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Share: What do you use your old PC for?

For me there are really only four reasons to own a IBM PC or device of similar vintage, and they all revolve around games:

1. 4.77MHz 8088
Many older games are designed to run with this processor and speed in mind and run too fast/not at all with faster processors. I'd always keep a 4.77MHz machine around, because nothing yet really emulates it.

2. CGA Composite Color
The CGA was more competitive than most people realize, and this is the best part of the adapter. This is hard to emulate on non NTSC displays.

3. Analog Joysticks
One speed, innumerable varieties to choose from, even IBM.

4. Tweaked PC Speaker
Simply amazing to hear recordings, I want to hear the "realsound" to believe it.

Which system to get is always the difficulty: A PCjr. can boast three out of four of those categories (and maybe the fourth with a 4863 monitor), but it is lacking in hardware compatibility and upgradeability. The PC/XT can offer all four (no IBM joysticks), but cannot support PCjr. or Tandy specific applications. Tandy can support all four but is not BIOS compatible with the PC.
 
Trixter said:
So do what I did: Get all three!
Click to expand...

I have an IBM PC , an XT, an AT

and I just acquired a nice Tandy 1000 SX that came with
640K , 3.5 and 5.25 drives, and even had a 20Meg Tandy
hardcard inside. Booted right up to DOS 3.3 :)
 
Use them for? Work...Word Processing, Database management, Spreadsheets, Email, programming...

Of course, we're getting into the "what is Vintage?" question. I'm talking about 386 and a few 486 machines for the most part.
 
mikey99 said:
I have an IBM PC , an XT, an AT

and I just acquired a nice Tandy 1000 SX that came with
640K , 3.5 and 5.25 drives, and even had a 20Meg Tandy
hardcard inside. Booted right up to DOS 3.3 :)
Click to expand...

While I have a soft spot for all Tandys and the PCjr, my favorite are the TL series with DOS in ROM. My TL/2 boots in literally two seconds. Hit the reset button -- boom, two seconds later, you're in DOS. It's great for assembler troubleshooting if you screw up a lot :)
 
While I was thinking very strongly of getting a Tandy 1000, probably an SX, for my 4.77MHz 8088 machine, I am against it these days. Tandys don't support PCjr. cartridges, and their compatibility with IBM PC games or is not without doubt. They also don't fit full length cards, so my IBM video card collection would be useless (and I doubt it would support the IBM EGA or VGA cards.) I don't like having to use CoCo joysticks or Tandy 1000 keyboards, while I can use a IBM Model M keyboard with my late BIOS XT. While the SX does can run 50% faster than an XT, that kind of a boost just isn't enough.
 
I owned an IBM PCjr back around 1985 and used it for a couple of years.
Struggled with the incompatabilities with hardware and software. Overall
it was fun , but I haven't had the desire to get another one of these.

I always thought of the Tandy 1000SX as what the PCjr 'should have been'.

BTW , theres a decent Tandy 1000 with monitor on eBay for a reasonable BIN :
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...MEWA:IT&viewitem=&item=320093808046&rd=1&rd=1

I was tempted to get this, but don't really need two of these.
 
When I'm in for a challenge, I boot my barebones PS/2 mod 30 (8086) into ROM BASIC and try some inline assembler tricks :). Sort-of live demo coding... Not much else I could do with it, as it has no disk drives whatsoever. I might one day code an intro or so, and leave it running indefinately, as it would only prevail in RAM until the next reset. There's a SONY W900 panoramic 24" screen plugged onto it so it would make a great running backround decoration.
 
Trixter said:
What does that syntax look like? I'd like to try the same thing...
Click to expand...

Look up the GW-BASIC docs: Users Guide has a concerning chapter, and also the CALL function in Users Reference. There's full explanation and an example to start with. I'd be more precise but I'm kinda in a hurry, packing for a long journey... So good luck! Oh and remember to always use retf !
 
Appendix C of my IBM BASIC reference has everything you need to know about calling ASM routines from inside the BASIC interpreter.
 
Trixter said:
I use my 5160 to explore what I was too young to understand growing up but now have the intelligence to comprehend. I have graduated from beginner to intermediate 8088 assembler programmer, which is a great deal of fun for me. One trick I seem to be known for is displaying full-color full-screen full-motion video with sync'd audio on a stock 5150. I'm currently working on a demoscene "demo" for 8088/CGA, including a 3-D engine.
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Ah, so you're the guy behind that. I always wanted to get my 5150 geared up to try running that (but lacked the sound card).

Most of my vintage machines aren't here in my house. Until last year, we only had an apartment so I ended up storing most of the stuff at my parents' house (where some of it has never moved from).

So my main vintage machine is actually my P166. It's a nice platform to play 'throttled' games on (games which adjust their gameplay based on the CPU speed). Old Sierra games are fun. No waiting for each screen to load like on the old days of the PCjr.

As it is, I never write code on old machines any more. I started giving up writing code 'for fun' mostly when I started writing code full-time. Now that I've got a wife & kid (2.5 weeks old!), I really don't have time. It'll likely be a while before I do any work repairing or playing with the old beasts now. Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to showing the little guy some old-school PC's when he's older.

Oh, and my Commodore 64 (which has gone missing, should be somewhere at my parents) I used to use a lot for games and SID music.

Joel
 
I have a 386 and a 486 as my main retro PCs.

I use them a lot to watch old demos (yeah, I could do that in dosbox, but nothing beats the feeling on the real thing, also not everything runs properly under dosbox). Then of course for retrogaming and my third interest is programming. I'd still like to finish a demo for my 386 and I have started my tests with OpenWatcom in C++ and possibly a bit of assembly too.

p.s. Hell, I never knew there was a forum like this! I was interested especially in vintage PC discussions and found it while searching for something. I am wondering if enough people are making demos or other software for old PCs, I'll check more threads now.
 
Optimus said:
p.s. Hell, I never knew there was a forum like this! I was interested especially in vintage PC discussions and found it while searching for something. I am wondering if enough people are making demos or other software for old PCs, I'll check more threads now.
Click to expand...

Welcome in then -- you'll like a lot of the stuff in the programming area from the sounds of it -- what with me making new games for old DOS machines, mbbrutman's TCP/IP stack for DOS, etc, etc...
 
I am using my old computers [e.g. Kaypros, Compaq Win ME, Gateway Win XP, laptop DOS, etc.] to test the deviceside and PLR systems to read 5.25" floppy disks.

But overall, how can you resist more modern computing ?

I want to get a lot of work done efficiently and fast, so modern is the way to go.

Just got a Toshiba netbook [less than $250] with Windows 7 so I can do my work easily and efficiently almost anywhere.

I am now 70 and do not know how much time I have left, so I want to make best use of it.

But I have to admit, it is entertaining and enlightening how far we have come since the early days of the 1980's.

Anyone else please share your thoughts !

Frank
 
GADFRAN said:
I want to get a lot of work done efficiently and fast, so modern is the way to go.

Just got a Toshiba netbook [less than $250] with Windows 7 so I can do my work easily and efficiently almost anywhere.

I am now 70 and do not know how much time I have left, so I want to make best use of it.
Click to expand...

A practical and honest answer. Use the right tool for the right job.

I use my older machines to explore how far they can be pushed. I enjoy writing software for them that meets or exceeds the quality standards I had 30 years ago but did not have the skill back then to implement.
 
I use mine for various things. I show my friends what ProDos is, wow them with a MOUSELESS DOS machine, and complete schoolwork assignments on my XT.

It just depends what projects I have and which computer I want to use to complete them.
 
Boy, this is an old thread - almost vintage.

Trixter said:
A practical and honest answer. Use the right tool for the right job. . . .
Click to expand...

Even though I'm very comfortable on a *nix command line and it's a powerful system I use DOS for some tasks. Regarding speed and choice of utilities, no UNIX or Linux system can hold a match to DOS when it comes to text processing. The vintageness of the computer is less relevant, but the DOS OS is certainly vintage. So, for a lot of text, I use a DOS machine and I have batch files set up to quickly flip files back and forth to different places over the network. It's simply the right tool for the job.
 
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