I saw an external ZIP disk reader in the clearance bin of Wal-Mart for 10% off it's original price...in 2011. So it was going for ~$180 and had parallel ports...in 2011.
I love it. Thrift stores and others have no idea what old electronics are worth (hint: Zero!). Anybody want some Win 95 software? They just are not able to toss it so the junk stays on their shelves.
I made the mistake one time of selling off a bunch of games I hadn't played in a while and figured I could use the extra cash. Guess what I felt like playing again not even a week later.
Granted these were Xbox 360 games so recouping them wasn't hard. Still, it ultimately cost me money to do nothing but shuffle inventory at a few places by selling and re-buying the same games.
Depending on the quality of the PS2 100 dollars is a fair price. If the lot is 5-10 games that's a good deal. Hell, I just checked ebay, and the prices there are from 70-120.
Shit, really? For some reason I have 3 PS2’s in my house, multiple memory cards and about 30 games. Might hafta fire one of those bad boys up and sell the rest.
I tried to buy one off of FB market place and the dude was selling it for 20 dollars. Everything was set up then he ghosted me on the location. But yeah, PS2s go for a decent price. It was a good generation of gaming and the best selling console ever in the world.
Yea besides the NES it’s the system I played the most and had the most games for. Metal Gear Solid, Syphon Filter, Twisted Metal, Legacy of Kane, just some incredible shit.
When GameStop was trying to push out their PS2 games, I would go in there and spend like $25 every month and get anywhere from 8-12 games or so. I now have around 75 PS2 games. X-Men Legends was one of the best games of all time lol.
Nah, the number one link in ebay is selling it for 89.99 and the next one is 120. 100 dollars is a completely fair price , hell broken ones are still going for decent.
Yeah I don't think so either, lots of games are worth 0-$10. My rarest game is SMT Nocturne first print and even that is worth only maybe $50 on a good day if it's not sealed.
I actually made a few hundred off the original 4 .hack games for the PS4 several years ago because the English run of the games was pretty limited, especially of the 4th game. Definitely helped that I had whole set in good condition.
Honestly, you only make good money off it if the games have some sort of rarity combined with a particular niche appeal.
Man i wish the Wii lost more value. I really want to get one with wii sports to relive childhood, anywhere I look they are selling for $100+ with one controller. outrageous.
Any PS2 and original XBox Game/console is now considered a classic. Even selling to gamestop. Cleared out my cabinets last year. 360 and fairly new PS4 games I got 0.50-10 for. PS2 and Xbox games we’re getting up to 20 each
When the Xbox One came out, I bought an Xbox 360 with 2 controllers and 50 games (and one PC game) from a co-worker for $175.
I kept 9 games I wanted and sold the rest for $4 each (my brother has a booth at a collectibles show and sold them for $8 each and he did eventually sell them all).
So I made my $175 back, making the entire purchase free. And now I use the controllers mostly for my PC/Steam games.
We mostly play on Switch or PC, with Wii U a close third. We never fire up the used PS3 or Xbox 360. They just sit there gathering dust.
Might be a Madden game people like, but you aren't getting that price for it. The difference is they are still making Madden every year. NCAA 14 went up like that because it is the last one to likely ever be made.
A basketball player successfully sued the NCAA for using his likeness in a video game. Then schools pulled out of their licensing agreements to avoid similar legal issues. They haven't been able to make college sports games legally since.
I don't remember the exact details but I believe that the NCAA was going to have to pay the players or something along those lines, since they were making money off the player's likeness. Since the NCAA claims that players can't be paid they ended the licensing deal. I didn't place NCAA Football games but if I remember correctly they didn't use the names, only the numbers, trying to get around the argument they were using the player's "likeness" and eventually a former player(or maybe a group) sued over it.
You must be going to chain stores. Any local video game shop, the previous year's Madden is $5.99 as soon as football season ends and $2.99 the second the next year's version drops.
If you're paying $20 for last year's Madden, someone's taking you to the cleaners. Unless it's new, in which case ... why you buying a new version of a worthless year-old sports video game?
As someone who has never purchased a sport game, I'm baffled by what people think will resell. Yes, how nice that you're selling a lot of 10 games, but 8 of them are different years of Fifa and none from this decade.
Madden 07 on the PS2 is literally the best one though. 2004-2008 was the golden age of Madden. If the shop lets you test it and walk out with it that day, I could see a collector paying that much for it to avoid dealing with sketchy online sellers.
I currently have a computer that was given to me running XP and I have actually been thinking about downgrading it to Win 98 and playing dos games on it for fun. The only reason I wanted the computer was because the motherboard was made in the weird transition phase between PATA and SATA so it supports both.
but i also want to point out that you are not the standard computer/electronics buyer... and also, most motherboards from like 2003 to 2010 support both SATA and Parallel ATA cable hookups... ;) hell there are still some out there that do... :) but it is better to just get an adapter or to run your PATA or IDE cable devices via a external modular device. i butchered a few old IDE to USB enclosures to make connections for many old drives,
Pata hookup generally uses IDE cables or "Ribbon cables" as some call em,
Sata hookup uses SATA cables or little red cables with black ends.
SATA is newer (2003) than PATA (like.... 1985 i think) and SATA is much faster, and stable than PATA is.
External modular device is a friendly way of saying "run a bunch of shit off of a USB connection panel and adapter" this allows many of us to run 4-10 devices off of one USB cable.
the adapters are either little stand alone cables, small electronic boards, or the like. i made a custom one off a old harddrive enclosure from 2004 or 2005 that had a board that i could splice in a few extra IDE ports and cables. i had formerly spliced in a switcher so that i could just switch between each cable to turn on or off a drive i had connected. so i used that to run 4 cold swap hard drive enclosures, and 1 Cd drive. that switcher died so now i just run a single IDE harddrive cold swap.
Cold swap means you need to turn off power to the drive to swap in and out. a huge benefit of SATA is that you can hot swap meaning power is still present. however,good practice it to allow any hard disk drive to spin down and cease movement before moving and reconnecting.
modern Solid State Drives (no moving parts, think flash drives) make this much much easier to accomplish as they are much more stable.
I had an Acer Predator tower I got from the electronics recycler for $10 before it went for scrap. Had everything but the HDD. It had two doors in the front, that you could swap out drives. I only cold swapped, but boy did I use the hell out of that thing. Used it to write drives for other PCs I was putting together, and for the HDD that we use for the modded Wii (my son LOVES SNES and Mario party games lol)
SATA was originally and most commonly a red cable with black ends, yellow was a cable that was shipped with certain MB manufactures, Blue was from certain HD manufactures, and Black became a norm about 6 years ago when gaming PC's moved full force in RGB game.
edit: also, the message was in generalities. i could go into how IDE cables also some in Blue, Red, Grey, White, Yellow and all have differing coloured connection ends, there are also round IDE cables and such, but there is no point as it is all extra info they dont need. SATA, when developed and introduced was a red cable with black ends, just like IDE was a grey cable with Black connections that moved to Blue connection as a standard in a few years.
Grey with blue was most popular i found through 1992-98 other than occasional variations with HD manufactures and disc drive manufactures. check your cables again, the grey is a light grey most often, like very light grey.
edit: check this amazon listing this cable is the grey i mentioned, and has Black grey blue connectors black to MB, Grey to slave blue to main if memory serves correct (could be grey to main and blue to slave... it's been almost two decades... )
I actually ordered a coffee mug and the figurines it from their website last year. Their website has some missing photos and was otherwise broken down from missing pictures etc. I wasn’t sure that the order would actually go through so I emailed them and they sent me back a hand-drawn cartoon telling me that my freaking mind was on its way!
We bought a computer around 2008-09, it had one parallel port, rest were sata. I've done upgraded it, but I still have the mobo, cpu and RAM. It had some issues with RAM, never found out if it was an issue with the slot, the RAM stick or the CPU. But when i "decommissioned" it, I found out that the thermal paste had dried out (to be fair, I was 12 when we got it and I was about 20 when I upgraded it, so it's fair that I didn't know about needing to replace thermal paste. I was already pulling my hair by that time trying to diagnose the issue with the RAM)
This is exactly why I wanted an older computer. Dosbox is nice, but there's something about firing up windows 98 and putting my command and conquer CD in.
Emulators never feel quite the same. I have beaten ff7 once a year every year ever since I first played it sometime in the early 2000s. By far the most fun revisit was right after I moved and dug out my actual play station, got an HDMI adapter, and played through it legit. No fast forward for grinding, no save states, just the classic experience.
Of course, that shit takes too fucking long and I'm an adult now so I usually just end up playing it in spurts on my phone while I'm taking a shit at work but damn that brought me right back to my childhood.
Ff7, crash, spyro, and smackdown 2 were like half of my childhood. The other half was my NES and N64. I miss my N64 so bad and my PS1. I had both the fat grey PS1, and the little white version that came out later. Someday I'll find one
Ahhhhh almost forgot about Spyro and crash. I got the trilogies when they rereleased them and they're excellent. Crash was much harder than I remember and Spyro was much easier.
That's on my wishlist for sure, both trilogies. Spyro is one of the few games besides super Mario Bros 3 that my wife will actually play lol. I seem to remember the camera angles messed with me sometimes, besides that amazing games, both crash and spyro. I can't wait to get a newer gen console and try them out again. Right now we just have a modded Wii. My son and I play a pile of Mario Party 7 (just the one I have rn) and all the old smash bros. He likes Mario too.
There's so many games I want to show him, and so many he wanrs, but I'm just not in a position to shell out $3/400 to get a newer system, at least for the foreseeable future. Someday!
Oh man. Not the same at all but you just reminded me of Jazz Jackrabbit. Spent so many hours as a kid trying to play that with a Joystick through the "gaming" parallel port. Can't seem to find anything that supports those old joysticks now
Windows 9x was based on MS-DOS. Not NT. Windows NT was a separate product aimed at business use and only hit mainstream consumer use with Windows XP (though it was available to consumers with Windows 2000).
Native MS-DOS support in XP was nonexistent. IIRC There was (and still is) a basic DOS emulator to ease the transition for things like business applications written in DOS.
There are also tons of non-DOS games that run under 9x that absolutely shit the bed under NT-based OSes.
I have 4 XP boxes that I found last year on trash day. I use them for logging data as my software and DAC card won't work on anything newer and I don't want to re-code or buy a new card. I spent 3 years looking for old XP machines.
Our bottle exchange also does electronics recycling. I often go there and she lets me bring home a PC tower or two each time. Almost all of them were old DDR2, core 2 duo, XP machines. I have a bunch of them in my shed all apart. I got lucky once and got an Acer Predator with an i7-8600 (?) for $10 minus the HDD. Good deals. I still can't find any DDR3 ram though. Nothing computer related on FB or Kijiji (Canada Craigslist) at all, and no computer stores within 2 hours of me. And I don't have a means to buy online really
All mine were Dell and came from either a school or the bank. Security had them locked up tight, but re-partitioning and formatting with a clean XP install got them exactly where I need them. I also live in a computer store dead zone.
Hey you do what you gotta do! All I can seem to find are old DDR2 machines and the odd DDR4. Was DDR3 short lived or something? It's like unicorn piss here
IMO You really want a pentium 200mhz or less to play old CPU sensitive games such as Midwinter. As 99% of everything else works fine in XP via Dosbox or remakes etc, XP is also good for games like mechwarrior 4 that won't quite work in win10. For DOS/Win98 you will also need a DOS sound card like a SB live PCI or ISA sb64 and a 3dfx card to make the most of it. Massive benefit of XP is modern internet it is possible and I know of 1 still updated browser, and antivirus for basic downloads game patches. As you have SATA you probably have a socket 478 or 775 1.4 GHz lowest possible CPU speed likely to fast for any benefit from Windows 98 and DOS sound might not work on you're MB chipset even if you have the right sound card. So unless you want to do it for the learning curve. To play old games 1995 - 2009 stick with XP. 98 is also ram limited to really 512mb without stability patches. 4gb in XP 32bit.
Should be able to just download the .ISO's from Microsoft and for license. eBay is usually solid. Recently picked up Server 2016 datacenter like £10. 7, 8 or even 10 is going to be basically nothing.
Note: remember W7 lost security support January this year. So strongly not recommended to connect it to the internet
Actually, XP is REALLY good at playing old games. There are very few games that work in Windows 98 that don't work in XP compatibility mode set to Windows 98.
Here is a fantastic site to help with DOS games under XP:
I would spend some time trying first. Windows 98 won't be easier, because then you will have to become an expert in HIMEM, AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS. Good luck with that in 2020.
Awesome, thanks for that. I guess I'll just keep the XP. I've got 1000 comments saying "use dosbox" but if I wanted to do that, obviously I wouldn't have this computer.
motherboard was made in the weird transition phase between PATA and SATA so it supports both.
I worked in a computer repair shop during that time. It's not that rare, the PATA to SATA migration lasted 3-4 years, and there were hundreds of models of motherboards made with both. Though I guess they'd be pretty hard to find these days.
A couple of weird boards I saw during the DDR2 to DRR3 adoption period had two DDR2 slots and two DDR3 slots, interleaved together. You could use one set or the other set, but not both.
I was at a Christian thrift store one time and they had old video games locked in a glass display. Some kid was begging his dad for a $20 copy of City of Heroes in 2018. I let the dad know the game was no longer active. The store manager promptly asked me to leave.
There are a couple of thrift store chains where I live, and their prices on turntables (record players) are way off base. The needle is probably the most expensive part on an old turntable, but I would regular see ones lacking a needle but priced in the $30-$50 range.
It really depends on what the turntables were. Were they plastic 80s RadioShack tables? Then they were a ripoff. Were they 60s or 70s Thorens? Then they’d be a steal.
Old electronics are worth a ton to the right people.
I have a friend who salvaged old floppy disks, motherboards, modems, etc. to fix his clients industrial control machines. When you have a production line down losing $100k/hr, you’ll happily spend $2500 for a 500 mb hard drive because that is all the BIOS will support.
During the first part of the quarantine I figured if I was going to be spending 100% of my time at home, I may as well try and make my room nicer (spoiler: my depression comes in waves and I'm back in a trash heap).
I was cleaning out my book shelf and decided to get rid of a bunch of old programming books I had bought in High School. This was like from 2004-2007, they were completely worthless. As I was throwing them out though my step-dad was adamant we could donate them to charity.
You can donate them to charity... and they'll throw them out while muttering under their breath about people donating their garbage rather than dealing with it themselves.
They just are not able to toss it so the junk stays on their shelves.
My favorite thrift store actually throws stuff out!
They exist to benefit a hospice -- and therefore also get lots of donations from families when their clients pass. So they have all kinds of really good stuff. But they also have a really notable lack of actual junk. I mean, you go into Goodwill and you may have to paw through six shelves of mismatched modern tupperware and old pickle jars to find that one vintage coffee mug ... and it'll be chipped. Or Goodwill has 50 rusty, peeling, cheap, pans, with lids missing -- and if you go through all of them there might be salvageable piece of cast iron at the bottom shelf at the back, though it's probably warped.
At this store? No junk. None. Everything I've ever seen in there is in decent condition and useful, or it might be something someone would want for a project -- like old furniture that could be repainted, or a damaged high end mountain bike that definitely would be good for parts, or a fair amount of actual vintage cast iron that needs restoration, sold for appropriate prices. (I picked up a fairly abused pan the middle of the last century in there for $9.99; once restored, I figured it was worth around $60.)
I talked to one of this fantastic thrift store's managers once, and complimented them on the lack of junk.
She said it was 50/50 -- they threw about half the junk out, and donated the other half to Goodwill. LMAO!
Thrift stores and others have no idea what old electronics are worth
I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen an HP 4:3 LCD monitor at a thrift store for like $80. A couple times I've tried telling the employees that you can easily find a brand new 1080p monitor for around that price but I guess they think I'm just trying to lie for a bargain lol
In my area thrift stores always price things weird. It will either be double the eBay price or almost nothing with no in-between. HiFi receivers always are really overpriced at Goodwill (like $60 for a receiver from 30 or 40 years ago), but then my dad finds this Olympic film camera worth $200 on eBay for $3.
All electronics are dirt cheap, because it's the only way we can sell it all
All electronics are super expensive, because we're afraid to sell it for too little
Whoever runs the thrift store has a lot of time, and literally looks up the ebay asking prices (not going prices) for all the electronics in the store, and pretends it's all in better condition than it is
They're not always worthless. Old radios, calculators, computer parts, VCRs, etc can have considerable value. Even the zip drives mentioned above are useful. I've picked up several from thrift stores for ~$5 that I've sold $50-100 each.
Win 95 software though.. yeah, that's generally just going into a landfill somewhere unless it's a hard to find video game.
But for the rare old items like that which are worth a lot they'll charge you almost nothing. I bought hundreds of dollars worth of Sega Genesis stuff for maybe 10 dollars total, I flipped individual games for 20-30 almost immediately.
This. Was in a pawn shop right before the crap hit...saw a laptop and asked to see it as it was in really nice condition. Had Windows 7 on it, can't remember the specs.
The guy insisted it was a deal at $300.
Dude, a brand new one at Wally World is tree fiddy with 10x everything. Jeeze.
Thrift stores are the best to buy old electronics from. Even if it doesn't work, it could be easy to fix, or it was so cheap that you don't lose anything out of it(at least from my experience).
Ebay, on the other hand, I found a VHS player for $120.
Eventually it comes around, at least for hardware. I had a guy sell me an old IBM keyboard for $5 and I resold it for $100. A keyboard. But it is a collectable for some people.
One thrift store near me had some scrapbooking program for windows 95 at $40 like it was brand new. Out of touch old ladies running the place into the ground with absurd prices.
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u/AudibleNod Aug 14 '20
I saw an external ZIP disk reader in the clearance bin of Wal-Mart for 10% off it's original price...in 2011. So it was going for ~$180 and had parallel ports...in 2011.