Wow, what a haul! I can spot a SC-88 in there. Will you have enough luggage space to bring back everything?

Are the prices much cheaper than north america or does the attraction lie rather in the rarity of the items?

I mostly recocnize console stuff. though you have a SC-55, if my eyes are not mistaken.

There are a first generation Ps2 harddrive (mostly sold in Japan), some Ps1 mouse and some Ps2-Memmory cards.
Is that handheld a "swan" or just one of those cheap LCD-games by the way?
Then there are this mystery console or pc in the top of the picture. The grey one. What is that? Looks special.

The sound canvas and the Ps2-HDD are probably the most exciting of that haul.

EDIT....
Nope. It was a 88. People here are better at recognicing stuff than I am. It turns out then. 😁

The way the items are packed, and the way the pricetag's on the stickers are made.
I suspect that he has been to Japan (tokyo's big secondhand market perhaps) and brought all this home from a vacation.

I'm still here on vacation for another two days. I've been wandering just about everywhere for the last two weeks.

Are the prices much cheaper than north america or does the attraction lie rather in the rarity of the items?

Oh hell yes. You're totally eliminating the importer and the reseller so there's a huge profit margin you don't have to end up paying. Stuff like those PS2 memory cards were $3 each, that PS2 HDD was $30 and that three-box set of Evangelion on 10 laserdiscs was a mere $15.
The biggest steal was that 68000 ACE HD for 6800 yen. That's essentially $75 CAD.
Also yes that is an SC-88 and correct, you see a WonderSwan Color. I was repeatedly raiding a store called HARD-OFF which is essentially a second hand store for electronics. There's so many wonderful things and the prices were amazing. Want a CRT-based Sony projector? Sure, $100. One of several SC-88's? Sure, $60. Massive multi-channel audio mixer? Sure, AS-IS for $18.
Also, someone got an Edirol machine a few pages back. I've located a second one there. $30.
The two most bizarre things I uncovered there was those two Sony "Data Eata" PDF-V55 document digitizers (they are like the Canon Canofile) that store everything to MD-Data and there was the DD-8 Data Discman.

Here's the top five most expensive things.

1 - Canon 24-105mm EF L lens - 55000 yen
2 - Canon 17-40mm EF L lens - 48000 yen
3 - Sharp X68000 EXPERT keyboard - 12000 yen
4 - Sharp X68000 ACE HD - 6800 yen
5 - Roland SC-88 Sound Canvas - 5800 yen

Those two lenses pretty much destroyed my budget. Put me $300 overbudget overall but between the two I saved $1100 or so.

I spy a WonderSwan among those items. 😎

2 x Thermaltake Crystal Orb BGA Coolers (NOS) (2001)

Media Vision Thunder Board (650-007-01-03F) ISA (Boxed) (1991) (Thanks to a fellow VOGONS member 😎 )

AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 (ADAFX51CEP5AK) (2003) (It's HAMMER TIME!!! (Get it?!) Just need to find a socket 940 motherboard now...)

Artex wrote:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 (ADAFX51CEP5AK) (2003) (It's HAMMER TIME!!! (Get it?!) Just need to find a socket 940 motherboard now...)

You could get a MSI K8T Master1-FAR. It was the launch board for the Hammer 😀, available the summer 2003. MSI K8T Master2-FAR is also an option, an extra CPU socket dosnt hurt, it was also availible the summer 2003. Both boards are the same normal ATX size.

I actually dont think you could get any other board the first couple of months. I guess the FX51 was released a few months after the Opterons when more boards had hit the market.

I bought some new stuff

Boxed Radeon 9800 Pro, aftermarket cooler but I have quite a few broken 9800 Pro cards I can borrow a cooler from if I ever feel the need. Very expensive, ~4 Euro.

Boxed Gigabyte Socket-478 i865 board with Zalman cooler and who knows what CPU. I got totally ripped off when it comes to this one... ~2 Euro

Both items from the same seller in Sweden so the shipping ended up ~10 Euro... I hate it when I have to pay more for the shipping than the items.

Good haul today from a relative's pre-estate sale:

NEC PowerMate SX-16 with all of the goodies:

Also, an IBM Aptiva 2159-S76:

I have not yet tested but will soon. Most everything was complete, but the NEC was missing the Windows 3.0 install disks (but I have the NEC 3.1 install). Thankfully, I did find all of the manuals and utilities disks. The Aptiva disks/manuals are not found yet but could be once more closets are cleaned out. The EXCEL box has no disks the the WORD disks are still sealed. Sadly some floppy disks were tossed a couple days before I arrived but I got there in time to rescue all of this stuff.

Skyscraper wrote:

Boxed Radeon 9800 Pro, aftermarket cooler but I have quite a few broken 9800 Pro cards I can borrow a cooler from if I ever feel the need. Very expensive, ~4 Euro.

leave it alone! That cooler is worth more than the card its attached to! high quality aftermarket coolers are FRAGGING RARE.

A note regarding S478 boards and coolers. I found that the tension is so strong, that when the board is removed from the case, it bends quite a bit. So I recommend to remove the CPU cooler, before removing the motherboard from a case. And when you install a board, install it first without the processor. Then when the boards is secured with screws, mount the cooler.

Artex wrote:

Media Vision Thunder Board (650-007-01-03F) ISA (Boxed) (1991) (Thanks to a fellow VOGONS member :cool: ) http://imagizer.image […]
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Media Vision Thunder Board (650-007-01-03F) ISA (Boxed) (1991) (Thanks to a fellow VOGONS member 😎 )

So my suspicions turned out to be correct when i realized my bid had been cancelled... 🤣

carlostex wrote:

So my suspicions turned out to be correct when i realized my bid had been cancelled... 🤣

Apologies. 🤣 I haven't "Artex'd" anything in a while and I didn't think he'd agree to it with a single bid in there already. This one's been on my want list for quite some time, so I do apologize - especially since the bid was another VOGONS member.

philscomputerlab wrote:

A note regarding S478 boards and coolers. I found that the tension is so strong, that when the board is removed from the case, it bends quite a bit. So I recommend to remove the CPU cooler, before removing the motherboard from a case. And when you install a board, install it first without the processor. Then when the boards is secured with screws, mount the cooler.

Don't remember this being an issue with the two S478 boards I've ever worked with. Still, if you've got the room to do so properly, that's never a bad idea if your cooler can be mounted whilst the board is in a case.

philscomputerlab wrote:

A note regarding S478 boards and coolers. I found that the tension is so strong, that when the board is removed from the case, it bends quite a bit. So I recommend to remove the CPU cooler, before removing the motherboard from a case. And when you install a board, install it first without the processor. Then when the boards is secured with screws, mount the cooler.

YEa, this is mostly a problem with cheap inferior brands. I have a board from supermicro and even with a massive copper block, the thing barely even flexes.

Today I went to Savers and got a SMC ISA NIC as well as a Logitech Wingman Extreme digital for 99 cents.

CelGen wrote:

Oh hell yes. You're totally eliminating the importer and the reseller so there's a huge profit margin you don't have to end up paying.

Japan is fucking crazy for retro tech aficionados.

Even at the "let's rip off the tourist" shops like Super Potato, you're still getting a stupidly better deal than buying from eBay or Yahoo Auctions. (even if they are relatively dear by local swap-meet/Hard-off price standards)

I think my complete-in-box Famicom (posted earlier) was somewhere around the $40 AUD mark.

CelGen wrote:

I was repeatedly raiding a store called HARD-OFF which is essentially a second hand store for electronics.

On my trip, I found Hard-off to be reeeeeeally hit and miss. I visited about 8, only one of them had anything relevant to computers or games. But I'm told this can very week to week, or even day-to-day, so you have to keep going back if you're after anything specific.

In the end, I relented to paying Akiba's "exorbitant" prices. I paid more than I would have if I had more time, but still waaaaay less than if I'd got this stuff locally.

Artex wrote:

Apologies. 🤣 I haven't "Artex'd" anything in a while and I didn't think he'd agree to it with a single bid in there already. This one's been on my want list for quite some time, so I do apologize - especially since the bid was another VOGONS member.

No worries. Since your want list is getting smaller and smaller i'll guess i'll have a bigger chance in the future. 😀

Catching up on older posts...

Munx wrote:

This arrived a few days ago for my K5/Voodoo machine, I plan on adding some more memory on this. [image of a 2MB ViRGE card] Wou […]
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This arrived a few days ago for my K5/Voodoo machine, I plan on adding some more memory on this.
[image of a 2MB ViRGE card]
Would this be the correct memory? Also seems to be damn expensive for what it is.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ALLIANCE-AS4C256K16E0 … =item5d55be661c

I'm not totally sure why you are upgrading the card. 2MB is fine for DOS 2D, there are better cards for Win9x (2MB still allow for 1024x768x16bpp), and the card is too slow for 3D anyway (for S3D I'd at least use a Virge/DX or /GX, not a plain /325, and the card only has 60ns RAM anyway).

oerk wrote:

EDIT: I do have a spare 1.8 GHz Pentium M. Normally I wouldn't even think about disassembling a complete laptop for 100 MHz more clock speed, but considering the CPU is regularly at 100%, and with my old HP the increase from 1.4 GHz to 1.8 GHz was tremendous - it might even be worth it.

Maybe the 1.4 GHz was Banias and the 1.8 GHz was Dothan? Did you check which core the 1.7 GHz and your spare 1.8 GHz have? If you are not upgrading from Banias to Dothan I won't expect more than the 5-6% frequency increase suggests.
I'd probably look at the software side first. XP should run fine. Maybe Linux doesn't support some hardware component?

idspispopd wrote:

oerk wrote:

EDIT: I do have a spare 1.8 GHz Pentium M. Normally I wouldn't even think about disassembling a complete laptop for 100 MHz more clock speed, but considering the CPU is regularly at 100%, and with my old HP the increase from 1.4 GHz to 1.8 GHz was tremendous - it might even be worth it.

Maybe the 1.4 GHz was Banias and the 1.8 GHz was Dothan? Did you check which core the 1.7 GHz and your spare 1.8 GHz have? If you are not upgrading from Banias to Dothan I won't expect more than the 5-6% frequency increase suggests.
I'd probably look at the software side first. XP should run fine. Maybe Linux doesn't support some hardware component?

Wow, didn't expect someone to answer that... All of them are Dothan, even the old 1.4 one. I've since upgraded to 2 GHz just because I could, and I do notice some improvement. Not overwhelming, but it certainly didn't hurt.

Joined the Roland club. SCP-55 for a fair price (I assume, those seem to be too uncommon to have a going rate?), including software, manuals and MCB-3. Sorry for the quality of the photo. (Forgot the manual for DoReMix on the photo.)

I tried to test it in my Dell Latitude D600 under XP (that's what I had at hand), it gets detected. I tried to force the MPU-401 driver, but the IRQ is stuck at "?", none of the available settings is accepted. Since that was just a test it is not too important, but if anybody has suggestions to make please do! I'll try Win98 next, either on the D600 or on an older PII notebook. (I realise that's still not completely period correct.)