bojay1997

Yep, it looks like they authorized my card as well today. Oddly, their website is still showing 03/31/22 as the release date. I think the authorization will just drop off once their system realizes that they have no stock.

There is a third category which is collectors who have a lot of money and just want to own games from their childhood in the very best condition possible and who have no intention of selling them. The reality is that as the years go on, the number of NOS games continues to dwindle as there were many years where individuals like the OP bought them for reasonable prices and opened them decades after they were released. Moreover, there are a lot of collectors that have been holding copies they bought years ago and who won't sell them and likely won't do so until they pass on and a family member liquidates their collection.

Worked on a PC with Chrome.

Is that a dead insect at the bottom of the back of the box?

We're you the winner of the initial set of auctions that went cheap? Oddly, those looked like the nicest copies and the feedback makes it clear that he actually sold them at the low BINs.

Disagree. The one that sold yesterday has some crud over the "o" in of and at several other places along the back seam. The copy that is up today has no such crud in those places. I believe these are in fact all different copies.

He does seem to have multiple copies as there were three prior listings and there are some that had worse debris under the back wrap going back to February 10th where he supposedly sold one copy of Quadrun for $250 as a BIN. I guess he finally realized the actual value.

"Game providers that feed us"? What is that supposed to mean? This is a private forum for classic video game fans supported by voluntary subscriptions, not a commercial website. Nobody is bullying Tommy into revealing anything. He came here of his own volition to share information and generate hype for his product. He is literally three days away from taking money from people before the hardware is finalized, before he has final pricing and before he has even placed manufacturing orders. While I agree that his communication has been more voluminous and detailed than Chameleon or Atari VCS box, I don't agree that he is well beyond those other products. So far all he has are some trailers, a list of potential developers, a demo that lasts mere seconds that isn't even running on the hardware, some renders and maybe a prototype that a small number of people have seen. There are literally hundreds of tiny companies at CES that have the exact same thing. The brilliance and tragedy of the tech industry in countries like China is that anyone with an idea and some cash can have their own product prototype engineered and manufactured. What I haven't seen is any proof that he has funding or the ability to take a four person company and scale to manage a manufacturing process that is going to require significant expertise and millions of dollars to get right. I imagine the first question potential investors must be asking is how a tiny company whose only asset is 30 year old software IP led by a talented musician with minimal business experience is going to make a mass-market consumer product happen. As enthusiastic and sincere as I think Tommy is, he certainly doesn't have the kind of resume most tech investors would embrace. The other thing I haven't seen is any proof that his purported target market really exists or that it isn't being fully served by every other electronic gaming device out there including mobile phones and tablets that most people already own. I don't feel entitled to anything, but if you come to a forum where I have participated for years and make startling claims that sound too good to be true, you better bet that I'm going to ask some questions. That goes double if you intend to starting taking $100 deposits.

Cool, so will you be warning or banning Tommy for personally attacking people who shared differing opinions about his commercial product? Was his post calling a long-time forum member a "snowflake" deleted? Did you delete his posts with R-rated images from various violent or sexually explicit games? I mean I'm really curious what specific rules you are claiming the people who were banned from the Tommy thread violated. I've gone through the list multiple times and I don't see any rule that was violated. Tommy and his followers on the other hand seem more than happy to hurl personal attacks and insults and to trash competing products like the Switch or the VCS or various others with impunity. I don't believe that Tommy has bought anyone off, but I do believe that there is a bit of a double standard here, perhaps because of his celebrity.

So, to clarify, are we allowed to open a new thread dedicated to open and honest discussion of the Amico outside of Tommy's thread? Because my recollection is that such a thread was opened and led to some reasonable discussion and that was shut down as well. I mean, I can understand wanting to be welcoming to someone who is prominent person in the video game community, but that same person is running a business and is actively using the forums to solicit business and feedback on his product. I'm not aware of any situation in the history of this site where a commercial business was allowed to essentially moderate its own thread and discussion by declaring that they had opened the thread and could decide what kind of discussion should be had as Tommy has done. What's really frustrating about all of this is that had the same rules applied to the Chameleon or Atari VCS, a lot of the scammy things that have happened with both products would not have been exposed. Indeed, members of this website exposed many problems in what Mike Kennedy was showing and probably saved a lot of people from being scammed. Similarly, tacos aside, this thread is keeping pressure on Atari by raising questions about what are becoming more and more vague promises and missed markers. As I have said before, Tommy doesn't strike me as a scammer and I hope his product is real, but the more I read about it and his increasingly lofty claims, the less convinced I become. Honestly, you don't have to raise millions of dollars or have 40 employees plus hundreds of contractors as he claims to show what he has shown so far. Every media appearance has been just him, he does all of his own PR on Facebook and Twitter and here from what I can tell. Heck, at CES he was literally walking around doing media alone with just a light up controller. A few hundred thousand dollars of personal savings and a key person or two could easily deliver the same thing. Continuing to shout down dissent and over-moderating an organic discussion by banning subscribers and long-time forum members in favor of a commercial business and a bunch of low post count fanboys doesn't seem like the best approach. I feel disappointed that things have come to this and I hope that free and honest discussion will be allowed to flow once again regarding the Amico and any other product that seeks the hard earned money of gamers prior to launching to the public.

Yep, I know Piko applied and Tommy declined. Personally, I think some gate keeping can be a good thing given some of the junk I have seen on other platforms.

Yes, it's the exact same one. Also, a second run was done several years after PRGE 2013.

I don't know, somebody posted 13 years ago now about an Airlock sample that looked similar. Tempest seemed to think it could be legit.

When the legislation was proposed, it was actually presented as something to protect small businesses as they were having to compete with Internet sellers that did not collect or remit sales tax.

Charging state tax on Internet purchases in the United States is now required in 34 states and was specifically authorized under Federal law a year or two ago in response to a Supreme Court decision. Charging foreign tax on purchases is not something that is authorized by US law, but sellers selling to the EU are now required to collect VAT, so if that is what Ebay is doing now, that is unfortunately lawful.

Yes, he is super bizarre. For a long time he would literally bid on and often win virtually every Odyssey 1 item that came up on Ebay. He claims to recondition the items he buys which doesn't seem to be very comprehensive from what I have seen. Recently, he has been claiming that he is "going out of business" in his auctions and yet here he is, still flipping stuff.

Just thinking back to his claims earlier in this thread that any indie game that was marketed properly could sell tens of thousands of copies. Hard to square that with the 5 downloads for his puzzle game in three months on the Google Store (as well as four, five star reviews from himself and three family members) and the 500 downloads of the poker game in that same time period, also on the Google Store.

Agree strongly. I received the same e-mail and was pretty infuriated about it. Retro is long dead and the mailing list shouldn't be used for things that have no relation to the dead magazine. Moreover, as someone who used to have a small action figure collection, I can honestly say that these look poorly made. If you're serious about being in this business, you need to partner with an established company that makes high quality figures.

This was manufactured by a company called Pleasant Valley Video in Ohio and it is just a reproduction, like all of their releases.

I'm sorry, but you seem to be the only one of the pro-dumping without permission people making this argument that if the owner would just make it clear that something is safely archived that everyone would leave them alone. I know for a fact that's not the case as I knew a collector for many years who was big in the NES prototype scene and who always made it clear that everything he owned was backed up in multiple locations. Despite that, every time he popped up on various forums, he was mercilessly harassed by people demanding that he make what he had paid thousands of dollars to obtain publicly available. On a number of occasions, he even offered to dump the carts for reimbursement of what he paid and people became even more aggressive. Nowadays he is pretty far underground and I haven't seen him on any of the forums at all. I'm willing to accept that you believe what you are posting, but your beliefs are clearly not shared by the rest of the mob.

I think you're getting confused by the other circular arguments in the thread. Nobody is arguing that some guy's private collection is a museum. The discussion was about the fact that a museum doesn't necessarily allow public or scholarly access to all of its holdings or collections nor will most museums allow duplication of materials under copyright. It just shows the absurdity of claiming that this is all about the need for preservation when the reality is that a lot of people in this thread really only care about public access, even if that means utilizing methods that are morally or ethically wrong to obtain that access.

Not correct. To apply for and obtain non-profit status in the United States, the organization must show that they have a public rather than private purpose, but there is no requirement that such a non-profit permit unrestricted access to its archives or collections. Specific grants or funding may come with additional strings attached, but many museums are primarily individual donor and private foundation funded at this point and on average, government financial support of museums is less than 25% of their typical annual budget.

Sure they are. There are literally people here admitting to engaging in shady activities to trick someone into leaving their game alone long enough to have it dumped without their permission and others that are perfectly fine with someone coming into someone else's home and stealing from them. Leaving aside the value to the individual collector, there is clearly a substantial premium in the marketplace attached to unique items and software. I'm actually someone who has contributed financially to group buys of things like prototype arcade boards over the years so they could be dumped and released and the difference in value between a unique board that has been dumped and one that has not been dumped can be thousands of dollars. I frankly find it fascinating and distributing that the people who beat the drum hardest for preservation and public access are often the ones who refuse to put their money where their mouth is and have a narrow view of collectors as selfish hoarders who may not feel that they have an obligation to release something to the public that they have paid substantial amounts to own. The reality is a lot more subtle and nuanced.

It depends on the museum and what the deed of gift retrictions were. The point is that by perpetuating this argument that everything must be made available to the public for free, you're just driving certain collectors further underground. There is an appropriate way to approach the holders of unique items from a preservation and public access standpoint and violating trust and using deception to copy software without permission is not the way to do it.

Sure, but the attitude expressed by many in this thread that anyone who collects and doesn't share their collection with the world for free is the very reason that we will never see some of the "lost" games that people are curious about ever released. Frankly, whether true or not, this story just reinforces the belief that a lot of wealthy collectors have that others are looking to steal from them and abuse their generosity and trust. With regard to your museum argument, it's just not accurate. Some items are donated to museums with specific restrictions in place and in some cases, museums and libraries act as archives and do not allow public access to those archives.