retroelectronics is a slog and you will not "solve" any of the problems you have with it. you will not get a pentium 3 or a mac or a videotape recorder that you can set down and wire up that will do everything you want and can be trusted to work every time you touch it because that's not the nature of the beast you've chosen to ride. this hobby will exist on a treadmill, always getting a new, slightly-less-janky version of every item, and when you say to yourself "this is now the best one i have," know then that someday you will be saying it again about an item you don't yet know exists. enjoy everything enthusiastically while you have it instead of treating it as simply a tool and a fixture that will follow you through life. this might be a metaphor for more things than just VCRs, there is no way to know
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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:
hey that's basically what my upcoming video is about
i don't have the arrogance or prescience to address this letter to everyone, but i would not be surprised if my problems are not unique to me
i'm not talking about it in so-explicit terms there but i suspect this is the bane of basically anyone who finds themselves needing to do retroelectronics for some other purpose, whether that's "to mess with other, less reliable retroelectronics" (as you seem to be doing most of the time) or some other only tangentially related pursuit
i believe yours is about film scanners? and i have a friend who has triumphantly acquired at least three, each of which they have described as the ur-scanner, and each of which genuinely did have incomprehensibly good specs and performance, and was yet supplanted, but not before taking up an embarrassing amount of space and time. there seems always to be a "next"
yes, mine is about having exactly that experience. though really this most recent scanner is the only one i've used that could really be described as having "incomprehensibly good specs and performance". it's also from 2003. this causes problems (hence the video)
well really it causes one specific problem in particular