I hate the prices on rare items, that stuff sucks. The price of things is far above what people should be willing to pay, but sellers have no incentive to sell for less and buyers have no choice if they ever want to mess with old computers. Frankly, old Japanese computers are easier to get a decent deal on because for one reason or another, Yahoo! Japan Auctions tends to give pretty damn fair prices.
What I’m talking about though is actually not the second-hand market, but the very interesting market of making new retro-computing goods. TexElec has some good examples of said things; accessories or expansions for old computers, or hell, sometimes even successors or recreations of them, like the Vampire V4 standalone, which from my reading is meant to be a successor to the Amiga 4000.
There’s always emulator boxes like the “mini” consoles that have been popular, but frankly I think those have firmly left “niche” territory by now, and only some of them are marketed at the niche. Nowadays the niche markets seem much more palatable to more expensive, but somewhat more versatile FPGA based emulation. (Well, maybe that’s not fair; software emulation can do things FPGA based emulation can not, but FPGA based emulation can do things that software emulation can’t do either, and you can already get software emulation on most computers, phones, and game consoles anyways. It definitely adds some value for being unique.)
What I’m talking about though is actually not the second-hand market, but the very interesting market of making new retro-computing goods. TexElec has some good examples of said things; accessories or expansions for old computers, or hell, sometimes even successors or recreations of them, like the Vampire V4 standalone, which from my reading is meant to be a successor to the Amiga 4000.
There’s always emulator boxes like the “mini” consoles that have been popular, but frankly I think those have firmly left “niche” territory by now, and only some of them are marketed at the niche. Nowadays the niche markets seem much more palatable to more expensive, but somewhat more versatile FPGA based emulation. (Well, maybe that’s not fair; software emulation can do things FPGA based emulation can not, but FPGA based emulation can do things that software emulation can’t do either, and you can already get software emulation on most computers, phones, and game consoles anyways. It definitely adds some value for being unique.)