I was looking to buy a retro laptop to play some old DOS games from the 90's.
I just had a look on ebay and noticed a Pentium 1 Dell XPI laptop sold for $200 within hours of being listed.
There isn't much else to chose from on ebay that is a reasonable price.
Do you think the old hardware is becoming overpriced?
Emulation on a modern PC works pretty well these days so it may all be a bit overhyped.
Are Vintage Laptops Going up in Price?
Windows7forever on 20/11/2020 - 18:05
Comments
No real reason to get old hardware when things like dosbox & dosshell exist
Was going to say the same thing. Play all my retro games on dosbox.
This is true. GOG has a huge library of classic games. The beauty is that the installers automatically configure DOS settings and it's one click to play the games. No more messing around with antiquated soundblaster channels conflicts and trying to get the darn game to run. The games generally run faster too. I have been a member of retro gaming facebook groups for a longtime and those guys are obsessed with collecting the original hardware, so I can see the appeal to a collector. I sold my SNES collection years ago when I realised I could play the same games perfectly through my computer with a controller. Sure, if I held onto the collection it would have gone up in value substantially in the last decade but I was able to free myself of cartridge clutter for a system I rarely used. I guess I have to remember that a 20 year old system is going to be slow, clunky and have many limitations. It will also take longer to install and set up games that I may seldom play because they are stored away on a vintage laptop that could break down at any time. I think I got it out of my system now :)
Like anything else, people love that old retro feel, and look.
I've seen some pretty good videos on restoring C64s, Vic20s from units that are rusty.
A Dinner table made from Motherboards, video cards etc.
Some of the old Apple Powerbooks and Amstrad laptops will probably start to increase in value/demand.Toshiba made some nice notebooks early on. I am sure I had one that we sold that had CGA graphics and had an XT processor.
The IBMS were usually Black and square.
Compaq had some nice looking units in the Armarda series as well as Presario.
Then there was Olivetti, which always looked odd, though this design was cool. The trackball would spring out .
Panasonic made a military grade notebook, which was 'bulletproof' which may increase in value.
I had a Compaq luggable with a plasma mono orange screen and dual floppy, as likely my oldest system. Though I was given it from a garage shelf well after it was much use.
I bought a generic 286 and later another IBM PS/2 286 machine when I was at uni because I was broke and they were $100. A new 486 was over $1000, and I couldn’t always get home to Mum and Dad’s to use their 386. Dos software is still surprisingly usable.
In 1994 I got a Mac se/30 for $50 from a computer lab refresh. Didn’t really use it except to learn about Mac and play around with some Mac software. Compatibility was a nightmare, you couldn’t just stick a disk with your word doc from a pc in the Mac. I remember installing os/2 warp to try out instead of windows 3.1, on a 386, as it had real multi-threading and memory protection, just no software I could afford.
My 2400bps modem was $149 in 1994, and that was an ozbargain-esque trawl around parts swap meets in Sutherland, Parramatta and Ryde. But I couldn’t afford the $10 and hour for compuserve, so dialed free bbs’s.
Apologies now for the poor sysops who saw me tie up their phone line to download software crackz and low res bikini photos of Elle macpherson.I got a job at an ISP in 1995 and one of the hardware guys gave me a decommissioned 14.4kbps modem - then I was flying with free internet to boot. And win95 came out so I could forget trumpet winsock (wouldn’t be surprised if the author, from Tassie I think, is still salty that he didn’t get paid for getting millions of machines online).
Great read. Did you keep any of your old systems?
I kept some PDAs, psion, palm and hp.
I should have kept an Apple PowerBook 100 and a PowerBook duo, they were cool.
I don’t have much affection for the old beige boxes, but those Apple products were nice.
Makes me cry when I think about the stuff I have junked over the years.
I still use various select pieces of old gear, so i find it very surprising that stuff that is/was very routine is in anyway collectible.
I mean, a Apple Lisa or an Altair or something has rarity value. But a beige Ipex 386 was generically slammed together in Ryde in 1993 for 100,000 public servants.
Most of these old laptops usually have a few issues, like a battery that doesn't charge or other problems due to age. Have you considered installing older versions of Windows in VMWare or Virtual Box and playing your games in there?