Software becoming collectable?

[SiriusHardware]

Here's an interesting story on the BBC website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27187609

That is a relatively extreme example of interest in retro-software / firmware but there does seem to be a steadily rising healthy trade in tape and disc based software for all the popular (and less popular) consoles and 8-bit home computers from the 80s / 90s era.

I would imagine the main interest comes from those who actually have the machines to run it on, but there might also be a type of collector who just buys certain items for their niche aesthetic appeal.

For example, the original releases of the famous 'Infocom' text-adventure game series came with a veritable goody bag of strange items in the box, all somehow related to the game and often involving an element of program protection. In the box for 'Leather Goddesses Of Phobos' you got a 1940s style comic book which showed the hero dealing with certain hazards by shouting unguessable 'native' words like "Kweepah!". If you played far enough into the game, you found yourself in the same situation with the same solution, which you knew only if you had read the comic book, and you were only likely to have that if you had an original copy of the game.

To a true collector it would be essential for every last one of these virtually valueless individual items to be present in the package. It would probably be more important than it would be for the disc to be working. This is roughly analogous to serious comic collecting, where it would be unthinkable for any issue which came with a free cardboard toy not to have the free cardboard toy still present and intact.

Another games series that might be considered worth collecting solely on the basis of their boxes would be the 'Ultimate - Play The Game' series, which had a highly counter-intuitive style of cover illustration which told you absolutely nothing at all about the game inside the box, and yet the first appearance of each new box cover design as a double page advert in 'Your Sinclair' or 'CRASH!' eventually became a major event in itself.

[DragonForce]

Retro Computing is big business indeed. It isn't just those people (like me) who still love and own the original hardware, many people use emulators on their PC's.

The Ultimate games are worth a small fortune now - at least the ZX Spectrum versions are - one game in particular "Bubbler" can often fetch £100 on eBay.

If you have any interest at all, google "World Of Spectrum" - pretty much every ZX Spectrum game ever made is available for free, legal download, along with various emulators to run them on. I say "pretty much every game", you won't find the Ultimate games there, nor Codemasters or Activision since permission to redistribute their titles have been denied.

[Refugee]

I have a box of TRS80 software mostly with manuals.
I offered the lot FOC a couple of years ago but there were no takers.
I will hang onto it for now and see how things go. It almost got dumped 5 years ago.

[SiriusHardware]

Originally Posted by DragonForce

The Ultimate games are worth a small fortune now - at least the ZX Spectrum versions are - one game in particular "Bubbler" can often fetch £100 on eBay.

If you have any interest at all, google "World Of Spectrum" - pretty much every ZX Spectrum game ever made is available for free, legal download, along with various emulators to run them on. I say "pretty much every game", you won't find the Ultimate games there, nor Codemasters or Activision since permission to redistribute their titles have been denied.

I owned the Spectrum version of every significant Ultimate title, but gave them all away in the mid eighties to someone who was still using a Spectrum as his main machine (I had moved on to the Atari ST).

It's a little mean spirited of Rare, etc, to sit on 30 year old games but I have noticed that digital versions are not entirely unavailable.

Yes, I'm aware of 'World of Spectrum' - a fantastic resource not just for software (with the few dishonourable exceptions that you mention) but for scans of many if not all of the better books concerning programming, etc.

Originally Posted by Refugee

I will hang onto it for now and see how things go. It almost got dumped 5 years ago.

Assuming these are original discs and manuals you are talking about, definitely hang on to them. If you want to get a better idea of how rare or desired they may be then this specific vintage computer forum

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/forum.php

-may be a better place to discuss them. It's a little more USA-centric than here although there is a significant British presence in the user base. It has a section dedicated to Tandy/Radio Shack machines.

If the software includes any of the TRS80 games which were considered to be classics, like the Scott Adams adventures ('The Count', etc) or the maze game ASYLUM - just a couple I can remember off the top of my head - they may indeed be worth something.

[DragonForce]

Originally Posted by SiriusHardware

I owned the Spectrum version of every significant Ultimate title, but gave them all away in the mid eighties to someone who was still using a Spectrum as his main machine (I had moved on to the Atari ST).
It's a little mean spirited of Rare, etc, to sit on 30 year old games but I have noticed that digital versions are not entirely unavailable.

No, that is very true, but that is the nature of the Internet. You can get pretty much anything you want if you know the right place to look.

I guess it could be seen as being mean spirited denying distribution permission, but it isn't really without some sort of reason. Back in the day there were lots of individuals who where basically, downloading anything Spectrum they could find, claiming it as PD or Abandonware (which it most certainly is not), shoving it all onto a CD and selling them for anything between 5 and 15 GBP each. Some software houses got annoyed, and rightly so. Certain individuals tried to claim that the cost of the CD was for "the convenience of having everything on the one disk" and "The convenience of not having to search and download it yourself" and that "no profit was being made of the actual games".

Add to this the fact that there are (and were then), emulators that would run on your phone - some of the software houses realised there was still profit to be made from some of their old games, and denied distribution.

I moved on to the Amiga after using a Spectrum for many years. At the same time I had managed to get hold of an old Amstrad PC1512, mono graphics, twin floppy and a huge 20 mb HDD. The Amiga outperformed this basic PC at every level, and so until I got hold of a DX2 486, the Amiga was it.

My father continued to use a +3 Spectrum and an Amstrad DMP2160 dot matrix priner, and later a Brother HJ100i inkjet (a rebadged Canon BJ10) for several years for his fishing column in the local newspaper. If push came to shove, he could still use that old +3 today, to do exactly the same as what he did back then. The only downside would be that the editorial staff at the Bristol Evening Post would have to enter his copy by hand, since they had nothing at the time (nor now) that could read the Spectrum's 3" floppy disks. Of course, in later years, he just did the lot on his Pentium PC and sent the whole lot off via email, but he still remembers the days on the +3 with fondness.

There is still a place for old computer equipment, just as there is a place in the world for classic cars, aircraft, radios and the like. Classic games are just as playable now as they ever were, and some people will pay big money for the privilege to do so. I for one still love to get out one of my little 48K machines and play Elite.

[G6Tanuki]

I'm wondering whether we're talking "original media and boxes" here, or "executable code".

While it may be nice to have a 1980s-era boxed-set of cassettes or discs and-manuals, as far as I'm concerned if it's not reliably readable it's just eye-candy.

[I have a set of original 9-track 1600BPI VM/CMS boot-tapes for an IBM 4381-12 mainframe in the attic. They're likely to degrade catastrophically if read, and leave horrible amounts of shed oxide on the drive-heads. Thankfully there are others out there who have preserved the actual bit-patterns which reside on my circular antiques].

[SiriusHardware]

Originally Posted by DragonForce

There is still a place for old computer equipment, just as there is a place in the world for classic cars, aircraft, radios and the like. Classic games are just as playable now as they ever were, and some people will pay big money for the privilege to do so. I for one still love to get out one of my little 48K machines and play Elite.

Ah, have to stop you right there. Sorry, but the only playable version of Elite was the BBC B version, due to that being the only mainstream computer which used an analogue stick as standard. I never could play Elite or any other type of 'flying' game with a switched joystick or, worse, keys.

I'm finding that with vintage computer hardware (the stuff you need to run actual vintage software) the biggest threat is starting to come from the dwindling number of TVs / displays which can be used with old computers.

I maintain in running order one small 12" black and white freely tunable portable TV for use with my ZX81s, one 14" colour portable for use with my original Spectrums, and a Philips badged RGB /TTL / Composite monitor for use with my Atari ST and Spectrum+2... plus an Atari monochrome monitor dedicated to the ST's high resolution mono display mode. It would be great to find one item capable of displaying the output from all of these, but even where modern TVs still have composite / RGB inputs, they often don't render the output half as well as the old Philips CRT monitor does. Plus, the tuners on modern(ish) TVs do not expect the transmitter they are tuned to to drift so much as a Hertz, so they can't cope with the output from Aztec modulators gently drifting as the computer warms up. That's why the ideal TVs for this purpose are ones with big rotary tuning knobs and AFC buttons, rather than rock-steady synthesised tuner types. (The older analogue tuned push button types with one tuning preset per channel are acceptable as well).

As a matter of interest, what are the lost items of original computer software (maybe games, maybe not) that you wish you still had? I suppose I'll have to nominate those Ultimate games that I so rashly gave away - but even if I still had them, it would never occur to me to sell them.

[SiriusHardware]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

I'm wondering whether we're talking "original media and boxes" here, or "executable code".
While it may be nice to have a 1980s-era boxed-set of cassettes or discs and-manuals, as far as I'm concerned if it's not reliably readable it's just eye-candy.

Basically both. There are people who would collect software simply to own it, the way some people might collect beer mats without ever intending to stand a glass on them, or albums without ever intending to listen to them. And then there are people who just want to load old software again and relive their past. Loading a file into an emulator somehow isn't the same as watching those ziggy blue and yellow border lines twitching until your program hopefully loads.

Myself, if I own an original eighties boxed item of software but can also obtain it as a digital 'Rom' (file snapshot) then only rarely will I load and run the real software... but it would still never occur to me to sell the original boxed software.

Quite recently, I unboxed my collection of Sinclair microdrive cartridges and found to my dismay that the majority had become unreadable - all the hours of work in the eighties spent persuading protected tape software to run from microdrive so I could run it in a few seconds instead of fifteen minutes... gone. Mind you, those cartridges were nightmarishly unreliable even in their day, so I wasn't too surprised.

[DragonForce]

The answer to the problem of TV sets and RF drift is quite simple, although requires small modifications to be made to the equipment. The inputs to those little ASTEC modulators, are power, and Composite Video. Just take that composite video signal and route it though a little buffer amp, like a BC547 emitter follower, and feed the signal to the yellow CV input on a modern device. The result is an improved display that does not drift, although you of course, lose the sound if you're using a 128K machine.

My collection of hardware and software exists simply for the ownership, I very rarely use any of my old machines now. Sell them? Not a chance. I could be persuaded to give away a 48K machine IF and only if it would get used, loved and looked after, but sell? No.

My old tapes are still in decent condition, it's the disks that are suffering degradation, both CF2's and the normal 3.5" DSDD ones, and some of those are my original Maxell master disks from when I used to run Alchemist Software. Luckily the tape masters are still reliable as well as the image dumps that are stored on CD ROMS made in the late 90's.

It isn't so much the equipment or hardware I miss from those days - it's more the simplicity of the era. I don't really think I can answer your question properly.

[SiriusHardware]

Originally Posted by DragonForce

The answer to the problem of TV sets and RF drift is quite simple, although requires small modifications to be made to the equipment. The inputs to those little ASTEC modulators, are power, and Composite Video. Just take that composite video signal and route it though a little buffer amp, like a BC547 emitter follower, and feed the signal to the yellow CV input on a modern device. The result is an improved display that does not drift, although you of course, lose the sound if you're using a 128K machine.

I'm aware of this approach but for the time being (maybe forever) I consider it desirable for vintage equipment to be as unmodified as possible. Since most of my retro stuff has been mine since it was originally new, I like knowing it has an unbroken, unmodified history. I'll probably have to revise this view when everything that I have which is capable of receiving a UHF analogue signal has failed.

I agree that a direct composite connection (better still, RGB where available from machines like the Amiga, ST, late Spectrums and so on) knocks the socks off an RF modulated connection. And yet somehow, that horrible video dot crawl was all part of the original experience.

As far as software goes, I did develop a fondness for the Infocom text adventure games mentioned in the first post - they were very expensive in their day and I was only able to buy two or three, but a few years after the ST and Amiga fell out of favour they became quite cheap to buy as 'new old stock', so I built up a nice collection of 'new in the box' examples of the Atari ST versions of their titles all, of course, complete with the various little toys and clues which came in the packaging.

I read the game files off the discs and backed them up quite a while ago- if I feel like playing them I just use FROTZ, a free 'Infocom game player' engine which is available for PC and Linux (including the Raspberry Pi, on which it runs very nicely). The original packages and discs are kept in a cool, dark, dry place where they will remain for the forseeable future.

[Gulliver]

In the UK at least, the concept of "abandonware" is not recognised legally. The copyright owners have every right to protect their property under the usual laws. It has been argued that in certain other countries there is a legal concept of "abandonware" where the software copyright lapses when the system that runs it is obsolete.

Ultimate/Rare have the right to deny distribution of their games, and while it's a shame I would happily buy a compilation cassette/CD/download for a few quid from them. I still have a few originals and...err...backup copies made in the mid 80s but wouldn't deny them a few quid. What I do find a bit disappointing is that they deny distribution and refuse to distribute themselves. Many of their titles and associated artwork enjoy mythical status - perhaps this is why.

World Of Spectrum are very good about seeking permission from copyright owners. But as stated, in the 90s and early 2000s it was quite common to find CDs on sale in small shops and market stalls with 8-bit computer games...and they were not always cheap. WoS even used to sell a CD of their archive.

Having done the emulator thing in the late 80s and 90s I went back to mostly using the original hardware. Though I do use a ZXPand on my ZX81 for SD-card storage rather than cassette. The Spectrum is used with cassettes.

[Outrun_uk]

Some of the more obscure console titles can fetch big money and even a few of the more mainstream releases are getting collectable. I still recall being at a car boot a few years ago, the lady had a handful of boxed Super Nintendo games. All but one I either had or wasn't interetsed in and yes, the one I'd not heard of (Secret Of Manna) is quite sought after. "D'oh" in the words of Homer :/

[electronicskip]

I myself collect Old computers,old video game consoles and software.
Ive got about 3,000 games,software,carts,etc titles and nearly 250 consoles/pcs etc,
Indeed software can be very expensive and prices can rise to up to £10,000 for the rarest of titles and special editions.

[Dave Moll]

Is it just games software that becomes collectable, or are there more serious applications with collectability value as well?

[whyperion]

dwindling number of TVs / displays which can be used with old computers.
Well if no-one is wholly interested in retaining CRT/TVs with the consequent oneway trip to the 'recycling' centre of so many, its not going to be easy unless people have the space to store spare sets.

[electronicskip]

Originally Posted by Dave Moll

Is it just games software that becomes collectable, or are there more serious applications with collectability value as well?

It's predominantly games software that's collectable, although early Apple applications can be a little pricey for some software, but it's really got to be in first class condition and complete as always.

[electronicskip]

Originally Posted by whyperion

dwindling number of TVs / displays which can be used with old computers.
Well if no-one is wholly interested in retaining CRT/TVs with the consequent oneway trip to the 'recycling' centre of so many, its not going to be easy unless people have the space to store spare sets.

Lots of games software use "light guns" which can only be used on CRT/TVs.

[SiriusHardware]

Originally Posted by Gulliver

Having done the emulator thing in the late 80s and 90s I went back to mostly using the original hardware. Though I do use a ZXPand on my ZX81 for SD-card storage rather than cassette. The Spectrum is used with cassettes.

Re: The Spectrum, have you come across an individual by the name of Paul Farrow? He seems to have encyclopaedic knowledge of the firmware of the Spectrum and its accessories like the Interface 1 and Interface 2 and has put it to good use by making some interesting hardware for the Spectrum, which he makes available (in the great original tradition of Sinclair hardware) in both kit form and ready built.

One example would be his his ZXC3 cartridge PCBS - with one of those, a ZX Interface 2 (or clone, such as a 'RAM Turbo') and some free loader software he provides, you can basically put any available software snapshot files onto the eeprom on the cartridge PCB, and when you switch on the machine you are presented with an on-screen menu inviting you to choose from the various titles you have loaded on the cartridge PCB. Whatever you choose loads near-instantaneously. I imagine the ZXpand for the ZX81 is functionally similar.

In theory, you need multiple cartridge PCBs each with an eprom or EEPROM programmed with a few titles, but I have access to a lot of large surplus EPROMS at work, so I fitted a ZIF socket in my one and only cartridge PCB and just drop different eproms into it, depending on what I feel like running (or playing!).

This is how I avoid running / using / wearing out the original tape software, which is kept largely dormant and unused in order to try to preserve its integrity and value.

[FrankB]

Here, the old Atari 2600's and a pile of games can bring you serious money.
I still have the factory repair kits for the Atari games and computers(400,800, 65XE, and ST series), KayPro (All series), Chameleon, Vic 20 Commodore Business Machines, C 64, Leading Edge, and a file cabinet full of factory Sams' service manuals for printers, Epson, Gorilla Banana, NEC, TEC, OkiData, Leading Edge (Including the special platen algt. tool that cost almost $400.00 US), and so many others I went to school on, I can't remember them all. This was back in the 80's.
I liked working on the old S100 systems and building the Ferguson Big Boards.
They were fun to solder up too. Never had any problems with solder, but some bad 2114 video memory chips were common.
Somewhere I even have 2 disk algt. jigs and the special software to do the head algt. Going to the Tandon Factory School was quite a learning experience.
As I run across boxes of software, I have been tossing them, but maybe I should hang on to it.

[electronicskip]

I actually have over 400 Atari 2600 cartridges and about 15 Atari 2600/7800/5200 games machines, I'm an avid collector of anything Atari or indeed anything retro game themed so I know of the value these things can bring .

I've been collecting ever since I was a kid w ith stuff going back to the very early 70' ,and at last count I've nearly 300 games machines and old computers going right back to the ZX80.