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The first one is your standard "stupid bidding war". On the 2nd one, I'm CLUELESS. I tossed my 486 DX2-50 motherboard years ago, it was so SLOW I couldn't stand it anymore. I do still have the EXCELLENT 1991 full sized Gateway tower that it came in. Think I have upgraded the motherboard in that tower 5 times, latest one is a very nice Asus P2B-B with a nice 1 Ghz PIII in it. Power supply still humming along after 15 years, fan is on the noisy side now (yes, been cleaned lately :rolleyes: ).
 
I'm totally amazed at those! And to think, I put a few old systems like that out on the street not too long ago (sorry, we had to make room and I couldn't find anyone that wanted them!). I should have put them on eBay!
 
The first one was perhaps driven up by the talk of "Ultimate DOS gaming machine" Hype, and the large selection of games on it. No idea about the second one.
The DOS Gaming Machine hype doesn't seem too bad, until you realise you can get an old celeron for £10.
 
I also see this type of activity when someone is trying to replace an exsiting machine that serves some special purpose, or is needed for litigation. In this case, the NEC machine is a bit wierd. I have a PI-133 version of the same type of box at home and it has a few idiosyncrasies (sp?). The other was an ATT labeld box, maybe the same type of thing.

Another interesting point is that both machines were bought by a realitivly inactive user with a 1 feedback. If they offer to pay by anything other than PayPal to confirmed address, I'd suspect a scam.

Either way, none of my auctions get this kind of response, although I did sell a NIB copy of Borland's Sidekick for $173 to some guy in Spain last year.
 
Retro DOS gaming has been picking up speed for quite a while, and the older 486 system with the apropriate video and sound cards are hard to find these days (believe it or not). If you look at what is involved time wise and money wise to find the correct parts (motherboard, RAM, video, sound, case, etc) it is probably cheaper just to buy a machine that is already setup then to piece it yourself. While newer machines are easier and cheaper to find, they are not suited to DOS gaming because the speed is too fast (and programs to slow down the system mess up the sound quality).

While I can see a few such systems selling for $100 I do not believe there are that many DOS gamers out there that would pay that kind of money for every system that will be auctioned, if you look around other systems have sold for less (and were not specifically targeted to the DOS gamer).
 
sorry to drift sort of off-topic, but will MAME run on a 486 *well*? I had downloaded it a number of years ago when that's all I had, but never bothered to figure out how to run it...duy doi
 
MAME keeps adding newer and newer games so you need a faster processor to keep up.

If you just want to play the original arcade games (frogger, centipede, etc) I think a 486 would work, but I think you need a fast pentium or better.
 
Retro DOS gaming is a far better experience on my Debian GNU/Linux Pentium 4 3GHz laptop running the fantastic emulator DOSBox than it is on the actual machines themselves.

I don't even have to configure my joysticks or gamepads, I just plug 'em in and they work!

I don't need boot disks, just different .conf files for games that need them, if a game crashes, I can just start a new DOS window without rebooting anything, and with an external USB floppy drive, I can install games directly from my old media (do they even make external USB 5.25" floppy drives?).

Being able to adjust the clock speed in real time also helps out a great deal with games from different eras (Ultima VI vs. TIE Fighter, for instance).
 
I was going to get to that.

Just think about how good it feels not to play the "Bop-a-mole" game with your IRQs, DMAs, and I/O addresses, not to mention bus-mastering, memory holes, and other BIOS/config.sys joys.
 
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