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Show off your (old) gear, win shiny new (ROCCAT) gear!

As you know, the GOG.com catalog spans many titles dating back as far as 1980 (, we're looking at you!), in times when computers kind of looked like modern-day [url=http://prepare.icttrends.com/images/2012/06/IBM_PC.jpg]microwaves sat on top of a console, and the first portable computer, the Osborne I, was put on the market in all the glory of its 24 pounds of weight and a steep $1,795 price tag.

We don't expect you to have gear that's quite as old, but we are curious as to what treasures you might be keeping in a box stored away in the basement or deep in an attic drawer. So show us your oldest gear and be greatly rewarded with the some of the newest on the market, courtesy of gaming gear creator and producer ROCCAT!

THE RULES:

- Your entry should consist of 1 or 2 pictures of your old gear and a description of up to 100 words telling us what it is, where you got it, what you used it for or any other fond memories you have with it. Maybe it was your first joystick? Maybe an old Atari controller you kept as a memento? We want to hear about it!
- You can only post one entry per person. If you post more, only the first one will be counted.
- You may not edit your post.
- Use your own photos of your own gear - we do know how to do a reverse image search!

Post your entry in the comments below before the deadline - you have a week, until March 6th, at 1:59 PM GMT. We aim to judge your entries and pick winners by Thursday, March 12th - we'll announce them in the contest forum thread and via PM to the winners themselves.

THE PRIZES:

1st place prize: a ROCCAT Isku, gaming keyboard with blue-tinted illumination, secondary programmable Shift function, and Thumbster Macro Keys below the spacebar to maximise gaming effectiveness

2nd place prize: a ROCCAT Savu, mid-size hybrid gaming mouse with an adjustable, 400-4000 DPI optical sensor, secondary programmable function, customizable illumination, and a powerful driver suite

3rd place prize: a ROCCAT Sense, mousepad with friction-reducing microcrystalline coating for greater mouse speed and precision

All winners will also get GOG.com gift codes to use on games of their choice to test out their new gear!

Honorable mentions: We expect there to be many great-quality entries, so we're reserving the right to give out honorable mentions to all those we find did a brilliant job, but didn't quite make the podium cut. They'll get GOG.com gift codes to use on titles available in our catalog.

Should you be one of our top three winners, we will need some mailing data (name, address, phone number) to ship your prize to you. If the ROCCAT Marketing Team ends up sending the prizes directly to you, we will need to share your mailing information with them. We will not share it with anyone that doesn't need it!

Please note that this contest is also being held on the French and German GOG.com forum - winners will be chosen, regardless of language, from across all three contest topics. :)
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radhplay: Hello. Even if this computer was not meant for playing games, it is a beautiful piece of old HP engineering. Holding an LCD screen, a Software-drawer filled with a nice DOS from 1985 and a RAM-drawer, 1 MB! in size, this machine could be used as a text editor (with dedicated external serial printer and dedicated external floppy drive), as a scheduler and calendar and as a LOTUS123 machine. It is a sturdy laptop, 8 lbs of weight! Although I have 'played' my way in gaming changing many machines since 1988, I simply couldn't throw this non gaming one away. A good friend of mine gave it to me many years ago and it was love at first sight.
Ha, no updates back then :-) ;-)
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Iain: I got my Commodore 64 back off my mother 2013, what you are seeing there is my original breadbin model from November 1985, I had to transfer it to a dead C64E case as the keyboard wasn't working and the case was cracked as my brother stood on it late 80's playing football inside the house.

You will also see my Spectrum +2A which I decided to get April 2013 which is sitting alongside my C64, tyhere is also my original VIC 1541 5" floppy disk drive.

Shelves holding all my original C64 and Spectrum cassettes (even more now)
Oh man, such a clean attic around this beautiful stuff!
Post edited February 28, 2015 by temia
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JMich: Hm, should I go looking for the Apple IIc, the 1984 Macintosh or try to see where my TI99/4A is currently at?
Decisions, decisions...

Or should I go for peripherals like the Iomega Peerless?
You know your history, man!
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catpower1980: *** I'M IN !***

(but only for the gift codes, no need for new gear ^o^)

In the picture lies my dear 21 year old mousepad that I still use. In 1994, it came bundled with a Compaq Presario (486 SX with CD drive and 8Mo RAM). From Doom 2 to Divinity Original Sin, it has followed me during 2 decades of PC gaming. Won't trade it for a Roccat mousepad ;)
Oh man, it's still RUNNING!
Post edited February 28, 2015 by temia
This was my first computer: a Zenith SuperPort 286 'laptop' from 1989. Boasting remarkable system specs of a 20MB hard drive, 0.5MHz processor, 3.5" floppy drive, 4-color EGA monitor, and 90 minutes battery life, it was pretty state-of-the-art for its day.

My brother and I spent long hours hunched over the monitor, programming in QBasic and playing games like Operation Neptune and Paganitzu.

The Panasonic KX-P1123 Dot Matrix printer was my primary printer for over 20 years: I only stopped using it 3 years ago when I ran out of printer ink ribbons.

And best of all? Both still work.
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Morty_P: I bought this Raiden Fighters cabinet years ago from a local college
It's good to see some arcade units still in homes I have the tabletop ms pacman one that I need to fix the screen and mod it to lcd and replaces the sticks and buttons on and wallah done.
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Post edited February 28, 2015 by DreamedArtist
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DrakeFox: I present to you, my Commodore 128. Since childhood when my father bought this I've held onto it and still play on it when nostalgia takes me.
I like your taste in furniture. I have the exact same piece your Commodore is sitting on. Only mine just has a TV on it, no Commodore.

I wish this contest was held prior to October. My parents moved out of the house I grew up in. I had to finally get rid of some of my stuff. But I wouldn't have won the main prizes anyway, the oldest item was a NES. Might take a few photos of something else though and enter just for the hell of it.
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Gengar78: I would love to show you my entry, but its region locked and only available in Antarctica. :/
Very wicked, very... witwicked... autobots... take my pills :-)
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JMich: And speaking of 8" floppies, did anyone else use flippies, or know what they are? I want to believe they were more widespread than I've encountered.
Used them, and still have a disk (and no drive to read it, so not even sure it still has the old school papers on it anymore).

That got me thinking... wonder how many people jumped onto the Zip drive craze? Or even recall what a Zip drive is? :-D
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fisk0: I've had this PS/2 keyboard since 1988, and still use it. For a few years I tried replacing it with a modern USB keyboard with all those fancy Windows keys and stuff, but finding that they all break within two years, I returned to this indestructible 27 year old Digital Equipment Corporation PCXAL-CA keyboard.
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gbaz69: Stuff is designed now to break very quicking, to increase the amount of total sales.
I'm sure many companies have actual R&D devoted solely to "planned obsolescence".

Heck, my socks and under garments deteriorate within one month. I am the person furthest away from being active.
(I'm bed ridden most of the time, and I'm maybe on my feet an hour a day, except days I need to leave house and do chores).
Quite right, things deteriorate regardless you're actually using them for anything or not, just sitting there heading inevitably for oblivion. To quote Det.Spooner in I,Robot [address your UNfavorite manufacturer] "Your sh_t keep malfunctioning around me!"
First pic: Some old games. One game is "Whale's Voyage" for the Amiga - I still have the game but unfortunately no hardware anymore.
The disks are functional - I backed them up on my Backup-HDD.

The other pic:
- A switch I used back in the days to connect 3 PCs with meters and meters of RJ-45 LAN cables.
- A VTech learning computer from my wife she used as a kid
- An old 45 GB hard drive from 2000 - operational.
- A Game Boy Advance - fully operational but the display is somewhat dark
- A Nintendo DS
- my actual mobile phone - a Nokia 6300. What a wreck ;)
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Probably two of my most rare and valuable video games.

Stadium events for nes:
Found it in a stack of game cartridges i bought for around $8 at a flea-market 4 years ago.
The game itself sucks, but since it is so rare, some pristine copies have been auctioned away for a very high price (for a game)

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/super-rare-nes-game-sold-for-35-100/1100-6424548/

Taito 78A - Bubble Bobble:
Instead of a PS3 i decided to get some Jamma arcade cabinets and a Bubble Bobble pcb as a start instead.
Extremely addictive, this game never gets old.
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Hmm i have several pieces of gear, but what to show? I'd show off my Atari800 if it hadn't already been given away before i moved pre-2000. The oldest stuff i have is probably some large & small floppies, or some older laptops that have since kicked the bucket.

Then there's old consoles, oldest being the NES, but none of it note-worthy enough for photos...

Well there IS a old travel chess computer game... Beyond that it goes more timeless stuff (non-electronic) that i have so...

Since my stuff is less than exciting i'll probably be skipped over...
Here I present you with a body of my deceased friend. He was my best mate from 2005 till 2013. He show my at my best and at the worst. Never judging, never betraying my trust, always being there when I needed him. He passed away last year and I kept his body for nostalgic reasons. Rest in peace buddy....


On serious note: got this computer second hand in 05. in 06 to play Oblivion I pretty much changed everything inside except HDD, RAM, Monitor and the case. Later added another stick of ram taken from a friend (ddr1) new hdd, new monitor, another two sticks of ram to play Fallout 3 and new gpu (it had AMD r400 gpu at first, 7600GT and later 4850 which i got for F3)

it is broken now. Could not turn it on after not using it for over a year. Might be PSU. Took out hdd but no reason to keep the computer anymore. Served me well for so many years and will send it to dump tomorrow.

Take care!
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high rated
When I was 12 years old I desperately wanted a Commodore 64. I saved for months, had my parents drive me to the city to buy it and was so happy - of course it was only the keyboard so I just hooked it up to our TV and did BASIC programming. But I eventually completed the system and spent many an hour (or entire weekend) playing games and having fun. It was AWESOME!
And almost 30 years later (thanks to being overly sentimental) I still have it and can play my favourite games whenever the mood strikes :)
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Couldn't resist this one.

Only took one picture but there is so, so much more. The obsession started here and has been going ever since.

This is my first computer, the IBM PCJr, given to me on Christmas morning 1984 by my dad who was a service engineer with IBM. I was eight. Along with it, I received the original King's Quest in the IBM packaging which I tore into instantly. The keyboard is the replacement non-chicklet keyboard that came out some time later. I did have the chicklet keyboard and OMG was it totally unusable. BUT the King's Quest keyboard overlay which only worked with the chicket keyboard (in the packaging in the picture) is still here and alive.

The joystick came home from work with him one day. I didn't ask any questions.

Below the Root was the other game I received that morning, also included.

And just for fun, my C64 got tossed in.

And before you ask, yes. It still works. Thanks to some careful surgery a few years ago, it still will kick up and run.
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TalwynPup74: When I was 12 years old I desperately wanted a Commodore 64. I saved for months, had my parents drive me to the city to buy it and was so happy - of course it was only the keyboard so I just hooked it up to our TV and did BASIC programming. But I eventually completed the system and spent many an hour (or entire weekend) playing games and having fun. It was AWESOME!
And almost 30 years later (thanks to being overly sentimental) I still have it and can play my favourite games whenever the mood strikes :)
...
you need to win. holy shit. 30 years old computer set up and it is still a) working b)it has own place in your house?
that's awesome!