The Official "Thrift finds" Thread

[Silverfleet]

Ok, not exactly a thrift find, but my strange luck continues. 

My buddy messaged me over the weekend asking if I had a spare Game Boy his wife could borrow. She has one game (Kirby's Pinball Land) from when she was a kid and her Game Boy is long gone. I found my spare GBA and brought it over there tonight, because you can't deny someone's video game nostalgia! As a thank you for dropping it off, he handed me this:



He got this a few years back as a gift, played it once, and put it in a box. No dog bone, but it did come with a nice regular NES control pad and the power supply/RF switch. And I didn't have the manual for R.C. Pro-Am, so that's cool too. Somehow, with all the NES-focused collecting I've done over the years, I've never had a toploader. Going to clean it up and put it on display until it gets modded for something other than RF output. Excited to have this! 

[DragonGrafx-16]

1 hour ago, Silverfleet said:

Ok, not exactly a thrift find, but my strange luck continues. 

My buddy messaged me over the weekend asking if I had a spare Game Boy his wife could borrow. She has one game (Kirby's Pinball Land) from when she was a kid and her Game Boy is long gone. I found my spare GBA and brought it over there tonight, because you can't deny someone's video game nostalgia! As a thank you for dropping it off, he handed me this:



He got this a few years back as a gift, played it once, and put it in a box. No dog bone, but it did come with a nice regular NES control pad and the power supply/RF switch. And I didn't have the manual for R.C. Pro-Am, so that's cool too. Somehow, with all the NES-focused collecting I've done over the years, I've never had a toploader. Going to clean it up and put it on display until it gets modded for something other than RF output. Excited to have this! 

Nice... I had a top loader growing up... and while it was nice that games actually worked I don't miss it now. My toaster NES with a BLW looks and sounds so much better than an unmodded top loader. And while I could have had my top loader modded I used the money from selling it to buy PC Engine stuff so yeah...

[Silverfleet]

1 minute ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

Nice... I had a top loader growing up... and while it was nice that games actually worked I don't miss it now. My toaster NES with a BLW looks and sounds so much better than an unmodded top loader. And while I could have had my top loader modded I used the money from selling it to buy PC Engine stuff so yeah...

To be completely honest, I'm very happy with my "Toaster" NES and the RetroTink 2X Pro. It looks amazing. It also looks great on a CRT with straight Composite-out. I've already modded that one to disable the 10NES lockout chip and allow games to run without pushing down the tray, so it works as well as any toploader I've used. I still wanted a toploader in the collection for years to complete my US NES collection, so I'm very happy to finally have one. I still want a FDS to go with my AV-modded original Famicom and/or a FC Twin, and maybe an A/V Famicom as well. 

[DragonGrafx-16]

I installed a BLW in mine because I would get the flashing screen with the 10NES disabled.

[Silverfleet]

BUT WAIT... THERE'S MORE!

Upon second look in the bag of stuff he gave me, the dog bone WAS in there!



Like the toploader, this is my first dogbone controller. Can't wait to test it out!

[Elvis]

Free to me. Xbox 360 Street Fighter arcade stick. Family paid under 50 dollars. No box. 

 

[BDW]

Bought 3 NIB Dell E773s 17" monitors for 50 bucks the other day. 10 years ago I would have balked at something like this but nowadays these things are worth their weight in gold. One went to my brother's DOS rig, the other 2 went to replacing arcade monitors with horrible burn in. Dog not included.

 

[Reaperman]

I finally got around to testing a Commodore CM-141 that I thrifted probably a year ago for $10-15.  I don't recall the exact price, but I do remember the s-video adapter cable costing more than the monitor. By the time the adapter arrived, the monitor had already been 'relegated to the pile' and escaped testing until today. when I needed a CRT to test out a kickstarted wireless controller.

 

It took a bit to find the power button.  It turns out that big round button on the left side isn't there to release the smoked-plastic screen cover.

 

Edited January 18, 2021 by Reaperman

[Tanooki]

Hey I found these in a clearance bin for $2 each today, and yeah most of them have pretty poor covers, but they are intact and not written in or ripped up at least.  Is there anything I should know about these books in particular as I know they're a much earlier version of the editions they still sell at retail today.  Just fun to have and read?  Worth using?  Worth selling in this state?  They seem fairly solid from the little I've skimmed them.

[fakecortex]

1 hour ago, Tanooki said:

Hey I found these in a clearance bin for $2 each today, and yeah most of them have pretty poor covers, but they are intact and not written in or ripped up at least.  Is there anything I should know about these books in particular as I know they're a much earlier version of the editions they still sell at retail today.  Just fun to have and read?  Worth using?  Worth selling in this state?  They seem fairly solid from the little I've skimmed them.

Don’t know about rarity, but some players really like this edition. Some can manage through compatibility with current stuff, others might just collect. I just do what the DM says, hahaha. Pretty cool find. 

[Asaki]

Nice score.

 

4 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Is there anything I should know about these books in particular as I know they're a much earlier version of the editions they still sell at retail today.  Just fun to have and read?  Worth using?

Well, you'd have to get the Player's Handbook if you wanted to use them And maybe a Monster Manual/Compendium.

The first two books are 2nd Edition, and I'm pretty sure the rest are 1st Edition. Not really a huge issue, I don't think, just letting you know. 1st and 2nd are a lot more compatible with each other than other editions.

 

The Forgotten Realms set is missing the maps and the plastic hex overlays, BTW (and the box). They're pretty cool,  HUGE poster maps...but if you just want to play, you can probably make due without them. There are plenty of resources online, you just have to keep in mind which time period you're playing in (they advanced the setting every time a new edition was released).

[Tanooki]

So basically since I have no one to ever play such things with, they're best to browse for the reading and maps, art in there too, or just get them to someone who could find some actual use who aren't caring much about condition of the cover just as long as it's intact to use.

[Shawn]

On 1/18/2021 at 11:20 PM, fakecortex said:

Don’t know about rarity, but some players really like this edition. Some can manage through compatibility with current stuff, others might just collect. I just do what the DM says, hahaha. Pretty cool find. 

 

To me, Second Edition was the only way to go.

[Asaki]

22 hours ago, Tanooki said:

So basically since I have no one to ever play such things with, they're best to browse for the reading and maps, art in there too, or just get them to someone who could find some actual use who aren't caring much about condition of the cover just as long as it's intact to use.

It's up to you, really. I have a ton of RPG books (thanks to PDF sales/bundles), and most of them I will never play...so I just read the interesting bits and look through the art. Maybe swipe an idea or two for my own campaigns.

A lot of the books do have some really good art. I love the old B&W line art stuff, but 2E had some really good color paintings as well, if you don't mind the super-outdated hairstyles

 

Some people play D&D by themselves, BTW, but it's probably easier to just find a solo-oriented game, like Tunnels & Trolls or Fighting Fantasy.

 

21 hours ago, Shawn said:

To me, Second Edition was the only way to go.

I prefer the older stuff, but 2E has its merits (and it was the first edition I ever played). I like that the editing, organization, and rules clarifications are a lot more robust than 1E was.

The second to last campaign I ran was 2E, we got through most of the Ravenloft "Grand Conjuncture" series.

[Tanooki]

I imagine by yourself wouldn't be very hard, just have to take the role of the DM and the lone character, but I could see that getting kind of boring and also self defeating if you kept it honest.   I think it was like the first year of HS I had a group I did this with at lunch and given the years I'm sure it was likely the 2nd edition being used so I'm sure I've entirely forgotten it but seen the books before.  I just wish someone would create a wicked AI routine that could play a DM and allow a lone person, or if one chooses to party up with others, and run through a traditional D&D game like this over a mobile app (ios and android) as I think that would be great.  I know there are a few partial things that do it, but seem pretty heavy on being card based instead of more traditional like Pathfinder, or being almost like some SRPG grid based bs.  Closest I recall was the Warlock on Firetop Mountain on mobile that got ported to Switch.

[Gamemoose]

On 1/18/2021 at 10:20 PM, fakecortex said:

Don’t know about rarity, but some players really like this edition. Some can manage through compatibility with current stuff, others might just collect. I just do what the DM says, hahaha. Pretty cool find. 

I'm not sure how big 2nd Edition stuff is, but the Forgotten Realms books might fetch some extra coin. I sold off a lot of my 1st Ed. AD&D stuff not long ago, including some Dragon and Dungeon magazines. I was very surprised how well the auctions did.

 

That is some good stuff!  RPG books don't rear their heads at thrifts in my neck o' the woods. Last one I found (and bought) was a copy of "Silver Age Sentinels" super hero RPG using the d20 ruleset.  I figured I glean it for mechanics ideas for my own game...whenever I'm done writing it.

[Asaki]

On 1/21/2021 at 10:36 PM, Tanooki said:

I imagine by yourself wouldn't be very hard, just have to take the role of the DM and the lone character...

Yeah, there are ways to do it, and even a small handful of modules designed for one person, but like I said, it seems easier to just play something designed for single player.

 

The 1E DMG has rules for solo play in the back, they're pretty neat. Basically you roll dice to randomly generate a dungeon on the fly, with optional things like "have someone draw a portion of dungeon for you, and keep it hidden in an envelope". I believe there are rules for wilderness exploration hex-crawling, too.

 

Someone made a Flash game out of the dungeon crawling section of the rules, it's pretty fun...but being in Flash, means you'll have to find alternate means of playing it now: http://blogofholding.com/dungeonrobber/

  

On 1/21/2021 at 10:36 PM, Tanooki said:

I just wish someone would create a wicked AI routine that could play a DM and allow a lone person, or if one chooses to party up with others, and run through a traditional D&D game like this over a mobile app (ios and android) as I think that would be great.

Isn't that what videogames are for? I don't know how playable they are, but I know Beamdog ported a bunch of the Baldur's Gate era games to Android.

[Tanooki]

I have 4 of those beamdog games when they hit GoG/Windows format.  Both Baldur's Gates, Icewind Dale, and also Neverwinter Nights.  I have to admit, they were fun for like the first 10-20 hours, but it got painfully slow and annoying that I just removed them as the grind was worse than not whaling in a F2P phone game. The action was stiffer than I'd like, played slow, and leveled up at an atrocious crawl.  It ended up being very very repetitive in the worst ways imaginable.  At least with a real DM and party you could just have them create a new room, new enemies, traps, conditions, ability to hit the town, whatever and it would stay fresh but in a game it's defined and it defined itself as boring pretty fast.

 

 

That said, it's a finds day.  For $50 I got a working original Gameboy and a label worn Pokemon Yellow today so that was a pretty nice thing to do.  Can't wait to work on that Gameboy to re-hab it into something special.  Currently now have I think 10 or 11 project handhelds, parts seemingly USPS lost in the mail for a week and a half now from just east of here in Pennsylvania as I guess the post office loved the box so much they just kept it where they scanned it.

Edited January 24, 2021 by Tanooki

[FireStar]

Here's my past month of thrifts, plus some Five Below finds in the third pic, I want to start sharing these more often again. Reading "Track and Field" and "Konami" on a box made me do a double take.

[Reaperman]

I've got kind of a neat one.  An ebay find, rather than thrifted, but I got a handmade (commercial?) arcade stick and some dbz game for $33 shipped.  Somehow I noticed that I didn't have a ps1/ps2 stick, ever since I remodeled my Red Octane into a Neo Geo controller.

 

Controller's a weird mix.  It's an MDF box with chinese controls (I think the control brand is the same as the Red Octane I linked).  Stick, board and cable, are all without branding.  The sparkly surface appears to be shelf paper folded over the MDF.  The back cover is hand-measured rather than being templated(?) and they went the long way to cut the bottom panel back to create a nub on there to cover up the the cable hole (way too much work for the result). 

 

It's wired better than my redoctane was, using a very clean circuit board, and quick connects vs soldering (still a rat's nest, but totally logical). Also I like having PC/USB come out at the very end like that. I'm thinking it was commercial, even though the back panel is measured out like that--because somebody building it for their own use would have gone for pretty cable management, and different controls.

 

Buttons actually have a nice feel, being slightly convex with audible/tactile feedback on the downstroke, with much less on the upstroke.

 

Big problem with it is that the screws used generally don't have enough thread for MDF--I had to glue in 4 of the actual stick's 6.  If they pull out again I'll just go for a bigger one with proper threads.

 

  

 

  

 

Edited February 5, 2021 by Reaperman

[+FujiSkunk]

After three months visiting the parents and working from "home" in sunny Florida, I'm finally back home (for real) and hitting the thrift stores again.  My usual had some '90s PC CD games, including quite a few Sega titles like Sonic CD and Sonic R.  "Sadly" I had them all already, so look for them in my thrift-store sale thread soon.

 

Meantime, remember those freeware/shareware collections that would dupe you into believing you just paid five bucks for an awesome collection of games, only to later make you realize you often had to pay more for any game you wanted to keep playing?  It's a good thing no company pulls shenanigans like that anymore... oh, hello, Microsoft.  No, I don't want to buy Office 365 or whatever the hell it is you're calling it now!

 

Ahem, anyway, this batch of CD's had one of those collections as well...

 

 

"Pretty as Ms. Pac-Man!  Awesome as Asteroids!  Mad as Missile Command!"  All of the original arcade action, now with fewer original names!

 

By the way, @SpiceWare, I think you have some explaining to do...

 

[Tanooki]

HAH space rocks.  I recently found a few of those shareware discs for a couple bucks locally too, also those same 2 sonic titles along with the collection with knuckles too.  I didn't have them, did like 15 years ago, so I kept them and got back the other few I used to have as well almost.  Those shareware ones I found, I left half of them, but did keep a few yet found my PC wouldn't access them and install the files at all even using DOSBox which sucked so I got to sell them as they can't be returned.   There's like a couple Doom ones, a Blake Stone/Wolf3D one, and a Duke Nukem 3D one too.  At least they had a quake mission pack and the quake 2 mission pack cds worth keeping.  This was like 3-4 weeks ago so similar timing.

[0078265317]

I got a toploader off ebay long time ago for 36 dollars.  But the right is badly burned not sure what happened.  But it works at least. 

 

http://mvvg.blogspot.com/2015/08/nes-top-loader-burnt-spot.html?m=1

[fakecortex]

17 minutes ago, 0078265317 said:

I got a toploader off ebay long time ago for 36 dollars.  But the right is badly burned not sure what happened.  But it works at least. 

 

http://mvvg.blogspot.com/2015/08/nes-top-loader-burnt-spot.html?m=1

oh snap, is that a game genie adapter for the top loader? suweet.

[0078265317]

35 minutes ago, fakecortex said:

oh snap, is that a game genie adapter for the top loader? suweet.

No the purple lable ones have thinner pcb.   They fit better.  Just jam it in there and kepp it in there.  No need to remove it.  Just press start with no codes entered.  And its like it never was there.