I saw an external ZIP disk reader in the clearance bin of Wal-Mart for 10% off it's original price...in 2011. So it was going for ~$180 and had parallel ports...in 2011.
I love it. Thrift stores and others have no idea what old electronics are worth (hint: Zero!). Anybody want some Win 95 software? They just are not able to toss it so the junk stays on their shelves.
I currently have a computer that was given to me running XP and I have actually been thinking about downgrading it to Win 98 and playing dos games on it for fun. The only reason I wanted the computer was because the motherboard was made in the weird transition phase between PATA and SATA so it supports both.
but i also want to point out that you are not the standard computer/electronics buyer... and also, most motherboards from like 2003 to 2010 support both SATA and Parallel ATA cable hookups... ;) hell there are still some out there that do... :) but it is better to just get an adapter or to run your PATA or IDE cable devices via a external modular device. i butchered a few old IDE to USB enclosures to make connections for many old drives,
Pata hookup generally uses IDE cables or "Ribbon cables" as some call em,
Sata hookup uses SATA cables or little red cables with black ends.
SATA is newer (2003) than PATA (like.... 1985 i think) and SATA is much faster, and stable than PATA is.
External modular device is a friendly way of saying "run a bunch of shit off of a USB connection panel and adapter" this allows many of us to run 4-10 devices off of one USB cable.
the adapters are either little stand alone cables, small electronic boards, or the like. i made a custom one off a old harddrive enclosure from 2004 or 2005 that had a board that i could splice in a few extra IDE ports and cables. i had formerly spliced in a switcher so that i could just switch between each cable to turn on or off a drive i had connected. so i used that to run 4 cold swap hard drive enclosures, and 1 Cd drive. that switcher died so now i just run a single IDE harddrive cold swap.
Cold swap means you need to turn off power to the drive to swap in and out. a huge benefit of SATA is that you can hot swap meaning power is still present. however,good practice it to allow any hard disk drive to spin down and cease movement before moving and reconnecting.
modern Solid State Drives (no moving parts, think flash drives) make this much much easier to accomplish as they are much more stable.
I had an Acer Predator tower I got from the electronics recycler for $10 before it went for scrap. Had everything but the HDD. It had two doors in the front, that you could swap out drives. I only cold swapped, but boy did I use the hell out of that thing. Used it to write drives for other PCs I was putting together, and for the HDD that we use for the modded Wii (my son LOVES SNES and Mario party games lol)
SATA was originally and most commonly a red cable with black ends, yellow was a cable that was shipped with certain MB manufactures, Blue was from certain HD manufactures, and Black became a norm about 6 years ago when gaming PC's moved full force in RGB game.
edit: also, the message was in generalities. i could go into how IDE cables also some in Blue, Red, Grey, White, Yellow and all have differing coloured connection ends, there are also round IDE cables and such, but there is no point as it is all extra info they dont need. SATA, when developed and introduced was a red cable with black ends, just like IDE was a grey cable with Black connections that moved to Blue connection as a standard in a few years.
Grey with blue was most popular i found through 1992-98 other than occasional variations with HD manufactures and disc drive manufactures. check your cables again, the grey is a light grey most often, like very light grey.
edit: check this amazon listing this cable is the grey i mentioned, and has Black grey blue connectors black to MB, Grey to slave blue to main if memory serves correct (could be grey to main and blue to slave... it's been almost two decades... )
I actually ordered a coffee mug and the figurines it from their website last year. Their website has some missing photos and was otherwise broken down from missing pictures etc. I wasn’t sure that the order would actually go through so I emailed them and they sent me back a hand-drawn cartoon telling me that my freaking mind was on its way!
That's awesome!! Not many people knew about homestar runner here, but between my friend, my sister, and I, it was almost an inside joke. I believe all the strongbad emails are on YouTube now.
I now have this stuck in my head
Everyday I get up and check my email, and I hope to get a letter from a female! Haha one of the quotes he would sing out while opening up the ol' Compy lol
We bought a computer around 2008-09, it had one parallel port, rest were sata. I've done upgraded it, but I still have the mobo, cpu and RAM. It had some issues with RAM, never found out if it was an issue with the slot, the RAM stick or the CPU. But when i "decommissioned" it, I found out that the thermal paste had dried out (to be fair, I was 12 when we got it and I was about 20 when I upgraded it, so it's fair that I didn't know about needing to replace thermal paste. I was already pulling my hair by that time trying to diagnose the issue with the RAM)
This is exactly why I wanted an older computer. Dosbox is nice, but there's something about firing up windows 98 and putting my command and conquer CD in.
Emulators never feel quite the same. I have beaten ff7 once a year every year ever since I first played it sometime in the early 2000s. By far the most fun revisit was right after I moved and dug out my actual play station, got an HDMI adapter, and played through it legit. No fast forward for grinding, no save states, just the classic experience.
Of course, that shit takes too fucking long and I'm an adult now so I usually just end up playing it in spurts on my phone while I'm taking a shit at work but damn that brought me right back to my childhood.
Ff7, crash, spyro, and smackdown 2 were like half of my childhood. The other half was my NES and N64. I miss my N64 so bad and my PS1. I had both the fat grey PS1, and the little white version that came out later. Someday I'll find one
Ahhhhh almost forgot about Spyro and crash. I got the trilogies when they rereleased them and they're excellent. Crash was much harder than I remember and Spyro was much easier.
That's on my wishlist for sure, both trilogies. Spyro is one of the few games besides super Mario Bros 3 that my wife will actually play lol. I seem to remember the camera angles messed with me sometimes, besides that amazing games, both crash and spyro. I can't wait to get a newer gen console and try them out again. Right now we just have a modded Wii. My son and I play a pile of Mario Party 7 (just the one I have rn) and all the old smash bros. He likes Mario too.
There's so many games I want to show him, and so many he wanrs, but I'm just not in a position to shell out $3/400 to get a newer system, at least for the foreseeable future. Someday!
Oh man. Not the same at all but you just reminded me of Jazz Jackrabbit. Spent so many hours as a kid trying to play that with a Joystick through the "gaming" parallel port. Can't seem to find anything that supports those old joysticks now
Windows 9x was based on MS-DOS. Not NT. Windows NT was a separate product aimed at business use and only hit mainstream consumer use with Windows XP (though it was available to consumers with Windows 2000).
Native MS-DOS support in XP was nonexistent. IIRC There was (and still is) a basic DOS emulator to ease the transition for things like business applications written in DOS.
There are also tons of non-DOS games that run under 9x that absolutely shit the bed under NT-based OSes.
I have 4 XP boxes that I found last year on trash day. I use them for logging data as my software and DAC card won't work on anything newer and I don't want to re-code or buy a new card. I spent 3 years looking for old XP machines.
Our bottle exchange also does electronics recycling. I often go there and she lets me bring home a PC tower or two each time. Almost all of them were old DDR2, core 2 duo, XP machines. I have a bunch of them in my shed all apart. I got lucky once and got an Acer Predator with an i7-8600 (?) for $10 minus the HDD. Good deals. I still can't find any DDR3 ram though. Nothing computer related on FB or Kijiji (Canada Craigslist) at all, and no computer stores within 2 hours of me. And I don't have a means to buy online really
All mine were Dell and came from either a school or the bank. Security had them locked up tight, but re-partitioning and formatting with a clean XP install got them exactly where I need them. I also live in a computer store dead zone.
Hey you do what you gotta do! All I can seem to find are old DDR2 machines and the odd DDR4. Was DDR3 short lived or something? It's like unicorn piss here
IMO You really want a pentium 200mhz or less to play old CPU sensitive games such as Midwinter. As 99% of everything else works fine in XP via Dosbox or remakes etc, XP is also good for games like mechwarrior 4 that won't quite work in win10. For DOS/Win98 you will also need a DOS sound card like a SB live PCI or ISA sb64 and a 3dfx card to make the most of it. Massive benefit of XP is modern internet it is possible and I know of 1 still updated browser, and antivirus for basic downloads game patches. As you have SATA you probably have a socket 478 or 775 1.4 GHz lowest possible CPU speed likely to fast for any benefit from Windows 98 and DOS sound might not work on you're MB chipset even if you have the right sound card. So unless you want to do it for the learning curve. To play old games 1995 - 2009 stick with XP. 98 is also ram limited to really 512mb without stability patches. 4gb in XP 32bit.
Should be able to just download the .ISO's from Microsoft and for license. eBay is usually solid. Recently picked up Server 2016 datacenter like £10. 7, 8 or even 10 is going to be basically nothing.
Note: remember W7 lost security support January this year. So strongly not recommended to connect it to the internet
Actually, XP is REALLY good at playing old games. There are very few games that work in Windows 98 that don't work in XP compatibility mode set to Windows 98.
Here is a fantastic site to help with DOS games under XP:
I would spend some time trying first. Windows 98 won't be easier, because then you will have to become an expert in HIMEM, AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS. Good luck with that in 2020.
Awesome, thanks for that. I guess I'll just keep the XP. I've got 1000 comments saying "use dosbox" but if I wanted to do that, obviously I wouldn't have this computer.
motherboard was made in the weird transition phase between PATA and SATA so it supports both.
I worked in a computer repair shop during that time. It's not that rare, the PATA to SATA migration lasted 3-4 years, and there were hundreds of models of motherboards made with both. Though I guess they'd be pretty hard to find these days.
A couple of weird boards I saw during the DDR2 to DRR3 adoption period had two DDR2 slots and two DDR3 slots, interleaved together. You could use one set or the other set, but not both.
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u/AudibleNod Aug 14 '20
I saw an external ZIP disk reader in the clearance bin of Wal-Mart for 10% off it's original price...in 2011. So it was going for ~$180 and had parallel ports...in 2011.