Thrift store find.

[paigeoliver]

My plans of many assorted panels for Mame cabinet #3 got a real jump start when I wandered into a thrift store with a friend, and came out with a bunch of controls.

The one on the upper left is a Wico Command Control. It is a true leaf switch 8-way stick with a top button. The included plug is an Atari 2600 one, but it will hook up via I-Pac just fine. Cost on this one $2. (By the way, there are several of these on ebay, they are awesome, and don't look like they would be hard to put onto your control panel).

Upper right is a Sidewinder Dual Strike. That is to hook up the Terminator 2 gun I am getting. Cost $4.

Lower Left is a Cheapo flight stick. It only cost $1, and I will actually attempt to interface the T2 guns through this before I tear up the dual Strike.

Lower right is a Sidewinder 3D Pro. This one is going to go into a standalone panel. (Mostly for Pod Race). Cost $3.

So a I spent $10 and walked off with some great stuff. They had a few more joysticks, but they were mostly those metal stick analog types that were popular back in 1986.

[AlanS17]

What king of thrist store sold that kind of stuff... Odd... I've never found anything that cool at a thrift store...

(Except for maybe my fully functional HP Laserjet for $15)

[paigeoliver]

Well, it was technically a "Resale & Consignment Shop". But it seemed like a thrift store, except that the furniture was all overpriced. Everything else had thrift store prices.

[Zapper]

Goodwill used to be my computer/video game hunting grounds, I got alot of cheap cool stuff there. But there are two things you need to remember when shopping at thrift stores, they all smell bad and anything with the Nintendo logo on it is overpriced.

[RandyT]

I've gleened a ton of stuff from thrift stores.  I went on a major binge a few years back when it was still possible to get stuff cheap.  But nowadays, it seems like the stuff has all but disappeared, or is way overpriced.

But I did manage to pick up a real gem the other day.  An Amiga CD32 with an cool add-on floppy drive built on top of it.  Even found the power supply after scrounging for it for about 15mins.  Only $10 and it works great.

RandyT

[Hoagie_one]

Yeah, 2 salvation army thift stores near me had a ton of that suff and 13 inch monitors and old pentium computers.  ALL CHEAP

If I had the extra cash, I would of bought the stuff on principle.

[Zapper]

The good stuff must end up somewhere. I once met a guy that ran a used computer store, in the back he had a huge box full of Atari 2600 games. He said he used to have a deal with some Goodwill stores, he would buy all of their video game stuff by the pallets!

[Hoagie_one]

There was a time when People would just give me their 2600 games.  nintendo was so superior that no onw wanted those old carts.  I have about 300 when I sold em

[AlanS17]

I was in the one thrift store I was going to for a while when this total nerd/dork/fat/smelly/you-get-the-idea walks through the door. I'm asking the woman at the desk about this 100MHz IBM laptop on the rack. The dude was obviously a regular there. When he saw the thing he was like "WOAH! That thing is GREAT! I want it so bad! I bet it's worth alot!" He ended up buying it for $100.

Then I ended up buying my HP Laserjet (which was probably worth almost double the laptop) for $15. The guy asked the woman why he never got deals like that and I thought to myself, "Cuz you're stupid and raise the price on yourself."

Moral of the story, nothing goes cheaper at a thrift store than technology products cuz the people working there don't know what it's worth. So don't be stupid and work your own way out of a good deal. Just play it cool...

[paigeoliver]

Hee hee. No way a 100 Mhz IBM laptop is worth $100. I bought mine on ebay for slightly less than that nearly 3 years ago. Still works great too, only problem is that it isn't as good of a web surfing machine as it used to be, not since everyone's html got so bloated (if I view source on one more page, and I see the DEFAULT font specified 500 times individually for each line of a 500 item drop box AGAIN, I think I might just go crazy).

[ErikRuud]

You must be looking a web pages vreated with MicroSoft products!  

My boss once used word to create an entry page for a system here at work.  The page was static with links to six different parts of the system.  The page less than20 images, about 8 paragraphs of text.  That's it, no rollovers, no frames, no dropdowns, nothing fancy at all. Just pictures, text and links.

He saved it from Word as an html document.

Word generated 29 pages of source code!  

There was xml, cascading style sheets(1 for every line of text), conditional logic, default font and size repeated over and over and over.

I use Excel to keep track of the points in our slot car racing series. To save time, I export one of the sheets as html, and then cut and paste the table from there to another html document. If I let Excel create the final page, it wants to point all the images at my local hard drive.    

[kspiff]

There are no good deals down here to be had, the Mexicans usually take them all before you get there

Still need to dig out that T2 gun for you

[paigeoliver]

There are no good deals down here to be had, the Mexicans usually take them all before you get there

Still need to dig out that T2 gun for you

Whener you get around to it. No rush. Luckily I got stuck picking up 20 hours of overtime this week, so I will have a bit of cash on hand.

[AlanS17]

There are no good deals down here to be had, the Mexicans usually take them all before you get there

Still need to dig out that T2 gun for you

Where you located, kspiff? I feel your pain. I live 7 minutes from the international bridge.

"Manifiestos! Manifiestos!"

There are deals to be had left and right, but someone cheaper than me (and that's hard to do) always finds them first!

[kspiff]

I'm in Houston, but it's all Mexicans down here (well, and blacks.. I'm the minority here), too.  I remember when my neighbor had a garage sale.. I work overnight and came home to a mini-fiesta of parked cars and children playing in my yard at 7AM

I just lost out (well, OK.. I never would have found it myself) on a Tempest mini that a Mex guy I know got for $40 non-working.  Sadly, he then sold it on eBay for a pathetic $250 to somebody who e-mailed him the day he posted the auction at $99.. I made it clear, though, that I would've paid much more to make him feel bad .. as well as the fact that if I could have gotten it working for him it would have net him nearly 4x that much.