Speaking of weird USB stuff - I have a USB to ISA interface from ARS Technologies, it's an interesting device but definitely not plug n play.http://arstech.com/install/ecom-prodshow/usb2isax3.html

Thanks for sharing thats really interesting, what ISA cards have you got working this way & how did you use them?

ery curious to know how this device works in practice.

... Error - Operator out of memory!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbS>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

Speaking of weird USB stuff - I have a USB to ISA interface from ARS Technologies, it's an interesting device but definitely not plug n play.http://arstech.com/install/ecom-prodshow/usb2isax3.html

Thanks for sharing thats really interesting, what ISA
cards have you got working this way & how did you use them?

I haven't actually done very much with the USB2ISA, it turns out it isn't exactly a simple plug and play solution to add an ISA bus to a modern computer. :) I poked at a modem a bit with it, but I haven't really USED it for anything so far.

What it does is it provides a USB interface to access ISA cards - the catch is that nothing else knows how to interface with an ISA card over the USB interface, so you have two choices: a) write your own software that will interface with the ISA card, or b) run a special version of DOSBox that supports USB2ISA, then DOS programs can access the ISA cards.

There's a short thread on vogons.org about it here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=61863

A few years ago, Foone posted a twitter thread with their experiments: https://twitter.com/foone/status/1228127962320404480

When looking this up, I also came across someone else's similar project for an ISA-over-USB adapter that they called ISASTM:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/jbaw38/isaoverusb_using_real_isa_cards_in_an_emulator/


Chris/akacastor

--- Maximus 3.01
* Origin: Another Millennium - Canada - another.tel (21:1/162)

On Sunday, May 5th AKAcastor muttered...

I find it frustrating that the cost of retro computer parts has gone up, but any time I do the math on "I should have kept it around since the 1980s!" the cost of storing things is way higher than the cost to buy again, even at current prices. (I do not intend to stop hoarding just yet though haha)

I'm always fighting hoarders who don't seem to understand the cost of sorting, organizing, cleaning, keeping, moving, re-sorting, and finding these things.
Especially cables, I just bought a VGA cable for $1 at a thrift store, that's way cheaper than keeping it through the ~25 moves I made during my young adulthood.

I needed an Apple IIgs video cable, they cost like $35 on ebay, but I was able to purchase DB-15 male to rj-45 modular adapters for $2.94 ea after shipping, as it turns out the real cable only uses 8 pins. So I bought enough parts to make three cables for $18. Remember that cables, even ribbon cables, are very affordable to make or find on digikey etc.

The computers are 40 years old, we can wait a few more days to buy or build a cable :)

I lament sometimes that I gave away a C64 and Apple II ~16 years ago, when they could be found at goodwill for $15, and now even goodwill sells them on ebay for hundreds. But if I kept things like that, I would have paid thousands in storage or movers or required to rent or buy a large vehicle to move them myself. This adds up to thousands of dollars, and there is a sort of "cost" in having to shuffle through bins and move them around and organize and label them and find things in them, and to take away useful space in your home for them and all of the extra stress, like when I suffered local wildfires in california and loaded my vehicle with all of my valuables.

I also sometimes think if I only knew the "retro gaming" market would blow up, I would have bought nintendos, segas, neogeos, whatever, and multiple copies of every popular game and bagged and stored them and what a great investment..

But any 1980's computer can still be purchased for less than the original cost. Calculate the inflated value, and, if you instead had invested into S&P 500 or the like, you could afford to buy 10x the retro computers for the 1980's value invested.

Also consider for the first twenty years these went *down* in value, I remember buying a Sega+CD with games for just $5. The 2020 covid pandemic was a market "peak" and it's coming back down again. Even if you bought the most "extreme" value items like an Apple 1 computer, rare nintendo accessories etc, dollar-for-dollar you would have done better to just buy stocks in those same companies. And, for much of their lifetime, stocks would have had significant gains that you could have sold at any time to divest or buy a home. Nobody could have predicted a youtube+pandemic market peak would happen. And stocks don't take up space in your home, you won't have to worry about wether to buy and regularly test a battery-backed sump in case of your basement flooding and ruining stocks, lol.

A lot of people wish they would have bought Amazon, Tesla, Microsoft, etc. stocks at an early time. But remember, if you were buying those kinds of stocks you were also buying stocks in Nokia, pets.com, GeoCities, AOL, Nortel, etc.

So, this isn't financial advice. I just want to suggest that saving your money over your career and investing in a well-rounded portfolio is a lot more likely to afford a retrocomputing hobby today than if you were to buy and keep microcomputers and gaming consoles at the time they were popular :) please don't hoard, sell the stuff you never use that can be again on ebay later!

--- ENiGMA 1/2 v0.0.14-beta (linux; x64; 18.18.2)
* Origin: Xibalba -+- xibalba.l33t.codes:44510 (21:1/121)

The computers are 40 years old, we can wait a few more
days to buy or build a cable :)

You must have way more patience than I! hehe :)

I lament sometimes that I gave away a C64 and Apple II ~16 years ago, when they could be found at goodwill for $15, and now even goodwill sells them on ebay for hundreds. But if I kept things like that, I would have paid thousands in storage or movers or required to rent or buy a large vehicle to move them myself.

I've come to the same conclusion myself. One possible exception is the Tandy 1000 HX that was my first computer, I do now have a machine (from eBay), but there's a lot of sentimental value in that original I had in the 80s/early 90s. But I can't think of much else that would have had significant enough sentimental value to be worth all the moves and storage.

So, this isn't financial advice. I just want to suggest
that saving your money over your career and investing in
a well-rounded portfolio is a lot more likely to afford
a retrocomputing hobby today than if you were to buy and
keep microcomputers and gaming consoles at the time they
were popular :) please don't hoard, sell the stuff you
never use that can be again on ebay later!

I think you're right about the financial side, but on the other hand someone has to hoard the things so we can buy it from them later! :)


Chris/akacastor

--- Maximus 3.01
* Origin: Another Millennium - Canada - another.tel (21:1/162)