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Market Analysis

Terry Yager

Veteran Member
Joined
May 1, 2003
Messages
8,763
Location
Saginaw, MI, USA 48601
Is it just me, or have there been a helluvalot of '486 & low-end Pentiums selling for ridiculous prices on eBay lately?
Is this trend just a temporary fluke, or should I begin building up these old systems again instead of junking them?

--T
 
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They hype em up as "dos game machines". I'm clueless also. I clearly remember the agony of trying to get my 486/33 fired up after sitting idle for years. I had totally forgotten how SLOW it was. When I was heavily into playing "mod" files, it could just barely keep up if I was using win 3.1. Getting "The 7th Guest" working correctly took days and days.
 
They hype em up as "dos game machines". I'm clueless also. I clearly remember the agony of trying to get my 486/33 fired up after sitting idle for years. I had totally forgotten how SLOW it was. When I was heavily into playing "mod" files, it could just barely keep up if I was using win 3.1. Getting "The 7th Guest" working correctly took days and days.

Yeah, that's pretty much the way I remember it too. So wazzup, are there a buncha kiddiez out there who wanna experience retro-gaming, or what?

--T
 
Retro gaming is big, will probably beomes bigger too. While I have retro gaming machines, none of them are 486 based (tandy 1000, 386/40 and p200mmx for DOS), I use my (3) 486 for messing with OS and doing Windows 3.1 programming (when I get around to it). I also collect VLB and EISA cards and need machines to put my ISA capture cards into.

Anyway yes, I have seen complete system "setup" for DOS gaming go for $100+ sometimes, but that is because they are hard to find these days outside of ebay and the landfill. I don't know anybody who has a saved 486 anymore, p2's are throwaway and more usefull so why would you keep a 486?

Its not just any 486 box either, you tend to see them with both 1.44 and 1.2MB drives, a decent soundcard, and a VLB video card, plus a cdrom and a few shareware games loaded. From the buyers point of view coming up with all the parts configuring them (jumpers suck), and getting them shipped is more of a pain and costs more then just buying the box all setup and ready to go.
 
But was the 386/486 in the early days of VGA and SoundBlaster really such a gaming platform? I remember big adventure and role playing games which often appeared on the PC platform, but gaming in general?
 
Gaming sucked on the PC (compared to C64, Amiga, ST, etc) up untill the 386, Soundblaster 16 or gravis ultrasound, and VGA came along. so 386/486 era machines were the big start of the PC gaming era.

It was a combination of the above items that got things going, plus PC specific games that the other platforms did not have (Wolfenstein 3d/DOOM as an example). Also prices started coming down and home penetration skyrocketed by the time the 486 was around so there was alot of money in the market.
 
I sold one of my spare 486's (a DX2-66) a few months back for £35. It got gutted and rebuilt into the case of a £1.5 million laser cutting machine as the original computer (which used custom I/O EISA cards) died :)

I've just picked up a rather interesting 486 mainboard that has PCI, ISA and VESA slots.
 
The PCI/ISA/VLB boards were buggy, I have one as a spare. You can get PCI/ISA 486 motherboards, they tend to be the last made and support overclocking the AMD 133Mhz version to 160.

I have a few 486/VLB motherboards (2 in use) and a 486 EISA in use (nice made in the USA high quality motherboard but needed a RTC click replaced before it would boot).

You can still find 486 motherboards if you look around, but they are not mainstream like they used to be.
 
I have two identical MSI boards with PCI and ISA slots. One of them hangs on boot, the other one doesn't work with floppy. The other ISA/EISA board I have keeps locking up randomly (might be the memory, it has 4 4MB 30 pin SIMMS). Working 486 boards are getting harder and harder to find!!!

I have the PCI/ISA/VESA board with a DX4-100, 16MB and 800MB hard drive, it works a treat :)
 
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