The Official "Thrift finds" Thread

[Tanooki]

Good selection, loving the FC imports.  Can't blame you either, if the show retailers were running the same scummy unsustainable (long term) crap ebay(etc online) is pushing right now, you're right, don't justify it.

[DragonGrafx-16]

1 hour ago, HoshiChiri said:

Not a thrift find- but the first retro show in my area in two years! Intended to just go crazy, but still only spent about half of what I brought... guess it's hard to justify some prices, even if I can afford them. 

Nice... Gaiares!

[schnuth]

Not gaming related but I found this sweet leather motorcycle jacket for $20 at a garage sale. It was pretty cruddy but cleaned up nice. Now I can start my midlife crisis properly by joining a biker gang or a Ramones cover band.

The only gaming related item I found was a PS Vita case for .25 cents, but I’m sure you don’t want to see that.

[HoshiChiri]

9 hours ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

Nice... Gaiares!

That one was funny- I'd already looked over the table, picked out a couple things, & was handing the guy the money when I saw that. Immediately retracted the money (causing confusion), picked it up- "this too!" And got out more money. ?

10 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Good selection, loving the FC imports.  Can't blame you either, if the show retailers were running the same scummy unsustainable (long term) crap ebay(etc online) is pushing right now, you're right, don't justify it.

I don't track the prices on all the games I'm interested in, but there's definitely some where price has outstripped interest (I don't want to spend $150 on a Neo Geo Pocket game!)

 

I'm having fun with the famicom games, becuase I get to shop like my sister does for retro games- based entirely on cover art! Always a bummer when I get a text-heavy game I can't really play, but fun when I stumbled into something decent. I didn't realize I'd grabbed Legend of Kage until I tested the cart, for example!

 

[+thegoldenband]

15 hours ago, HoshiChiri said:

Not a thrift find- but the first retro show in my area in two years! Intended to just go crazy, but still only spent about half of what I brought... guess it's hard to justify some prices, even if I can afford them. 

Nice haul! What's going on with that Dreamcast release, "Yeah Yeah Beebiss"? Clearly it's a reference to an infamous, possibly non-existent NES game that was once listed in a catalog. Is it a Dreamcast game hacked to imitate what people thought YYB would be, or a hacked NES ROM bundled with an emulator, or...?

[Tanooki]

8 hours ago, HoshiChiri said:

I don't track the prices on all the games I'm interested in, but there's definitely some where price has outstripped interest (I don't want to spend $150 on a Neo Geo Pocket game!)

 

I'm having fun with the famicom games, becuase I get to shop like my sister does for retro games- based entirely on cover art! Always a bummer when I get a text-heavy game I can't really play, but fun when I stumbled into something decent. I didn't realize I'd grabbed Legend of Kage until I tested the cart, for example!

 

Pfft $150?  I wouldn't either, especially (guessing) if it were loose.  English releases you can count those over that price on one hand, and being worth it would be even less than that.  Unless it was like Cotton, Evolution (UK), maybe Big Bang Wrestling(english), I can't think of something that high, even popular Rockman loose is less.

 

Famicom, that is one of the great ways to do it, go blind and go by the sticker, sometimes you can find a real gem with that ranging from goofy to serious art.  Seeing how cheap they often still are, especially if you buy a pile of bulk, odds are you'll get more than your monies worth that way, even if some are just unreadable text adventures/RPGs.

[Tanooki]

I could do a pic, as the sticker has to be seen to be believed, but I caught half price books national sticker barcode lookup with a fat pricing error today.

Double Dragon Advanced for GBA $7.99

Actual paid ebay recent values $80-90, and it's in excellent shape too

[HoshiChiri]

On 8/15/2021 at 1:47 PM, thegoldenband said:

Nice haul! What's going on with that Dreamcast release, "Yeah Yeah Beebiss"? Clearly it's a reference to an infamous, possibly non-existent NES game that was once listed in a catalog. Is it a Dreamcast game hacked to imitate what people thought YYB would be, or a hacked NES ROM bundled with an emulator, or...?

It is a homebrew designed to replicate what the game could have been! The programmer (John Riggs) actually named it Yeah Yeah Beebiss 2, on the off chance the original exists & gets discovered. Technically it's an NES game, this is a port.

[Reaperman]

Thrift shop came through!

• Dell D630 laptop, $7.99 win xp
• Dell 600M laptop, $5.99 win 7
• Renegade Battle for Jacob's Star $7.99 100% complete
• tiger football $3.99 complete+ working
• tiger baseball $3.99 complete + working

So the tiger games are nice, Renegade was a bit expensive (but when am I going to find another neat big box game!?), and weirdly the two laptops are what I'm most excited about. 

 

  

 

I'm shockingly heavily invested in D-series dells like these (for gaming) and am excited to get one of the 4:3 ratio ones. I left an HP laptop for a similar price since they're harder to deal with. Some of them come with mildly hot nvidia setups--not these two but for the price, I'm not picky.

 

Both of these Dells came with hdd's, not even "formatted" to "wipe" their data. Both machines seem to be from the same 'slava' source and the older one oddly has win7 on it while the newer one XP. Win7 has a password (I'll just chuck it in the drive dock later), the xp one indicates the owner (probably of both) was big into diy stock trading, and what appears to be either web design, or some slightly shifty business related to websites(or spam).  I'll probably know more when I see the other one.  Every cheap dell has a story.  (my dos box is the neatest, it came from the local nuclear plant) 

 

Here's my period-correct (but hotrodded) d-series setup, playing Outrun 2006 (with my pile of other d-series bits in the cabinet above)

Edited August 21, 2021 by Reaperman

[Tanooki]

WOW I miss seeing old computers at thrifts.  Local goodwill started getting all whiny about old PCs and refused to take them a few years back pretty much.  You sure that SSI game was too much, seems to me a lot of big box games carry some value these days.

 

I would have been thrilled finding either of those laptops, probably more so the older one,  you can stuff all sorts of 90s stuff on there easy from the old DOS/98se era.  What a trip finding that stuff at a thrift.  Also nice on those basic TIgers, they look good, can't speak to football but baseball was my first home handheld from retail in the day, have one of them still, same color scheme too (not your red but blue/green) and it's still mindless fun.  Learning to roll the score takes a bit but worth it.

[fakecortex]

On 8/20/2021 at 7:42 PM, Reaperman said:

• tiger football $3.99 complete+ working
• tiger baseball $3.99 complete + working

That's pretty sweet. I've been getting back into my LCD handhelds lately actually. Acclaim made some really fun Simpsons ones, which beat out Tiger in my opinion and remind me more of Game & Watch quality. Although Tiger Bowling and Mini Golf will always be some of my favs (if not most frustrating) and first handhelds. How do football and baseball stack up? And when you say "complete" are you referring to it having the battery cover intact? That is a necessity, haha.

[Tanooki]

24 minutes ago, fakecortex said:

That's pretty sweet. I've been getting back into my LCD handhelds lately actually. Acclaim made some really fun Simpsons ones, which beat out Tiger in my opinion and remind me more of Game & Watch quality. Although Tiger Bowling and Mini Golf will always be some of my favs (if not most frustrating) and first handhelds. How do football and baseball stack up? And when you say "complete" are you referring to it having the battery cover intact? That is a necessity, haha.

You're right about acclaim, they did some solid stuff for a few companies both makers of NES stuff, but also licensed things.  I remember having this Simspons game that works really really better than many tigers, and in more recent decades I've had 1943 which plays like a high quality tiger or radio shack game if not better with variable stages that change up stuff.  For most with Tiger, complete is just intact, battery cover, but really they all did come with paper manuals, usually throw aways in most cases, I've got a few from some handhelds I have from them.  Also Konami had these overly tall handhelds, some have some really well done gameplay.

[Asaki]

On 8/20/2021 at 7:42 PM, Reaperman said:

Some of them come with mildly hot nvidia setups--not these two but for the price, I'm not picky.

"Hot" is no joke, those things tend to overheat and die

I've got a thrift shop Dell (I think?) with nVidia, I wasted money on a new screen for it, only to find that the chip is fried and won't output to the LCD anymore.

The external DVI port still works, but for how long?

[Reaperman]

7 hours ago, Asaki said:

"Hot" is no joke, those things tend to overheat and die

I've got a thrift shop Dell (I think?) with nVidia, I wasted money on a new screen for it, only to find that the chip is fried and won't output to the LCD anymore.

The external DVI port still works, but for how long?

Redoing the thermal paste can help a bit (since these are so old) but if you have a look at my main d-series 'dell precision' setup, with a 128mb quadro, it's had the screen and keyboard removed, and a cpu cooler with a usb fan adapter added in the hole. The addon cooler is probably not necessary with that much open air, but is there to make it look like a hot wheels car. I was experiencing thermal throttling in certain games, and even when I wasn't, that little stock fan made it sound like it was about to take off.

 

I have an actually-mobile precision too, but yeah, it gets too hot for actual lap usage. It has the lower res screen off of a latitude on it to keep the framerates up.

 

 

11 hours ago, fakecortex said:

And when you say "complete" are you referring to it having the battery cover intact? That is a necessity, haha.

Oh yeah, my bad, that's all I meant. No blister+manual involved here, but at least I didn't need to hunt down a battery cover.

Edited August 22, 2021 by Reaperman

[thegamezmaster]

Great score Reaperman. Congratulations on everything. Hope you have fun!

Edited August 22, 2021 by thegamezmaster
Edit

[Asaki]

16 hours ago, Reaperman said:

...if you have a look at my main d-series 'dell precision' setup, with a 128mb quadro, it's had the screen and keyboard removed, and a cpu cooler with a usb fan adapter added in the hole.

Yeah, I kind of noticed that

That's not too far off from what I'm doing with mine, but I don't use it very often.

All my other laptops, if I can find a way to keep the fan at 100%, I will do it. I had a Toshiba where the HDD overheated and died.

[Reaperman]

So here's one that doesn't fit so well in the thrift finds thread, but I wanted to brag on it.

It turns out there's not an 'only slightly overpriced eBay finds' thread

 

Rush 2 guides are pretty hard to find, and when I do, the prices usually make me sad.

So for years I sat on an eBay saved search for a reasonably price guide, and it finally hit.

Then in the suggested items of it was...holy cow another one.  I guess my search kind of sucked.

Now I've got two guides, each were under $15 shipped, which is high, but not "$100 high"

 

I thought it would help find that 'sweet building ramp' which is visible from the Las Vegas strip, but it doesn't seem to.

A shame Prima never made a 2049 guide--heck they even made an LA Rush guide, so what's their excuse?

 

Edited August 26, 2021 by Reaperman

[AtariLeaf]

Facebook marketplace yielded a nice Sharp 13" LCD tv with component and svideo out but the RF is pretty sharp too ( pun intended). $15

[Tanooki]

Always nice when you get a properly made LCD panel that doesn't butcher the potential super sharp quality (Again no pun intended) possible for old graphics on such a display.  When they cheap out, it's blur, fuzz, or worse a mix of both, and that's even before getting into a 30+ms display lag which is a kiss of death.  That's a great panel for the basic size of it all if it refreshes well and looks clean.

[+GoldLeader]

On 8/29/2021 at 12:26 PM, AtariLeaf said:

Facebook marketplace yielded a nice Sharp 13" LCD tv with component and svideo out but the RF is pretty sharp too ( pun intended). $15

 

Honestly that looks like a really nice score!   I'm a sucker for things like this.

 

The thing of it is,  and maybe I'm alone is this weird thought,  but back in the 80's (I know sounds like a Goldbergs intro) as a kid I used to dream of "The Future" and thought we'd see things like this...Easily portable, sharp screens with speakers built in or even little all in one arcade type cabs, (to say nothing of a much better version of Asteroids for our Ataris)...Hell, I thought the Vectrex was pretty futuristic when I bought it too ...

 

[vrocko]

On 8/15/2021 at 12:57 AM, HoshiChiri said:

Not a thrift find- but the first retro show in my area in two years! Intended to just go crazy, but still only spent about half of what I brought... guess it's hard to justify some prices, even if I can afford them. 

Psycho Fox is great for the Master System! I wanted a Marioish game for the Master System and Psycho Fox fit the bill!!

[vrocko]

On 8/20/2021 at 7:42 PM, Reaperman said:

Thrift shop came through!

• Dell D630 laptop, $7.99 win xp
• Dell 600M laptop, $5.99 win 7
• Renegade Battle for Jacob's Star $7.99 100% complete
• tiger football $3.99 complete+ working
• tiger baseball $3.99 complete + working

So the tiger games are nice, Renegade was a bit expensive (but when am I going to find another neat big box game!?), and weirdly the two laptops are what I'm most excited about. 

 

  

 

I'm shockingly heavily invested in D-series dells like these (for gaming) and am excited to get one of the 4:3 ratio ones. I left an HP laptop for a similar price since they're harder to deal with. Some of them come with mildly hot nvidia setups--not these two but for the price, I'm not picky.

 

Both of these Dells came with hdd's, not even "formatted" to "wipe" their data. Both machines seem to be from the same 'slava' source and the older one oddly has win7 on it while the newer one XP. Win7 has a password (I'll just chuck it in the drive dock later), the xp one indicates the owner (probably of both) was big into diy stock trading, and what appears to be either web design, or some slightly shifty business related to websites(or spam).  I'll probably know more when I see the other one.  Every cheap dell has a story.  (my dos box is the neatest, it came from the local nuclear plant) 

 

Here's my period-correct (but hotrodded) d-series setup, playing Outrun 2006 (with my pile of other d-series bits in the cabinet above)

Renegade Battle for Jacob's Star is a good one! Always loved the space combat genre.

[vrocko]

Found a Dell 20" flat screen monitor at the St. Vincent De Paul's Thrift Store in Warren, OH that works. Nice monitor and in great shape. Had the power cable and the connection to the PC as well. $14.99 + tax. No games though but the monitor is going on an old Windows XP PC with plenty of games on it! Seem to be finding flat screen monitors everywhere now. Going to get rid of those huge SD monitors. ?

[KeeperofLindblum]

Found a silver PS4 controller for $5... Just had to clean it up and it's working great! 

I got INCREDIBLY lucky, but it's also all I really found during a thrifting trip. 

[Tanooki]

I figured this was worth popping up here, yesterday when kiddo was at practice they have limited seating due to added classes, hit a thrift up and wham, this.

Now the I guess disappoint/sleazy part of it, the charging independently for the manuals... I mean really?  Had I not asked to see a stack of what I thought were books in the case I'd have never even known.  Each jewel case was a dollar, manuals were mostly $1-2, but one of them was $5... whatever.  If you know your stuff, you can probably see the winner in this image by a landslide.  There was little goodwill at that goodwill that day with those antics, but I got the last laugh.