Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither is blinding accepting everything at face value.
There can be a middle ground, y'know.
Let me know when you find it…
Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
101–110 of 120 posts
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#102wow. sick
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#103No where near as cool; but ages ago when I worked at Tumblr, and when we were expanding the office, they were going to throw out the MAME arcade cabinet - since I lived about 15 minutes walk away, I put it on a dolly with a coworker and we pushed that thing through Manhattan to my apartment building. Got some great looks from people as we tried to navigate it up and down curbs. Still have it over 8 years later sittin…
I have a similar story. I was working at Microsoft and part of the internal arcade alias. One day, somebody on there mentioned a team was moving buildings and had some arcade cabinets in their storage room that they had to get rid of, one of them being a Street Fighter II: CE cab. SF2 was my favorite arcade game as a kid, so I needed it. I asked how much and they said free. I got excited and quickly rounded up some c…
I was on one of those calls where you get a question you weren’t expecting..
Jorge: do you think a foosball table will fit in you Honda (element)?
Me: I’ll take the back seats out and be right over.
He was given the table when the office moved and only had room to move one of the tables. And it does fit.. barely.
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
$2k would be a bidding war. This is worth way more than that! I definitely know some collectors that would part with $50k to have this.
I think the price is silly but https://www.ebay.com/itm/275969869915
And that’s for one needing some TLC. The top of the cabinet is coming apart. The speakers are missing. The floorboard is missing. The display has ghosting. The colors are fresh and crisp but it’s hardly “slightly used” as the one in the OP is. Still. I’m just lost for words he got this off the street.
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-…
Same thing with aquariums. If you want a 150 gallon you have to pay. If you want a 2000 gallon and are willing to go pick it up and move it, it's usually free.
I've found church organs that were probably 100k+ for free before as well. You just need a giant place to put them...
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#106What'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!
> It always boggles my mind when people jump straight to "bin it" rather than "I'll see if anyone wants to buy it".
Except ... ever tried to sell something worth $500+?
Good grief, the number of idiots. And it goes both ways.
Look, I know what I'm selling. I know what it sells for on FleaBay. Any offer below 50% of that and I'm going to tell you to pound sand (most of the time it's not even 10%--I mean, really?). I will throw it in the garbage rather than enable these kinds of morons. By the same token, if you give me about 65-75% of FleaBay, IT'S YOURS.
And, vice versa. Dude, I can see what the last 10 of these went for on FleaBay, and you're trying to get quadruple that. Get stuffed.
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#107As someone who just bought 900 Pokémon cards at an unadvertised estate sale at a roadside Michigan blueberry stand, I can relate. We had just stopped by for blueberries. I happen to see a couple unlabeled sheets of paper tacked up in a corner with grainy scans of cards. I asked the old farmer if she has some for sale and she pulls out this massive binder of cards with many first edition and holo cards in very good co…
I hope you offered the proper/perceived value for them, and not the "cardboard" price
I don't know, if someone wants to dump a whole lot on you, you should just take their asking price. They're not asking you to do a valuation. They won't feel the "loss". However, if you go through and tell them what every card is "worth", and buy a couple that you can afford, they will then feel bad if they ever part with them for less than their notional value.
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Per the placard over the Tron pinball machine at the Pacific Pinball Museum, the licensed arcade games made more money than the original Tron movie! These cabinets are so rare, I have to wonder how it wound up on the curb. I'd imagine there's no way it's a happy story, unfortunately. Someone apparently felt that was worthless.
> Per the placard over the Tron pinball machine at the Pacific Pinball Museum, the licensed arcade games made more money than the original Tron movie! That might be due to movie accounting. There are times the producers of the movie have an incentive to make sure a movie has little or no profit, even if it does okay at the box office. For example when someone other than the producers will contractually get a percenta…
"Always ask for a piece of the gross. Not the net. The net is fantasy." — Freakazoid!
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#109I always wonder, for rare games like this, do folks copy the firmware/ROM to preserve the software for others?
It depends on the person who owns it and the expense/level of effort required.
Some game collectors are motivated by the idea of owning something that no one else has. For decades, there were no preserved, shares versions of Marble Madness 2 available for that reason, but looks like that finally changed last year.[1] Akka Arrh was a similar case.
If a collector is interested in preserving and sharing, there's still the expense/effort factor. For an arcade game, they need to buy (or find someone with) specialized equipment, and may need to desolder chips from the board. I.e. there's a non-zero chance of destroying a one-off artifact, even when performed by people with experience.
The production ROMs for Discs of Tron have been preserved for quite awhile.[2]
However, if this was a test machine, it would be neat for someone with the necessary gear to dump it and see if the code is different.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/05/after-30-years-the-wo...
[2] e.g. http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=dot...
Re: Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lady doesn't want to talk about it -> the owner was some man who is not in her life anymore.
Might have just come with the house. I've purchased houses where the former owners didn't bother to move out anything big and clunky.
Yep. I have a century-old pool table (coincidentally also made in Chicago) that was left in the house I lived in as a little kid. It is extremely rare. Thinking of taking it to Antiques Roadshow.