Hacker News Reader

Comment by johndoe0815 | Hacker News Reader

It depends, you have to catch the right time window.

Some hardware that was discarded (or sold cheaply on eBay) in large numbers a decade or fifteen years ago, usually as "second hand" University surplus taken out of the recycling bins, is now an expensive collector's items - early 68k Macs, SGI workstations, DEC VAX/MIPS/Alpha machines, black NeXT hardware. Even the prices for puny Commodore VIC20s, C64s or a Nintendo NES have climbed quite a bit - gone are the days when you could buy one at a flea market for a couple of Euros.

Of course, it's much more difficult to restore such a system to working order nowadays. Capacitor failures, dying SCSI disks and leaking batteries are only some of the many problems you face when you actually want to use an old computer instead of just putting it on a shelf (like so many boring computer museums do).

This reminds me that it's time to look after our Tektronix 40xx, TI Explorers and Xerox Stars...

View on HN

Yeah, those DEC machines are pretty expensive right now. I was mildly surprised at how much it would cost me to get a DEC AlphaServer (not HP or Compaq), let alone with freight shipping as they’re always on the opposite end of the country as me. Unfortunately all the retro stuff I have in my wishlist now are rare enough to be in the thousands at least.

I remember reading stories of kids finding S/360s on Government auction sites for dirt cheap. Sadly government auction sites never have anything cool whenever I look.

> This reminds me that it's time to look after our Tektronix 40xx, TI Explorers and Xerox Stars...

I’m still waiting to see if I’ll ever find one of the Tektronix 44xx Smalltalk workstations. Even some of the more rare machines in my wishlist I’ve seen for sale, even if they were far out of my price range, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen on of those period.

> cheap S/360

Ohhhh even a "free" mainframe is NOT cheap

You need a LOT of space, power, time and patience.

Not to mention rigging, pallets and trucking.

It strikes me as the computer hobbyist version of getting a good deal on an old Bridgeport mill.

Fair enough. Still though, I've personally never seen something like that even offered on an open market.

I've gone in the opposite direction. Stuff is just... stuff. It breaks down a lot, and while sometimes I wonder if it would be cool to have a PDP-11 or VAX to play with, if I think about it for a while it just makes no sense.

A modern phone has more power than a 90s supercomputer. The classic 90s super-deluxe workstations are easily outclassed by a Raspberry Pi 4, never mind an M1 Mac.

Modern consumer hardware is so unbelievably fast and powerful it's a much more exciting thing to play with.

I somewhat agree with this, save for in the fine details.

Emulation is good until a point; often button response latency is off, audio is mixed incorrectly, and CRT rendering artifacts are not properly accounted for.

For instance, I keep a grey brick Gameboy around for noodling with LSDJ about once or twice a year. The bass response is just lovely.

There's a whole community that harvests and covets SID chips because emulation just doesn't nail it.

There's a retro gaming convention in Vancouver every year, or was before Covid, and there's a few crews of musicians with classic hardware. I recommend checking it out just to hear the difference analog hardware makes.

And on the computer side of the fence, although modern machines are outrageously powerful, responsiveness is becoming something of an endangered species, but on early to mid 90s Macs it's the rule for all but the most demanding applications.

Especially if retrofitted with flash storage of some kind, those old Macs often wait for you more frequently than you wait for them. And while the OS isn't great at multitasking, that could be seen as a feature — instead of tens of tabs and a dock full of programs open, you're forced to focus only on the 1-3 apps that can be open before classic Mac OS multitasking breaks down.

I'm seriously considering setting up an old pre-OS X Mac of some flavor as a zen mode writing machine for this reason.

There have been so many advances in emulation that I would say a lot of this isn't true anymore. You can pretty much get next to flawless emulation of anything PSX and older (with much of the newer stuff more than good enough for playing even if not exact replica), and with runahead you can match or beat original device latency.

I've never seen a "CRT" shader that comes anywhere close to the quality of art representation of Neo Geo titles as my MVS and its recapped Wells Gardner.

And those "scanlines" ones are just sad.

To say nothing of my experiences with sound quality and input latency.

Well the last paragraph is ignoring my point about run ahead I think.

I don't want to "beat" the device, I want to experience the device as it was intended.

It seems absurd to say emulation is worse because you prefer a slightly greater amount of input lag.

Timing is everything in old games, change that and you change the experience into something different. Not to say it's better or worse, but it's not the same.

To this day only the expensive LCDs come close to CRT colours.

> A modern phone has more power than a 90s supercomputer. The classic 90s super-deluxe workstations are easily outclassed by a Raspberry Pi 4, never mind an M1 Mac.

And this power is used to run levels over levels of abstactions. C compilers on phones ? no way. I got some BASIC interpretter on my phone which makes a ZX Spectrum look elegant in comparison. Text is hard on a smartphone screen. Graphics is also hard.

> Modern consumer hardware is so unbelievably fast and powerful it's a much more exciting thing to play with.

See above. In the past you had limited computer power now you have limited screen. And the new trend in UX design does not help either.

I think the one thing we've lost is the complete "down to the register" accessibility and the close coupling of hardware and software. You can write your own boot code from bare metal and actually make useful things happen based on data sheets.

It's concievable to grasp an entire 8086 or 68000 system in that way, but the Raspberry Pi, for all its benefits, is almost certainly going to be dealt with with relatively high-level languages and abstractions.

I got rid of a lot of my old game consoles when I realized that I didn't really appreciate the trouble of having them all connected when the games were equally playable on other devices I owned anyway. Actually pretty freeing.

If you're not tied to the idea of owning the actual hardware then you get emulate these to tool around in the software side of things, maybe relive the glory days of DCL vs Bash flame wars.

Yeah, old games hardware pricing seems to follow a U shape, with the ps2 and original Xbox currently occupying the bottom of it. Anything older/rarer is climbing back up the other side

For sure. I managed to snag a "second hand" University NeXT Computer (the 1st gen Cube) for a few bucks on eBay a number of years ago with the Frog Design monitor, and a 68040 upgrade board. Going for almost $3000 now on eBay based on completed listings. The upgrade board alone is $600.

I also managed to snag a 2nd gen 128kb Macintosh for $5 at a second hand computer shop.

That's true. As a former SGI admin I bought an Indy several years ago for about 150 Euros, including the CRT which is as bulky as it gets. Now it's almost impossible to find one on eBay (in Europe at least). (I sold mine shortly after I bought it because it was so slow and took a lot of space).

But the capabilities are available cheaper now.

Having said that, I'll keep my vintage 6809 machine with custom polygon rasterizer ASIC and bit-slice mathbox coprocessor. Such an unusual combination of hardware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com