Hard Drives smashed. Going to village-e-recycling along with an old CRT. Oops also a 32” Dell monitor that went kaput.
Krikey that’s a fair amount of $ spent, but a lot of good times over the years too.
I’ll pour one out. i recently had a big visit to the town e-cycle center. Old motherboards, PSU, routers, etc. I leave empty PC cases out front on bulk trash day and often they are gone before the pickup from neighborhood scavengers.
Wow, look at those old warhorses, riding off into the sunset. All the life and time that must have been swirled around inside those boxes. So much scrap, but also so much glory, @Nixxter!
That seems weird to me. What could people possibly want with old PC cases? I’d have thought desktops are dying out.
Well in the interest of accuracy, when I say I often leave them out front that probably means I did it twice. And of those two times once somebody grabbed the case. :-)
I have at least that many stacked up like cordwood in my basement. Then there are the couple that actually work, one of which is an AMD machine with a 2070S that is fine except for the CPU runs a tad hot, and the other I turned into a budget Linux box for no good reason.
I find it so hard though to recycle them when they are actually working ok. The dead ones are no problem, other than physically schlepping them to the e-recycling spot.
Oh, and TVs and monitors galore…
I peer with furrowed brow at your stack of cast-offs, all of which look newer than this backup 3rd gen Intel laptop I currently inhabit. Time I get off my butt and get the desktop rebuilt and back in service then…
Sad on some level that those can’t find their way onto a “Buy Nothing” or Freecycle group, but sometimes it’s just not worth the effort.
I’ve sold 3 old ones on Craigslist/FB for $30 each in the past year or so. I also was surprised.
[edit] I did also leave in almost everything except the hard drives, so there were CD/DVD drives, obsolete video cards and expansion cards. Maybe it’s vintage PC folks…I DID sell a Windows 98-era Saitek joystick (new in box) for $50 to an old guy (probably my age) who “wanted a challenge”
I guess for some people, these are like used cars. An assortment of junkers and fixer-uppers. Complete with the nostalgia value, except instead of “I lost my virginity in the back seat of one of those”, it’s “I played my first FPS on one of those”. :)
Such beautiful cases, no windows or rgb leds in sight.
That Dell XPS case (bottom right) must weigh 50 lbs at least. Must be made out of a solid piece of plastic that they hollowed out.
There are lots of folks out there building retro machines, purely for the nostalgia and/or accuracy of playing games on original equipment. No DOSBox for these guys. They want the Voodoo 1 card and the 486 and the 14" CRT for the full, unaltered experiences.
While I’ve never actually gone out of my way to build one, it’s because I’ve never had to. I’ve kept and maintained every computer I’ve ever owned going back to 1993 and my first one.
I can’t explain it, but playing old games on legacy hardware tickles my brain in ways I don’t understand. It feels fantastic. I guess ‘nostalgia’ is the right word for it, but it’s quite emotional for me. My first computer was built by our local Team Electronics in July of 1993, and I still have the receipt. It came with DOS 6.something and Windows 3.1 and of course no dedicated video card. It’s been upgraded a bit since then, but I still have the original floppies in the original boxes to put it back the way it was originally if I want to.
These days I don’t fire those old rigs up very often. The last time was when I played through Thief: Gold on my Pentium II 450 with a Voodoo 2 on my 19" CRT monitor. I haven’t had as much fun with any game since I did that, and that was a few years ago.
Heh. I teach a class every fall called Game History, which is more or less mandatory for our Game Studio students. While the content and approach can vary, we always integrate our collection of vintage hardware and software, mostly consoles. Playing Pong on a real Pong machine, or Odyssey, is much much different than emulation, for instance.
What we don’t have are old PCs for DOS games. We use DOSbox type setups for those, though if we had the people/resources it would be great to build up a set of MS-DOS and early Windows machines. The hardware is quite doable. The software maintenance and all can be daunting on a large scale.
Somewhat ironically, though, I generally loathe this sort of thing. I lived through those days and have no desire to return. I have very little nostalgia for old games. My first PC arrived in early 1983, and I happily sold it a few years later.
What, you don’t pine for the days when getting the game to run was the game?
While I rarely play anything older than my 1993 start year, I do frequently have the desire to play quite a few titles from the mid to late 90’s, when graphics were becoming a lot less vague.
Late 90s, yeah, some solid playable stuff there. With the backlog I have of games from this century, though, it’s hard to justify.
And no, no nostalgia at all for batch files, expanded and extended memory, EMMS, Quarterdeck, shadowing the video BIOS, high-loading the mouse driver, or any of that. Hard nope, that.
But could you do it if you had to? Without reviewing anything like a template first?
I’m not so sure that I could anymore, since it was only a skill I needed for a few years there, and could not wait to forget.
The boot disks I have are the same ones I made 30 years ago. For that same computer.
Hell no I couldn’t write those .bat files today. Not without some studying.
Porque no los dos?
