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vitaflo

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Posts posted by vitaflo

  1. Posted · Edited by vitaflo

    This lot has been sold.

     

    I've decided to sell off my collection of Atari 2600 games, 80 games in total (some duplicates).  Selling this as a lot.  Asking $40 + shipping (US only).  Note this is 12 lbs worth of games, so shipping might be pricey depending on where you are.  I can give shipping costs if you give me your zip code for those interested.  These games, while working in the past, have not been tested recently.

     

    List of games in lot:

    3-D Tic-Tac-Toe  
    Adventure  
    Air-Sea Battle  (Text Label Red)
    Air-Sea Battle  
    Airlock  
    Amidar  
    Armor Ambush  
    Asteroids  
    Asteroids  
    Astroblast  
    Atlantis  
    Basketball  
    Battlezone  (Silver Label)
    Berzerk  
    Berzerk  
    Blackjack  (Text Label Green)
    Blackjack  (Text Label Yellow)
    Bugs  
    Canyon Bomber  (Text Label Gold)
    Casino  
    Centipede  (Silver Label)
    Chpper Command  
    Circus Atari  
    Combat  (Text Label Red)
    Combat  (Text Label Red)
    Combat  
    Cosmic Ark  
    Dark Cavern  
    Dark Cavern  (Korea)
    Defender  (Sears Red Text)
    Defender  (Blue Text)
    Demon Attack  
    Donkey Kong  
    Donkey Kong Jr.  
    E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial  (Silver Label)
    Fast Food  
    Football  (Text Label Yellow)
    Gopher  
    Grand Prix  
    Hangman  
    Hangman  (Text Label Blue)
    Haunted House  
    Human Canonball  
    Indy 500  
    Indy 500  (Text Label Yellow "11")
    Laser Blast  
    Lock 'N' Chase  
    Math Gran Prix  
    Miniature Golf  (Text Label Red)
    Missile Command  
    Ms. Pac-Man  (Silver Label)
    Pac-Man
    Pele's Soccer  
    Phoenix  (Silver Label)
    Pitfall!  
    Pole Position  (Silver Label)
    Q-Bert  
    Reactor  
    RealSports Baseball  (Silver Label)
    RealSports Football  (Silver Label)
    Riddle of the Sphinx  
    Sky Diver  
    Solar Fox  
    Space Attack  
    Space Invaders  (Text Label Red)
    Space Invaders  (Text Label Red)
    Space Invaders  
    Space War  (Text Label Red)
    Star Raiders  
    Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back  
    Summer Games  
    Super Breakout  
    Super Challenge Baseball  
    Surround  (Text Label Green)
    Surround  (Text Label Green "41")
    Venture  (Red Label)
    Video Checkers  (Text Label Red)
    Video Olympics  
    Video Olympics  (Text Label Gold)
    Warlords

     

     

    Photos:

    8CUYlQL.png5Nm53J0.pngqOjACid.pngY1jNUky.png

  3. Posted · Edited by vitaflo

     

    Let's all remember that these are mass produced items with production runs in the tens of thousands and more often for games you know and like in the hundreds of thousands. It takes a long time (years) for any real scarcity to manifest.

     

    Many games sold over 1 million copies. There's over 50 of them for both NES and SNES, many of them the best games on the system. Nintendo sold half a Billion (yes with a "B") games on the NES alone.

     

    There's been a huge influx of new collectors lately, but for most titles, there are plenty of games to go around. Games aren't scarce at all. Once a collector has a game, there is no need for them to get it again. As people fill out their collections, demand goes down and these titles will tank in price. It's the same thing that happened to baseball cards in the 90s.

     

    The "valuable" games will be anything with a print run of less than 100k, or almost certainly less than 50k. This is very few games, as most games needed a print run >50k to recoup dev costs, and usually they're the worst games on the system.

    • Like 1

  5. Posted · Edited by vitaflo

    It's an impressive repository. But I can't stand the styling and layout however. It isn't warm and inviting and moody. Everything is harsh white shelving and metal and glass. No warmth of nature or style to the decor(or lack of it)

     

    It's certainly not like a library, which is the one thing that always bugs me about these collection displays. They just seem so ridiculously...weird looking. I think part of it is because anything from the last 20 years looks like a DVD or CD collection, which nobody has sitting out to show off. A big row of NES loose games might look interesting from a shape perspective, but it doesn't really catch the eye unless it's arranged by label color, not title. But then good luck finding any of the games.

     

    The reason libraries with books tend to look interesting is every book is a little bit different in size, shape, spine, etc. They're also not popping with neon colors everywhere. Plastic cart shells and cases just don't really have the same effect.

  6. Posted

    Collecting for the shelf always reminded me of those old ladies who collected Beanie Babies and put them in plastic cases to display. They're childrens toys, they're meant to be played with.

     

    I have a feeling in about 10 years the retro collecting scene will be about as similar, people who spent way too much money on crap that's not worth anything anymore and just sits around collecting dust.

    • Like 1

  8. Posted

     

    If the market right now is saying a game that should be common is $20 like Contra, that tells you all you need to know.

     

    Actually Contra is going for $40 right now. Yes, this tells me all I need to know. Retro game collecting is trendy right now, but the general public isn't aware of it. There are tons of games sitting around in storage and the supply is low because of it. This creates a perfect storm. Game prices are artificially high because of it.

     

    Like all collecting trends, it will pass. The fact that it's even being discussed right now as a "problem" is why prices are increasing. It's not because there's not enough supply to go around. For most games, there's plenty. It's just artificially inflated.

    • Like 1

  9. Posted · Edited by vitaflo

     

    I think you're right, I used to be quick to say the fad of game collecting would eventually die, and obviously it will, but games will never be cheap again like they used to be. It hit so popular that it's not just gonna die off, and there's always gonna be new people entering the fray.

     

    And old people leaving when they realize they have too much crap around and no space to keep it.

     

    Lets take SNES for example, a system with ridiculous prices right now. There are 50 titles on that system that sold over 1 million copies. There are not, and never will be, 1 million SNES collectors out there. There are plenty of games to go around, and most of these games are the best on the platform (which is why they sold so much).

     

    Everything right now is based on the fact that more people are entering the collecting scene currently than exiting (because of youtube et al) and many many people with games in their attic have no clue what they are worth that are not yet back in circulation. Give it time, when those games get out of the attics and the general hype around collecting stuff dies down, the market will tank.

     

    What's going to be hard moving forward is getting those old games that had print runs of 50,000 because there *are* 50k collectors out there and they're all trying to get one. But unless you're a "gotta have them all" collector, you usually don't want those titles anyway. They only sold 50k for a reason (they're horrible).

  10. Posted

    THANK YOU, lol. Every time I try to explain that weird muffled echo quality of SNES audio to people they think I'm nuts.

     

    Though it's not like the Genesis' sound is any better. A little thin and tinny for my liking.

     

    What version of the Genesis? If you had a v1 and used the headphone jack the audio was amazing. On the SNES I think what you're talking about (and I know what you mean) is from the sound samples they used. They unfortunately stood out and sounded quite hollow. Nintendo basically forced devs to use only Nintendo's sound samples and most of them were crap. About the only thing the SNES did reasonably well was orchestral music.

  11. Posted · Edited by vitaflo

    I've been following this trend recently and it's due to a number of factors. The main one now is Youtubers creating demand by playing old games on their channels, and resellers taking advantage of this by artificially propping up prices across the board.

     

    For most games, there are plenty to go around for everyone. For example, Super Mario World sold 13 million copies in the US. Every single person who has any passing interest in games could easily get one given the supply. Yet they still go for $25 loose on ebay even though this is one of the most common games in existence.

     

    Someone recently did an experiment with a cheap Gameboy game that nobody wanted, Rampart. At the beginning of 2014 they bought up the entire supply on ebay for around $3 each. Over the year they started posting it up for higher dollar values, eventually getting it up to $25 a year later. As the price went up, resellers entered the market with their copies and kept inflating it until it got up to about $40. This is for a game that until this guy did his experiment nobody wanted for $3.

     

    This sort of thing is happening all over. Resellers don't care if the copies never sell, they are just looking for the one mark in the bunch to buy it. They can keep on relisting for years until someone desperate enough needs it for their "collection". Then they made their profit.

     

    The collection scene right now is similar to the way baseball cards or Beanie Babies use to be. Prices are just being made up for mostly common and horrible games. This of course in turn shoots up prices of the actual rare games as well. But there are so many games still sitting in people's attics doing nothing, that it artificially makes scarce even common games.

     

    Once all these games come out of hiding and into the market and people complete whatever collections they have (or get bored of them as they will, the current retro game trendiness will pass), the retro market will tank and resellers will start offloading inventory (tanking the market even more) to get out before it collapses. Resellers will then move on to some other market that is more profitable.

     

    I can see actual rare games retaining some of their value but common and garbage games holding up to these ridiculous prices will not stay that way forever. Anything with a million+ copies cannot hold their value when all of them are out of attics and back in circulation. Most games have vastly more copies made than there are collectors to buy them.

    • Like 3

  12. Posted

    I played all 3 of these games (FF, DW, PS) when they came out (I used to review video games for a living). The answer is no contest. Phantasy Star destroys the other two. PS was so far ahead of its time when it was released. 4Meg cart with the best graphics at the time, 3D dungeons, 3 planets, female protagonist (who isn't some sex toy, unheard of at the time), a wizard with an ambiguous gender (not actually the case, but a messed up English translation made it so) and one of the first story driven RPG's released on consoles.

     

    For anyone to claim FF or DW better either didn't play PS or has nostalgia. That's obviously not a bad thing, but at the time it was very obvious PS was the vastly superior game.

  13. Posted · Edited by vitaflo

     

    This excactly.

     

    I've worked retail many years, and when I'm teaching new hires to spot returns of stolen items, there's two key things I tell them to look for:

     

    1) The sob story. No one just happened to buy two $50, unrelated items, then change their mind. It's always 'my recently deceased Aunt said told me before she died to return these to pay for my broken car because my ex wrecked it before she broke up with me and kicked my dog'. Or something like that.

    2) The anger. Only thieves get really and truly angry. If they threaten to have you fired or arrested, you've got a crook for sure.

     

    Rosa is a textbook case. If she turned up where I work, we'd kick her out.

     

    Nailed it. Obvious from the start she's nothing but a scammer. And a bad one at that. 100% made up fairy tales from her, all of it, most likely including it being a "her".

    • Like 1

  14. Posted · Edited by vitaflo

    0) Connecting to a CRT or an LCD?

     

    1) If you use an LCD monitor, are you comfortable relying on the internal scaler for non-native resolutions?

     

    2) If you use an LCD, is it wide screen or 'square'

     

    3) How important is the overscan area to you (on a vanilla ST, the white area around the green desktop)?

     

    4) How important is 50 Hz support?

     

    5) Does your CRT or LCD support any 50 Hz timings?

     

    6) Do you have a 40 pin shifter (ST/Mega/Stacy) or a GST (STe) shifter?

     

    7) How much soldering is too much?

     

    0) LCD

    1) Yes

    2) I have both widescreen and 4:3 LCD monitors

    3) Not very

    4) Not important

    5) No

    6) STe

    7) Depends. Does soldering include desoldering? I think most people would like a black box solution, but honestly, *any* solution is preferable to what we have now, which is basically nothing.

     

    I'd pay whatever price is required to get a decent solution that is as easy as possible to install. $150+ is no issue at all. Also, documenting as much of this info as possible would be very helpful posterity's sake. There's so little good info out there on this that I think it's really important to write down for historical reasons.

  16. Posted

    actually not working yet

    :(

     

    i formatted my disk with the dos prompt and was able to copy the program onto the disk

    the disk and it content opened up on my Atari but when i try to run the program it keeps telling me that "Data on the disk in drive A: may be damaged"

     

    i have tried several different disk's and programs and still get the same result

     

    any ideas ?

     

    You can't just do a normal format in DOS, it won't work (at least not in my experience). From the DOS prompt, try this instead to format your floppy:

     

    format a: /t:80 /n:9

     

    That should work.

  19. Posted

    If your handy you can make your own out of a JROK, or a NEOBITZ, I recommend the neobitz. If you look on ebay, there exists ones premade that convert RGB to component. I have one, and it works very well, they run about $40.

     

    These look like they are made for arcade boards. Will it still have the correct sync when using it with an ST? I have an STE (NTSC). Is the pinout from the monitor port into these things going to be any different than, say, monitor out to SCART RGB?

  20. Posted

    Now for those in the US, the best bet outside of old computer monitors, would be an RGB to YPbPr component video transcoder (usually an SCART=> component adaptor), and use that on a TV. (with nearly identical quality to the native RGB, and again, should work with any Standard Definition compatible TV, but probably best not to use and HDTVs as these sometimes have issues with SD stuff, particularly 240p rather than 480i, and in any case filters should be turned to minimum)

     

    Any recommendations on such a transcoder? I'm looking for an NTSC solution that is better than the general RCA output I have.

  25. Posted

    Can anyone tell me what those jumper leads are for? :)

     

    It appears that this is a baud rate enhancement Mod. it basically uses a shift register to double the standard baud rate of the ST serial port. I think it requires the use of a CPX module to take advantage of it. There were several versions of this kind of mod and I am not sure which one this is. I have instructions for a couple of these and it doesn't quite match.

     

    *EDIT*

     

    After some more research, it appears this might be a factory fix of some kind for this revision of the STE. This thread shows this chip on the Atari STE schematics yet there isn't a place for it on the motherboard. So this may have been added to later motherboard revisions:

     

    http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f...506&p=21537

     

    Most definitely done in the factory. Just received a stock STe a few days ago and after opening it, it had the same leads. Curious what it fixed, if anything.

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