Building New & Refurbished Old/Vintage Computers To Sell For Retro Gamers & For Old Software

[Operation_PeaSea_Storm]

Simple Questions Regarding The Viability & The Overall Market For Such Computer's: 

 

Firstly, thanks so very much for sharing your opinions and thoughts on everything and for helping me to find out if it is viable for me to go ahead with sharing the computer's I make for my little hobby of building old vintage PC's with others. 

 

My real question is whether it would be viable to proceed with selling old & vintage Computers I build using parts that are as close to new or new old stock as possible. 

 

The OS I would mainly be using is Windows XP. 

 

What do people think  when it comes to the market being big enough & if people would be willing to pay a small to medium premium for me to cover my parts costs, sales fee's, postage costs & very importantly my time that it takes to source the parts, build the Computer's and all the time listing the PC's, communicating with customers and packaging the PC's etc? 

 

If anyone has anything at all they can add, even thing or questions I haven't thought to ask, that would be appreciated so very much  

 

Thanks again in advance  

 

 

[PowerPCFan]

25 minutes ago, Operation_PeaSea_Storm said:

Simple Questions Regarding The Viability & The Overall Market For Such Computer's: 

 

Firstly, thanks so very much for sharing your opinions and thoughts on everything and for helping me to find out if it is viable for me to go ahead with sharing the computer's I make for my little hobby of building old vintage PC's with others. 

 

My real question is whether it would be viable to proceed with selling old & vintage Computers I build using parts that are as close to new or new old stock as possible. 

 

The OS I would mainly be using is Windows XP. 

 

What do people think  when it comes to the market being big enough & if people would be willing to pay a small to medium premium for me to cover my parts costs, sales fee's, postage costs & very importantly my time that it takes to source the parts, build the Computer's and all the time listing the PC's, communicating with customers and packaging the PC's etc? 

 

If anyone has anything at all they can add, even thing or questions I haven't thought to ask, that would be appreciated so very much  

 

Thanks again in advance  

 

 

I'm not a retro gamer but I love old tech.

 

Question about: "small to medium premium"  --  how much $$ do you mean? 

 

And how are you going to find the new old stock? It's gonna be really expensive. 

 

Amazing idea though! 

[Kilrah]

Doubt it, the type of people who want to run an old machine like this tends to be the one that is most likely to enjoy scrounging parts from the bin or for cheap, assembling and figuring things out themselves (see the retro hardware thread here...)

 

I'd expect the market for someone wanting a turnkey thing at a premium to exist but be really small. 

[SimplyChunk]

51 minutes ago, Operation_PeaSea_Storm said:

The OS I would mainly be using is Windows XP. 

How would you do this legally?

 

52 minutes ago, Operation_PeaSea_Storm said:

My real question is whether it would be viable to proceed with selling old & vintage Computers I build using parts that are as close to new or new old stock as possible. 

It's not super viable.  Like @Kilrah says, the people that are in to the Retro PC theme are in to it for all the aspects of PC building.  So they take it on themselves to source the parts and put the machines together.  I don't think I'd have had one quarter of the fun I've had from Frog if I'd have just bought it from some guy on eBay.  Tinkering is what keeps me interested in PCs in general.  If I wanted Retro computing without the fuss I'd just buy an old Mega Drive (Genesis) or Super Nintendo

[OhioYJ]

There's also companies that already specialize in old computers. Seems to me I remember one of the tech youtubers doing a video about one of these companies a while back. Mainly these PCs are purchased by companies with old equipment and software  with these kind of requirements. (Much wider market than "gamers")

 

However the point is these companies offer warranties, and have large supplies of parts. Trying to compete with any of that would not easy. Having a warranty claim would pretty much wipe out any profit on that one job (if not put you into the red).

 

Also be careful turning hobbies into a "job", as they will become just a "job."  I've known people who like to work on cars so they become a mechanic, in their off time they want to do anything but work on cars.

 

As for the legality of the OS, it does make me wonder where these companies obtain them? There have to be a limited number of "new" copies out there now. I know NIXSYS (an example of one these companies) offers MS DOS 6.22, NT 4.0, Win 95, 98 SE, 2000, and XP? Surely an "actual business" wouldn't be pirating OS?

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Operation_PeaSea_Storm said:

Simple Questions Regarding The Viability & The Overall Market For Such Computer's: 

 

Firstly, thanks so very much for sharing your opinions and thoughts on everything and for helping me to find out if it is viable for me to go ahead with sharing the computer's I make for my little hobby of building old vintage PC's with others. 

 

My real question is whether it would be viable to proceed with selling old & vintage Computers I build using parts that are as close to new or new old stock as possible. 

Yes, to a point. The machines do not need to be "New/Like-New/New Old Stock" to be viable, they need to just be clean. The problem is that restoring old machines usually runs into some problem parts, like swelling caps, or worn bearings in fans. Those you can fix. The harder parts to acquire are hard drives.

 

Ideally, you would be able to source SSD's that work on the old PATA or SATA interfaces, but this is what I mean by "to a point"

 

There's kind of a bowl shaped vintage PC graph where everything older than a 286 is worth money to retro games, if it's completely intact, or the hard drive has been replaced with an alternate sourced part. When you get to the 386/486/Pentium/PentiumII, pre WinXP era machines, most of these are better off running Windows 95OSR2 or 98SE. Since that OS is completely unsupported and difficult to update to a state that is viable, but since they are all pre PCIe/SATA, finding replacement parts is difficult.

 

Everything that can take XP range from Pentium 4 to Ivy Bridge. Just sourcing parts that aren't PCIe/SATA will be hard.

 

 

1 hour ago, Operation_PeaSea_Storm said:

The OS I would mainly be using is Windows XP. 

 

What do people think  when it comes to the market being big enough & if people would be willing to pay a small to medium premium for me to cover my parts costs, sales fee's, postage costs & very importantly my time that it takes to source the parts, build the Computer's and all the time listing the PC's, communicating with customers and packaging the PC's etc? 

 

If anyone has anything at all they can add, even thing or questions I haven't thought to ask, that would be appreciated so very much  

 

Thanks again in advance  

 

 

Honestly, there is a small market for retro gaming, but honestly the retrogaming is focused on DOS/Win95/Win98 hardware

 

XP hardware doesn't really offer anything that a current system can't deal with with the exception of software that only works on 16/32-bit CPU's rather than 32/64bit. That's going to be mostly old productivity software, not so much games.

 

And don't stick a bare XP machine on the internet, it will be infected with malware quickly.