Dolt

DOH!

Sweet! You are one lucky S.O.B.--enjoy!

Actually, a trade-in/donation policy for sending in old Combats and Pac-Mans would be cool. Like, 35 carts would get you a homebrew.

If you live in the New York tri-state area, you might want to make a visit to Gothic Cabinet Craft, as they have the world's classiest CD tower (I have 2), and as it's constructed, you could hold a boat load of games on it. It's the last tower on this page: http://www.pagelinx.com/cgi-shopper/search...total=6&start=3 They stain in any color for you--we have deep mahogany, which makes them look quite antique and much more expensive than they are. Before you bug at the price, look elsewhere on the site and you'll find a coupon, plus they usually charge a lot less if you buy in the store as opposed to online. Clive

Has anyone here done it? How did you go about it--was it under your home owner's insurance or did you take out a separate policy? What was your source for determining the overall 'worth' of the collection? How long did it take the insurance agent to stop laughing when you said you wanted to insure Atari games? Basically, what was your experience doing this and do you feel it was worth it? Clive

I downloaded the Game Manager Excel sheet at AtariGuide a few days ago and it really seems to be just what I needed. The one drawback is that all the cart prices that it quotes are from 1999-2001, so they're a bit out of whack (usually they're too low). AtariGuide certainly hasn't updated the prices, but the sheet allows you to update the prices as need be. Has anyone updated prices on their copy?

From the sounds of it, your rec room is in a basement. Spiders love basements for some reason; don't know why. There may not be a lot of other bugs for them to live on, but they need water just like anything else, so if you can, try and put your games in as dry an area as possible. They also don't like heat, so if there's an area near a boiler or perhaps a warm window, that's a good possibility too. Storage is always a good idea for games; considering how many you have, I'd have figured you already had them in some storage arrangement. Since you're unpacking games, if you come across the box for Thrust DC... Clive

OK, so I heard this mix CD, "Peanut Butter Wolf's Jukebox 45s," in a store the other day and it had this hysterical pseudo 1970s funk jam called "My 2600" by Captain Funkaho on it. Naturally I had to pick it up if only for the Barry White voice at the beginning rumbling "yeaaaaah....plug that sh-t in!" If two songs count as a collection, then I guess I'm collecting songs about Atari, because I also have "Atari 2600" by Splitsville which I wrote about in the 2600 Connection a few years ago. Over the last few years, on and off, I've tried to track down other label-released songs that were Atari-related, but have pretty much come up empty-handed. For instance, I found and listened to "Atari Track & Field / New Controller Conspiracy" by Atom & His Package, and while it was funny, it had nothing to do with Atari other than the title. So, does anyone know of any other songs specifically about Atari? A song like "Pac Man Fever" doesn't count in this case, nor do (admittedly interesting) sonic experiments in making music with an Atari 2600. If you know of a song, let me know! Clive

Abraham & Straus (aka A&S) Caldor Barker's I remember how you'd be so psyched if you wandered into the TV department of a store while your parents were shopping. Maybe no one would be playing the Atari--and if they weren't, yay, you'd get to try a game as long as you wanted! I remember playing Breakout for at least an hour once uninterrupted--utter nirvana. My parents must have been relieved to know that I was safe in one spot, not bugging them trailing them around the store.

I got about 5 low-rarity games in the boxes yesterday--stuff like Golf, Othello, and Night Driver--and then I got another 6 or so boxes like Laser Blast and Video Olympics without games. Those were beat up but I got them for $2 a piece, so it was worth it to me. While I have 333 carts, collecting stuff in the box is pretty new to me, so getting 10-12 boxes is a big deal to me. Go figure.

I know that store on St. Marks Place here in NYC had one for sale for a while recently--not cheap either. That was my guess as to where you got it.

I'd guess that most people here do a mix of thrift and ebay. I live just outside New York City and it's damn dry here, especially if you have 330+ games like myself, so I do use ebay from time to time. On the other hand, I still go to local game shops and thrift stores because honestly, I like the hunt. I had a few awesome scores in the past which I've blathered on about here before, so I still hold out hope that good stuff is out there, waiting to be filched from the unsuspecting. I don't think I've every paid more than $20 for a game, and usually it's more like $10 or so for me. On the other hand, as you can see, I'm pretty cheap. I don't like spending a lot of money on a game, especially since I've been fortunate enough to land a number of high rarity games for a few bucks in the past. I have no intention of scrambling after a Video Life unless I find it in a musty basement as part of a yard sale. While I use ebay to find games and certainly I make money selling items on ebay, I dislike the service when it comes to collecting, because it made it much harder to find a great score in the wild for ANY kind of collection. People who don't realize what they have will throw anything they come across on to ebay and hope it makes a few bucks. I found Waterworld, Quadrun and a bunch of other rarities in the wild for $2 in the past, but now that would never happen. It's a shame, because the electricity you feel when you suddenly find something really cool lying forgotten in a cardboard box is a great feeling--and its highly addictive. You don't get that bidding on a computer screen, and I miss it a lot these days...

"Generation X" is a term that was used by Douglas Coupland when he titled his incredibly sh---y novel of the same name. Coupland is a Baby-Boomer. He derived it from the name of Billy Idol's first band. Billy Idol is a Baby-Boomer. "Generation X" didn't ask for the name; it was forced upon us, much as the Baby Boomer-controled media has dumped a lot of other stuff on us. For instance (and my favorite bone to pick among many in this topic), according to the Boomers, the Eighties were all about greed and money; I recall it being about really creative music. But of course, since I'm a dumbass Gen Xer, I don't REALLY know about music--no, the ONLY good music was in the Sixties. Great, a bunch of loser stoners like the Doors are in the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame (another Boomer artifice) so that everyone can be made well aware that only the Boomers' music is/was worthwhile. The Boomers had and continue to have their nostalgia trip--how many more TV specials do we need about Woodstock? Boomers go on about how Woodstock '99 ended with riots and fires, destroying what Woodstock was about. Yeah, well, people burned down the vending area at the original Woodstock, but you never read about that anymore. Why? Because the Boomers were all about peace. After all, they stopped a war. OK, if you're so good at stopping wars, do me a favor and stop the one that the "President" you bought started. Oh, of course you wouldn't want to--you have stock in Halliburton. Ah, but I digress. Where was I? Oh yeah: There's no worthwhile music today (except for that yummy new James Taylor CD, oh boy!). The reason no Gen Xers really 'get' music must be because there's no one to lead the way--the spokesman of my generation shot himself in the head in Seattle in 1994. Who the hell made a talentless heroin addict like Kurt Cobain MY spokesman? The Boomers--because he died in part from drugs just like all their useless hack heroes, so the Boomers could, like, relate, man. Yeah, get out of my face and go relate all the way home in your shiny black BMW SUV, listening to bad/any Janis Joplin and eating low-salt Doritos at stop lights while talking on your damn cellphone and debating on whether to TIVO tonight's wacky "Will & Grace" rerun. These people make me want to puke.

I've tried a bunch of different methods, but the key for me is portability--I don't want to carry around 14 sheets of paper, 'cause they don't fold up nicely in my wallet. I had a massive list in 8-point type in Microsoft Word, then I was given a PDA and kept it in there. The problem was that the PDA eventually refused to sync with my computer, so I had no way to get the list out of it. Since I couldn't move data to and from the PDA in general, I eventually stopped carrying it around. Next, I got an iPod, so I put the list on there, but ran out of space (it will only show text files up to a certain length, then cuts off the rest). So I divided the list in half and that worked for a while, but it was a hassle to go back and forth between chunks of list. So I went back to Microsoft Word and reduced everything to 4 columns of 6-point type, and it works just fine. I learned my lesson--just as I like to play simple, lo-tech videogames, keeping track of them should be equally lo-tech.

I have the 'opportunity' to get a six-switch Atari in the original box along with a game storage bin and 25 common games like Frogger, Amidar, etc., for $75. Something tells me it's not really worth it, but being as I haven't purchased a boxed system before, much less a six-switch, I figured I'd put it by y'all--perhaps it is a great find and I just don't know what I've stumbled across. So: --is it worth it? --what should I look for beyond condition of the box? --Is a six-switch Atari the same as a 'heavy sixer' or are there differences?

If you're really looking at this in order to submit info to your insurance provider, I'd pick up a Digital Press guide that's a few years old--like maybe that fifth edition that came out in 1998--and get some prices out of that. The new edition is nice, but the older one would be ideal for this purpose because a number of prices seem to have fallen in a now ebay-ized world (for example, Glib was listed as $150 in the 1998 edition, and $90 in the current one). Do me one favor--when you finally insure them, post to this topic about how much it costs to insure ancient Atari games ('cause I probably ought to do this myself), and whether they fell over laughing when you handed in the paperwork.

I have a bunch of collections--some of which I would love to get rid of, but there's no reasonable way other than via a trash can. Take comics--I had about 7 boxes of them, wittled them down to the 1 1/2 boxes of stuff I wanted to keep and then decided to sell the rest. Well, forget about selling; it took six months to give them away! There was some 'good stuff' in there too; it's just that the market is glutted with comics--everyone is selling, no one is buying. I eventually donated them to charity and shudder to think that someone probably just threw them in a dumpster rather than give them to some kids. When I was a kid, I collected buttons (pins, some call them). Out of the 700 ones I have, I only would keep about 30-40 (mostly rock bands and politicians). I haven't actively collected a button in over 15 years, but about twice a year, someone I know will give me a baggie with 30 buttons 'because I figured you'd want them.' So I'm stuck with a button collection that I have no attachment to, purely out of politeness. Concert tapes? I have a billion of them. LPs and 12" remixes? Tons up the wazoo. VHS tapes? You bet. Twin Peaks memorabilia? Tour shirts? Back issues of Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly? Got 'em all right here. And don't even get me started about the stuff I accumulated throughout the 90s before Episode One.... All of this stuff, I'll never have time to consume (again), and 90 percent of it is largely worth nothing, compared to the time, effort and gasoline expended finding it, storing it, etc. Over the last year, I've come to three important realizations about collections: 1. I tend to collect because 'I'll want to read/hear/play/watch this again someday and it won't available." Well, odds are it WILL be available--you can get just about any song, article or game off the net, whether legally or not. For the collections that I have which matter to me (as opposed to the buttons, etc), this negates most of what I've accumulated. Also, and perhaps more importantly, something else will come along that will grab my attention. New music and movies are made every day. New fads come and go. There's always something new coming along, so holding on to the detrius of the past is a bit pointless, as I'll probably never devote as much time to it as I did when whatever it is first came on the scene--and I may well not want to (after all, I have no idea whatever happened to my early '80s D&D game stuff, articles, etc., but I could really give a rat's ass anyway). 2. The value of collections have a limited lifespan. Value is based on what something you own is worth to someone else. The basic necessities--for example, food, oil, clothing, a Hooters calendar--will always have a value. Collections are not necessities and therefore have a variable value. When there's fewer people who can appreciate the value of an item, it is worth less, no matter how much it theoretically is worth. If I took five Beatles CDs to trade in at the local used CD shop, I'd get $20. If I take five sickeningly rare power pop CDs by Spiltsville, The Semantics, Cherry Twister, Owsley and The Sneeches, they'll offer me 25 cents a piece, because they have no understanding of what the discs are worth. Of course you're all familiar with that basic scenario--it's the precursor to how you got your $2 Quadrun at your local videogame store, right? (OK, at least it's how I got mine, but I digress). The point is that no matter what you collect, few people in the world at large know what something is really worth, and that number sooner or later will shrink. People will leave Atari collecting, whether by boredom, changing interests, shifting priorities or death. When I have a kid, they will learn but they won't REALLY understand the worth of Dad's Quadrun or those five Avalon Hill games or Glib or the Waterworld in the box, and so on. And eventually those carts will lose their value and they'll be lucky to get 50 bucks for them 40 years from now or whever I kick off. 3. I collect because I wish I had the time to fully enjoy the item. This is the most disturbing thought of all, and I wonder if anyone else here has observed this: Modern society is now structured so that we have less free time than ever before. In North America, we get the least vacation time of any industrialized nation in the world. Into the scant hour or two a night that people have 'for themselves,' there are dozens of competing interests: TV, sports, music, games, books, exercise, concerts, board games, sex, drinking, gambling, the internet and more. Not only do we not have any time to relax, we also don't have enough time to properly enjoy any of our interests. Ever know a fat person who bought a diet book but never cracked it open? The act of buying the book wound up being their tribute to the concept of dieting, rather attempting to diet. Well heck, I'm like that too--I buy books all the time though there's some that I will probably never get around to reading, CDs that I'll listen to once, DVDs where I'll never explore all the cool extras, and lord knows I've never actually played "Homerun." We have become a society where the purchase of an entertainment item is often becoming the entertainment itself, because we have no time to appreciate what we have obtained beyond gloating over the bullet points on the back cover. I am a collector of many things, and I will continue to collect and be appreciative of what I am fortunate enough to have (time permitting). Nonetheless, I am becoming frustrated with what seems to be an increasingly pointless endeavor. Clive

Quest for Quinta Roo is only a 3?! I've only ever seen one of it and the place wanted $30 for it (needless to say, it's still their their possession). Steve-guess you found the games after all; I guess that explains why you were hooking up the Coleco. Clive

Get a useless pac man cart and mess it up so that you can PRACTICE before doing this to the dishaster cart!

What a stupid question! (couldn't resist!)

There was a river raid 3?

I'm sure this has been gone over elsewhere at some point, but what's the life expectancy of a cart? From what I always understood, the program is basically kept in the cart by a charge of static or something? Ever since I heard that, I'm hesitant to put a cart on my carpet while switching between various game, lest static electricity screw up my cart.

Wow, and you guys deleted that other guy's list?! Ok, so really now, what the hell is CRC?

what the heck is CRC?

And then