The Classic Video Game Players Thread

Sega Wanted Phantasy Star IV To Flop In The West, Hence The Sky-High $100 Price

You might take anything Victor Ireland says with a grain of salt, but it sounds like the kind of silly thing that could happen.

So I'm looking to sell off a fair bit of my older collection of games (gamecube, dreamcast, GBA, DS etc.). Basically, had them all boxed up and doing nothing but collecting dust for years. So started dragging those boxes out and cataloging with CLZ Games app.

Pretty stunning what some of these games have sold for (mostly have CIB).

Was basically looking to go into a retro store and just offloading my collections I'm comfortable selling at this point. I've seen a few YouTube videos where people will sell their collections to some of the known retro YouTubers and always see comments like "he got lowballed" and the like. But I have no idea if I'd get taken or not.

Any tips? I understand the stores won't buy at full price of course, they're in to make money. But also don't know what to expect. Like half the value? More? I know condition plays in to it - nothing is graded and don't want to mess with that. Do I shop around? Get a quote from one store and then go to another?

Just looking how to maximize getting a fair price.

My experience in this realm is now 20 years old.

Stores will give you ~30% of what you could get doing the legwork yourself. Post on eBay, wait, collect funds, package, take to post, send, confirm receipt, deal with customer service.

When I have big ticket items +$100 on a collectible type thing, I usually weigh the work of me posting vs the ease of just getting it gone. I also give a small bump to knowing that if I sell my $300 fight stick to the local retro store for $85 in store credit I'm helping a small business owner keep on keeping on. That is worth a small bit, to me personally. And finally I get a small bump with the belief that the local store will make sure the item gets used (play more Dreamcast games!). For whatever that is worth in the universe.

I am also NOT in a position financially where I need to get $300 for a fight stick to put food in the table or gas in my car (was absolutely there 20 years ago though!).

I am a big fan of a store named eStarland, which is near me (kind of - it’s maybe 45 minutes away in good traffic). They do a great trade in used games and since I sold off a lot of my old games there, I’ve used store credit to buy many of my new games. Their prices have always seemed fair, too. If you’re comfortable with shipping your games away and having someone at the store appraise them, I’d check it out.

I sold some PSP games to BOOK OFF for ¥10 a piece :o.

Thanks for the feeback. There's a few retro stores around here I can take it to so will probably see what that is like first. I'll probably shoot for 30% of the value of the collection.

Would also kinda assume they might not be interested in some of the games that are in the $10-$15 price range.

Still going through boxes. Thankfully I kept most stuff together but have had some fun adventures. For Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii I had the game box was with the rest of my Wii games, which was good. But found the manual in one of my PC game boxes. And then the actual disc turned out to be inside the Wii.

I got my 2 PS Vitas up and running. I'm amazed that you can still access the store and everything. Got my PS3 running too. Super cool how that still has store access. I got MGS4 and DMC recently at the local used video game store. I want to make sure I have access to good PS3 games since it is a weird console. Will need to see if there is anything I want on the store.

Also getting my Wii U and Super Analogue NT going too. Got an HDMI switcher for all the old consoles and will have them on a rolly cart that I can hide under my desk or even roll into the living room.

Will take pictures when finished.

I got my 3DS up and running recently. Wondered why it wouldn’t charge, took off the flap and found the battery bulging. Very glad that I got to it before any leakage. A good reminder for me to check in on any devices I care about at least once every 1-2 years. I was able to get a 3rd party battery on Amazon for about ¥1200. Compared to the Vita, which I also got up and running recently, it seems like there hasn’t been much movement on the hacking/homebrew scene. So, I updated a few of the plugins to the latest versions, dabbled in a few games, then put it back on the shelf.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Got my PS3 running too. Super cool how that still has store access.

They wanted to close the store a few years ago, but backpedaled following an online uproar.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I got my 2 PS Vitas up and running. I'm amazed that you can still access the store and everything. Got my PS3 running too. Super cool how that still has store access. I got MGS4 and DMC recently at the local used video game store. I want to make sure I have access to good PS3 games since it is a weird console. Will need to see if there is anything I want on the store.

Also getting my Wii U and Super Analogue NT going too. Got an HDMI switcher for all the old consoles and will have them on a rolly cart that I can hide under my desk or even roll into the living room.

Will take pictures when finished.

By the way, have you put CFW on your Vitas? I love the way the RetroFlow Launcher plug-in works compared to the usual bubbles.

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/qx5gZw5/2024-11-03-190241.jpg)

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I got my 2 PS Vitas up and running. I'm amazed that you can still access the store and everything. Got my PS3 running too. Super cool how that still has store access. I got MGS4 and DMC recently at the local used video game store. I want to make sure I have access to good PS3 games since it is a weird console. Will need to see if there is anything I want on the store.

Also getting my Wii U and Super Analogue NT going too. Got an HDMI switcher for all the old consoles and will have them on a rolly cart that I can hide under my desk or even roll into the living room.

Will take pictures when finished.

I recently got a PSP. Saw it in a thrift store for $40 and couldn't resist picking it up. Came with 3 games: God of War: Something or other, Hot Shots Golf, and WipeOut Pure.

I have recently been working on setting up Home Assistant to control my gaming av system. I have HA itself running on my old laptop with a Samsung Galaxy Tab A running as a controller and an KinCony AG8 setup running ESPHome to send IR commands to my RetroTINK and a couple of HDMI switches. Still a work in progress but an AV Control system for 13 different system is just a few more hours of scripting in YAML (god awful language) away from being a reality.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/z7yBQAt.jpeg)

You are living the dream!
(somehow just looking at that screenshot sent warm fuzzy feelings through me...)

Mr GT Chris wrote:

You are living the dream!

If only I had more space/money

Over Christmas i finally got to check out my brother-in-laws collection and it is redonkulous. He has like a 1000 square foot basement overflowing with games including a complete-in-box set of the North American SNES releases (I am a bit jelly of this). His AV setup sucks though lol.

Quote is not edit.

I still massively regret getting rid of almost all boxes and manuals of my 8 to 64-bit cartridge and PC games because of a move...
Also most of my magazines dating back to 1988.

Not a clue where I'd actually put them now if I still had them. Just the games themselves take up so much space already.

Rykin wrote:
Mr GT Chris wrote:

You are living the dream!

If only I had more space/money

Over Christmas i finally got to check out my brother-in-laws collection and it is redonkulous. He has like a 1000 square foot basement overflowing with games including a complete-in-box set of the North American SNES releases (I am a bit jelly of this). His AV setup sucks though lol.

Wild! I have a computer desk in a room that my daughter and I share. I have a 22 inch screen with HDMI/DVI/VGA inputs that I would love to replace someday. Connected is just the Mac and Xbox Series S, but I’ve also had the SNES mini and PS3 connected in recent times. Just having everything out at once makes too much clutter on my desk. Then all my handhelds which are probably my first love these days.

I am getting close to having my dream gaming AV setup. Since my job used to be about 80% AV stuff (it is maybe 15% since I changed jobs 2 years ago) I have wanted to get some sort of AV Control System setup for my gaming stuff. I am not 100% of the way there but I am getting close. I am using Home Assistant (on an old laptop I wasn't using for anything, but I keep having issues with it so I think I might buy a new Raspberry Pi 5 to host this), a KinCony AG8 (for IR and RS-232 in the future), a couple of cheap HDMI switches (planning to upgrade someday to a TESmart 16 port switch), a GamesCare 6x2 Component Video Switch, a RetroTINK 5x Pro, a new Hisense U7N, and an Android tablet that I wasn't using for anything else to control it. Currently it looks like this:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/SiEFWdy.jpeg)

That is a screenshot from my tablet that will be sitting next to the TV. I still have some scripting to finalize (as someone with tons of C style language experience I f*cking hate YAML), but I am really close to having a one button to gaming on whatever system I want setup like I have always dreamed of. It is pretty cool since so far I am only out like $50 (for the KinCony AG8 plus some miscellaneous cables and stuff) as I already had everything else needed to make it work.

Rad!!!!

Totally!! Sorry, I’m not familiar with many of the terms you used but I’m wondering… Which of the consoles can you automate the on/off switch etc. and which ones still require physical interaction like pushing a button on the device? Also, do you usually use flash carts or original cartridges? The negative of using originals would be needing to swap carts for each game, but you’d still get that nostalgic feeling.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

Totally!! Sorry, I’m not familiar with many of the terms you used but I’m wondering… Which of the consoles can you automate the on/off switch etc. and which ones still require physical interaction like pushing a button on the device? Also, do you usually use flash carts or original cartridges? The negative of using originals would be needing to swap carts for each game, but you’d still get that nostalgic feeling.

So if I wanted to lock the console power button in the on position I could control the power to some of the consoles using something like a TP-Link Kasa HS300 power strip (or other smart home compatible power control device, this is just the model I have), but many of these consoles (or at least the version I have) make use of a momentary power switch so that wouldn't work. I have a pretty decent collection of original cartridges (and I probably buy more old cartridge games in a year than I do new ones) though I do often play my games off of an SD card loaded into my Super NT (HD Super Nintendo clone) or Mega SG (same for Genesis). I am planning to mod my PS2 and Xbox to just run everything off of an SSD (I have a couple dozen disc games for each) and I already have the GameCube modded to run everything off of an SD card (I only have 2 or 3 disc games for it as it was just purchased as part of my quest to get all the Zelda and eventually Metroid games and the systems to play them, I have the collectors disease). Technically the MiSTer can run most of the 5th gen (N64, PS1, Saturn) and older stuff off of SD card, but I kind of like breaking out the carts when I want to play that stuff just for the old school experience, yet I want them piped through a good upscaler on my 4k TV because I don't want to mess around or dedicate any space to an old CRT.

As part of my planning phase for this project I actually made a system diagram similar to what we use at work if you want to see how everything is routed:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/IY54dVW.png)