"Hard to find" or "hard to find dirt cheap"? All that stuff is easy to find on ebay. But you are paying ebay prices.

All the local thrift stores and Craiglist stuff has not had any soc 478, soc 775 or soc 939 for a year or two in my area. Back about 2018-19 could find some once in a while for very good price but maybe yes those days are over...

The days when I could pick up Athlon XP and 939 motherboards barely over shipping was probably a decade ago. Shipping has gone up quite a bit since then too.

It's not that the stuff isn't still out there. It's that there are no worthwhile marketplaces, and very few buyers, none of whom want to pay above bargain-basement amounts. And so, very few bother any more. And accordingly, much of what's out there moulders on shelves until it eventually gets tossed to the recyclers.

I remember 14 years or so ago you could find Pentium 2 slot 1s on the side of the road with sound blaster 16s in them.
Nowadays it's mostly 2008+ stuff , which I guess would make sense from an E-waste circulation of computer equipment standpoint.
I guess you could try overseas classified sites where the hardware might not hold as much value and convince them to ship it to you.
Otherwise I guess the exorbitant fees on eBay might be the only bet unfortunately.

Asian markets still have plenty of stuff from that period.

AppleSauce wrote on 2022-06-05, 05:24:

I remember 14 years or so ago you could find Pentium 2 slot 1s on the side of the road with sound blaster 16s in them.

But not the real, classic SB16s?
Those must have been cheap Vibras with their coloured headphone jacks, right? 🙂

Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-05, 14:06:

AppleSauce wrote on 2022-06-05, 05:24:

I remember 14 years or so ago you could find Pentium 2 slot 1s on the side of the road with sound blaster 16s in them.

But not the real, classic SB16s?
Those must have been cheap Vibras with their coloured headphone jacks, right? 🙂

They were various different model opl3 sound blasters like the ct2230 one of which I still have in storage , I think I had like 6 or 7 of them and sold them all off except for that one , which I kinda regret seeing what they go for now.
One of them might have been Ct1700 series of some sort , I think it had a volume wheel.

Depends on what you are looking for. Desirable parts are getting rare for cheap.

maybe, or maybe there is a sort of rolling 15 year period, much before that things are rare and difficult to find and much after that they are more common, a kind of component time horizon

happens here too
i remember in 2017 for example i traveled to USA on vacations, and i bought on ebay a couple radeons 9800 pro , tested and working, for maybe 30dollars or 35 each.
and a voodoo3 back then was like 70dollars , now both have a high price.

What i had no idea is how sb16 cards jumped prices and are hard to find now. Back then i bought many of those, I must have more than 20 sb16s of different models. The expensive ones were the AWE32 models.

I can find refurb desktops from that time period at the local Micro Center and other places, but it's not worth buying, because I can buy slightly newer desktops as well, and still run XP on it or turn it into a 64-bit Linux box. As far as components go, there isn't much beyond RAM that I can get easily without resorting to websites to find what I want. NewEgg actually has a lot of old soundcards and videocards for sale, from foreign sources, likely scrappers/eRecyclers.

SETBLASTER wrote on 2022-06-05, 02:25:

Not only that, i find very difficult to find a very good 478 motherboard, most of the ones I see are are not the good ones.

That's the issue. Now that we have perfect 20/20 hindsight, anyone who is familiar with this stuff KNOWS which motherboards, sound cards and video cards are the most desirable from any era. Those will go first, and command a price as well.

For S478 that would be i850 and 875P mobos. And maybe E7205, if you're feeling funky.

I recently (last 3 weeks) went through the exercise of trying to locally source PCI (32-bit/33MHz legacy parallel ) sound cards.

I managed to find :

- A CMI8738 based card (already have one with apparently same chip rev, so skipped)
- an ESS Maestro 2E (ES1978) based card (which I purchased)
- 2 different Creative Labs base cards (did not bother checking exact models since I did not care, as I likely have enough Live! and Audigy variants to last a lifetime)

I also ended up sourcing a new-old-stock ALS4000 based card of Ebay, as I wanted to try one of those .

Time and COVID (most likely) caused most of my go-to local vintage sources to close, so that may explain my slim pickings. There likely are, however, some untapped sources for me to explore in downtown Montreal, so the hunt will continue. Maybe I will be lucky enough to score some dual-channel capable VIA or SIS based Pentium 4 boards (recent interest of mine), but local sources (pawn shops, flea markets, used PC shops, etc) nearby seem to be at Core2 gen or newer, for the most part.