Dave Farquhar

If he were testing the games to make sure they work, and cleaning them up a bit, I wouldn't have a problem with it--like you say, it's capitalism. I deal with exactly this type of competition in my other areas of interest, but the people selling them fix up whatever problems they find and in some cases guarantee them. I don't begrudge anyone trying to make a living but I do think middlemen ought to add some value to the things they sell. Would I buy from him? If I wanted it badly enough and couldn't find it for 39 cents at the thrift across the street... It's less hassle than winning it on eBay and cheaper than paying the winning bid plus shipping.

If the neighborhood sale is an annual event, you probably won't find a lot of classic stuff. I found an N64 and a Sega Saturn at a neighborhood sale last weekend, but the guy was asking close to game store prices. Someone bought them, but it wasn't me. I find sales sometimes where someone hasn't cleaned out their basement in 20 years, and those are always the best sales, for games and otherwise. Best thing to do is to get out on Saturday mornings and go. Hit lots of different neighborhoods to get a feel for what you find where. It may be a while before you start hitting jackpots, but you will. Even if all you find is modern games, they can be trade bait for the stuff you really want.

OK, I have to speak up here, as someone who has worked at a newspaper and has a journalism degree. First, calling a newspaper and talking to a reporter or editor won't get you very far. Odds are the reporter who would have covered the story and the editor who would have edited it are both long gone. Journalists generally work for small town newspapers for one of two reasons: To build up a portfolio to attract the interest of a bigger paper somewhere else, or because they're related to the owner of the paper. The former is much more common. The person at the paper you want to talk to is the person at the morgue. The morgue is the newspaper's library, where old clippings are kept. A lot of papers have the morgue computerized now, but something that happened in the early 1980s probably isn't in the computer system. Also, on-location reporting is only necessary for television. Sometimes it's helpful to go to the scene, but that's if time and budgets permit, and if actually seeing the event will add something to the story. The rule of thumb is three sources: If you can get three people to talk to you, then you've got a story. If you talked to them on the phone, that's fine. More sources makes for a better story, but it depends on how busy you are that day. The Alamogordo reporter had a lot more time to dedicate than the NY Times business reporter did, that I'll guarantee. The local account may have gone on a wire service, but when the story involves a large public company known to be in trouble, chances are the wire services (Associated Press, Reuters, and/or United Press International) will have their own reporter cover the story. But here's where I'd suggest researching: http://news.google.com/archivesearch -- Google's newspaper archive. Searching there on "Atari Alamogordo NM" turned up 13 matches. That's a start. Broadening and narrowing it will help. Some of the stories are subscription-only, but some have previews. I've used it to chase down some obscure family history that happened 100 years ago. If I were a journalist covering this, I'd start by digging up whatever contemporary news accounts I could find. Then I'd see if I could track down any of the sources in the original stories. The last two questions in any conversation should be these (in any order): "Is there anyone else you think I should talk to about this?" and "Is there anything you'd like to add?" Talking to the people in power at that town today won't get you far. They may or may not remember, and they don't have anything to gain by talking about an old story that had nothing to do with them. But at any rate, the search on Google tells me this story hit the Philadelphia Inquirer and Miami Herald. Those are two large and respected papers (and they were larger in 1983). That tells me that something happened. I wish I had time to run this down. But I'm sure someone will take this and run with it.

The trick to finding older stuff at yard sales is to figure out where the Ataris would have been 20 years ago, and go there. You want the ones that haven't moved. That's not to say you'll never find one in a 5-year-old house, but odds are the Atari got sold when they moved into that house five years ago. My best hunting ground is an older neighborhood a few miles away from where the Children's Palace and K-B Toys (both long gone) used to be. It looks just like the neighborhood my family lived in back in 1981-82. You won't find one every weekend, but they're still out there. You do have to be patient though. I find 1-2 a month, but I hit a dozen or more sales every Saturday. If Atari consoles and carts were the only thing I were looking for--or even if video games in general were the only thing I were looking for--it probably wouldn't be worth it.

PM sent!

I think it was partly because the cartridge offered instant gratification. I know the people who had Nintendos but no computers got fidgety back in the day waiting for disk-based games to load. The other issue was control. If the NES had been disk-based, it would have just been a matter of time before third parties figured out how to do their own titles and get around licensing, and other parties figured out how to copy them. Piracy was a big, big problem with the computer systems at the time. The cartridge didn't totally lock out third parties or piracy, but it sharply reduced both problems.

Yeah, the 4039 dates from the days before Lexmark went evil. I wouldn't buy their new stuff now. Depending on what you're doing with it. For OCR and scanning clipart, you still need one, but those are specialized uses now. I admit, I don't use mine much. My wife uses hers a little more, but she majored in art. I had a 1600 (300 baud!) and then a 1670, then I got a used 2400 and sold my 1670 for 20 bucks. Sometimes I miss those days, but what we have now is better--more than one person can use the board at a time now. But I do miss Tradewars, now that you mention it. That 1600 was slow and really noisy--the 1670 was a big upgrade. I think I still have it somewhere. I seem to remember picking up another 1670 at some point but I think I traded it for Amiga stuff.

Sorry to pull the discussion back around to why it failed (I hope no one minds)--didn't Coleco have difficulty delivering the Adam in quantity at first also? I know when the Adam was released, it was a lot easier to find Commodores than Adams. So I'm not sure that everyone who wanted one would have been able to get one. The bugs didn't have to be fatal--Commodore struggled mightily with the 64 and the 1541 disk drive. And there were things about both machines that they never did get quite right. The difference probably was that Coleco ran out of money about 8 years before Commodore did. I also wonder if selling the integrated system may have hurt Coleco. At $595, the Adam was price-competitive with a complete C-64 system, but you could get a bare 64 for $199. You couldn't do much with it except hook it up to a TV and play cartridge games, but some budgets would have been able to better absorb buying the bare 64, then adding a disk and/or tape drive and printer and stuff down the line. And Commodore offered several printers at several price points. Mind you, they were junk, but you could pick the one that met your budget and your needs the best. I know Commodore played up the expandability/upgradability of its computers, but I can't remember if any of those ads targeted Coleco. But Commodore was pretty much the thorn in everyone's side. Including its own. The Adam may very well be the most underrated computer of its era. Today, well, the quirks in these old computers make them interesting. (Will we be saying the same thing about Windows 95 in 10 more years? I dunno.)

No kidding. I saw the printer my wife bought three years ago (before we were married) for $6 earlier this week. I think it was a $120 printer. My everyday printer is a Lexmark 4039, a hopelessly obsolete laser printer. I bought it 10 years ago for about half price, but it's one of the most reliable pieces of equipment I ever owned (it was designed as an office printer). These days you can get a 4039 with a low page count for $35. The toner cartridges are hard to find, but when you can find one for under $50, it's a lot of printer for the money. Not flashy, but cheap, economical, and reliable. Cost per page when I can find an original (not refilled) toner cartridge for under $50 is around a penny a page. Since we print a lot, I really like that. Scanners show up for a lot of reasons. Sometimes people see one with double the resolution so they buy it and toss their old ones. (Never mind their old scanner probably has a higher resolution than their printer anyway.) But the bulbs in scanners do have a finite lifespan, so some may actually be junked because they're bad. They used to be a replaceable item, but for the cost of the bulb, you might as well just get a new scanner if one burns out. The other (legitimate) issue is drivers. And finally, some scanners never had Windows XP drivers released, or the manufacturer wanted $30 for the driver. And if you're careful shopping around, you can get a new scanner that'll probably be a little faster and might have better software and pay not much more than that. But I've REALLY taken this off topic. To reel it back in... Um... Commodore modems are generally worth a couple of bucks as curiosities. If you assembled a complete set of them, they might be worth a little more. There weren't a lot of models--first was the 1600 VICmodem, then the 1650 Automodem, the 1660, the 1670 (1200 bps!), and you may or may not want to count the 1680 (for Amiga). They're historically important, even if they aren't worth a fortune today. The 1600 was the first truly affordable mass-market modem (I think it originally retailed for $99), and the 1670, if I remember right, was the first 1200 bps modem to retail for less than $200. Isn't that frightening?

A 1702 monitor isn't worthless, but it isn't as useful as the later monitors (1902, 1080, 1084) that can do RGB. But the 1702 was much less likely to break. From a reliability standpoint, the 1702 has to be one of the best monitors anyone ever made. I used to get my Commodore monitors fixed at TV repair shops when they failed, for what it's worth. (I can fix a lot of things but I stay away from monitors because the high voltages scare me.) Any of the Commodore monitors make fine displays for game machines and other computers of the era (Atari, Apple, etc.) I still use my 1702 a lot. I need to get my 1080 fixed. I think I threw my 1084 away at some point. I got tired of it breaking--I think it broke on me 4 times. Depending on the model, a broken Commodore monitor *may* have value, if someone is able to fix it and wants it badly enough. Since a 1080, 2002, or 1084 monitor will work with all 8-bit computers and consoles, Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIgs, and IBM PCs with CGA, those monitors can save someone a lot of space. Be careful trying to fix 64s for profit. A dead 64 is worth $5-$10 to someone who wants the salvagable chips, like the 6581 SID (sound) chip. With a working 64 worth $15-$20, it's easy to spend more on parts than the machine is worth. The power supply was much more problematic than the computer itself, so if you have one that doesn't power up right, try it with another power supply from a computer that did power up. The most common problems I saw on 64s were blown 6526 CIA chips (there are two of them) and memory chips. The memory chips weren't socketed. I don't remember the model number on them anymore, but I believe there were 8 of them, so look for a cluster of 8 chips that are smaller than the 6526, 6581, 6510, etc. I used to troubleshoot bad memory chips by stacking a new chip atop the old one. Sometimes there was more than one bad chip, so I'd have to chase a problem with multiples. But when the system started behaving differently, I knew I probably had found a bad chip. As far as disk drives go, the 1541 is dirt common and not worth a lot, though a working 64 bundled with a working 1541 would probably go for more than either on their own. The later 1571 and 1581 (3.5-inch) drives are worth considerably more. Commodore printers.... I've seen them cheap before, never bothered picking them up. Most Commodore-branded printers weren't very good when they were new. Most of us used Star Micronics or Epson printers. They cost a little more but were a lot faster and had better print quality. I hope this helps. I loved those machines, 20 years ago...

Yeah, one of my best friends from my days messing around with Commodores (we're still good friends and he was the best man at my wedding) pointed that story out to me sometime around 1998. Every once in a while one of us runs across it again and it's always good for a few giggles. Amazingly enough, the 8563 had a lot of interesting and mostly unused capabilities. Of course its secrets took several years to surface. Its biggest drawback was its lack of sprites, but of course the chip had been originally designed for a machine that had no use for sprites. We still get the biggest chuckle out of the popcorn popper cup story.

It would do the trick, yes. Basically you disassemble the joystick, peel away the tape holding the old pads down, drop these into place, and put a piece of packing tape over it to hold the new pads in place. Way back when, we used to pop the pads back into shape to try to get more mileage out of them. That worked too, although once a pad popped out of shape, it was prone to pop again more quickly. If you can get 100 pads for 8 bucks, that's not bad. It'll fix a lot of sticks. The first repair is a real pain, but they get easier.

Well, it looks like the only cassettes were Typing Tutor and States and Capitals. Multiple copies of Typing Tutor. I thought there were disks in the stash, but the only one I located was in the 810 drive itself. It's an Elephant or a Maxell, so if it's commercial software, it's a copy. I haven't fired the drive up yet to see. But I did connect all of the computers to a TV and fire them up, and all of them work. I popped the hood on the 800s, and one has 32K and the other has 48K. I don't know what the 400 has, but a PRINT FRE(0) in Basic responds 13K and some change, so it has at least 16K. The peripherals are pedestrian stuff--an 810 floppy, and 410 and 1010 tape drives. Based on the prices I was able to dig up on eBay, there seems to be more demand for these Ataris than there is for a C-64 or an Apple II, so that's good. Now I know I didn't overpay. They're nice machines, especially considering they came out in 1979. Considering what else was available that year, if I'd seen one then, and I hadn't been four years old , I would have found a way to buy one.

I happen to live about half an hour away from Trade N Games. Good store, and the owner's a really nice guy.

Yeah, I had dozens of games on disk and probably only four or five cartridges. I know I had Defender and Dig Dug. But the games I kept coming back to year after year were Pirates! and Seven Cities of Gold, and they were disk games. Both games were way too big to fit on cartridge.

The 128 was a great machine (it's what I had growing up) but the 64 outsold it probably 10 to 1. I don't think the 128 sold more than 2.5 million units total, and I know there were single years that the 64 topped 2 million units. It was a chicken and egg problem. Nobody wanted to make software unless people bought the machine, but who wanted to pay double when there was so little software that took advantage of the better capabilities? By the time software came out that really took advantage of it, it was too late. Compatibility wasn't quite 100% but I only ever found a single title that wouldn't run on my 128. I think it was an early version of Archon II. I'm sure it was revised to run on the 128, since Archon II was a popular title and still had miles left in it when the 128 came out. As far as price, one thing you could do is get a cheap 64 and wait for a 128 at your price. Grab a $10 64, wait for a 128 at $30, then flip the 64 if and when you find one. The disk drives are compatible (I recommend a 1581 if you can find one; for 5.25-inch disks the 1571 was a great drive but the 1541 is a lot easier to find.)

Yesterday my wife scored a find. She located a fairly sizeable collection of 8-bit Atari stuff. I was primarily interested in the 2600 stuff, but there were also several computers--at least two 800s and a boxed 400, peripherals, and software--mostly cartridges, but also a few cassettes and some disks. I haven't had time to go through it yet (this year, "Labor Day Weekend" means I work all weekend). I'm sure I'll want to keep some of it, but I just don't have room for all of it. I've never had any difficulty unloading my extra console stuff, but actually trying to trade off or sell vintage computers is a whole new area for me. Can anyone offer any guidance?

Plastic was revolutionary, hip, and high-tech in the '50s when you started to see it (the leading brand of accessory for Lionel and American Flyer trains was "Plasticville," celebrating the material it was made of). When you look at the early transistor radios, there was no attempt to disguise what they were made of at all--it was smooth and marbled. By the end of the decade (and absolutely by the late '60s), its coolness factor had worn off. Remember in The Graduate, what the boring parents and their friends wanted him to get into? Plastics. It's not so much necessarily that plastic was considered flimsy and cheap, just ordinary. There may not have been a lot of market research that went into the 2600's design, but its design evolution pretty well reflected the design trends of the time, from the boxy woodgrain sixers up to the sleek jr.

An original IBM PC can be fun (and there were lots of good games for the PCjr and Tandy 1000, which had better graphics and sound than the standard PC) but I agree, it just doesn't have the charm of the machines that put up a good fight but didn't win the war. There's just something about the underdogs. I didn't buy my first PC until 1994, after Commodore went bankrupt, and I held out until nearly the end of the year until it was painfully obvious they weren't ever coming back.

An entire room of our house filled up entirely with your old black plastic! Dusty junk with peeling stickers from a smelly basement somewhere! Now you have more toys than the other kids, except you're a 34 year old man! Somedays I wish she'd find something, anything, to collect just so I'd have a counter argument. I read somewhere a suggestion that said every woman should encourage her husband to buy a classic car in need of restoration, because then he won't have time or money for a mistress, because all of it will go into that car. I told that to my wife, and she said, "Well, duh!" She's always encouraged my hobbies. She says men without hobbies drive their wives nuts.

I'm starting to see a lot of broken original Playstations. You can get parts for them, but the parts cost nearly what the console is worth. If you've got a burnt-out motor, when you remove the plastic ring you'll break it, so you'll have to buy both a motor and a ring. Granted, nearly every NES I see has problems too, but often you can fix the cartridge connector for the cost of a paper clip and a cotton swab and a little alcohol, and if you do have to replace it, you're looking at one $10 part, not two. I bought a broken Atari 2600 a couple of weeks ago, but it was obviously subjected to abuse (the power connector is broken, like it got stepped on while the AC adapter was plugged in). Can't blame the console for that. When I hold the plug in just right, it seems to work, so once I find some cheap gadget with the same connector on it for a donor, I'll have that back in business.

People have used all sorts of nasty solvents to clean PCBs for years; the only danger most solvents have is against the plastic case itself; the PCB will be fine. If you sat there for 15 minutes rubbing the case with alcohol you might discolor it some (the first sign of damage), but it only takes a few swipes with a cotton swab to get the majority of the dirt off the contacts. Clean a couple of games and see what you think of the results. I bought a "broken" NES recently with the blinky-light problem. The NES was fine; the games it came with were dirty. I went ahead and disassembled the unit and cleaned the cartridge connector just because it only takes me 10-15 minutes to do it. The NES's connector is touchier than top-load units. It's a good idea to clean Atari, Genesis, and other carts, but it's a must with the NES.

The Plus/4 and 16 were cheaper to make because the video and sound were on one chip, like they were on the VIC-20. The two computers were designed to compete against sub-$100 computers from Mattel and Timex and from the Japanese. But by the time they came out, Mattel and Timex were on their way out, and the home computers from Japan never crossed the Pacific. Both computers were flops in the States, but they did OK in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe. But the Plus/4 and 16 are indicative of Commodore's biggest problem. The success with the VIC-20 and 64 were largely accidents, and Commodore never again did the couple of things they intentionally did right with those two machines, so they never were able to duplicate it. That's no knock on the Amiga; the Amigas were fantastic machines, but Commodore had no idea how to market them.

What about Ghostbusters? I wore out the joysticks on my C-64 playing that when I was a kid. Little Computer People is a forgotten classic today too. I wouldn't call Crane's pre-Pitfall 2600 games lackluster though--by today's standards they're simple, but at the time they were pushing the hardware in ways nobody had done before. Pitfall Harry had less personality and character development than Mario, yes, but look at the platforms they ran on. Just getting multiple colors onto Pitfall Harry was an accomplishment. As far as Sid Meier... In computer circles he was famous before Pirates!, but mostly for his simulation-themed games like Silent Service and F-15 Strike Eagle. Overrated, yes, but so was Babe Ruth. But the "not as good as Seven Cities of Gold" comment brings us to... Dan Bunten. He wrote Seven Cities of Gold and M.U.L.E. The problem is he was so far ahead of his time. M.U.L.E. was a 4-player game in the early 1980s. The rest of his titles were way out ahead of the curve too. I seem to remember reading that Bunten wanted to do Civilization in the mid-1980s, before computers powerful enough to do it were common. He was working on Global Conquest when Meier did the original Civilization. Bunten led a very complex life, undergoing a sex-change operation in the early 1990s among other things, and died young, at 49. I sure would like to know what Danielle Berry (the name Bunten used after the change) would have made with ubiquitous high-speed Internet available at her disposal. Bunten gets my vote as the most underrated developer. Playing a Bunten game, to me, is like listening to a Velvet Underground record. The Velvet Underground's flaw was being so far ahead of its time. Listen to that band, and it's hard to believe their first record came out in 1968. The world just wasn't ready for them yet. Bunten was the same way--he just managed to score a hit with Seven Cities of Gold somehow. And even then he was breaking new ground, because entertainment software that taught history was a new concept in 1984.

I have a couple of the old Western Electric phones from the AT&T monopoly days (the first time around). I use them too. I like the look, and they're built like tanks so they'll probably still be working in 100 years. I also have the console TV that was in my family room when I was a kid. It still works fine. I used to do some video production as a hobby, and I used a Commodore 1702 monitor connected to the composite output of my editing board. It's hard to find a better monitor for that, and you'll pay more when you do find one. The display is clear and they run forever. I also used a very old Hitachi VCR when I had to do stuff on VHS, but it finally died. That's a shame, because the VCRs made in the last few years are total junk. I'm sure I have more than that, but those are the things I can think of right away that get regular use (or did until recently).