It’s such perfect condition I have to wonder if they bought a cabinet then made up a faked story about finding it out on the curb outside as trash for clicks.
Bitter, cynical, and jaded is no way to go through life, son.
Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
11–20 of 120 posts
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#12I saw this a few days ago on an arcade collector's forum (not based in the US), and the majority reaction was disbelief. People seemed to think it was a hoax. That thing is museum quality. I wonder if it's due to those suburban garages, allowing people to pile up stuff for decades. That and having more cash to buy goodies than most of the rest of the world, of course.
For classic cars and other large pieces of vintage machinery, "barn finds" have been a common source of weirdly well preserved specimens for many years - especially in dry climates. Now that we live in a world where many elderly people have had suburban garages for many decades, that probably will be a major source of interesting finds like this.
All other things being equal, having the space to keep a large object you're not using is gonna be a big predictor for how many specimens end up in a safe storage situation for long enough to become antique.
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#13I saw this a few days ago on an arcade collector's forum (not based in the US), and the majority reaction was disbelief. People seemed to think it was a hoax. That thing is museum quality. I wonder if it's due to those suburban garages, allowing people to pile up stuff for decades. That and having more cash to buy goodies than most of the rest of the world, of course.
Large objects can be so hard to deal with that they are often discarded, regardless of theoretical price or value. Motorcycles, Hammond organs, etc.
So often it might be worth quite a bit it someone in another location, but especially after someone dies, there often isn’t the energy to deal with it. So on the street it goes.
You can find some people asking $6000 for a Hammond B3, but then someone can’t give away a D-152 outside of an urban area because folks don’t know what it is on a search. It better than a B3, essentially the deluxe model. But they weight nearly 500lbs and people don’t know how to turn them on to test even (it is a 2 step process)
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#14What's the monetary value of a find like this? It always boggles my mind when people jump straight to "bin it" rather than "I'll see if anyone wants to buy it". I guess sometimes you just need the headspace!
Yeah, you really do. I'd imagine who isn't in the space might think "well the graphics are so outdated and the thing is so heavy, who would want to deal with it?"
And we don't know what else was on the curb that was taken by the trash people; sometimes you get to a point where you decide that cleaning out fast is worth more than hoarding until you're able to sell everything.
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#15What's the monetary value of a find like this? It always boggles my mind when people jump straight to "bin it" rather than "I'll see if anyone wants to buy it". I guess sometimes you just need the headspace!
TBF this is more of a "have to find the right buyer" product. Some arcade aficionados would give an arm or a leg to get one, but most of us don't have the interest, the space or the know-how needed to get it running (I guess the odds of finding one in working condition, like this one, are not that good).
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#16What's the monetary value of a find like this? It always boggles my mind when people jump straight to "bin it" rather than "I'll see if anyone wants to buy it". I guess sometimes you just need the headspace!
Here's one for $8k: https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/240731233987834/
Listed 2 years ago, apparently still unsold. Which proves the point I was making in my sibling comment :)
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#17Dude just happens to find a fully working and in great condition arcade cabinet deluxe from 1983 in 2023? Jesus! What a find! I’m a huge fan of old arcade games and even built a few mame cabinets myself - this is extraordinary. There aren’t very many of those games left let alone working in great condition. Many have lost their CGA monitors or fried their boards.
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#18I'm not surprised at seeing this. Most of my electronics "purchases" in the 80s to 00s were perfectly good discarded things just thrown out on the street because they were inconvenient or someone bought something shinier. I even got a 2 year old Intel Mac Mini once and used it as a desktop for nearly 3 years! An arcade machine, regardless of how rare it was, would be something I walked straight past though! Too big a…
My friends and I were into computers before this, but four of us got into systems administration and network architecture primarily from dumpster diving around the SF bay area in high school. Sun Microsystems and SGI workstations, Cisco networking equipment, IBM and DEC servers... we got good getting enterprise and/or obscure technology working and talking to each other which gave us a more generalist or fundamental knowledge of systems and troubleshooting.
And it was so much fun...
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#19I'm not surprised at seeing this. Most of my electronics "purchases" in the 80s to 00s were perfectly good discarded things just thrown out on the street because they were inconvenient or someone bought something shinier. I even got a 2 year old Intel Mac Mini once and used it as a desktop for nearly 3 years! An arcade machine, regardless of how rare it was, would be something I walked straight past though! Too big a…
There used to be awesome retro tech to be had at thrift shops, before they figured out there was a collector's market for it.
The great finds are far more rare now.
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#20I saw this a few days ago on an arcade collector's forum (not based in the US), and the majority reaction was disbelief. People seemed to think it was a hoax. That thing is museum quality. I wonder if it's due to those suburban garages, allowing people to pile up stuff for decades. That and having more cash to buy goodies than most of the rest of the world, of course.
Chicago does have an incredible density of suburban garages, perhaps at a scale which is unique in America. Row after row, column after column, copy-pasted outwards on a massive grid.