The Retro PC Thread

[Tanooki]

Swinging a wild one into the park my guess the top 3 of the list of 7 things I said probably would range in a $30 to $60~(the voodoo) in value if I hazarded a guess. If I'm low that's fine, whatever, they're just parts and I'd let the market have their way with it I guess. I have no interest in building an old PC again, just no time for it and letting stuff rot seems stupid.

I guess it makes sense the cryptocurrency crazies would screw up something even that old which shouldn't even net them a shiny penny let alone a peso or a ruble given how slow and old they are but ebay doesn't care when you can find a sucker born every minute around that few genuine types who may really be building a dream machine of their childhood again.

I was thinking kind of like what maru brought up when I realized what that voodoo card was as I recall people going nuts over Glide wrappers in the 90s with the original N64 emulator UltraHLE as you could get crazy performance off that, other legit games too. Not that the TNT2/Viper was any slouch either.

Back at the time I recall settling for a couple years or maybe more on a Matrox Mystique card which I found was doing some amazing stuff in modern games. I recall it at the time doing true justice to various games from Quake to FF7 to Shogo and others. I kind of went back and forward with a few things, but Diamond, Matrox and 3DFX kept me interested most. I never bothered with Nvidia for the longest time as the early stuff at least I owned was garbage and reflected as much with some limitations both hardware or software causing display stuff that bugged me. So when it came down to the others eating it I stuck with ATi for a long while.

[isiolia]

I guess it makes sense the cryptocurrency crazies would screw up something even that old which shouldn't even net them a shiny penny let alone a peso or a ruble given how slow and old they are but ebay doesn't care when you can find a sucker born every minute around that few genuine types who may really be building a dream machine of their childhood again.

I don't think it did in any direct way (at least), and I didn't read the comment that way.

Cards that crypto miners tend to go for are 4GB and above models. However, the general shortage of cards has meant that even lower tier cards have ended up selling above MSRP due to demand, with people going for what they could get. Only real way that it'd trickle down to vintage hardware is if people were really just doing that instead of attempting to build current rigs, due to price spikes on GPUs and DDR4.

What I've observed more is that collecting vintage hardware and doing retro builds has become more popular over time. In turn, choice parts have risen in value. Video cards aren't even really the thing - price out stuff like period MIDI boxes (Roland MT-32, etc).

[Tanooki]

True, whatever the reasoning behind it all is it's likely a mix of many reasons. Either way I really should pull them out of this old soundblaster box I have (the better cards are in electrostatic bags) and take some pics since it appears some minor demand exists. I should probably make sure I'd have some small reasonable boxes for such things with adequate packing when I get around to it.

[Anapan]

Hearing "Matrox Mystique" is awesome. I coveted that card only for it's name. I think the boom for this stuff is only that - collecting vintage hardware. I've bought this stuff for way too much only because of a debate read off of old Google Groups archived conversations from Usenet in the era these cards were sold. Not that I ever regretted buying them. I gave a lot of my cards away to my friend's dad because he has always been able to provide ram for whatever ancient build I try. Member Berries for sure.

Waffling here. Should I try to purpose an already established platform to list ancient PC hardware components available? If I do so can I wash my hands of any involvement to keep my zero-responsibility goal intact? Is this possible? I'd like to give it a try, but as soon as someone comes to me with a problem I'll definitely bail.

[Tanooki]

I liked that card from what I remember as it really made the games of then, even the FF7 PC conversion truly shine. Never was a big fan of that game, but the PC version had some great perks including that amazing yamaha sound synth wavetable emulator which took those MIDIs for FF7 and made them sound even nicer than many tracks on the PS release. A few years back someone figured out how to get that thing working in a modern OS so I did the tinkering between a few programs and MIDI on my old games sounds stunning on this computer now.

[fastbilly1]

The Roland MT32 has always been pricey...and I have always wanted one.

[wclem]

Need a suggestion. I obtained a 2.2 GHz Core 2 duo. Anyone have suggestions on what video card to pair with it.

Something that will not make the CPU the bottleneck but will make the most use of what the CPU has to offer.

Considering windows vista or seven. I have four gbs of ram for it. Pci-e but it does have an open pci slot. Would like to reasonably run games from the era this was made. HDMI is not mandatory but would be nice. .

[fastbilly1]

Anything from the geforce 8000-400 series should be good You can easily get something like a gt260 for around $30 shipped and it will make a great gaming pc.

I mean by running 7 you can get the extra benefit of a newer card at a very low price as people are dumping them. I mean I bought an 8800 a couple years ago for $5, but I bought a 640 last month for $20. And while the 8800 is technically a better card, the 640 pulls far less power.

[Ziggy]

Isn't the 9800 less power hungry than the 8800? You can get a 9800 really cheap.

[Anapan]

If you're planning to install a modern Windows, I'd suggest an ATI card that can output 15Khz with CRT Emudriver through its RGB analog port, and still play any game that the CPU can support. Something like a 2 or 4GB R7 (with that CPU (and RAM), Probably 2gb will suffice). If you want 15khz support make sure it has a db-15 VGA port. I'm using a 1GB Radeon 7400 for my main oldschool windows rig/cocktail arcade cabinet.
Why I suggest this is because you can take advantage of the ability to play oldschool games in original resolution with no lag on a CRT with an RGB to Y-Pb-Pr (component) transcoder (PM me if you have trouble finding one, I have a spare). Emulation will be easy for most systems and PC games will submit to either HD or SD with the right settings (just make 2 shortcuts). Then a cheap vga switch will allow the most games to be enjoyed on the two different standards. I have some specific tweaks I use for dosbox to get 240P out of dos games from windows @ 60FPS on a similar machine. Everything will run perfectly with ~0 lag if set up correctly. YES!

Oh yes - those suggested cards are good suggestions. If not interested in 15Khz, I always prefer Nvidia for the saturation adjustments and better support.
I have some spare nvidia cards as they are not useful for my current projects.

If you are considering it, then go with Windows 7. You will be hit with less bricks on your way to making your ultimate gaming rig. I personally would choose XP for that system, but I'm biased toward making a long and hard go at getting the most out of any hardware, and I thrive on making load times the smallest. That ram would be best shared among a minimal XP rig, but you will probably have a bad or horrible time as I did. I won when I made everything copacetic but it was stupid because my computer couldn't do certain things.
Get another stick of ram and then install Windows 7 if you wanna have a good time. I also have access to ram. PM me if you need some.