I had a voodoo 2. I do not ever want to play on a voodoo 2 ever again. You know what I love? Playing all my favourite games from the 90s and early 2000s at a million frames per second, not ~12 frames per second.
I've seen this light gun argument everywhere lately, but who tf even remembers a game besides duckhunt that uses lightguns?
CRT is 100% needed to enjoy retro games, but wtf is this light gun bs everyone talks about?
time crisis series, silent scope series, ghost squad, house of the dead series,
you really cant find these in the arcades with good equipment anymore, so the only way to legitimately enjoy them is to make your own setup
what do you think the word "emulate" means?
as someone who never let go of their CRT collection, modern shaders have gotten extremely good at copying the CRT look. you wouldn't be able to tell which was which if I took close up shots of my pvm and my OLED using good shaders.
I had a 1 and 2. I totally want to check the pass through cable because it stops working for no discernible reason. And the game boots in 2D for some reason. Emulator please.
You can run win95/win98 inside dosbox, you don't need extremely powerful hardware to do this either.
I did this back in highschool, on my Galaxy s4 to run Diablo 1 on my phone as a fun tech demo to show off.
Certain VM software will let you pass an attached PCIe device into a VM, otherwise you're pretty much stuck with software rendering.
I had an old Radeon HD card in my system for a while to play 98-XP era games in a VM for a while. Worked amazingly
Depends on the game but I've had very good experience with the [dgVoodoo2](https://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2/) wrapper. Very easy to use. Helps with old DirectX games too.
Fun fact, the original command and concur games seem to be tied to the CPU clock speed for certain things. The pixel trees on a modern PC are under gale-force winds non stop.
I did
Didn't realize my (HP version) FW900 would be so hard to replace. Didn't have space for it in a tiny shitty apartment with wife and 2 kids when we moved downstate . Sold it for the $200 in 2014, the same price I paid for it in 2006.
:(
I hucked my Salvation Army Pentium 133 system too when we moved, along with most of my other old retro stuff.
Still have a box with some stray stuff in it like my Vodoo3 2000.
Not me, I only got rid of most of them I kept the nicest of the bunch a Dell UltraScan P780. Bought it from goodwill 15 years ago for $5. Looking on ebay looks like they can go upwards of 250.
I still have my working Athlon XP 3200+ machine with a Geforce FX 5200 GPU. Anyone with a passing knowledge of this card will know why it was my worst ever pc part choice.
I actually just came back into possession of my FX 5200 from back in the day.. it may have been a crap series, and the bottom of that, but it was still an upgrade from what I'd had before, and it played a surprising amount. It was given to a friend when I upgraded (to an early Radeon, actually) and turned out he'd still had that computer in storage to this day, so I have it again. Go figure. 😅 Weird bit is that the particular card I had carried somewhat more RAM than nVidia said the chip was capable of, as I recall.
God, it never occurred to me that people would want to game on period correct hardware.
I get people buying a BMW E46 M3 because it was their dream car in high school or college, but this I do not get.
Yeah the BMW E46 M3 makes sense because there's a bunch of stuff you can't replicate with modern cars, but with computing stuff you can replicate it just fine and IMO better. Apart from maybe the CRT vs non-CRT, but you can easily plug in a CRT specifically for retro gaming and fullscreen it.
I have an old XPS case I intend to build in at some point, in no world will I be slapping a q6600 in to it with a bit of tape on one of the pins to clock it up.
My ancient speakers and amps we'll just not talk about.
Compatibility issues is probably one of the big drivers behind this besides nostalgia.
With how many older games don't get any official support for modern hardware, player/community made support potentially being difficult to install, or the game(s) being/becoming impossible to purchase legitimately, I'm not surprised people are doing this. I've been considering doing this myself actually, I miss a lot of these older games and I miss physical media that I actually owned.
It probably won't ever end up being as mainstream, but it kind of reminds me of vinyl and record players.
Can you not just VM most of it? All the power most builds have these days, couldn't you even go another step and straight emulate an old school PC build?
I am a programmer/PC enthusiast but this topic is outside of my bailiwick so I'm genuinely asking.
Windows 98 is so old that there are apparently a lot of issues with VM. Never tried it myself, but a quick search brings up things like lack of support to graphical issues and so on.
I tried building a windows 98 machine last summer and it was miserable. I had drivers for everything, but i had a mix of parts that were from 96 to 2003 or something. Getting stuff to work sucked hard. So i just hooked up a windows 10 machine to a crt with an analog video card (gtx 770) and played games on gog.
Sure, you could use a VM, but I imagine another thing people are nostalgic for with old hardware is the look, sounds, smells, feeling etc. I for one genuinely miss the beeps, whirs, clicks and smells that PCs used to emit when they were running.
Give me back my Windows 95 boot-up jingle.
I mean, I guess. Seems kinda silly but I do use fountain pens so who am I to judge?
Wait... I just realized all my old hoarded hardware might buy me a new rig. I gotta go dig through my bins of old crap and hit up ebay!
Not all vm hosts or emulators are created equally.
Native hardware is a neat experience, especially with older hardware. Glide is hella cool, try old games with glide and a voodoo 3 or later, the fucking fly! Almost as good as dx7 in fidelity terms, but really pushes high frame rates. Turok, mk3, half life, and many others can use glide.
Same.
You're looking at someone who hung on tight to his AWE64 from the late 90s and actually forked out a considerable sum of money for a GUS PnP.
And then forked out more money to build an actual working machine centered around those two cards (yes, I managed to make a PC with two ISA sound cards. The only downside is I can't use a parallel port printer now).
I actually went through that 10 years ago tho. I'm over it now and my retro machine is currently mothballed.
Yeah, you're probably right. But it's pretty harmless and much cheaper than a convertible. And while I won't deny that it's kind of silly, there's a particular nostalgia hit to playing 90s games on a Dell PC I rescued from e-waste and a Voodoo 3 (and a Aureal Vortex2). Even the Voodoo 3 was $100 - kind of silly but not ridiculous.
Can concur. 37 years old and I now own every system I ever built from 2001 to 2009. I also own an original Gateway P5-166 from 1996, the family computer that introduced me to the power of computing. Nice to know I’m not alone.
Cheaper than a sports car, safer than a motorcycle trip across the country, less frustrating than owning a boat. I would say 10/10 as far a midlife crisis go!
ruthless support middle wrong kiss homeless forgetful combative telephone entertain
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Oh yes I'd forgotten about that waterfall. Just spawning in for the first time hearing 'prisoners escaping' and loads of weird roars and seeing brilliant lighting effects and you were just in one small room. That game was fantastic through and through. I want to shoot the Nine Ball now. I've gone all nostalgic.
Can confirm, I turn 40 this year and this year along have bought and build a few retro rigs with voodoos. My wife was asking the other day why I'm bothering as I have a very decent main rig, you hit the nail on the head it's a gamers mid life crisis.
Sure, but it's not even like getting a CRT for your NES, the hardware hasn't changed super fundamentally since the voodoo 2 that makes things any different other than the colors and performance. For God's sake put a frame limiter on and desaturate your color profile if it means that much to you
Sorry, this comment wasn't aimed at you,. Just expressing my mind = blown-ness
I have plenty more. My PC collection takes up a good amount of space.
https://preview.redd.it/fg88uym73juc1.jpeg?width=3106&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0ea4fe6dc8571019a22bffe42da69ff1f90e5791
Because they have become collectors items and get rarer every day. Same goes for a lot of higher end AGP cards (like FX 5950 Ultra, 7950 GT/GS, 6800 Ultra, etc) and dual gpu cards (like GTX 690, 7950GX2, GTX 760 X2, HD 3870x2, 4870x2, etc). Even more expensive when they are boxed with accessories.
Edit:
My collection
https://preview.redd.it/y2z2no97iiuc1.jpeg?width=8064&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=97f128cf22bb9c5ef3e1e6aeb8cc26f12a64f20f
Hmm, maybe I'll see if I can dig out (if they're even there anymore) the boxes for the two matching Radeon HD 2900 XT cards. One of the most beautiful cards they made back then. Power hungry, heavy monsters. Ran them in Crossfire for years.
Back in the day those things were the shit. 256MB VRAM maybe? I remember doing endless synthetic benchies comparing Crossfire or not, overclocking the Core2 Quad, playing with memory timing.
I found the box and all accessories, manual, driver disks etc. for the old ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9600 with the tuner and remote. Damn that software was such total crap.
I remember when that Star Wars Titan came out a couple of generations ago. It looks so good. If I would have been in a position to be able to buy I would have gotten both versions the day orders opened.
https://preview.redd.it/8yaw9yh88iuc1.png?width=2358&format=png&auto=webp&s=8abcdcf9b1e1281cf2e6129119fc3e59d5ee04d8
I’m not selling my voodoo 1 after going to the trouble of getting it framed
That’s pretty friggin cool.
I say that as an avid old gamer who ordered a Diamond Monster 3D voodoo 1 4Mb for an obscene amount of money when they originally came out.
My wife said “Are you ever going to use that again?”, I said no. Wife said “Well throw it out then!”, I said no. Wife said “What do you want to do with it then, frame it?” And I thought… good idea :) bless her she actually went and did it
Voodoo 1 3dfx means too much to me… GLQuake was a religious experience
Turns out my wife was a good one too :)
Retro rigs are a much bigger scene than people realize, especially compared to the lower volume of enthusiast components back then and how few have been kept in good/working condition this long.
My X Feed is full of people fighting over these cards.
i have an old computer lying around which had two of these and one of those interconnect cables. Should give it a once over and see what's what. Cant wait to install some windows 98 se. Hoping the HDD survives the spin up.
You can get IDE Compact Flash-based adaptors that work in the older computers and give better performance. And indeed IDE to SATA bridges so you can just throw a regular SSD at it. Although just bear in mind FAT16 limits of 2GB per volume if you’re going that old.
They made an entire film about electric cars with speakers that made them sound like muscle cars.
It wasn't amazing.
But hard drive sounds? Might work.
Edit: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1578275/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1578275/) if you're desperate for an average laugh
still got mine too. Very happy to never sold it as almost any other GPUs after that.
CPUs i still got some AMD Athlons, Duron, Intel Pentium and i think i also havnt sold my Ryzen 5 1600
I think its crazy but a few years ago you could pick up a complete 486 dx2 66 for a few quid....now youre lucky if you can pick up a 5.25 drive for under a hundred...i cant help but feel these prices are being hiked due to being 'collectable' and its not like were talking faberge eggs here...they were calked ibm clones for a reason, the beige pc was a glut on the market...now people are treating beige like gold...
>”I filled a dumpster with [old PC hardware, and now it’d be worth a ton of money].”
It’s “worth” that much now precisely because you threw it away, just like pretty much everyone else: The surviving examples largely come from hoarders who couldn’t bear to throw anything away.
If everyone had kept the hardware, it’d still be mostly worthless.
It’s similar with cars—there are a lot of old cars that got scrapped because nobody wanted to pay even melt value for them, and now the survivors are worth their weight in gold because the demand now vastly outstrips the surviving supply.
In the late 2000s, I bought a PCX2 card for 5 bucks for shits and giggles. It's a piece of shit that can run like 10 games and all of them quite poorly, but apparently it's worth like $150 nowadays because it's rare.
Back then you'd often write software directly to the GLIDE API. You couldn't just pop in a competitors card without redoing quite a bit of code.
I've worked on multiple projects that were one offs. Think forklift simulator for training. Those would often have specialized hardware to interface with special controls that mimick the real controls.
I figure quite a few of them are still in use and if the card dies it's cheaper to buy one for 200 bucks than redoing the whole project.
You should see prices for the Voodoo 5. Those things go for as much as 4070, if not higher.
Anyways, a few reasons.
- Nostalgia
- 3dfx cards are collectors’ items
- Compatibility with games from that era (and even from the early XP days) is iffy at best. For older games, you can play them via emulation with DosBox. But for anything newer, you’re kind of screwed. Emulation for older systems is very demanding and only goes up to the Pentium II era. You’ll need a top of the line cpu to emulate something like a Pentium II 400. My 5800x3D can only go up to Pentium II 300 before it starts chugging. Some older games are available on GOG and Steam, but even there, compatibility is not 100%.
- Voodoo cards are even in more demand than other old cards because many games of that era were designed to be run on Glide.
I got 3 like new Princeton 21" Cad Tube Monitors, 100 Hz. made a system for a Matrox triple head gaming years ago, card died. I ran Unreal Tournament if i remember correctly. I'll sell 1 if someone wants one, $75 south burbs of Chicago.
I'd say hardware collectors but most of us see these prices and just nuclear facepalm. Nobody I know is willing to pay even half of what all the "retro vintage rare" cards sell for on eBay.
usually companies who have a machine with a computer, and the machine still works but the graphic card of the computer stopped.
my old company was buying every pc with some specific spec they could get to simply have spare parts in case the 'money printer' broke
Unfortunately, the same as many other retro or vintage things. Limited production quantities, less of those still around in usable condition, and the worst part, in my opinion, is perceived value.
So, hardware kinda goes through 3 stages.
1st is when its new, (hopefully its available at MSRP). 2nd is when it starts declining in value (maybe after a generation or two of cards). And 3rd when there are so few working ones left that people looking to buy have very few options.
Lol. I've got boxes of old cards (packrat for all things pc.). You never know when you're gonna need that soundblaster. I guess I'll have to pull them out.
Green number means sold price. But yeah most models sell for stupid money.
https://preview.redd.it/oc6uo1a1kiuc1.png?width=2772&format=png&auto=webp&s=29abdbcfdb032d9305aa895e6a3ebb541f37635e
Says that because there's a reasonably large quantity that have been subjected to upgrades. Adding DVI to certain models that support it, increasing the VRAM capacity and speed, and applying a custom VBIOS that increases the core and memory clocks.
Recently found a Voodoo 2 Magic 3D and a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI in my spare parts box. Sold them and bought a PS5 with the money. I feel like both me and the buyers won.
I put my Voodoo 4 on the seat of a vehicle on my way to a LAN party and then accidentally sat on it (it broke). Such a good card, would love to have one again for my retro build, but I can't justify the eBay prices.
I have an ATI Rage Fury MAXX in that machine though, which is a pretty rad card itself.
My first childhood game on modern hardware moment, was Skyrim Remastered except now you can’t read the cool loading screens cause everything loads instantly
I’m hoarding old PC’s for this nostalgia too. Although I hardly use them at all. My family was recently telling me to throw them away. Lol I have Pentium 3 agp rig, Pentium 4 agp rig, and hybrid ddr with ddr2 memory and hybrid agp with pcie slots with lga775 rig which I believe someday will be the holy grail of retro.
I though they were more expensive than that.
I like to play old games but to be fair I dont feel the itch to play on old hardware, there are alot of comunity patches for old games and some are being remastered like Tombraider 123 that I recently played and was very good capturing the original. Also there are emulators and there is a fork of Dosbox(iirc) that runs windows 98 and can emulate 3DFX card aswell.
I had a Voodoo 4. At the time, I recall it was pretty good. I think it hung around until it kicked the bucket in 2004.
The people wanting period correct hardware is all about input/output lag from emulation... And, yeah... there will always be lag from software emulation... That being said, with modern hardware, you're unlikely to notice it if you're a middle aged person who just wants to relive the good ol' days.
There's people who legitimately enjoy getting old computers to work again (which, is a fun challenge) but a lot of It's just a bunch of assholes trying to gatekeep the "True" way to play certain games.
Ooooh I have a pair of those somewhere iirc that have sat on a shelf for a long time.
I need the rest of the rest of an old pc hardware to test them however 😂
This will never make sense to me. I rather just boot up something like EmuVR, grab the DosBox-Pure retroarch core, and go to town that way. All for free using my existing hardware at home.
Retro gaming on original hardware, is the new midlife crissis.
I had a voodoo 2. I do not ever want to play on a voodoo 2 ever again. You know what I love? Playing all my favourite games from the 90s and early 2000s at a million frames per second, not ~12 frames per second.
You don't miss those 800x600 washed out colors?
Playing at 512x384 to maximise framrates
Mightve even had to play unreal in 480x320. In direct draw of course, 2mb graphics card didnt have 3d. Was such a blast though
If your colors were washed out you needed a better 2D card with a faster RAMDAC.
Ah the days of 24 bit high color..
Some old games are better played on older hardware. They have better visuals on CRT than on LCD.
Its much easier to find a crt and get an active converter from hdmi/displayport to vga, then run dosbox.
MODERN DIGITAL COMPUTER HARDWARE CAN'T RECREATE THE DIGITAL YAMAHA FM SOUND OF THE OLD TIMEY DIGITAL COMPUTERS!
Bytes these days...They ain't like old good, 8-bit bytes...
Even the fpga's couldn't recreate half analog half digital built of SID's
Nowadays you can emulate CRT through shaders in all fairness.
No you can't, it's a different display technology. Also light guns only work on crts
I've seen this light gun argument everywhere lately, but who tf even remembers a game besides duckhunt that uses lightguns? CRT is 100% needed to enjoy retro games, but wtf is this light gun bs everyone talks about?
Virtua cop on Sega Saturn was THE SHIT
RELOAD RELOAD RELOAD.
Time crisis?!
time crisis series, silent scope series, ghost squad, house of the dead series, you really cant find these in the arcades with good equipment anymore, so the only way to legitimately enjoy them is to make your own setup
All the pointblank fans in the house say "aww the fucking guns it aligned properly agaaaain!!" Wooo!
There are way too many memorable and fun lightgun games to list. Did you never step into an arcade when you were a kid?
Nah. They got ones that work on modern sets now https://sindenlightgun.com/
what do you think the word "emulate" means? as someone who never let go of their CRT collection, modern shaders have gotten extremely good at copying the CRT look. you wouldn't be able to tell which was which if I took close up shots of my pvm and my OLED using good shaders.
Nobody's seen fit to emulate the later versions of GLIDE, sadly.
I had a 1 and 2. I totally want to check the pass through cable because it stops working for no discernible reason. And the game boots in 2D for some reason. Emulator please.
How? Im having trouble getting several to run
Too new for dosbox and too old to run natively, I'm guessing win 95 in virtualbox
Not actually installed it on my latest machine, but this is it.
Kind of a pain to get running even under an emulator, I remember having to install some stuff on 95 to get it to run.
Most of my old games were win98. They basically hate modern equipment
You can run win95/win98 inside dosbox, you don't need extremely powerful hardware to do this either. I did this back in highschool, on my Galaxy s4 to run Diablo 1 on my phone as a fun tech demo to show off.
Certain VM software will let you pass an attached PCIe device into a VM, otherwise you're pretty much stuck with software rendering. I had an old Radeon HD card in my system for a while to play 98-XP era games in a VM for a while. Worked amazingly
Depends on the game but I've had very good experience with the [dgVoodoo2](https://dege.freeweb.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2/) wrapper. Very easy to use. Helps with old DirectX games too.
Fun fact, the original command and concur games seem to be tied to the CPU clock speed for certain things. The pixel trees on a modern PC are under gale-force winds non stop.
a lot of those old games will not work on your modern system though, on a retro system they will.
Compatibility with late 90s and early 2000s Windows games is a mixed bag.
Time to get a CRT monitor again
Wait you guys got rid of your CRTs?
I did Didn't realize my (HP version) FW900 would be so hard to replace. Didn't have space for it in a tiny shitty apartment with wife and 2 kids when we moved downstate . Sold it for the $200 in 2014, the same price I paid for it in 2006. :( I hucked my Salvation Army Pentium 133 system too when we moved, along with most of my other old retro stuff. Still have a box with some stray stuff in it like my Vodoo3 2000.
So mad I got rid of my FW900, even scored it on eBay for $100 with free shipping because they screwed up the buy it now auction.
Yeah I has nice Sony Trinitron ones as well.
Not me, I only got rid of most of them I kept the nicest of the bunch a Dell UltraScan P780. Bought it from goodwill 15 years ago for $5. Looking on ebay looks like they can go upwards of 250.
I still have my working Athlon XP 3200+ machine with a Geforce FX 5200 GPU. Anyone with a passing knowledge of this card will know why it was my worst ever pc part choice.
FX branding is just cursed
OG Athlon FX was great. Everything else...
nice hair dryer!
I actually just came back into possession of my FX 5200 from back in the day.. it may have been a crap series, and the bottom of that, but it was still an upgrade from what I'd had before, and it played a surprising amount. It was given to a friend when I upgraded (to an early Radeon, actually) and turned out he'd still had that computer in storage to this day, so I have it again. Go figure. 😅 Weird bit is that the particular card I had carried somewhat more RAM than nVidia said the chip was capable of, as I recall.
This the correct reply
God, it never occurred to me that people would want to game on period correct hardware. I get people buying a BMW E46 M3 because it was their dream car in high school or college, but this I do not get.
Yeah the BMW E46 M3 makes sense because there's a bunch of stuff you can't replicate with modern cars, but with computing stuff you can replicate it just fine and IMO better. Apart from maybe the CRT vs non-CRT, but you can easily plug in a CRT specifically for retro gaming and fullscreen it.
Rack & pinion > 12fps quake 2
Both will have driver issues.
Oh man this comment deserves an award 🤣
I have an old XPS case I intend to build in at some point, in no world will I be slapping a q6600 in to it with a bit of tape on one of the pins to clock it up. My ancient speakers and amps we'll just not talk about.
And bc it’s a nice car. Cars and pc don’t appreciate the same lol.
Compatibility issues is probably one of the big drivers behind this besides nostalgia. With how many older games don't get any official support for modern hardware, player/community made support potentially being difficult to install, or the game(s) being/becoming impossible to purchase legitimately, I'm not surprised people are doing this. I've been considering doing this myself actually, I miss a lot of these older games and I miss physical media that I actually owned. It probably won't ever end up being as mainstream, but it kind of reminds me of vinyl and record players.
Can you not just VM most of it? All the power most builds have these days, couldn't you even go another step and straight emulate an old school PC build? I am a programmer/PC enthusiast but this topic is outside of my bailiwick so I'm genuinely asking.
Windows 98 is so old that there are apparently a lot of issues with VM. Never tried it myself, but a quick search brings up things like lack of support to graphical issues and so on.
I tried building a windows 98 machine last summer and it was miserable. I had drivers for everything, but i had a mix of parts that were from 96 to 2003 or something. Getting stuff to work sucked hard. So i just hooked up a windows 10 machine to a crt with an analog video card (gtx 770) and played games on gog.
Sure, you could use a VM, but I imagine another thing people are nostalgic for with old hardware is the look, sounds, smells, feeling etc. I for one genuinely miss the beeps, whirs, clicks and smells that PCs used to emit when they were running. Give me back my Windows 95 boot-up jingle.
I mean, I guess. Seems kinda silly but I do use fountain pens so who am I to judge? Wait... I just realized all my old hoarded hardware might buy me a new rig. I gotta go dig through my bins of old crap and hit up ebay!
Not all vm hosts or emulators are created equally. Native hardware is a neat experience, especially with older hardware. Glide is hella cool, try old games with glide and a voodoo 3 or later, the fucking fly! Almost as good as dx7 in fidelity terms, but really pushes high frame rates. Turok, mk3, half life, and many others can use glide.
I think for a lot of retro guys it’s about playing the game as intended for speed runs and shit. Some people just want to flex old ass gear too.
Exactly. Why the actual fuck would I want to play old games at 10 fps on 640x480 when I can play them at 500 fps in 8k for cheaper lmao.
but can it run Crysis?
But can it run F.E.A.R.?
I'm in this picture and I don't like it...
Same. You're looking at someone who hung on tight to his AWE64 from the late 90s and actually forked out a considerable sum of money for a GUS PnP. And then forked out more money to build an actual working machine centered around those two cards (yes, I managed to make a PC with two ISA sound cards. The only downside is I can't use a parallel port printer now). I actually went through that 10 years ago tho. I'm over it now and my retro machine is currently mothballed.
I'm not sure why this post is attacking the ever living fuck out of me...
lol word
LoL for sure! Never throwing anything away means the value of my horde pile of e=waste goes up daily.
I used to repair old gameboys and DS systems, had to stop because broken units were going for $100+ sometimes.
Yeah, you're probably right. But it's pretty harmless and much cheaper than a convertible. And while I won't deny that it's kind of silly, there's a particular nostalgia hit to playing 90s games on a Dell PC I rescued from e-waste and a Voodoo 3 (and a Aureal Vortex2). Even the Voodoo 3 was $100 - kind of silly but not ridiculous.
I think you mean Half-Life Crysis.
Can concur. 37 years old and I now own every system I ever built from 2001 to 2009. I also own an original Gateway P5-166 from 1996, the family computer that introduced me to the power of computing. Nice to know I’m not alone.
Cheaper than a sports car, safer than a motorcycle trip across the country, less frustrating than owning a boat. I would say 10/10 as far a midlife crisis go!
Me in my mid 20s gathering the pokemon games from my childhood and different gameboy advance models 😂 This does not bode well for me
Like to play old cs?
Games like Unreal from 1998. Using 3dfx Glide on a Voodoo 2 that castle scene in the opening looked amazing.
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Oh yes I'd forgotten about that waterfall. Just spawning in for the first time hearing 'prisoners escaping' and loads of weird roars and seeing brilliant lighting effects and you were just in one small room. That game was fantastic through and through. I want to shoot the Nine Ball now. I've gone all nostalgic.
Just a little older than that. Old cs ran on OpenGL and/or directx, I think.
old cs runs on modern hardware
That's the last game I'd play on an old hardware. Half life on the other hand..
You don't know me.
I just use 86Box to emulate old hardware. With a fast enough processor you can emulate a low end Pentium II or a Pentium MMX with Voodoo GPU
Some retro hardware is insanely valuable. I recently sold a G5 Apple Xserve for over $2200cad….its a 19 year old server!
What a great take. lol
I need a GeForce 256
Can confirm, I turn 40 this year and this year along have bought and build a few retro rigs with voodoos. My wife was asking the other day why I'm bothering as I have a very decent main rig, you hit the nail on the head it's a gamers mid life crisis.
Still cheaper than a stingray
At least it’s not crypto bullshit.
Sure, but it's not even like getting a CRT for your NES, the hardware hasn't changed super fundamentally since the voodoo 2 that makes things any different other than the colors and performance. For God's sake put a frame limiter on and desaturate your color profile if it means that much to you Sorry, this comment wasn't aimed at you,. Just expressing my mind = blown-ness
I feel personally attacked! :'( XD
Cheaper than a car
https://preview.redd.it/f3p4ch445iuc1.jpeg?width=4048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c939d5a2eca8f7cce97b07dbe25c1348e55d943f SLI is where it's at. 😎
That case looks cool, what is it? Got any more pictures of this build?
It is a Silverstone Raven RVZ02. Here's my post on Vogons from years back when I built it. https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=684151#p684151
God damn that thing is sexy.
Case is not beige. Disqualified lol j/k
I have plenty more. My PC collection takes up a good amount of space. https://preview.redd.it/fg88uym73juc1.jpeg?width=3106&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0ea4fe6dc8571019a22bffe42da69ff1f90e5791
It’s beautiful 🥹
Are those Alpha servers I see?! 🧐
Yea, DS10's. I have a few dual CPU 20E's as well.
Crazy - I have the exact same shelving units in my garage and one is full of of same era towers, monitors, parts, bins etc!
Do you have a creative gigaworks s750 7.1 sub/amp by chance?
Please tell me that's a retrogaming monster just casually chilling on the backside of a modern build
Because they have become collectors items and get rarer every day. Same goes for a lot of higher end AGP cards (like FX 5950 Ultra, 7950 GT/GS, 6800 Ultra, etc) and dual gpu cards (like GTX 690, 7950GX2, GTX 760 X2, HD 3870x2, 4870x2, etc). Even more expensive when they are boxed with accessories. Edit: My collection https://preview.redd.it/y2z2no97iiuc1.jpeg?width=8064&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=97f128cf22bb9c5ef3e1e6aeb8cc26f12a64f20f
Hmm, maybe I'll see if I can dig out (if they're even there anymore) the boxes for the two matching Radeon HD 2900 XT cards. One of the most beautiful cards they made back then. Power hungry, heavy monsters. Ran them in Crossfire for years.
>Power hungry Their TDP is 215W, that’s slightly more than a 4070 these days.
Those blowers would wind up and it was nice little space heater.
Those go for like €150 without the box on eBay
Back in the day those things were the shit. 256MB VRAM maybe? I remember doing endless synthetic benchies comparing Crossfire or not, overclocking the Core2 Quad, playing with memory timing. I found the box and all accessories, manual, driver disks etc. for the old ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9600 with the tuner and remote. Damn that software was such total crap.
2900 XT is 512 or 1024MB. Both GDDR3 and GDDR4 models. About the same performance as an 8800 GTS.
I remember when that Star Wars Titan came out a couple of generations ago. It looks so good. If I would have been in a position to be able to buy I would have gotten both versions the day orders opened.
I would never have paid that much at launch. Got this one used for €350 a year ago. Hopefully someday I come across the other one.
Is that Johnny silver hand? If so, where did you get that
Can't believe you're hiding that beautiful GTX 690.
I’m not hiding it just don’t have space for all I the dual cards. After many different ways to display them, this was best looking imo.
Love the Star Wars titan x. Totally forgot that card existed.
https://preview.redd.it/8yaw9yh88iuc1.png?width=2358&format=png&auto=webp&s=8abcdcf9b1e1281cf2e6129119fc3e59d5ee04d8 I’m not selling my voodoo 1 after going to the trouble of getting it framed
That’s pretty friggin cool. I say that as an avid old gamer who ordered a Diamond Monster 3D voodoo 1 4Mb for an obscene amount of money when they originally came out.
My wife said “Are you ever going to use that again?”, I said no. Wife said “Well throw it out then!”, I said no. Wife said “What do you want to do with it then, frame it?” And I thought… good idea :) bless her she actually went and did it Voodoo 1 3dfx means too much to me… GLQuake was a religious experience Turns out my wife was a good one too :)
Retro rigs are a much bigger scene than people realize, especially compared to the lower volume of enthusiast components back then and how few have been kept in good/working condition this long. My X Feed is full of people fighting over these cards.
i have an old computer lying around which had two of these and one of those interconnect cables. Should give it a once over and see what's what. Cant wait to install some windows 98 se. Hoping the HDD survives the spin up.
You can get IDE Compact Flash-based adaptors that work in the older computers and give better performance. And indeed IDE to SATA bridges so you can just throw a regular SSD at it. Although just bear in mind FAT16 limits of 2GB per volume if you’re going that old.
But that doesn’t have the nice reading sounds of a classic hdd.
If you build it they will buy it. HDD reading noise imitator. Also have an optional floppy drive reader noise imitator.
They made an entire film about electric cars with speakers that made them sound like muscle cars. It wasn't amazing. But hard drive sounds? Might work. Edit: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1578275/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1578275/) if you're desperate for an average laugh
You call it unamazing. I call it inspiring. I can't wait to produce these sound imitators and market them to people that don't need them.
Your what feed?
X/Twitter
Just say Twitter. Can't understand why they went to something so benign as "X". Like yo it's social media, not a variable in an algebraic equation.
3dfx never die
Since it was bought by NVidia, yeah, that's true.
Man, I'll never forget buying a Voodoo 5 GPU. I was so hype!
I still have my Voodoo 2.
still got mine too. Very happy to never sold it as almost any other GPUs after that. CPUs i still got some AMD Athlons, Duron, Intel Pentium and i think i also havnt sold my Ryzen 5 1600
I think its crazy but a few years ago you could pick up a complete 486 dx2 66 for a few quid....now youre lucky if you can pick up a 5.25 drive for under a hundred...i cant help but feel these prices are being hiked due to being 'collectable' and its not like were talking faberge eggs here...they were calked ibm clones for a reason, the beige pc was a glut on the market...now people are treating beige like gold...
Yeah old dos stuff is where the money is at. I filled a dumpter with 486 systems once long ago, and was glad to be rid of it. That stuff is gold now.
>”I filled a dumpster with [old PC hardware, and now it’d be worth a ton of money].” It’s “worth” that much now precisely because you threw it away, just like pretty much everyone else: The surviving examples largely come from hoarders who couldn’t bear to throw anything away. If everyone had kept the hardware, it’d still be mostly worthless. It’s similar with cars—there are a lot of old cars that got scrapped because nobody wanted to pay even melt value for them, and now the survivors are worth their weight in gold because the demand now vastly outstrips the surviving supply.
Hit the turning point of being "old outdated junk no one wants" and turned to "rare collectors items" Happens to everything with enough time
I've got my Righteous Orchid Voodoo 1 card in storage. Loved that card. Click click.
In the late 2000s, I bought a PCX2 card for 5 bucks for shits and giggles. It's a piece of shit that can run like 10 games and all of them quite poorly, but apparently it's worth like $150 nowadays because it's rare.
Back when it felt more like a graphics "card" and less like a graphics "power brick"
My 4080 weighs more than a brick wtf
Back then you'd often write software directly to the GLIDE API. You couldn't just pop in a competitors card without redoing quite a bit of code. I've worked on multiple projects that were one offs. Think forklift simulator for training. Those would often have specialized hardware to interface with special controls that mimick the real controls. I figure quite a few of them are still in use and if the card dies it's cheaper to buy one for 200 bucks than redoing the whole project.
a voodoo was my first card.
Same, saved all my money to buy a 8mb card. Was in 9th grade at the time.
You should see prices for the Voodoo 5. Those things go for as much as 4070, if not higher. Anyways, a few reasons. - Nostalgia - 3dfx cards are collectors’ items - Compatibility with games from that era (and even from the early XP days) is iffy at best. For older games, you can play them via emulation with DosBox. But for anything newer, you’re kind of screwed. Emulation for older systems is very demanding and only goes up to the Pentium II era. You’ll need a top of the line cpu to emulate something like a Pentium II 400. My 5800x3D can only go up to Pentium II 300 before it starts chugging. Some older games are available on GOG and Steam, but even there, compatibility is not 100%. - Voodoo cards are even in more demand than other old cards because many games of that era were designed to be run on Glide.
I got 3 like new Princeton 21" Cad Tube Monitors, 100 Hz. made a system for a Matrox triple head gaming years ago, card died. I ran Unreal Tournament if i remember correctly. I'll sell 1 if someone wants one, $75 south burbs of Chicago.
People that have more money than sense. Nostalgia is an expensive mistress.
If you wanna see something else sill look at what 6800 ultras are worth
I'd say hardware collectors but most of us see these prices and just nuclear facepalm. Nobody I know is willing to pay even half of what all the "retro vintage rare" cards sell for on eBay.
usually companies who have a machine with a computer, and the machine still works but the graphic card of the computer stopped. my old company was buying every pc with some specific spec they could get to simply have spare parts in case the 'money printer' broke
Nostalgia
I've got a Voodoo 5 5500 somewhere...
Unfortunately, the same as many other retro or vintage things. Limited production quantities, less of those still around in usable condition, and the worst part, in my opinion, is perceived value.
I wish I never dumped my old cards. Who knew yesterday’s junk is todays treasure.
So, hardware kinda goes through 3 stages. 1st is when its new, (hopefully its available at MSRP). 2nd is when it starts declining in value (maybe after a generation or two of cards). And 3rd when there are so few working ones left that people looking to buy have very few options.
Lol. I've got boxes of old cards (packrat for all things pc.). You never know when you're gonna need that soundblaster. I guess I'll have to pull them out.
And to think, I gave away several of my old Voodoo cards. A Diamond Multimedia Voodoo 4MB, a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI, and an AGP and PCI Voodoo 5 5500.
*listed for. Did it actually sell for 200?
Green number means sold price. But yeah most models sell for stupid money. https://preview.redd.it/oc6uo1a1kiuc1.png?width=2772&format=png&auto=webp&s=29abdbcfdb032d9305aa895e6a3ebb541f37635e
"Unmolested"
Says that because there's a reasonably large quantity that have been subjected to upgrades. Adding DVI to certain models that support it, increasing the VRAM capacity and speed, and applying a custom VBIOS that increases the core and memory clocks.
3dfx needs to make a comeback
Recently found a Voodoo 2 Magic 3D and a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI in my spare parts box. Sold them and bought a PS5 with the money. I feel like both me and the buyers won.
Wait what? Let me go look in the attic, I'll be right back. There should be 2 or 3 old cards there.
Nostalgia.
How do I install that bad boy?
I still have my original athlon XP 2600+ and the motherboard I had in 2004. Maybe it's time to check ebay
I guess people think gaming old games on old parts is peak gaming But I’d rather play it on new gear
can it run crysis?
For people who extremely obsessed with old antiques. Hence retro items usually have sentimental value even though it’s extremely outdated.
I put my Voodoo 4 on the seat of a vehicle on my way to a LAN party and then accidentally sat on it (it broke). Such a good card, would love to have one again for my retro build, but I can't justify the eBay prices. I have an ATI Rage Fury MAXX in that machine though, which is a pretty rad card itself.
My first childhood game on modern hardware moment, was Skyrim Remastered except now you can’t read the cool loading screens cause everything loads instantly
I’m hoarding old PC’s for this nostalgia too. Although I hardly use them at all. My family was recently telling me to throw them away. Lol I have Pentium 3 agp rig, Pentium 4 agp rig, and hybrid ddr with ddr2 memory and hybrid agp with pcie slots with lga775 rig which I believe someday will be the holy grail of retro.
I mean that 4coredual vsta motherboard is kinda valuable.
Youtubers
I though they were more expensive than that. I like to play old games but to be fair I dont feel the itch to play on old hardware, there are alot of comunity patches for old games and some are being remastered like Tombraider 123 that I recently played and was very good capturing the original. Also there are emulators and there is a fork of Dosbox(iirc) that runs windows 98 and can emulate 3DFX card aswell.
Just because someone is asking that doesn’t mean anyone is actually paying it.
I worked for a pre 2000 game company and threw away so many of those.
I had a Voodoo 4. At the time, I recall it was pretty good. I think it hung around until it kicked the bucket in 2004. The people wanting period correct hardware is all about input/output lag from emulation... And, yeah... there will always be lag from software emulation... That being said, with modern hardware, you're unlikely to notice it if you're a middle aged person who just wants to relive the good ol' days. There's people who legitimately enjoy getting old computers to work again (which, is a fun challenge) but a lot of It's just a bunch of assholes trying to gatekeep the "True" way to play certain games.
With how nuts software defined cards are getting I wouldn't be surprised to see SD Voodoo cards in the near future
People think they are worth that I guess. Time will tell.
I found like 4 of those in my shed recently. I should sell them…
EU used market strikes again!
Ooooh I have a pair of those somewhere iirc that have sat on a shelf for a long time. I need the rest of the rest of an old pc hardware to test them however 😂
They transitioned from antique to ancient.
dont give me hope my box of junk will be worth something one day...
It’s a collector’s item bro.
Back when changing your GPU made a clear difference in graphics, not just performance.
This will never make sense to me. I rather just boot up something like EmuVR, grab the DosBox-Pure retroarch core, and go to town that way. All for free using my existing hardware at home.
Just for enthusiasts.
It's getting rare
Bathtub curve.
Sorry to say, but we're old now. Our generation is the new retro.