience of that era. So that may explain why 98SE seems to be such a huge point of focus...
2) that early 2000s hardware seems... well-suited... for 98SE builds
3) supply of 'good' stuff prior to that era is... much more scarce. I could go to eBay in the next 15 minutes and find a whole bunch of reasonable options for a 98SE system, and some weirder options. I need to start a thread about this, but I have been looking for months for a reasonable DOS/ISA system, and other than maybe two clean Katmai PIII rigs that got away from me because I was slow to make up my mind, I... haven't been able to find anything particularly appealing. Super-duper-yellowed-yucky-looking large OEM systems, AT motherboards, overpriced pre-assembled retro systems that inevitably seem to get one component or two 'wrong', vague listings for systems that don't tell you what any of the cards in them are, etc.

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-30, 01:19:

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-29, 23:11:

That being said, I will note that smartphone concepts seem to have entered people's brains, e.g. you hear people wanting to 'factory reset' laptops. And... yes, Win8+ does have a reset mode now, but traditionally, you 'reset' a Windows machine by pulling out the restore media (or Microsoft disc), formatting the partition, and reinstalling. So yes, if you have smartphone brain, retrocomputing has a significant learning curve.

Now this raised a new question: Which make and model was the first computer that advertised system restore partition by default (not the function provided by Windows)? IIRC this practice started in mid-2000s.

Well, Dell in the late 1990s had a thing where they would put a recovery 'volume' at the end of the hard drive. Not in any kind of reserved way. It was just some bits on the drive outside of any formal files system. If you never wrote to that area of the drive, you kept the recovery image. But if you did a lot of disk writes, whoops, it could get overwritten and then you needed the OS media and the 'ResourceCD' as Dell called it.

Until some point in the early 2000s, hard drives were definitely too small for official recovery partitions and it was all recovery media. But you're right - certainly the late-2000s Vista/7 machines from large OEMs had recovery partitions, I just... completely forgot about them...! I guess what makes them different from the Win8/smartphone-style factory restore is that you have to trigger them through some special boot procedure rather than from the existing OS itself. But that's a relatively small difference. I think that's also around the time they stopped bundling any kind of OS reinstall media...

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-30, 01:19:

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-29, 23:11:

And the final observation I would make - non-PC-compatible platforms have much higher learning curves and just general dependencies. Look at vintage Macs for example - anything from the beige era requires unique monitors (or adapters), unique peripherals, some exotic ways to get data into the thing, etc. Mostly things that haven't been made since about 1999. Not to mention the classic MacOS is... quirky... in various ways that are not logical if you didn't grow up using it. It's funny - back in the day, the Mac would have been much, much simpler to unbox and get up and running and be productive with, but today, a retro 98SE system, say, is much easier to get up and running than a beige Mac.

Backward compatibility has always been highly valued in x86 communities, but not quite so in Apple's. After all Apple has changed its CPU design four times: 6502 > 68K > PPC > x86-64 > Apple Silicon. Any version of OS X or macOS drops supports to computers about six years old; itself is only supported for about three years. I'm not deciding right or wrong here; it's just the Apple's userbase has a very different mindset and value about backward compatibility.

I don't think I would count 6502 since that was never used in a 'Macintosh'-branded product.

But I think the explanation is much simpler: in the mid-1990s and earlier, there somehow could be a market of Mac keyboards (ADB), Mac printers (serial/AppleTalk), Mac monitors (magical DB-15), Mac modems (external), Mac video cards (NuBus), Mac hard drives (SCSI), Mac floppy drives/controllers, etc. That became unsustainable as Mac market share shrank in the dark era, especially when the Windows side grew dramatically bigger and bigger. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he talked about embracing "industry standards" (i.e. PC standards) and that was the end of all those things. VGA/DVI/DisplayPort, IDE, USB, 1394 (which Apple certainly hoped would become more of an industry standard than it ended up being), etc took over. (PCI and PC-world video chips from ATI had already entered the Mac world earlier.) And so... the beige Macs from before this era have all these quaint requirements for peripherals that stopped being made in about 1999.

Meanwhile, PC world... well, you could still buy new PS/2 keyboards well into the mid-late 2000s, no? I saw a large OEM 'gaming' system in a store a few years ago that still had DVI ports. (DVI in 2019?! really? I think every monitor made since about 2008-9 with DVI also has DisplayPort) Everybody in PC world is terrified of something with insufficient backwards compatibility being returned that they just don't drop anything...

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-29, 23:01:

But... unless you have a near unobtainium i865 C2-capable motherboard, the C2D/C2Q is a bit too new for easy Win98SE, and it's a bit too old for a late XP box.

I guess it depends on how you define "easy". For example, I don't think it's too difficult to install Win98SE on a P35 chipset, though dealing with SATA drivers and the extra RAM (more than 512 MB) can be somewhat bothersome the first time. Technically, you could use an IDE hard drive smaller than 128 GB and a single stick of 512 MB RAM to avoid that.

Also, you don't need chipset drivers for Win98 to work on such a platform, just a compatible PCIe graphics card. And it doesn't have to be an expensive one either, any run of the mill Radeon X600 should work with Catalyst 6.2 drivers. For sound, a SBLive or Audigy card will be fine, as long as you don't expect great DOS compatibility on such a "modern" chipset. But for plain Win9x gaming, it should be ok.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-30, 01:40:

Until some point in the early 2000s, hard drives were definitely too small for official recovery partitions and it was all recovery media. But you're right - certainly the late-2000s Vista/7 machines from large OEMs had recovery partitions, I just... completely forgot about them...! I guess what makes them different from the Win8/smartphone-style factory restore is that you have to trigger them through some special boot procedure rather than from the existing OS itself. But that's a relatively small difference. I think that's also around the time they stopped bundling any kind of OS reinstall media...

I bought an HP Pavilion ZE4000 series in early 2003 (March or April) and still got its bundled recovery discs. My next laptop was an MSI U100 netbook bought in January 2009 and it had both a recovery partition (WinXP SP3 on its 160 GB SATA HDD) and a recovery disc (but the netbook had no optical drive 😅 ). Unfortunately I didn't have any new computer in between.

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-30, 01:40:

I don't think I would count 6502 since that was never used in a 'Macintosh'-branded product.

Have you noticed that I didn't use Macintosh but Apple, haven't you? 😉 Both The 8-Bit Guy and the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley mentioned how Steve Jobs intentionally hindered and/or interfered Apple II sales and developments in order to promote Macintosh, which he considered as his pet project.

And I just found out that Star Trek veteran J.G. Hertzler (chancellor Martok and other characters) played director Ridley Scott during the filming of that famous Super Bowl commercial! 😆

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-30, 01:40:

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he talked about embracing "industry standards" (i.e. PC standards) and that was the end of all those things. VGA/DVI/DisplayPort, IDE, USB, 1394 (which Apple certainly hoped would become more of an industry standard than it ended up being), etc took over. (PCI and PC-world video chips from ATI had already entered the Mac world earlier.) And so... the beige Macs from before this era have all these quaint requirements for peripherals that stopped being made in about 1999.

This is why I didn't like Apple's culture: whenever Jobs made a decision, most Apple users would rationalize his decision automatically, particularly regarding matters of backward compatibility. Some users might complain in lowered voices but in the end they'd agree with Jobs "for greater good." 🙄

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-30, 01:40:

Meanwhile, PC world... well, you could still buy new PS/2 keyboards well into the mid-late 2000s, no? I saw a large OEM 'gaming' system in a store a few years ago that still had DVI ports. (DVI in 2019?! really? I think every monitor made since about 2008-9 with DVI also has DisplayPort) Everybody in PC world is terrified of something with insufficient backwards compatibility being returned that they just don't drop anything...

Em, you can buy brand new PS/2 keyboards by Logitech TODAY (model K100), and many GeForce 16 and 20 series cards still had DVI ports; GeForce got rid of DVI in the 30 series.

Just checked: You can buy brand new R7 240, GF 210, GT 710, 730, 1030 at Coolpc, the largest chain of PC components for DIYers in Taiwan.

Those who don't know about Coolpc can check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D5HCXWZthk
BTW the cosplayers were at Taipei Expo Dome, not the Guanghua Market where Coolpc is at. 🙄

Y'all are forgetting the 65C816 in the Apple IIGS ... but that became more of a sidebar. Woz said he wanted to take it to 8Mhz and run rings around Macs, but that might have just been to piss off Jobs at that point 🤣

leileilol wrote on 2024-09-30, 00:35:

well, they're the phil cards. with enough seo and algo, you can turn trash into desirable. Wait until someone develops a fixation on CentaurHauls to make every WinChip an underdog along with outrageously rare Windows Sound System cards from AWARD-WINNING PRESTIGEOUS GAMER HEADSET MAKER Turtle Beach

You don't say that again.. or else you want your 233MMX chips to trade for 100 bucks because of HIDDEN UNTAPPED cache slowdown potential?

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-30, 01:40:

dormcat wrote on 2024-09-30, 01:19:

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-29, 23:11:

That being said, I will note that smartphone concepts seem to have entered people's brains, e.g. you hear people wanting to 'factory reset' laptops. And... yes, Win8+ does have a reset mode now, but traditionally, you 'reset' a Windows machine by pulling out the restore media (or Microsoft disc), formatting the partition, and reinstalling. So yes, if you have smartphone brain, retrocomputing has a significant learning curve.

Now this raised a new question: Which make and model was the first computer that advertised system restore partition by default (not the function provided by Windows)? IIRC this practice started in mid-2000s.

Well, Dell in the late 1990s had a thing where they would put a recovery 'volume' at the end of the hard drive. Not in any kind of reserved way. It was just some bits on the drive outside of any formal files system. If you never wrote to that area of the drive, you kept the recovery image. But if you did a lot of disk writes, whoops, it could get overwritten and then you needed the OS media and the 'ResourceCD' as Dell called it.

Until some point in the early 2000s, hard drives were definitely too small for official recovery partitions and it was all recovery media. But you're right - certainly the late-2000s Vista/7 machines from large OEMs had recovery partitions, I just... completely forgot about them...! I guess what makes them different from the Win8/smartphone-style factory restore is that you have to trigger them through some special boot procedure rather than from the existing OS itself. But that's a relatively small difference. I think that's also around the time they stopped bundling any kind of OS reinstall media...

My old Compaq Presario 2286 has a recovery partition, but it also came with a restore CD anyway (which is good because the recovery utility doesn't work 🤣). The restore CD blindly sets the size of the recovery partition to 25% of the drive's capacity, and the original drive was 4.3GB.

I remember reinstalling Windows on my parents' Dell in the mid-2000s (more than once), but I never knew that it had built-in recovery tools. I just used the Windows CD that it came with, and then I installed software and drivers using the huge stack of CDs that it came with (including two copies of the same version of Office with different labels for some reason).

Besides, the recovery partitions became a target for malware. There was malware that would inject itself into the recovery partition, so going through the recovery procedure would reinstall the malware. I wasted five DVDs when I bought my Toshiba laptop in 2011 just in case my custom hosts file missed something (which didn't happen) or the hard drive died (which did happen).

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-30, 11:15:

Y'all are forgetting the 65C816 in the Apple IIGS ... but that became more of a sidebar. Woz said he wanted to take it to 8Mhz and run rings around Macs, but that might have just been to piss off Jobs at that point 🤣

The story I heard was that the manufacturer of the 65C816 promised 8MHz, but they struggled so much to hit 4MHz that Apple dropped the clocks below 3MHz to get enough chips to meet demand.

I feel the end of Windows 10 support is going to be quite an event in cheap hardware availability. I'm waiting for the public to be made fully aware of it. Windows 11 cuts off a lot of machines. It's ridiculous really, saying something like a Kaby Lake machine can no longer be easily used. So wasteful.

But on the topic of retro thrills, I think there will always be a fresh group looking for their particular nostalgic experience.

Interest, no. Accessibility, yes.
Working Windows 98 compatible hardware, even the younger parts start to get a little rare and prices are rising. Even the more decent Pentium 4 era stuff are either got scrapped or found their way into the hands of collectors and scalpers.

Now it's the post-DX10 XP era hardware that hit rock bottom on their price and I see a lot of people developing interest in XP retro. XP mainstream support ended in 2009 and we are getting close to 20 years past that. People who got into PCs in the mid-2000s and have no nostalgia for Windows 98 are approaching 30.

It's a good time to pick up that not super appealing 2006-2010 hardware. Just like it was a great time for '90s hardware around 2007.

Actually it's also a great time for a lot of hardware up to around 2017 because of how corporations flush their fleets of machines.

Personally I have not bought anything hardware related for two years or something. I wanted to get a feel for how others are feeling about the prices and availability and also your own want/need in all this craziness.

I am thinking that at some point the stock will be so low and prices be so high that people can not motivate replacing their crumbling hardware, I would just give up and go with some kind of emulator. Similar to how many have given up the dream of a working CRT in 2024.

Maybe I will make a graph of this and we could charter a cruise ship and have a conference...

I think its a few things, especially if we are talking about 98 and earlier

Many of us have built the systems we want and now quietly gaming away happily on their PC's

Period correct hardware is no longer cheap, due to both demand and hardware reaching end of its life, eg bad caps further reducing working stock.

Time itself has moved on. I joined this forum when I was 31. We had a dos PC for less then a year before upgrading to Win95.
My brother is about the same age now (34) If he was to start this hobby today his focus would be a bit of Win98 and mainly XP.

So later 9x and XP builds are becoming more of the focus, somewhat luckily alot more PC's were also made during this era.
So if you don't consider Pentium 4 retro then alot of builds will be "flited" out of your view

I was saying it was last chance for cheap P4 3 years ago, so I'm saying it's last chance for cheap Core2 era now. Sandy bridge to Haswell has not quite bottomed I think yet still a couple of years left on that clock, but if you want the good stuff with a couple of years less abuse, start looking.