This weekend we organized (as every year) a flea-market at our marching band clubhouse. One guy said there was a complete NES set somewhere (I always man the "electronics" section of course) so we checked it out. Had to connect it to a really old TV so I could manually dial-in the right channel (most others needed electronic programming, which often requires going through menu's AND the correct remote which is not always included).
We almost NEVER have old game consoles or classic computers on our flea market (people put them on Marktplaats usually) so I was pretty exited to find the NES.
And it worked. There was SM2, SM3, Tetris, Boulderdash, and 2 other games I don't remember, a Game Genie and a 4 player adapter included. Also a box to store the cartridges and the manuals of the games. Also the original box was there and in excellent shape.
Good that I was there as most of the people would have sold that off for a couple of Euro's. Being there I didn't exactly know what the value's on Marktplaats are those days but we put up a price of 35 Euro on it. (We never put prices on stuff, but this was a good exception
). Maybe not enough but I didn't want to go TOO high....
It was getting later and later and I was already determined to either buy it myself or sell it on Marktplaats if there wouldn't be a buyer. But suddenly a guy who had been buying some other stuff (for the prices we asked, no bargaining as usual) said, OK I want that Nintendo. I was a bit disappointed in one way, but on the other hand, we earned some good money for the club. Also, I really don't need yet ANOTHER gaming device, I'm actually thinking of selling some stuff already...(non-arcade I mean).
We also sold an incredible lot of CRT TV's this year. It's so strange, the last couple of years, the "market" for those TV's was getting worse and worse (lower prices, less demand
) but this was a VERY good year, and we actually had LOADS of them. One guy (they usually are immigrants who most likely export them to their home country) bought 12 of them for a fixed price per unit....nice guy to deal with compared to some of his "colleagues".....
Next year, I'm going to talk to the guys at our club who organize it and say I will pay a little if I can "operate" on all the remaining TV's for a while. I plan on removing all the rubber wedges, convergence strips and convergence rings. Normally all stuff remaining (except for books and cloths) always end up in this:
but the electronics are not longer allowed to go in there, we have to put those in a separate container for environmentally friendly handling.
Sooooo, what did I buy myself ? Well, a number of very nice 80's 12" vinyl and this:
Yep....another type-writer. Am I starting a new hobby ? No. I've been working on the IBM selectric and I can't get it to print reliably with an even spacing. Also, the IBM's are DAMN heavy and HUGE. Although I now have the perfect letter ball, the spacing of the letters would completely ruin any serial tag repro.
There were of course a number of typewriters at the flea-market, most were the standard mechanical "suitcase" typewriters, and one was actually one with a small CRT and floppy drives, so more a complete text machine from Olivetti. I tried two mechanical machines to see the font. They were very close to what we need. Only the numbers are a bit different. Then I found this electronic one and thought that could be ideal for our job. Checked the font, and while it is NOT 100% perfect, the letters do look identical but again the numbers are slightly different.
I figured that it would be better to have a slightly different font then an unreliable spacing which would ruin stickers.
And I bought it for a pretty good price at 1 Euro
It's also very portable and light-weight. Some interesting trivia: it's a former DDR product by a company called.....ROBOTRON (
http://robotrontechnik.de/) !
