It’s definitely a rare piece that you don’t see much. I have a Sega CD Version 1 CIB which Pricecharting thinks is worth close to $1k. Can’t emphasize enough how unbelievably shitty that system is and how the price is driven strictly by its rarity. My recollection of it was that it was extremely finicky and didn’t even work 100% of the time. The actual playable ones are the V2 and CDx, but considerably more of those units exist. So that’s a system I’ll consider selling.
Craigslist four years ago. It was an odd journey.
Guy said he had a mint Virtual Boy in the box. Don’t remember what the original price was, but when I e-mailed him, he said he had an offer for $120 and would like it sold by the next day. I told him I could match that - I didn’t feel like getting into an e-mail bidding war - and he agreed to sell it to me.
So we set a location and time at a gas station. I waited an hour and he never showed up. He had my cell, but I only had his e-mail address. I e-mailed him a few times, but he never responded. He wrote back that night to apologize and we decided to try again the next day.
I also asked him to confirm that the system worked and he said yes. He got it as a gift in 1996, played it a couple times, then boxed it back up and it’s been in a chest ever since.
So I went to the same location the next day and didn’t see him after 25 minutes. I e-mailed him and he wrote back, saying he was just there. After maybe another 20 minutes, we finally met. The guy said he thought he saw me earlier, but wasn’t sure if it was me. Umm…my dude…I told you what kind of car I was driving and you could just come up and ask.
At any rate, we popped some batteries in and guess what? The screen didn’t work properly. I looked it up and it’s apparently a fairly common problem and an easy fix, but I didn’t feel like spending $120 on it. I said thanks, but no thanks.
He offered to drop the price to $100, but I said no. We shook hands and he left. I sat in the car a few minutes and called my wife and he returned to tell me that he was going to list it again on Craigslist the next day for $80, but he’d sell it to me for that right now. I said no again. Just didn’t feel like dealing with it.
The next morning, I saw his new post. $20. I immediately e-mailed him and said I’d buy it. As it turned out, my son was sick from school that day, so I threw him in the car and we went back to the gas station. The guy came around the corner - apparently, he lives nearby and doesn’t have a cell phone, hence the shitty e-mail communication - with the system in pillow case.
I bought it for $20 and that was that. He threw in an in-box Vertical Force, which Pricecharting says is worth around $50 right now. The entire system is complete with documentation, warranty card, and everything. It just has that video issue, which is apparently caused by adhesive on a couple ribbon connectors drying up. It can supposedly be fixed by heating them up in the oven or even with a hair dryer to remelt the glue. I’ll probably try it at some point. For now, the box is just on display in my office.
All told, we e-mailed back and forth more times than the number of dollars I paid.
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Lmao craigslist crackheads. Screen thing should be easy but ffs don’t put it in an oven plz.
lol no, it wouldn’t be the entire unit, just the ribbon cables. I’ve seen videos where you put it on low heat, just enough to melt the glue. I’m in no hurry to try it. Perhaps one day I’ll try a hair dryer first. I believe the cables can also be soldered to bypass the glue.
Come to think of it, I wonder if there are just replacement cables out there. Might be a safer bet. The screens themselves are fine. Everything looked great - I haven’t opened it since we tested it four years ago.
Yeah you can solder cables. The one on the Game Gear is soldered to the board and you have to unsolder to do screen upgrades. I’ll definitely have to recap the Game Gear at some point because it’s nearly shot. The electrolytic capacitors they used on the video and audio boards on those are completely trash and leak with 100% probability at this age. Probably won’t swap the screen though b/c Game Gear is another POS system and I don’t wanna sink any more time or money into it than I have to.
Something like that happened to my original Xbox. I read it’s a really common problem.
Are you talking about the clock capacitor? Your Virtual Boy story is the way I’d try to get into the expensive stuff though, which is to say buy broken ones and fix them. Just need to know ahead of time what the common problems are and how difficult / expensive those repairs are.
Yup. The Xbox kept working for a while, but I had to switch it on and off at the power strip and then had to reset the clock every time. Eventually died completely. A friend who works for Microsoft gave me his system and it happened to that one, too. Now I have my brother’s.
Has the capacitor been pulled from that machine? It will eventually leak on that one too and corrode the board if not*. So many of these systems have major issues. I ended up repairing around a handful of Xbox 360s from RROD. That one had a quick “fix” not too dissimilar from the oven technique, which was to fire it up with the heatsink removed for a few seconds so that the heat could reflow the traces on the GPU. It was a temporary and not great fix.
*Unless you have a v1.6 Xbox board, in which case the capacitors in those are fine. Can check from the boot menu. I’m assuming maybe you’ve already done this or know this.
Yup, that’s what happened
are GameCubes a hot commodity?
Picked up GT7
Good nostalgia game.
Holy shit my local microcenter had like 10 3080tis & other ones.
$1300 +?
$2100! A little um “aggressive” there.
Includes CrossCode, Celeste, Super Hot, and 988 others.
Sick bundle
Also a snap buy for Baba is You, game is brilliant
I can’t speak for the whole entire bundle (obviously), but Celeste, Crosscode and Baba is You I have all spent many hours on and worth it for just those 3
Yep, 100% fpr anyone who doesnt have any of those three games. All three on their own are each worth at least double that
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https://twitter.com/PlayOverwatch/status/1501966345218531335
Beta signup page isn’t working right now. They said they’re working to increase capacity. Guess it’s popular.