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Vintage Computers Any vintage computer systems, calculators, video games etc., but with an emphasis on 1980s and earlier equipment.

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Old 10th Jul 2019, 8:42 pm   #1
martin.m
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Default Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Looking on an Internet selling site I have noticed people asking (and getting) £60 - £100 for desktop computers that would have been thrown in a skip fifteen years ago. 600Mhz processors, 12Gb hard drives and all of them running Windows 98. Are they sought after for gaming and is it worth hanging on to my old XP machines?
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 8:59 pm   #2
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Retro gaming is coming back. Retro is however manky old PCs now.

Even better than that, a working Acorn A4 laptop went a couple of months back for £740 and BBC micros are routinely going for £300 a go now.

I should have kept hold of my hoard of them for a few more years after literally being given nearly two skip fulls of the things from local schools when they moved over to PCs fully. I nudged them out slowly over 3 years on ebay and yahoo auctions (back when it was a thing)
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Old 10th Jul 2019, 11:59 pm   #3
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBungle View Post

BBC micros are routinely going for £300 a go now.
??!! I have two of those complete with disc drives.

Judging by other posts, though, both would need their PSUs (Rifa caps) doctored before I could even think about turning them on, much less passing them on. Neither of them have been powered up in about 20 years.

With regard to Win '98, I really wish there was a 100% accurate Windows 98 emulator for Windows 10, as I have a lot of good '95 / '98 games, especially simulations, for which my best hardware at the time was rather underpowered - it would be nice to be able to run them at flat-out speed without having to source what would be, for its time, a maxed-out top of the range Windows 98 machine to run them on.
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Old 11th Jul 2019, 12:18 am   #4
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBungle View Post
Retro gaming is coming back. Retro is however manky old PCs now.
Here up to 486 is regarded as vintage, while P5 is just coming in to that range.

It's the old story - modern gear becomes old rubbish, then dumpable old rubbish, then starts generating interest and then is vintage/classic. I gave away two Macintosh Portables, a Toshiba T3200SX and five IBM 5160 PC/XTs in the late 1990s, all would be worth a decent sum now.

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BBC micros are routinely going for £300 a go now.
I didn't know they'd gotten up to that level in the UK - they are certainly worth $500 or more here, but were less common - by the mid 80s schools were split between BBC and Apple, then between Acorn, Mac and PC - by the time PCs were in the mix Acorn were starting to get very niche. Poly had disappeared by the mid 80s, thanks to some aggressive marketing of the Apple IIe.
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Old 11th Jul 2019, 12:31 am   #5
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Mine never went away! I am still using Windows 98 on a Gateway PC. I keep financial stuff on it as it is never connected to the internet. The PC also came bundled with some very user-friendly and versatile imaging software. It would cost over £400 to buy the current version that would run on my laptop.
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Old 11th Jul 2019, 2:28 pm   #6
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBungle View Post
Retro gaming is coming back. Retro is however manky old PCs now.

Even better than that, a working Acorn A4 laptop went a couple of months back for £740 and BBC micros are routinely going for £300 a go now.

I should have kept hold of my hoard of them for a few more years after literally being given nearly two skip fulls of the things from local schools when they moved over to PCs fully. I nudged them out slowly over 3 years on ebay and yahoo auctions (back when it was a thing)
This is exactly why ive kept hold of most of my hoard and software because prices are going through the roof on a lot of items now even unworking ones.

I did get rid of a pile sometime ago but it was really only the tip of the iceberg and im glad I held onto most of the machines.

Also have a decent amount of DOS games/software ive kept hold of.
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Old 11th Jul 2019, 4:11 pm   #7
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

What a shame then that most of my software archive is the more "serious" applications such as word processors, spreadsheets and the like. They don't have quite the appeal of vintage games.
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Old 11th Jul 2019, 4:20 pm   #8
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Sadly seems to be the case. I was looking to acquire a Pentium 1 system for nostalgic reasons, and when I saw the kind of asking prices I decided better of it.

I still have an IBM Thinkpad 600 which isn't much newer (P2 era I think). If only I could get the sound to work in MS DOS mode of win98 SE. Or infact a nice disk image of a setup OS to save me the bother! Though I did manage to get the Xircom PCMCIA Ethernet card delivering a glorious 10MB
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Old 11th Jul 2019, 4:20 pm   #9
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Dave Moll: Don't know about that. I'd rather like a copy of TechWriter
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Old 11th Jul 2019, 4:26 pm   #10
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Yes, but would you pay "big bucks" for it if I had one for sale (which I don't)?
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Old 11th Jul 2019, 4:46 pm   #11
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

medium bucks yes
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Old 11th Jul 2019, 11:18 pm   #12
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Thanks for your replies. I will definitely hang on to my old XP machines. Here is one that I use for transferring vinyl to digital. It even goes on the Internet now and again.
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Old 12th Jul 2019, 11:01 am   #13
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

I have a Dell laptop running XP, and use it for programming software for radios that were released during the W98 & XP times. Much of the software doesn't run on WIN7 even under emulation mode.

It is also handy because it has a serial port. Using a later PC with a USB>serial converter just adds the possibility of something else not playing the game when trying to program.
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Old 12th Jul 2019, 11:36 am   #14
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

I have an Advent here still on XP but I admit, rarely used. Still if the price is going up, I will hang on to it.
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Old 12th Jul 2019, 12:06 pm   #15
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

I would think the systems which will be in demand will be ones which were very high-end in the '98 era, with hardware 3D graphics cards and top of the range Soundblaster audio cards.
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Old 12th Jul 2019, 12:37 pm   #16
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

I have a Top of the range Notino MVI laptop computer running windows95 which was supplied and Lotus smartsuite which my brother gave me a while ago.

Cost him 2k back in the day and still works perfectly with all the original software and accessories.

Will be hanging onto that one for sure.
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Old 12th Jul 2019, 6:33 pm   #17
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Ooh. Time to check out what that motherboard I spotted in the pile that has the old DIN keyboard connector on it. Suspect its a 386 or 486. Have some pretty ancient HHDs is a box too. Maybe one of them is the W98 disc for said MB.
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Old 13th Aug 2019, 8:09 pm   #18
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

I still use a Win98 machine (a very kind gift from a forum member) to run some elderly EPROM programmer software and other elderly bits that insist on REAL access to the hardware, such as an excellent disk emulator with ISA GPIB card to work with HP85 computers!
The only sad thing is how hard it is to view websites with Win98. The Internet Explorer that comes with Win98 seems incapable of rendering many modern websites, and I can't find a suitable substiture that will run on Win98.
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Old 13th Aug 2019, 11:36 pm   #19
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Talking Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Win_98 and old hardware. Recently, in order to investigate a problem, I tried loading Windows 98 to a much more modern machine which has 4 GB of RAM. Windows 98 complained and would not load. A quick investigation revealed that the cause was too much RAM! Too much RAM, eh? Well that makes a change!

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Old 13th Aug 2019, 11:48 pm   #20
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Default Re: Is Windows 98 making a comeback?

Does anyone still routinely go Online using XP? I have an old laptop, used for backup, and I do still download emails on to it occasionally, relying on the ESET AV for protection. ESET have not updated the software that runs on XP, but the AV database does still update.

I've often wonder what W98 would be like on a modern machine; didn't know that 4GB of RAM would overwhelm it. Of course, W7 goes out of support in January.

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