Retro Macintosh communities have plenty of these kinds of people, too. I guess that's more expected because lol Apple, but it seems to be so common that the absolute treasure trove of long-forgotten games and software for pre-OS X are largely untouched by YouTubers. Doesn't help that tons of old games just crash Basilisk II, so there's still good reason to maintain your old Macs.
In one of his talks about the old days at Commodore, Bil Herd trolls the fuck out of people by talking about the rare protos he has and how they're all just stacked up in the basement, and if they ever do get fired up it's just throw power on and let it rip, no autistically going over all the caps with an ESR meter or what have you. He built this stuff it's not 'super special' to him.
IIRC Bil Herd owns 2 out of the 3 known surviving Commodore LCD prototypes and one of them doesn't even work anymore. but he doesn't seem to be in a hurry to fix it. He even pulled one apart and made a video about it. That's actually kinda based.
I told the story here before but I picked a visually well-preserved Performa 475 off eBay for a pittance some years ago. I knew literally nothing about it, never owned one, never interacted with one in the 80s and 90s. (They weren't popular in my country) I basically just liked how it looked and it was cheap. After fixing it's various problems, it easily became one of my favorite machines because there's so much interesting and weird software for it, yet I made the same observation - nobody seems to care. It even took me a while to find a pixel art program (one of my favorite non-game things I like to do on these old things) for it and I even found out that there was an Deluxe Paint off-shoot (Studio/8-32) for it, there was virtually zero information on google and I really had to dig.
If you really dig into the gritty of this stuff it just really isn't that special. The most interesting thing about it is was time it existed in and with what limitations it needed to be made. These computers are really primitive measured with our current technology and you can easily reproduce vastly improved versions on a hobby budget nowadays. I really appreciate the few projects that don't go overboard with FPGAs and and other crazy things but stick largely to similar primitive hardware, like the various 8 bit computers and such. It's a pity that many of them rarely diverge from reference designs or just slap modern FPGAs and MCs on the hard parts (or just ignore them altogether - just use serial bro) and call it a day. To build such computers and make them interesting without going crazily overboard, you kinda need "house rules".
Shortly before I left that entire scene there were the first signs of the audio-voodoo-autism moving into retro-computing in regards to caps in these old machines. I assume because there's a huge overlap between autists that have too much money and don't understand signal theory and autists that collect this old crap without understanding it. My favorites were people slapping extremely low-ESR caps (like ceramics) into analog signal and/or timing circuits that clearly depended e.g. on the discharge curve of the cap and then wondering about various problems. Except usually bypass caps (were you really can just take whatever in this old junk) you can't always just replace a cap with a cap of a completely different type, especially in these old machines where you sometimes find excessively clever circuits that employ all kind of physical characteristic shenanigans where it was acceptable that it worked only 98% of the time because you couldn't just slap a MCU on the problem. Pure madness.
lol, the 35 year old scotch tape and other patchwork
I figure nobody cares about retro Mac software because very few people in the USA had a computer at all before the 2000s, and those that did generally just had a cheap DOS or Windows machine. Everything Apple sold was pricey, even their cheaper computers still broke a grand. And considering computers were mostly used as glorified word processors back then, why should you bother with a Mac when everything is on DOS, and for much cheaper?
Myst was originally a Mac-only game made in HyperCard.
One thing that's become a bit of an annoyance for me now is the old 400KB/800KB floppy drives. The trouble is that they're a variable speed drive, meaning that it's impossible to create a Mac boot disk using a 1.44MB PC floppy drive. It also makes finding replacement floppy drives somewhat problematic, as Apple was the only manufacturer to use a variable speed floppy drive AFAIK.
That's what I got. Needed some finagling because even back then Apple loved it's locked-in shit and looked for a specific type of harddrive. I ended up installing System 7 in an emulator on the PC and then just put the card in ready-made. I also got a Network card and pull the newest and hottest 0day 1337 Mac Warez from a local ARM running a FTP server. Networking and some computer that just runs a standard FTP server without frills like encryption is such a timesaver with these old machines and getting files on and off them, basically everything supports FTP. Also it takes me back to the days of actual FTP servers and downloading stuff over the course of three days - always at night, cheaper phone line fees you see - to download some big software package. (Nowadays you just torrent and that multi GB file is there in about ~5 mins, guess investing all that money into anti-piracy shit over the years was really worth it huh)
NOOOOO how DARE someone steal those things! They should've gone into some soyboy's hoard never to be seen again...
Honestly, is this stuff really worth thousands of dollars, like sure they are rare, but what is someone going to do with a old business computer. I have a few retro machines laying around but they are all as maxed out as they can be so they can run retro software at the max possible settings. These machines are just 8086 dos computers with proprietary ibm hardware, and while cool really belong in a museum rather the the hoarders wearhouse that is computer reset. Not to mention only one of them worked as Davids infamous video shows
Well, retro fans will have an interest, sure, and eBay and the like make it easy to fence hobbyist stuff like this. Those IBMs are rare enough though that if they show up on eBay, people are gonna notice. It'd be like trying to fence the Mona Lisa. Maybe the thieves already had buyers lined up or something?
If you haven't already I really recommend the Youtube Channel Yesteryear's Mac Games. It really scratches my nostalgia itch when I used download tons of silly shareware games from Shareware.com.
Wow, that brought on a wave of memories. Escape Velocity, EV: Override, and EV: Nova were space traders/fighers a la Elite which were incredibly popular, and I think only one of them got ported to Windows. I think their most interesting game was Avara, though. It was a mech FPS with flat poly graphics and unusual controls, and really great procedural sound - like missiles would have a doppler effect when they whizzed by your ship. Great game to play with headphones. It's been ported to modern systems as FOSS, but I haven't given it a try yet.
