LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS

It's a labour of pure love keeping your old gaming PC going

MOST PC GAMERS ARE LOOKING FOR CHEAP DEALS ON HIGH-END graphics cards right now. Personally, I'm looking for an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. That's a 19-year-old graphics card with a total of 128 MB (not GB!) of memory. Online, some sellers are charging R17 000 for it.

Here's why. Firstly, because retro PC gaming (and building the old-fashioned PCs to play on) is an utter absolute living nightmare. And secondly, because sellers know that the scarcity lets them set their own prices.

The idea is simple enough: Pick up a machine from a particular year from PC gaming's storied past, and you'll be able to play games on it without any need for simulators like DOSBox, or for community patches that add widescreen support but also bring unwanted changes like a new main menu or a silly cursor.

But it’s absolutely true. Such a device can, with a properly installed and licensed version of Windows 98, a suite of correct drivers installed via a folderful of CD-ROMs and floppy disks, a tangle of now-obsolete cables and the moon in vernal equinox at the moment you press the power button, play old games.