Lizstar

Gay Murr Girl

Liz, Goblin, Part-Time Shark, VTuber, retired speedrunner, author, GDQ staff, Sega fan, "Yuri Sommelier", Walking Encyclopedia of All Things Useless, Twitch partner, general menace. Says "Murr" a lot. This is not a place of honor, views my own, etc. Avatar art by me.


Every few months I get The Bug

I collect retro machines, I just like them. They make me happy. I've wanted to get into retro PC collecting for years, though, not just retro consoles. I grew up on Windows 95 and 98, and I want a W98 machine I can futz around with, stream from, and goof off in.

But the market is intimidating. I never know where to start or what to do. Just searching on Ebay you find a lot of these like, aftermarket custom tiny PC things. Or I could try and build one from scratch, though the parts cost a fortune and are impossible to find nmow.

I can find other ones on like, ebay too, but I never know if it's what I need or want, or if I'm getting ripped off.

Like is this good? Is this a good deal? It LOOKS good but I'm so unused to this market I got no idea. I'm kinda at the point where I just want someone to grab me, point at a listing for less than 300 bucks, and go "get that" lmfao


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in reply to @Lizstar's post:

Depending on where you live, Liquidation sales can be good for this?
You won't believe how ancient some of the machines still running some stores' bookkeeping software, or government offices are.
Extra bonus is that the big resellers usually leave those alone, because they can't easily and quickly flip them.

I can’t speak to the pricing, but the stats sound like a really solid machine for a 98 box, significantly in excess of the recommended system requirements (and with the W98 install taking IIRC 200MB or so, you’ll have so much room for activities!)

Dang, I really wish my old Win2k system hadn't died due to a rental that didn't actually have electrical grounding (surprise).

I doubt I'd use it much, but it'd be nice to fire up for some difficult/impossible to workaround retro gaming.

It was more a 2004 gaming rig, but still, would have access to that shit period of like 1996-2005 where random things just absolutely won't run on modern systems. I know it was like a dual core Athlon something, so I'd still have to mess with affinity now and then, but I suppose I could also just dual boot Win98 and have that not recognize the other core at all.

Well, now I need to NOT look into old systems.