I tried to sell my N64 and my horde of games to pay for an OG Xbox so I could play halo. I remember the price was so lousy the guy at EB Games told me I should hold onto them. I’m very thankful of that guy in hindsight. I managed to get a used Xbox for a pretty good deal not long after anyway
That's exactly how I lost my DK64. I didn't get anything for it at eb games so I sold it at a garage sale then bought a refurbished og xbox. I wish I had that console still but the Analogue 3d is a great trip down memory lane (even if I only got the black one)
I’d love an Analogue but I can’t justify the price tag when I already have the console
The value proposition isn't really there if you already have the hardware. Its got some cool features but you could live without them for sure.
Yeah, I wish I hadn't sold all my old games every time I got bored of them, but I didn't have an allowance or anything, and rarely got any games for holidays, so it was my only consistent way to get new games.
My parents just gave them to my neighbor when I joined the military. "You don't need those distractions anymore."
Damn, they sent your ass to the military and sold your games? They must really hate you lol
Not sold gave them away. The feeling is mutual. Luckily I hid all my MTG cards in my car.
Mom can never find these
WTF
There's a reason I don't talk to them anymore.
I had an original 1.0 gold cart version of Legend of Zelda. I also had a misprinted Excite Bike that had the label for Ghosts N Goblins. Plus a ton of other games and stuff for it.
Mom donated it when i left for college...
The gold Zelda cart isn't as rare as the plain ol' gray one, oddly enough. I used to have a book of rarity and prices for the entire NES catalogue published around 2000 or 2001. Kinda wondering how much has changed in the 25 years since it was published. 🤔
I didn't know that. Still, I am a bit miffed my mom just gave them away. I know it was like 20 years ago but yeah. RIP mom, you didn't know...
I dunno about misprints, but I've got a five screw Excitebike as well as a five screw Gyromite that are Japanese Famicom cartridges inside the shell with a Famicom to NES adapter. This was an actual official thing, and was how some very early titles were distributed at first.
While we're talking rarity, I also have a copy of Fantasia for the Genesis which is naturally the only cartridge in my entire collection that won't boot no matter what I do to it. I use it as a cartridge slot dust excluder these days.
Famicom to NES adapter.
Wait, all these years I assumed the famicom and NES just differed in branding...and that's not the case? The games literally weren't interchangeable?
They are not. They're architecturally very, very similar but there are some small differences between the Japanese and US machines.
Some of this was very deliberate on Nintendo's part. The pin count on the Famicom cartridges vs. NES ones is different, and the Famicom lacks the infamous 10NES lockout chip which was present in the US models and their cartridges. Famicom game piracy was rampant in Asia prior to the US NES release, and Nintendo didn't want that to play out again in the West. The NES was made incompatible out of the box with Famicom carts not just to prevent imported Japanese Famicom games from being played on it, but also to prevent the myriad of bootlegs available from being played on it as well.
This is before getting into the expanded capabilities provided by the Famicom Disk System, which we never got in the West. Fun fact: The expansion port is still there, on the bottom of your NES beneath that little hatch cover, but it was never officially used for anything. That was probably its originally intended purpose, though, since the piggyback cartridge strategy used by the top loading Famicom would have been quite tricky on the front loading NES and its gimcrack faux VCR mechanism.
There is some more rambling to this effect in the now ancient post of mine here, including a showing off of the adapter in my Exitebike cart. As the story goes, for the US launch of the NES Nintendo could not produce enough game cartridges fast enough so their solution was to take existing stock of Japanese carts and bung them in cheap but official Famicom-to-NES adapters complete with a lockout chip on each, and package them all up in a US style cartridge which has a ton of extra room inside to begin with. Notably, if you've ever wondered when you were a kid why your Exitebike game pretends to have a save function, and where it's trying to save to, there's your answer: A Famicom tape recorder, which is a peripheral we never got in the US. But the game ROM is actually the Japanese version on a Japanese cart, in an adapter.
But if you're a dedicated enough nut, you can take that adapter out of your old Exitebike or Gyromite or whatever cart, and stick any Japanese Famicom (or pirate) cartridge in it, and mostly they'll just work with some minor limitations. The NES, for example, lacks the ability to accept the extra sound channel input that Famicom cartridges could provide via add-on chips.
Wow. That is all genuinely cool to know. Thanks for writing it up! I had forgotten about excitebike having the save option that didn't work until you mentioned it but now it makes sense! I do remember the bottom port also!
This (and your other post) were great, thank you!
There are multiple examples of parents doing this in this thread. I hope y'all don't speak to them still.
biggest mistake of my gaming career was giving away my snes and snes games my grandparents kept asking me to donate to their church. they'd ask me all the time and I would always say no, knowing I'd want them in the future.
they caught me on a bad day and I said sure... I think about that mistake frequently 🥲
idk if this better or worse than me having my games stolen by movers when i moved
$50 for all my old toys. I regret it every day
I've never met anyone who got rid of any classic video game stuff who didn't regret it. The moral of the story is, don't. This is why I have an entertainment center full of stupid old consoles and three bookshelves full of games for all kinds of systems.
A few systems I traded in over the years to fund newer consoles when I was young and didn't know any better. I got all of them back, though, and in most cases before they became trendy enough again for the used prices to skyrocket.
I got rid of all of mine so far except my current one (switch 1) and have never regretted it. They take up lots of space and you cannot take the memories from me regardless. Emulation works great and I have a couple original NES and SNES controllers wired to work via USB.
Yeah, and Nintendo is still selling them at full price...
Nintendo knows what they’re worth. Never undercut your own product unless you have to.
Me thinking about my Sega Dreamcast that my mom GAVE AWAY to my cousin when we were packing up for a move. "I thought she'd have fun with it." Of course she's going to have fun with it! I had Jet Set Radio AND Crazy Taxi!
Me continuing to harass Nintendo by transferring my 20 year old DS games and saves from my equally old R4 flashcart (and microSD) to my AYN Thor because digital media & freedom is forever.
I still have all my old video games, but I miss my first PC 😥
Thinking about the Colecovision that dad threw away that I have the knowledge and skills to fix now. Sure it's been 40 years, but still.
3d print your toys. You build the 3d printer. Learn some form of CAD. You design and recreate the toys from your childhood. A fun distraction.
I got cents for some of mine at GameXrazy
My brother sold his n64 and games and a sega Saturn with many games our friend worked hard to pirate, all for $40. His excuse? "I needed weed."
I told him I would've easily given him $90 for all that. This was in like 2005.
I try not to think about the NES and the pile of games that I gave to my cousins because I was getting a Sega Genesis, and then a few months later I went over to visit and I asked where the NES was and they told me "We were always leaving the games out on the floor so our mom threw them all away."
Cheer up! Think of all the fun that $10 brought you!
You do remember, right? OP? PLEASE tell me you didn't just blow the $10 on something useless!?
I set up an rpi with RetroPi and torrented rom collections. Though I guess some people get nostalgic for the physical objects, based on all the replies here. I don’t care so much myself.
Buying ps2 games as a kid, I threw the boxes away and kept the discs in a large CD booklet. I still have these games and some of them would go for a pretty good price today, but not so much without the original boxes!
I have so much of that old stuff in bins, and it's really a treat because one of my nephews goes nuts for gaming relics from 10-20 years before he was born.
But funny enough when I want to play an old game, I stick with emulators.I'm old and have limited time, so I ain't afraid to use rewind (save state on steroids) and most of the time I use no visual filters/shaders and go with sharply defined pixels. My 10 year old budding AuDHD videophile self would spend hours tweaking the 2 or 3 picture dials on my shitty old hand-me-down CRT trying to get the yellow blocks in Super Mario World the perfect shade of yellow or see the most detail in my ActRaiser avatar. I am aware that some of that old art was drawn to look more detailed on a CRT than the original clean pixels would look on their own, but I still dig it.
Fortunately, CRT filters and (allegedly) beam simulation are getting much better than ever.
Might not be worth your time fiddling with though, still.
I remember reading a while back how 4K resolution is kind of a sweet spot for rendering all the phosphors for a really good CRT simulation.
I do like experimenting with those things sometimes. Just the other day I was showing my son something in Mario World and started playing with the filters. The worst looking ones (composite and god help me, RF) definitely were the most cozy!
If you have a high refresh screen (240Hz+) you should check out BlurBuster's and mausimus' ShaderBeam for motion clarity in retro games!
Mine doesn't go that high but I am still gonna check it out. Thanks!
I just got a N64 and Diddy Kong racing, and a working PlayStation 2 slim for free from a friend who was about to toss them out.
I'm good with the fancy crt effect over emulators but I have to rma my damned oled and it doesn't look nearly as convincing on my old monitor
I sold my copy of Pokémon Heartgold for €100 a few years ago. It didn't even include the Pokewalker!
All posts need to have the same title: me_irl it is allowed to use an emoji instead of the underscore _
