eBay

Christmas in July

Brent Retrocomputing, Technology , , , Leave a comment

I have been neglecting this blog for far too long – it’s been the better part of a year since I posted last. So, I’m going to make a point of trying to get a post up at least once a week – if nothing else, just to get myself back into the habit of it. Fortunately, I have some ideas for content. Thanks to some choice eBay finds, I’ve been bitten by the retrocomputing bug again!

Here’s what I picked up:

Item 1: A lot of 5.25” disks. On a quick review, it looks like there are a bunch of disk magazines, and various disks from user groups, as well as a few other odds an ends.

5.25floppiesItem 2: A lot of 3.5” disks. A lot of shareware from the Christella Enterprise Catalog, as well as a bunch of fonts and graphics software, as well as a few games and other odds and ends.

3.5floppiesItem 3: An Apple IIGS ROM 00 with a Transwarp GS card. What’s exciting about this one is that I was able to acquire the whole setup for US$710 + shipping. The Transwarp usually sells for about that much on its own. But, for that price, I got a ROM 00 IIGS with Transwarp GS and RAM cards, a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and two 3.5” 800K disk drives (which is good, because it looks like my old 3.5” drive has died). So, I consider that a pretty good deal!

IIGSAll of this came in a couple of days ago, so when I get a chance to play with it, my plan is to sort through and image the surviving disks and make them available, as well as to write about anything interesting that I find. It looks like the disks were stored relatively well, so I’m hoping to get a recent recovery rate from them. But, that’s a topic for another post…

Adventures In Retrocomputing: IIGS Project Update

Brent Retrocomputing, Technology , , 2 Comments

It seems like with any sort of popular product, there is a certain cycle regarding it’s availability. At first, you can buy it new at retail fairly easily, then the next new thing comes out and it gets harder to find at retail, but is marked down significantly. Then the secondary market opens up (ie. eBay, Craigslist, Garage Sales, Flea Markets, etc.) and you can get whatever you were looking for for dirt cheap because everybody wants to blow it off. Then, finally, as things get more rare or collectable, they begin to fetch higher prices. I’ve noticed classic video game consoles start to trend this way within the past few years – still highly available, but people are beginning to ask more for them (more about that in another blog post), and the Apple II seems to be heading toward the tail end of this cycle.

Looking at various info sources, it looks like even as recently as 5 years ago, old IIGS hardware and accessories were cheaply and readily available through eBay. Nowadays, basic systems are still plentiful (for example, I could have picked up a full Limited Edition “Woz” last week for $150 plus shipping) but they typically don’t come with much in the way of upgrades, and it is becoming more and more difficult to find the upgrades on their own. For example, a Transwarp GS card was listed a couple of weeks ago, and sold for $425. One of those might pop up once every few weeks to a month.

That being said, as long as you are patient and keep an eye on the auctions, you can find the occasional gem. While the Apple 1MB RAM cards are still relatively plentiful (even if most of them are only fitted with 256kb) 4 and 8MB RAM cards are almost impossible to come by on eBay nowadays (although you can still purchase Sirius cards from 16sector.com. They’re a bit pricy though.) – fortunately for me, I managed to find a 4MB Sequential Systems RAM GS card for a decent price, and it works! So, with 5MB of RAM total, I’m now able to take better advantage of the hardware and run GS/OS software and games that I couldn’t before. Another item off the checklist!