OldAtarian

I definitely agree with this. There's no legal or whatever obligation to tell a seller "hey, that game I just won is worth a million times what I'm paying for it", but there is, in my opinion, a moral one. I've actually had this happen where I informed the seller of their mistake. In the end, they let me have it for the price I paid. I, of course, was keeping it anyway, but I always feel bad for the seller that's uninformed and just trying to make some money and had the potential to make more than they ever dreamed, only to see that shafted by some scum waiting under the surface to convince them to sell for much less with a "deal" that seems incredible on the surface. Ebay is also a special case in that in a true auction, you can actually bid what the item is worth but if there aren't enough bidders to push the price up to that point, you win for less. There's nothing immoral about that, either. Auction has been a legitimate form of trade since ancient times. You made the best offer you could for it, it's not your fault that nobody else bid it up to that point. Shilling What ya gonna do then??? It wouldn't matter. I would have been prepared pay to the high bid price anyway. That's one of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, never bid more than you think an item is worth. So the seller has a second account, you bid it up to your high price, or what you think it is worth, and the seller uses the second account to see how far you will go, and you bid it to your max and then stop..Correct? Close, but not quite. The few times I've done it I would make my high bid with my main account then immediately underbid it with my second account to max it out. If anyone bids higher than what I think it's worth, they can have it. If I think something is worth $500 and I don't want to wait around 7 or 10 days for the bids to go that high, I would have no problem putting in a $499.99 bid with a second account. If someone else thinks it's worth more than $500, I walk away. I don't really see what the problem is. Ebay gets paid fees based on a final value of at least $500. If I had not bumped up my bid, it might have ended for a lot less and Ebay would have lost money. It happens in real auction houses all the time where someone jumps the line and makes a crazy high bid for something they want badly enough. If the seller shills me, though, that's a different story. I'd report that in a heartbeat. I might even cancel my bid. If I wanted the item that badly, I would have bid it up myself rather than letting my max bid ride. There's a big difference between me inflating my own bid to scare off the small timers and being shilled by the seller to find out my max bid. What it all boils down to, though, is how badly I want the item whether I bump my own bid or not. I think in over 500 items won, I've done it twice maybe 3 times at the most. I don't do it for items that come up for sale every day, only the rare stuff that might be years before I see another one. If a 1400XL proto or 1090 expansion box came up, I'd do it, but not for most other things. For most other things, I'd make my high bid and let it ride. If I happened to be online at the the time a listing ended, I might even snipe it with no guarantee that I wouldn't be outsniped. I lost one recently where I sniped it at 4 seconds and the bid didn't take because a lot of other people sniped at the same time I did. It's not the same as a side deal because I never collude with the seller in any way, for those items I just make sure the bidding gets high enough early on where most people would have to think twice about how badly they want the item before bidding against me.

I wish we had the ROFL smiley where he pounds his fist on the floor. It would be so appropriate.

That's what I say. You're going to pay $2500 for a 30 second game of Space Invaders when you can buy the real Space Invaders for a buck and play it infinitely or until you run out of guns. If you really want to play the Pepsi version, save your money, download the .bin, and run it in Stella.

You can do like Atari did and cut a piece of heavy card stock to the size and shape of a floppy disc and stick it in there to make sure nothing gets jostled around. Be sure to cut a hole in the middle for the spindle.

I wish I could find an Acorn RISC PC here in the States. Shipping from the UK is too much for me.

If you don't want to wait, Best and B&C are probably the only real choices in North America but be prepared to pay large money for them. You can try the auction sites but you'll have lots of competition, mostly from the rest of us here, and you may not save much if anything and shipping will likely be killer, especially if you have to buy a complete system with monitor, external drives and software. Falcons and TT's also don't show up very often anymore. I'm not sure who the equivalent dealers are in other parts of the world.

I would imagine the glue on the label would pretty much be stuck fast after 30 years and you'd likely tear it up trying to get it off. You could just poke a hole in it over the screw to get it open or if you have a really good printer and the right paper stock with a sticky back you could make repro labels. A lot of those old carts have worn or torn labels on them anyway. I've also been noticing a few Tigervision PAL carts on there lately, and some of those sell for pretty good prices here, too.

Hi, In Atari mode, the ATR8x00 acts like a peripheral controller. It doesn't boot any driver. It already knows about drives and printers. You do have to load a driver so the Atari can use R:, but the ATR is ready for that too. It will want a standard, non atari, drive to boot from, numbered 0/1. If you want to boot CP/M, then you will need several disks to setup the Atari as a terminal, and the ATR as a CP/M computer. I am working on a set for an order and will make more. The manual for the ATR8000 is online here...http://atari.a8maestro.com/info/8ball/atr8x00/atr8kman.txt. The CP/M manual is not part of this manual. I add info as I get it or make it to...http://atari.a8maestro.com/info/8ball/ballho.htm. Rick I'd like a complete set of those discs, assuming that the CP/M disc is bootable.

From an issue of START JRI's JATO Board The first of the 16-MHz accelerators was the J.A.T.O board from John Russell Innovations. We have to confess to some bias on our part with John: we know him personally and like him. Now the technical terms here involve things like "bus cycle", "data window", "chip select", and "wait state", and are not understandable to anyone except a fresh Computer Sci graduate. So we'll translate to English; pardon if it's not technical enough. We honestly don't feel that passing along a great deal of technical talk will help you in your decision about purchasing these products; performance figures will. John noticed some slop in the ST's timing-a way to sneak an added memory cycle to the CPU every now and then, when video wouldn't mind. It works primarily on RAM chips that are 120-nanosecond rated or faster; fortunately the majority of 150 nanosecond RAMs on ST machines are pessimistically rated. So John whipped up a prototype board that gave the ST about a 12 percent speed increase (1/8th). John was busy with other things; his 4096-color board and the Genlock. His friends asked him why he didn't market this accelerator board. He shrugged and said that well, the performance increase isn't awesome, but it isn't costly, either. So the unit ended up being priced at $99, which is a very fair price. Physically, the JATO board looks like a 68000 with a little daughter board glued on top. To install it, you unsolder and remove your 68000, then solder in a socket and plug in the JATO board. As a neat add-on, John added an LED and shut-off switch; the LED lights whenever the board is accelerating something. Performance-wise, the JATO board gives you a barely visible increase in speed-1/l0 th, depending on what you're doing. However, balancing this is its low cost. If you're on a budget, this is the obvious choice in CPU accelerators. --------------------------------------- So the JATO board doesn't actually give you 16mhz performance. It gives some performance improvement by streamlining some operations, but doesn't actually bump the CPU speed to 16mhz. The only way you get 16mhz performance is to use a 16mhz CPU and bump all the system clocks to 16mhz. So for the tiny speed improvement, to maybe the equivalnet of 9-10 mhz, you have to desolder your existing 68000 and solder in the upgrade socket and it's not even worth the trouble. You'd probably get that much improvement by replacing the 68000 with a 68010.

I'd like to point something out to you - you are complaining that eBay's rules were broken correct? And because of this you lost the chance to bid on something correct? You THEN decide to tell us that you have a 2nd user ID(legal) that you would have pushed up the bids with(illegal). Now I submit to you that yes you are correct in your original argument that the listing should not have been ended early BUT you should also be suspended/banned for your admitted activities of shill bidding. You cannot have 2 IDs that bid in the same listing. It's eBay policy. No one is perfect and everyone does something wrong/illegal/against the rules at some point. It's over, let it go and move on. And no - I didn't win this auction. Just drives me nuts that people can justify breaking a rule/law to keep someone else from breaking a rule/law - that leads to vigilante behavior(admittedly at the extreme). Where does it end? How is it illegal to push up the bid with a second ID? Tell me. It's not shilling. Shilling is when the SELLER pushes up the bids with a second ID, not the buyer. If I think an item is worth $250 and the seller starts it lower, HOW am I breaking ebay's rules by artificially inflating the bid if I have every intention of paying? Ebay gets MORE money if I do that, not less, and I'd really like you to show me WHERE in ebay's rules, exactly, it states you are not allowed to bump up your own bids. You are breaking Ebay's rule that says IF you have two accounts you can't use them in the same listing... Not my rules. You obviously didn't notice that the two top posts of this page were duplicates. In my original I edited it when I realized you did post the link to the rule. Please go back and read the edited post at the bottom of the previous page.

eBay Auction -- Item Number: 280595883446 Is it?

Other companies besides Sony made MSX computers. It was supposed to be an open standard, not limited to a single manufacturer. And it was originally conceived by Microsoft. "MSX was the name of a standardized home computer architecture in the 1980s conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi, then Vice-president at Microsoft Japan and Director at ASCII Corporation. It is said that Microsoft led the project as an attempt to create unified standards among hardware makers. Despite Microsoft's involvement, MSX-based machines were seldom seen in the United States and Britain (although heavily advertised by Toshiba in the UK), but they were popular in other markets." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX

I've been seeing a lot of Commavid carts on ebay Germany recently. A person could make a fortune buying them and then replacing the PAL PROM with an EPROM with the NTSC game burned into it.

Did you talk to a "Brandon" or "Chad" from India? That's what usually happens to me. There's usually some foreigner who can barely understand English with an English sounding name handling your live chat or email support requests and typing the responses to your questions from a previously prepared script. If your particular complaint isn't covered by the script, they can't help you. Phone support is even worse. It's gotten to the point now where if I call for support and the person at the other end speaks less than perfect English, I just hang up because I know the call is going nowhere. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmD_8cBqhW0

This kind of confrontational behavior is allowed, yet we're still not allowed to talk politics?

Triple post. Site was having technical difficulties. I edited this post without realizing it had been posted several times. Please go back and read the edit if you responded to a duplicate post.

Triple post. Site was having technical difficulties. I edited this post without realizing it had been posted several times. Please go back and read the edit if you responded to a duplicate post.

I'd like to point something out to you - you are complaining that eBay's rules were broken correct? And because of this you lost the chance to bid on something correct? You THEN decide to tell us that you have a 2nd user ID(legal) that you would have pushed up the bids with(illegal). Now I submit to you that yes you are correct in your original argument that the listing should not have been ended early BUT you should also be suspended/banned for your admitted activities of shill bidding. You cannot have 2 IDs that bid in the same listing. It's eBay policy. No one is perfect and everyone does something wrong/illegal/against the rules at some point. It's over, let it go and move on. And no - I didn't win this auction. Just drives me nuts that people can justify breaking a rule/law to keep someone else from breaking a rule/law - that leads to vigilante behavior(admittedly at the extreme). Where does it end? How is it illegal (a violation of the LAW, not ebay policy. You used the word 'illegal', not me.) to push up the bid with a second ID? Tell me. It's not shilling. Shilling is when the SELLER pushes up the bids with a second ID, not the buyer. If I think an item is worth $250 and the seller starts it lower, HOW am I hurting ebay or the seller by artificially inflating the bid if I have every intention of paying? Ebay gets MORE money if I do that and so does the seller. It's not my problem if my maximum bid happens to be more than some people would be willing to pay and discourages them from bidding. Anyone who wants the item badly enough can always outbid me by the minimum increment at the end. What's the minimum increment at $250? $2.50? $5, maybe? That's nothing when the bid is already that high. Even if the bid was at $10,000 anyone who can afford the $10,000 can surely afford the next higher bid increment. Nobody is stopping them from doing that. Do you really think ebay is going to do anything that causes them to make LESS money on a sale? And what's the difference whether I use my own second account or I get a friend or relative to do the bidding that maxes me out? This item would have ended much higher anyway if it had been allowed to run so a few early bids to discourage outside deals from being made wouldn't have hurt anybody. In a real auction, if the bid is $100, anyone can stand up at any time and bid more than that without waiting for the minimum bid increment to reach that point, in other words if the bid is at $100 and the minimum bid increment is $10 and I stand up and offer $500 then I pay the $500 and not $110. Nobody is going to argue with that, not the seller and not the auction house, who collects a higher buyer's premium.

I definitely agree with this. There's no legal or whatever obligation to tell a seller "hey, that game I just won is worth a million times what I'm paying for it", but there is, in my opinion, a moral one. I've actually had this happen where I informed the seller of their mistake. In the end, they let me have it for the price I paid. I, of course, was keeping it anyway, but I always feel bad for the seller that's uninformed and just trying to make some money and had the potential to make more than they ever dreamed, only to see that shafted by some scum waiting under the surface to convince them to sell for much less with a "deal" that seems incredible on the surface. Ebay is also a special case in that in a true auction, you can actually bid what the item is worth but if there aren't enough bidders to push the price up to that point, you win for less. There's nothing immoral about that, either. Auction has been a legitimate form of trade since ancient times. You made the best offer you could for it, it's not your fault that nobody else bid it up to that point. Shilling What ya gonna do then??? It wouldn't matter. I would have been prepared pay to the high bid price anyway. That's one of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, never bid more than you think an item is worth.

WRONG! How many times do the rules have to be pointed out to you? It is against Ebay's rules to use their service to strike outside deals. The only way the buyer could have contacted the seller was through Ebay's messaging system. They used Ebay to strike a deal that cheated Ebay out of the revenue they would have gotten if the listing had been allowed to run. They should both be banned.

suggest you read the thread again, it is a PIZZA BOX add on NOT a 1450XLD case You can add PBI to a 1200xl It is up to Curt what he does with his time and money I am aware it is a pizza box case. I was addressing a point someone else raised earlier in the thread about wanting a 1450XLD case instead.

may only be 50-60 reg'd in that thread, there are many more then that in peoples hands... not all 1200XL's in existance are doc'd in that thread... this is a very worthwhile project... sloopy. I'm just trying to be realistic. How many of the remaining 1200XL owners, who may or may not be out there somewhere, do you think will even be aware of this project, much less be willing to buy it? The reality is that the majority of the 1200XL owners who will even know anything about this project know about it already from reading this thread. It's not likely that releasing this is going to open up a floodgate of unknown 1200XL owners rushing over here to buy one. You're absolutely right, though, if Curt wants to sink his time and money into it, it's his time and money. I just to hate to see it all go into something that has only a limited market to start with. A more mainstream project involving an 800XL or 130XE, which have the advantage of greater numbers, would make more financial sense. Let's use the poll results. At this time 35 people would buy it for less than $75 and 45 would buy it for less than $100. 23 wouldn't buy it at all. That's not a lot of confirmed yes's considering what the project is likely to cost. Can the total cost of the project including tooling costs be spread over so few users and still meet the price points above? And what happens if a lot of the people who voted 'yes' later back out? Then he's stuck sitting on inventory that might take a while to move which is money that could be used for other things.

Fortunately, not too many SMS card based games. I don't even remember any 'killer games' in that format. Because the cards contained a lot less memory than the cartridges. I think they were offered as a cheaper alternative for developers who didn't need all the extra space in the regular cartridge so they could sell their games at a lower price point.

Yeah i do the same.One idiot emailed me back and said something to the likes of "well thank you Mr.know-it-all, lets all bow down to you".That was the 1st time i sent a message to that seller.Some just don't like to be told they're wrong.That happened only once though.You always run into a jerk at Ebay no matter how nice you are. You got lucky. The messages I get back usually contain expletives that I've never heard of, and I'm an old geezer.

Actually 2k (1977 standard) I prefer to think that there are multiple aesthetics for VCS games. Some are keyed to specific moments in the machine's history, such as the 1977 2k period, or the Activision/Imagic era, or the 8k bankswitched game. Others focus on trying new approaches that were never viable or obvious during the machine's commercial life, such as the contemporary demake, and so forth. If I dare quote myself (from Racing the Beam), here's a plausible summary of why the 2600 feels so powerful: "So much was possible on the Atari VCS, and not because it was a powerful computer. It wasn’t powerful at all. Rather, so much was possible because the machine was so simple. The very few things it could do well—drawing a few movable objects on the screen one line at a time while uttering sounds using square waves and noise—could be put together in a wide variety of ways to achieve surprising results." So simple? Then why does everyone complain about hard it is to develop for?