A while back, I picked up a big MZ-80B lot on Rakuten Market, a distant third in the so-called flea market apps in Japan. So little happens on Rakuten Market that I almost never have the motivation to make myself check current listings, it's seriously like once or twice a month, compared to Mercari, which at least has enough volume to make it worth checking throughout the day, or Yahoo Auctions, which has tons of good things all the time. But fortune was with me, as I was able to pick this up for a very fair price. It was a three-box set so I think the shipping put some people off, but overall this was still a big-time bargain.

It came with an MZ-80B system and a dual floppy drive set, as well as a gigantic dot matrix printer, all of it boxed, so no doubt the size was also off-putting to a lot of people. I have less than zero interest in a dot matrix printer, myself, much less a big one, much less still a big one in a box, but you take the good with the bad. I sold the printer immediately just to reclaim the space. I also got to testing the MZ-80B and floppy drives.

Fortunately, everything worked. Actually, this collection is almost unbelievable. Usually when I get floppy disks this old, they almost always have considerable scratching and often some amount of mold. These were all in great shape, both original and backup disks.

It's tough to match the aesthetic above, it's such a look. But I don't really have room for the (boxed) MZ-80B, either, so I did a quick check to see if the floppy drive controller on my MZ-2500 would also work in MZ-80B mode, which it does, so I quickly sold off the MZ-80B to make space more manageable.

The floppy drives themselves are quite a piece of equipment, when I think back to my ,8,1 days on the Commodore 128, this seems rather sophisticated, dual drives requiring a dedicated floppy drive controller.

The disk collection contained various versions of BASIC and F-DOS, including some utilities.

And a hefty selection of games. The MZ-80B is monochrome only, and quite an early system, so most of what you see is text-mode display, rendered using alphanumeric characters and predefined graphic glyphs.

However, you could add graphic memory and access true graphic modes, which often looked quite nice on the monochrome display. I love the look of the white background with black graphics!

The box was still sturdy, but kind of worn down and taped up.