you guys are concerned over old consoles and crts eventually kicking the buck for good but what about retro gpus? some third and first party vendor variants of certain architectures highly sought after just as much as a copy of mgs
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all those things can be repaired none of them will ever be dead for good except in cases of catastrophic failure that causes damage to irreplaceable components
>none of them will ever be dead for good except when they are dead for good
Thanks moron.
Learn to solder dumbass. All these parts are radioshack tier bullshit that any teenager can handle. You should be worried about all the surface mount dogshit in the newer electronics
You can't fix a shot integrated circuit even if you can do BGA rework. You can replace it with another working one at best... but that's assuming you have access to another working one.
Phosphors literally dim over time, moron.
>they can be fixed until they can no longer be
>9800 Pro (first GPU I purchased brand new with my own money) went breasts up on me last summer
>now the CRT from my childhood is dying again
>went breasts up
None of the cards came with breasts. So this is all on you and your mishandling of medication intended for your own personal us.
>None of the cards came with breasts
I beg to differ
You'll be dead before every GPU is unfixable.
There's demand, just less. Retro PC gaming with original hardware isn't as sought after. MGS isn't even that sought after lolwut
I'll use them, repair them, and enjoy them as long as I can. But I don't pretend that eventually all my retro shit will be via emulation some day.
Such is life.
I think it's inevitable that we get to a point where we have components documented well enough and fabrication is good enough that you could order any replacement chip from China some day.
Consoles and GPUs can be emulated, and the ones that can't be emulated now will be emulated eventually if a dedicated autist wants it badly enough.
I only concern myself with CRTs because it's display technology with capabilities that fundamentally cannot be emulated by other technology, and the manufacturing process is practically lost at this point so the current stock is all we'll ever have for the foreseeable future.
>you guys are concerned over old consoles and crts eventually kicking the buck for good
No. Only a few underage non-guys are.
There are only a handful of video cards that actually have features so unique they're needed for certain things. In most cases so many of these were made that they were easy to find for cheap until bandwagoners.
>I only concern myself with CRTs because it's display technology with capabilities that fundamentally cannot be emulated by other technology, and the manufacturing process is practically lost at this point so the current stock is all we'll ever have for the foreseeable future.
Tell my you watch stupid children on youtube without tellimg me.
shouldn't you have a wife and children instead of posting on /vr/ in the middle of the night?
I think you failed at life
>You nailed it
Obviously
>can only reply in the form of twitter memes
zoom zoom
>and the ones that can't be emulated now will be emulated eventually if a dedicated autist wants it badly enough.
What is that autist doesn't exist and you don't have the skills to make it possible by yourself? MAME still cannot run arcade 3D games anywhere near well.
I found out recently you can use one of these Radeons with S-video to output Retroarch to a CRT. I don't know anything about it but it sounds cool. I saw a Radeon 4890 for 10 bux and almost got it but I saw that it has a TDP of 250W or something frick that
lol you missed the bandwagon op enjoy paying $800 usd for a 25 year old gpu (UNTESTED)
>consoles vs CRTs vs GPUs
>while an Adlib Gold already goes for thousands
don't worry anon minimum wage for fast food is now $20 dollars so just flip burgers for 100 hours and you can afford a single computer component from 1995 np
well, maybe make that 200 hours after taxes, and try to just live in a gutter and not eat very much to save money
I bought an SC-88 pro for like 100 some years ago. The only great use it has is playing the Viper soundtracks as midi files, which is great, but pretty much every old PC game I have has a CD soundtrack that was either composed on a Roland or a similar device and sounds exactly the same as playing it with midi.
There's value for that in terms of preserving PC gaming history. In terms of playing the games? Who gives a shit about having any number of various crappy early 3d accelerators to play Quake at 20 frames per second with blurred out textures.
There's very few GPUs that let you play games that modern PCs wouldn't
The only ones that come to mind are certain DOS games needing an S3 card to play without graphical glitches, some turn of the millennium games needing a Geforce3/4 for some mostly minor graphical effects and there's also some early Windows 95 games that need a specific 3D accelerator card for hardware accelerated visuals to work at all.
There's very few games that fit those requirements worth playing. Do you really care about the fog effects in the PC port of Sega GT that much? Are you actually going to play Supaplex on a real DOS machine? If not then it's simply not worth spending the time and effort to hunt down a specific graphics card when literally any other card will play 99% of PC games from its own era.
>There's very few GPUs that let you play games that modern PCs wouldn't
>Very, very few of those have features that are not present in modern GPUs through backwards compatibility.
Are there even any other than the NV1? IIRC though those games had non-NV1 versions too, but they didn't look as good. Has anyone ever made a wrapper or added emulator support for that thing?
Well you could also count stuff like Voodoo, ofc. The only way to run games with Glide API now is through software emulation, which is little different than emulating a console's GPU in practice and has all of the inaccuracies that come with it.
lolwut. There were tons of "GPU"s that had features others didn't. That modern ones don't. And that were used by exclusive games. Even where there are "versions" of games that ran on different hardware that can be largely irrelevant. Sort of like saying "b-b-but there was a GB version of this SNES game"
Ok, name some.
Why?
W-buffering on Geforce 3 and 4 series cards is a feature that was quickly dropped and afaik was never supported by ATI Radeon cards
In most games it makes for a very very minor difference but the two games I know it has major effects on are the fog effects in Sega GT looking a lot better with it, and all the lighting and shadows in Splinter Cell being absolutely fricked on non-supported systems
dgVoodoo2 tries but mostly fails at recreating the proper effects
>There's very few GPUs that let you play games that modern PCs wouldn't
Depends on whether you mean play in any form or play accurately. There are a number of Win 9x games which simply won't look right on any GPU past the GeForce FX series, since Nvidia dropped support for 8-bit paletted textures (and ATI had done so a long time before that). The original PC ports of FF7 and FF8 are amongst them. Voodoo wrappers (or emulation) aren't perfect either, and some of the more obscure APIs from that period have simply been lost to time and are inaccessible without real hardware. Hell, even amongst Voodoo cards there are compatibility issues. You need both a Voodoo 1/2 and 3 to cover everything, as there are early Glide games that don't work on a Voodoo 3.
Yes, it's ultimately mainly autism and there's really no NEED for anyone to have this stuff, but the same goes for real console hardware. Some people just want a 100% faithful experience. It can also be fun to tinker with some curious/failed products. I have an S3 Savage 2000, which was a disaster of a card with a completely broken hardware TnL engine, but it does allow the use of S3TC. It only works in a handful of games, but it looks absolutely incredible for the time. You can also force-enable the broken TnL engine, which has some interesting results.
>I have an S3 Savage 2000, which was a disaster of a card
Later S3 cards do indeed suck for 3D acceleration but paired with a Voodoo 1 they make for an amazing DOS/Win95 machine due to their incredible DOS support
S3 was basically the only company to fully and properly support VESA standards under DOS with almost everyone else taking some sorta shortcuts resulting in compatibility issues like stuttering scrolling in Commander Keen
how is the performance of S2000 in UT?
I have a couple of Savage4 cards and I wonder what difference the 128-bit memory bus makes
Most retro PCs people are interested in are either from the pre-IBM compatible era, or up to max the 486 era. The interest in retro PC GPUs generally fades out past the Voodoo 2. Most games past that can either still run on modern Windows natively, have a fan mod to allow them to run, or can just be run in a VM.
And you can even emulate those older PCs anyway. Yes accuracy and real hardware and all that, but PCs (Especially not the ones from the IBM compatible era) are not consoles, they rapidly started to move away from being a single set design like say a Commodore64 would have been, so there is no hardware to really target as the "accurate" one, and also unlike those pre-IBM PCs or consoles they would require a lot of setup and configuration to get running, and will likely have many issues while setting them up. Not to mention a lot of the authentic hardware can be hard to get and/or very expensive. And unlike emulators you can't just create a new virtual HDD or reload a save state or so if you do something to hose your install, or configured something wrong, or discovered that 30-40+ year old RAM is actually faulty, etc. Look at the laughable price of something like a Voodoo 2 on eBay right now, and notice that if you sort by cheapest the top results are just bare RAM chips to replace faulty ones rather than full cards.
Even people who do use real hardware tend to use newer replacements for at least the storage if not also other components like homebrew modern replacements for soundcards or such.
So a combination of expensive parts, a pain and lot of time to setup with the risk of hosing it all and having to start over, parts that old being faulty and a lot harder to repair than a console 70s computer(good luck sourcing replacement parts), no single hardware config like consoles so emulation accuracy issues are far less impacted, and being able to run newer software on modern systems means there isn't really much of a desire for GPUs past the 90s.
anon you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about
if it can run windows 98 and has driver support, you're going to be paying $$$
Hey moron-kun, the Voodoo2 came out in 1998.
Very, very few of those have features that are not present in modern GPUs through backwards compatibility.
Anything that's broken can be repaired (unless you do something moronic like set it on fire). And in the case of proprietary components, it's up to the community to come up with a solution. Look at the NES as a great example of this: you can currently recreate an NES completely from new components which the exception of only the CPU and PPU. Far in the future when NES' kick the bucket, fans will have to release a drop-in replacement either in the form of a recreated chip or a small FPGA replacement.
The same will happen with PC'S if (and only IF) anyone cares about them enough to save them. But PC gaming is garbage and there isn't a single good title so I fully expect that the hardware will die and that will be the end of it. However, I do expect that Japanese PC platforms will be properly preserved in some form.
>you can currently recreate an NES completely from new components which the exception of only the CPU and PPU
Big deal, those are essentially the only custom components, everything else is more or less off-the-shelf, other than the lockout chip which nobody would WANT to include anyway.
Others have already made far more impressive progress on systems like the Commodore64 where there are both FPGA and ARM-based software emulation drop-in replacements for custom components that have high failure rates like the PLA or SID, there are multiple options for those now.
>Well you could also count stuff like Voodoo, ofc. The only way to run games with Glide API now is through software emulation, which is little different than emulating a console's GPU in practice and has all of the inaccuracies that come with it.
Or you could use wrappers, especially since the API was made open source over 20 years ago.
Those wrappers are software emulation layers.
>which the exception of only the CPU and PPU.
This is why not everything can be repaired. Sometimes it would be destroying something else broken to harvest a part.
This. Every time they made an NES they had to destroy an NES. But they made it up on volume.
Every bit as real as anons.
I kept a few of my old GPUs, and I care about them as much as old consoles and CRTs. I wish there were people I knew that can assist in maintaining them for me, but I've not the space nor means to preserve the joy. For example, these are ATi graphics cards which has a die which is unable to maintain contact to a surface and it needs an ever expanding heatsink to transfer its heat. No one likes ATi style graphics, so there's not much effort into research into replicating or preserving them. The price is extremely high to have someone custom machine a copper core onto extruded aluminum with proper mounts requires highly specialized skill and tools, not to mention the material cost of the raw materials. I didn't win either the Mega Millions nor the Powerball, so their eventual heat death is inevitable; and it's such a shame since they did power some great gaming memories for me but that's now how others remember it.
are old GPUs sought after?? what are they even useful for?
They're pointless e-waste and should be avoided.
Some old "GPU"s are very much sought after. Certain cards are required to run certain things. Some of these are emulated to some degree of accuracy. But there are plenty of people who prefer original hardware to dealing with emushit.
There are a few random cases where games pushed their graphics to the absolute limit on the highest settings by optimizing for a specific type of graphics card and utilizing as many of its features as possible. In a lot of those cases, the game can just brute force the same result with a more powerful graphics card, but some weren't future proofed.
it's mostly 3dfx stuff or high end cards from the competitors and PCI versions of good 3D cards
eventually all retro consoles that have been actually used for long enough will have their proprietary coprocessors die. they'll have to be replaced by whatever the raspi-equivalent is in like 2040, emulating the pinout. obscure games that pushed the limits by exploiting random bugs and undocumented features will become unplayable.
It's less sought after because old software is, to some degree, still executable with emulators, compatibility layers and so on. Consoles for the most part don't even bother, and a lot of those games aren't emulatable yet, so people hunt for old machines. There's also the interfacing issue, you can emulate software but the controllers and accessories are a different story, and most old games on PC used keyboard and mouse.