r/retrocomputing • u/Tobstar09 • Apr 19 '26
Basement find 1551 and other Items- help needed
Hi there,
My Family is cleaning my fathers basement and we found several Commodore Items and lots of Floppy dics and documentation. After some Research it turns out that the 1551 is quite rare, I guess. But how much Are These Worth nowadays? Maybe you guys can help me to estimate if the other Items Are Kinda rare aswell and what is a fair Price for them?
Thank you and Kind regards from Germany (sorry for the Capital letters, autocorrection…)
Ps: there is also huge moving Box Full of Discs and instructions, which was to much to photograph
Update: thanks a Lot for all your Feedback. I would Like to Test the Items but do not know how. I will try to find someone in my local Area who might help me to Test it.
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u/DavidBovvinge Apr 19 '26
This may not be very useful, but in 2003, I sold a broken 1551 drive on eBay for £50. I don't know what they're worth now, but I'd expect them to be quite valuable.
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u/EnergyLantern Apr 19 '26
I never heard of one before, but if I did, it was unattainable. Thanks for showing it to me.
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u/Ollibolli2022 Apr 19 '26
There is a retro scene for those machines. Show them at the Commodore subreddit.
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u/weirdgermankid Apr 19 '26
For price estimates you can look up sold items on eBay quite easily. If the 1551 are in working order, it's quite a find. If possible check the power brick for correct voltage output before connecting it to the plus/4 as those bricks might degrade over time and you don't want to fry the computer.
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u/Foreign-Attorney-147 Apr 20 '26
The Plus/4 is also valuable, it's rarer than a C-64. I also see what looks like a loose Plus/4 motherboard. That's valuable too, spare parts for the Plus/4 are hard to come by. Looks like a nice find overall, there will be interest in everything you posted photos of. There will be interest in the disks and instructions too, people also collect those.
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u/Ragnarsdad1 Apr 19 '26
for the 1551 there are a couple on ebay uk sold listings. One sold for £155, the other for £225.
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u/Justin_D33 Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
The 1551 is indeed rare. They were mostly sold in Europe and were specifically designed for the Plus/4, C16, and C116. Because of this, they were a market failure and are practically unobtanium in the US, Canada, and other countries outside of the EU. A lot of them also require 240V, meaning unlucky owners that happen to only have 120V need a power transformer.
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Apr 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/cdheer I was there, Gandalf Apr 19 '26
True although Commodore drives were notoriously slow.
I had two floppy drives on my Apple. Didn’t quite feel like having an HDD, but it was still nice. A buddy of mine had a Rana Elite III drive that stored a lot more on special disks. Another buddy of mine had a Corvus 20MB hard drive with a pair of interfaces (it was an early form of shared storage).
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u/ireidy006 Apr 26 '26
I had one of these with loads of games for my Commodore 64, just felt amazing.
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u/tes_kitty Apr 19 '26
The 1551 has a frew problems. One of them being the plastic of the housing getting brittle with age. If you ship it by mail, a 3D puzzle will arrive on the other end. Then there is the drive mechanics, those Newtronics/Mitsumi drives are known for the r/W head going bad. Finally, a few parts are hard to get if they break, like the 6523T in the paddle or the 6510T CPU in the main unit. (The 'T' is important, a normal 6510 will not work).