Of course it was inevitable, but has anyone noticed that the "good" stuff is getting harder to find? Floppy drives dried up some time ago. Then went CD/DVD drives that use the parallel interface. I had a hard time finding a place that still carries 80-pin ribbon cables, and I suspect that is limited to stock. Even Ebay..... socket 7, even socket 370 boards, have become a lot more scarce....
There is still plenty of peripherals over here, but boards are getting difficult. And PSUs. Trying to find one that pre-dates P4 spec is hard. Also old software & OS.
So many combinations to make, so few cases to put them in.
IDE ribbon cables came with motherboards until just a few years ago. You can't tell me those are hard to find.
Floppy drives? Those things are still being produced with black bezels, both external and internal. Although I've heard people recommend against them since they apparently can mess up disks. If any of that bothers you there are more than enough vintage ones floating around.
Yeah but when you get a motherboard off ebay you may not get ribbon cables. Out of the places I usually order from, only one still has ribbon cables. I think this is largely due to the switchover to SATA...
Ebay has tons of EIDE CDROM drives for cheap, you can find cable lots cheaply as well.
The good stuff to me is the rare high end stuff that people wanted back in the day, and pay good money for now. That stuff is getting rare and expensive since most of it has been recycled or stuffed into collections.
If I was smart I would have snagged duplicates of stuff I wanted back when ebay was new and shipping was much cheaper.
Collector of old computers, hardware, and software
On ebay lots of ribbon cables are being sold. Here for example, 80-wire.
I can care less about the cables when 3DFX cards cost an arm and a leg while some of the best of the mid 90s gear may as well cost one their first born. Optical drives are an annoyance but not build breaking compared to getting a great board or high end isa audio gear. Because of the rip off shops and gold scrappers one can go broke rather fast after only a few systems. Rising prices of everyday expenses doesn't help either when there is steady single digit year to year inflation. Oh well by December people will have a lot more to worry about than just Christmas shopping.
On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.
I don't know where you are, but the local Microcenter has all that stuff in stock and brand new. They even have new 3.5" floppy disks!
I wasn't trying to start an argument - just making an observation
I don't doubt that you can get such off Ebay. However, I don't do that myself but usually get a friend who like to Ebay to grab for me - so I usually don't ask unless I can't get something any other way. And besides, new is better most of the time - I would be highly suspicious of used drives because they are mechanical devices which can wear out
Yeah I wouldn't say that those types of things are hard to find, but then I use eBay for that type of stuff, which are small enough to post easily.
Life? Don't talk to me about life.
wrote:I don't know where you are, but the local Microcenter has all that stuff in stock and brand new. They even have new 3.5" floppy disks!
Cool let me know if they got a new Yamaha GX1 or CS80 let alone a heap of boxed Roland medi gear. A Quantum 3D Alchemy rig would be a dream come true.
On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.
wrote:wrote:I don't know where you are, but the local Microcenter has all that stuff in stock and brand new. They even have new 3.5" floppy disks!
Cool let me know if they got a new Yamaha GX1 or CS80 let alone a heap of boxed Roland medi gear. A Quantum 3D Alchemy rig would be a dream come true.
Well, that's not exactly a fair comparison. How did you go from cd-rom drives and 80pin ribbon cables (both of which were still sold at any computer store up until about 3-4 years ago) to brand new roland midi gear or a Yamaha GX1 (the latter of which was last produced in 1977)
The things you enumerated are still ubiquitous as hell.
Newer floppy drives are being said to lack proper head lifting machinery, making them cheap but rapidly damaging the floppies. Stick around with early 90's drives, they aren't yet affected by that plague.
Hardware comparisons and game system requirements: https://technical.city
Little things like cables or floppy drives are best obtained by grabbing a bulk lot of several machines. Strip them all and over time you simple "have it all" 😀
wrote:I don't know where you are, but the local Microcenter has all that stuff in stock and brand new. They even have new 3.5" floppy disks!
Yeah but MicroCenter has what? 20 stores in the entire United States? When I bought my XBox 360 I drove all the way out to the one by Villanova University which is over 80 miles away because they had a kick ass rebate that made the trip worth it. They hadn't opened the one in Paterson yet at that time.
