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What vintage computer stuff have you purchased this week?


eightbit

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I always see threads like this in other categories, so what the hey. If there is another and I missed it I do apologize.

 

For me:

 

1. 3D Blaster Banshee PCI

 

I have been looking for one of these (PCI version) for a long time. The AGP version is abundant on ebay, but the PCI version does not show up all that often. When it does it is usually quite expensive. Probably because by the time of the launch of this card AGP was all the rage and the PCI version probably either did not sell well or was produced in limited numbers. Oddly the AGP and PCI versions run at the same bus speed ;) Anyway, this card has been touted as having fantastic DOS support (and 2D support in general) as well as being a light version of a Voodoo2 on one card. The seller listed it as "AGP" but it was PCI ;)

 

2. Creative CT7260 Encore DXR3 decoder card with proprietary loopback cable

 

It is a DVD hardware decoder card. Basically a rebadged (for Creative) Sigma Designs Realmagic decoder. These were so cool. Perfect DVD playback on a vintage machine using a hardware decoder. And adds composite and s-vid out to boot. I long forgot about this but for some reason remembered it today. Searched and found it (with loopback cable which is necessary!) for $20 shipped :)

Edited by eightbit
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I just got a grandma edition 433mhz celeron with intergrated everyfreaking thing bare bones desktop

 

not what I would call vintage, but its old enough to make someone a starter windows 98 rig when I clean it up and sell it

 

almost grabbed a windows 98 era usb video capture dongle from diamond, but passed since it was a NIB windows 98/2000 era device wanting to use it on my windows 7 64 bit garage machine

 

if you want to record composite / svideo on a windows 98 rig ill go back and snag it lol (to be fair I actually made a decent amount of cash per year on a pentium 166 and some second hand tape machines converting weddings and whatnot back in the day to that new fangled DVD format with a USB converter)

Edited by Osgeld
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Feast your eyes on this beauty! Seven Cities of Gold and Plundered Hearts are two of the cooler boxed titles that came with it. Worlds Greatest Baseball Game too... can't wait to fire that one up actually. :love:

 

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...just when I think I'm going to get out of C64 for good (and just focus on my Amiga and TI computers), something like this comes along. The 128D really is a kickass machine. Wish the Amiga 1000 was built as well!

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Some interesting stuff arrived over the past week.

 

1. Asus V6800. This is a scarce card, Asus' implementation of the Geforce 256 DDR. The GF 256 was the first Geforce card, but the DDR versions arrived a little later. Because the GF 2 followed quickly on the heels of the GF 256, these cards are hard to find now for a reasonable price.

 

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2. Gateway Voodoo 3 1000. An unusual OEM card. The V3 2000, 3000, and 3500 are the most well-known versions of the V3, all sold at retail and used by OEMs. The V3 1000 is a cut-down version with only 8MB. However, the memory is fast, overclockable 6ns SGRAM. The core clock is 143MHz, same as the V3 2000.

 

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3. This is the Powerramp arcade stick. It is basically a programmable PS/2 keyboard in an arcade stick shell. You can map every input to a specific key on the keyboard. Because it is recognized as a PS/2 keyboard and not a joystick, it has excellent compatibility with DOS and Windows games. I think MAME folks harvest the PCB to make professional-grade controllers, but I need this to play Descent!

 

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Broke down and bought an MBX system for my TI-99/4A on Saturday - mainly because the megaSTe I was saving for sold to someone else :( , and the money simply burnt a hole in my pocket.

 

You guys understand! When you don't get the vintage item you were pining for, you HAVE to buy something to combat the depression!!

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Nice stuff! That C128D is sweet! And, I wish I had those video cards ;)

 

My Dxr3 decoder and 3D Blaster PCI came in and I couldn't be happier. The 3D Blaster Banshee is by far the best performing PCI card out of the half a dozen I own and it was amazing to watch Superman The Movie perfectly on a Pentium 180 Overdrive!

 

I think I am done with this system. Time to build up something a little more powerful for some more demanding early-mid 2000's games next. But it still is no slouch ;)

 

Modernized it slightly with a Gotek I just purchased as well as a "JustCooler" sitting right next to the Banshee just to make sure it doesn't overheat....as well as keep the whole inside just cooler ;)

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Ohh, I also picked up a new boxed Zip 100 (parallel version) starter kit at Goodwill for $5 as well as a new boxed ATI All In Wonder Pro PCI for $5. I'll have to get pics of those in here shortly. Will I ever use the Zip? Probably not, but you never know. I just couldn't pass on it as it was new and cheaper than a pack of smokes! The ATI All In Wonder Pro has everything but the software disc oddly. But everything is unopened. I actually had to open the bag containing the remote just to get the old sealed (and leaking) four pack of AAA batteries out of there. Thankfully the leakage was contained by their plastic wrapping. I think this will be a good thing to use to connect older game systems/computers that use composite and S-Vid to the machine to output on a VGA display....we'll see how that goes/looks ;)

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  • 4 weeks later...

Picked up this recently for $5 and finally got around to adding it to my vintage 1996 Gateway. Really love this card. Was able to add an 80GB UltraATA100 hard drive to the system that I had kicked around in my pile of parts for years (that otherwise would not be detected by the onboard IDE connections as they are limited to smaller HDD's) as well as an extra DVD burner and it worked perfectly. To my surprise Promise provides the BIOS update (which I applied and upgraded this from v2.01 to v2.20 which supports even larger drives!), drivers and manual on their website to this day. Now that is support!

 

The only drawback was that I had to remove the DVD decoder card due to the lack of PCI slots in this system (its only drawback in my opinion) but its not a big loss. I'd rather have space for games that use it to watch DVD movies anyway :)

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Edited by eightbit
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I haven't been buying, I've been selling off what remains of my collection.

A C128D, Apple IIe, TS-2068, Spectrum 126 2+, software, etc...

But I did buy a 68hc11 development board a few weeks ago I guess.

 

 

I hear yah. I have sold off a few of my vintage machines (ones in particular that I spend less time with) in order to streamline my collection some and to lighten the load should I have to move (actually, I know I will have to move soon) and I have to box everything up. Still, I am buying tidbits here and there to upgrade the machines I am keeping and trying to make more money than I spend ;)

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I haven't been buying much of anything recent either. Just some memory for my as-of-1996 unfinished Vs440FX project, a ViRGE DX 4MB PCI videocard and a pile of 8087 co-processors.

 

It's weird, everytime I want to finish the VS440FX I get my head stuck somewhere in meh-land. The PentiumPro is essentially the same as a Pentium II and III, minus the MMX and SSE instructions. And I already have 2 comprehensive legacy rigs built up and outfitted very nicely. Gateway 2000 80486 DX2/50 and a Slot-1 Pentium 3 @ 1.4 GHz. Legacy ports, legacy sound, legacy graphics, legacy OSes. Legacy everything. Yet the P3 rig has 1GB of memory on the 440BX chipset, so I can do Office 2003 and even 2007 or a modern-day (and current) browser.

 

It runs everything from DOS 5.0 through Windows 7. With the sweet spots for GUI OSes being 98se and XP. And I have pre-configured disk images to restore to any of those OSes instantly. I do keep a selection of legacy graphics cards for corner cases and older OSes. I have a 1MB Cirrus Logic 5422-based ISA 16-bit videocard, Riva-128 4MB videocard, and a TNT2-Ultra 32MB VIVO card at the ready. And of course 4MB of S3 graphics goodness. Otherwise I use a Gainward Geforce 4600 with a legacy BIOS for DOS VESA compatibility. Not forgetting the venerable Voodoo Graphics, though I prefer DirectX ports for compatibility and not having to have that dongle cable. I don't care how much "cool legacyness" it comes with.

 

So I'm kind of not wanting to finish the PPro unless there's a technical advantage I'm unaware of. Can't let sentiment get in the way, otherwise I'd have to build a complete system around every processor ever made. And that means back to the 90's warehouse again. And I'm not going to do that again. Maybe the PPro will forever remain a mythical figure in my head!

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I have the 8MB model myself. It is low power consuming and fantastic!

 

 

Should be cool; I'm looking forward to it. I set my IIgs up this weekend and for the first time was playing around with HDD images on the FloppyEmu, trying to run GS/OS 6.0.4. Never played around with GS/OS before, and the 128k onboard + 256k on the IIgs memory expansion board of course wasn't enough. So I pulled the ships off of my old RAMFactor card and used them to max out the IIgs board, but 1280k still really isn't enough to have a good time with GS/OS if you wanna play games from within the GUI, play MOD files, etc. So that's why I ordered the 4MB. Can't imagine needing 8, but hopefully I don't find out the hard way that I should have bought that instead.

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There was lots to score at Amiwest. I got a Prisma Megamix at Amiwest for my A4000 and one of those big arcade joysticks for my C64 from Matthew and Amigakit. Online a snagged a dual floppy drive for my BBC Master. Really excited about that since Acorn stuff doesn't come up often.

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