OldAtarian

I noticed that one. It's probably not a bad deal since CIB goes for over $100 and I'm sure at some point you'll be able to find a manual for a lot less than $65, it's just the waiting for one to turn up that's a pain. I already have that one CIB or I'd have grabbed it myself. I'd rather see someone else get it who doesn't have it than be mercenary and start hoarding them all.

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.

It takes a long time to drive from Venezuela to the United States. That's how the cheap shipping option usually works. The postal or delivery company workers aren't real keen about how quickly they dispatch the packages, either. They have to wait until they have enough packages to justify sending the truck out. They aren't going to make a delivery with only 1 or 2 packages in the truck. It might take them a month to accumulate enough deliveries to make it worthwhile.

Except for the fact that I had a bid of $250 already in. If he was going to sell to the high bidder, it should have been me. If he had bothered to notify me of the fact, I would have gladly paid it. My mistake was in not using my alternate i.d. to bid it up early (example, I use my main ID to bid $250.00 then use my alt and bid $249.99 which brings the bidding up to $250). I didn't think I'd have to because there would have been plenty of bidders once they saw the LFI and LFII carts in boxes. If I really wanted to be a bastard, I could start a bidding war between my two I.D.'s and the seller would have been afraid to end it early and miss out on getting a higher bid later.

The seller pulled the listing after someone made him an offer of $75. He ran a special BIN for the buyer of $75 to legitimize it. I had already bid $250 and was prepared to go higher with a snipe later on. It was a side deal.

Already been commented, on, but I'm talking about how he set it up through eBay. NOT outside of it. They don't care if he did or not. Tough luck. And you can't argue "well it would have been $925" because how could you know that for sure? Market value? Maybe, but what if it happened to be a day when no one really bid on it? They take what they get out of it, and if that's $75 whatever. $925 is a piece of sand in an ocean to them. I can tell you it would have been at least $700. And that's a fact, because that's what I would have maxed out at.

How are you going to cover the costs for this project if you can't cover the costs for a run of 2600 cartridge shells? There's maybe 50-60 1200XL's registered in the serial number thread. If you can't justify the cost of making 2600 cart shells with a few thousand, how can you justify the cost of this? And how do you put a 1200XL into a 1450XLD case? The drives were addressed as high speed PBI devices in the 1450XLD weren't they? The 1200XL has no PBI to tap into. The biggest issue still goes back to there being too few 1200XL's left in the world for this project to make any sense.

I did, too. I actually saw that listing before I saw it mentioned in this thread. Usually trying to correct people on ebay only gets you a nasty message back telling you to mind your own f'ing business or gets you banned from bidding on the listing. I think people deliberatley set out to deceive people sometimes and don't want anyone getting in their way. That's why anonymous bidding is bad. I used to be on a coin collecting forum and a few of us used to police ebay for counterfeit or altered coins and when one appeared we would warn the bidders about it so they don't get ripped off but you can't do that now. Ebay should have left it as it was. A lot more people are being robbed now and don't even know they're being robbed until it's too late to do anything about it.

So do any of the historians have the official production figures for the 1200XL, or are we trying to extrapolate that information from the serial numbers that are gathered here?

The one that really gets me is Pete Rose Baseball. That game looks amazing considering the system it is running on.

Actually that's incorrect. We don't allow our members to use eBay to contact each other to make offers to buy or sell items outside of eBay. Also, members can't use information obtained from eBay to contact each other about buying or selling outside of eBay. It was sold on ebay though so technically no rule was broken. They still got their cut so they dont care Yes, but ebay would have gotten more money if the listing had been allowed to run. Ebay's share of $75 is nothing compared to what it would have been if the listing had reached it's final value at the end of 10 days. There would have been aggressive bidding on that one.

I never said that I expected people to pay more than the seller is asking EXCEPT if they are a professional. A customer who buys something from a dealer for less than it's value is under no obligation to pay anything more than what the price on the item says. If I were to buy a baseball card from a dealer that was $100 in the price guides but he had a $50 tag on it, he can't hunt me down later and say I still owe him $50 because he put his price on it. In the case of a member of the public responding to the question "How much do you want for it?" he doesn't know what it's worth so how is he going to know what a fair price is when he doesn't know what the dealer knows? In many trades, members of the trade have access to information through various organizations that they belong to that the general public can't get. Even price guides that are sold to the public often aren't accurate indicators of real values, but the trade sheets that the dealer keeps behind the counter are and only he gets to see those so where is the public supposed to go for accurate information?

Just the fact that you ask that question marks you as unethical. It can be considered a predatory business practice. When you are a professional, you should be held to a higher standard than the general public because you have specialized knowledge that the general public doesn't and you are using that knowledge to exploit people. An ethical buyer and seller of used items makes his best offer up front without asking the seller what he wants for it. If the seller won't take it, then at least he has made a fair offer for whatever it is and the seller won't find a better deal by going anywhere else so he will then know what his item is worth and that you were being honest with him about the value. I used to work in the sports card and collectibles trade and I knew who all the honest dealers were and who the shady ones were in my area because I used to go to them once in a while to get offers for things and I would steer my customers away from the dishonest ones if they were looking for something I didn't have or wanted to sell something that was too pricey for me to handle. The truth is nobody gets ripped off anymore, everybody knows about Ebay and this entire argument is pointless because the only way brick and mortar collectible shops actually make money these days is from buying stolen items from drug addicts that need money NOW! .....but, the few people who are too stubborn or lazy to take 5 minutes to research the value of an item via the internet deserve to get low balled, it's there own damn fault for expecting everyone else to do the work for them. Remember this lesson kids... Nobody gets ripped off anymore? If you look in my other thread, someone sold a boxed Learning Fun I and Learning Fun II in a side deal for $75 after I had already placed a much higher bid which he canceled to accept the side deal. There's still a lot of predators out there and a lot of people who don't know the true value of what they have.

In my first message to the seller I told him I would have bid as high $700, which was a bit of a bluff to make him worry (I probably would have gone as high as $400 just for the LFII boxed) but I hadn't seen the LFI boxed in there because it was concealed in the photos but I would have noticed it eventually because I'm always scrutinizing and rescrutinizing the listings I bid on and then I definitely would have bid the $700. I probably would have lost even at that, but at least I would have been making an honest offer for the games, not trying to screw the guy for every penny. I don't resell any of the good games I get. I keep them and let them appreciate. The only ones I resell are the commons I no longer have room for to free up some money for new buys. If anyone sells them, it will be my heirs because they won't be leaving me while I'm still alive. I have no desire to be a dealer in anything. I've been down that road in the past and don't want to go down it again.

Indeed! And even after all the cost reduction that went into the XE's, they still couldn't compete with the C64/128. The Commodores just had too big of a user base by then and it was all because of Jack Tramiel and his price war. He had to compete against the leviathan that he created. C64's would sell for over 2 more years after Atari dropped support for the XE, right up to the day when Commodore went under.

I got a 1200 XL, A Mega ST2 with Megafile 30, and a Lynx 2 with 4 games, power supply and carry bag. Paid about $200 for the lot collectively and that includes shipping from 3 different places. That Mega ST deal also included the JVC SC1224 that I am looking for a cable for, my freaky looking CX-22 trackball, and one of those chunky Wico Command Controls with the fat base that doesn't look like the normal Command Control stick. Also came with a bunch of software like Pagestream 2.1 with the 2.2 upgrade, Speedo GDOS, and dozens of other professional grade programs I never would have afforded in the 90's. The 1200 XL also came with a bunch of loose carts. No rares, but still a nice bonus. The Mega also has some kind of SIMM memory board installed that I haven't identified yet mainly because it has 2 gobs of hot melt glue holding it down, oh and 3 Atari mice. Don't ask me why one ST needs 3 mice, but I'm guessing at least one of them is broken.

Considering the Commodore 64 was released at $595 months before Atari announced the 1200XL at $899, I wouldn't exactly say the honor of Power Without the Price goes to Atari,at least not where the 8 bits were concerned. The ST, yes, but the 8 bits were behind the pricing curve for most of their existence, reacting to Commodores price drops but never being in a position where they had the pricing power. Ironically, it was Jack Tramiels price war with T.I. that basically caused the Atari 8 bit line, that he would later buy, to flounder. Talk about having something come back to bite you on the butt later. Karma can really suck sometimes.

Just the fact that you ask that question marks you as unethical. It can be considered a predatory business practice. When you are a professional, you should be held to a higher standard than the general public because you have specialized knowledge that the general public doesn't and you are using that knowledge to exploit people. An ethical buyer and seller of used items makes his best offer up front without asking the seller what he wants for it. If the seller won't take it, then at least he has made a fair offer for whatever it is and the seller won't find a better deal by going anywhere else so he will then know what his item is worth and that you were being honest with him about the value. I used to work in the sports card and collectibles trade and I knew who all the honest dealers were and who the shady ones were in my area because I used to go to them once in a while to get offers for things and I would steer my customers away from the dishonest ones if they were looking for something I didn't have or wanted to sell something that was too pricey for me to handle.

Shipping took that long the whole year. And he had 1 negative feedback for 10 month and then suddenly another 45 within 6 weeks. That might have to do with how ebay fixed the feedback system. It's very possible he was one of those douchebags that played games with feedback and never got negs because the buyers were afraid of retaliatory negs. This is why I always insisted on getting my feedback as a buyer first or I leave none at all. As far as I'm concerned, once I pay you for what I bid on, I should get my positive feedback right away. I've carried out my end of the deal and usually within a few hours, most of the time within a few minutes, of the auction ending. Buyers should just get an automatic positive posted to their account by ebay that the seller has no say over once they've paid. It should only be the seller who has to wait for feedback from the buyer.

My newest message to the seller congratulating him on his brilliant business acumen "Oh, and I didn't notice you also had a boxed Learning Fun I in there as well. That's another $500 game. So you sold $1000 worth of merchandise for $75. Merry Christmas."

Wasn't me since my paypal account just took a $500 hit for a certain auction. What was the auction number? eBay Auction -- Item Number: 170571514550 Original listing I bid on. I actually bid twice, the second time to pad my offer my little so it held up longer (and NO, I did not make the minimum bid hoping to walk away with it for $20 or I wouldn't have made my second bid.). He canceled all bids to do the side deal but the bid hadn't yet been bid up to my max. It was a 10 day listing only a few hours old so it DEFINITELY would have been bid up once a few more people saw the boxed Learning Fun II in there. eBay Auction -- Item Number: 170571559129 Side deal sale. I also sent a report to ebay with both listing numbers. Hopefully both buyer and seller will be receiving emails from ebay in the near future. If you were upset before check my edited post - There was a Learning Fun 1 CIB as well. Wow, this guy screwed himself. Thanks for pointing that out. I was so pissed off about missing the LFII that I didn't bother to check what the covered up game was. So there's now at least $1000 of merchandise there that some idiot sold for $75.

I'm hoping he comes back and offers me a side deal so I can tell him what to do with it. Hope he enjoys his $75 now that he knows he could have gotten a helluva lot more just for waiting. $75 is a joke. We throw away more than $75 worth of paper products (toilet paper, paper towels, tissues, napkins) in a month in my house. That's all $75 is worth.

Wasn't me since my paypal account just took a $500 hit for a certain auction. What was the auction number? eBay Auction -- Item Number: 170571514550 Original listing I bid on. I actually bid twice, the second time to pad my offer my little so it held up longer (and NO, I did not make the minimum bid hoping to walk away with it for $20 or I wouldn't have made my second bid.). He canceled all bids to do the side deal but the bid hadn't yet been bid up to my max. It was a 10 day listing only a few hours old so it DEFINITELY would have been bid up once a few more people saw the boxed Learning Fun II in there. eBay Auction -- Item Number: 170571559129 Side deal sale. I also sent a report to ebay with both listing numbers. Hopefully both buyer and seller will be receiving emails from ebay in the near future.

Yep. I confirm. The PET makes an appearance in a number of places, even the second season of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", when Buck is in the sickbay with a fever - he uses a PET (with a cheezy 1980s video overlay) to watch events unfold in the docking bay. There's also a 12" PET in "Terminator 3" in a pile of old computers at the end of the movie. Which is ironic since Gil Gerard was a known Atari 800 user.

Seller on ebay had Intellivision lot with CIB Learning Fun II up for auction and someone offered $75 for him to end it early when I already a bid of over $250 in and would have gone higher if I was outbid. Rest assured, I immediately notified the seller when the listing was canceled of the true value of that game and how high I would have gone to get it and linked him to the recent $500 auction, so don't hold you're breath waiting on your merchandise to arrive. You know who you are, jerk.