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Same. Do I need any of these things? Nah not at all really but they are part of that TOTC/Early 2k days nostalgia for me where I wanted to get into macs so badly (demoing all the various macs at CompUSA - before the days of the Apple store) but there was just zero way for early 20s line cook me and my hourly wage to afford/participate. I mean four bills is crazytown IMO but $30 bucks? I can get down on that :D

Anyways, fun times and now we can get all those things that were out of reach back then :)
 
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I've seen quite a few of those GRAIDs popping up on eBay recently. Almost snagged one but realised that I have lots of FW enclosures already so don't really need another.
I have a couple 500gb fw800 mini graids. For the $20-25 bucks they cost round about I dont think you can beat their build quality and i/o. These bigger graids have been more than I was wanting to spend until recently. Right now I have it on my PMG5 but I am on the look out for another 2 or 4T which will be daisy chained via FW800 and combined with a 2009 mini for a new to me NAS solution.
 
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There's been no activity in here for ages. This is what happens when I'm absent! :D

Let's clear away the cobwebs and start discussing eBay bargains again… I fancied a bit of retro gaming and here's what I snagged from Japan for £58 GBP including shipping costs:

XpFTQVu.jpeg


Better known in the West as the SNES. We use 220-240v in Europe so I'll have to replace the 100v power supply but that's not an issue as I already have something suitable at the ready. Likewise with an NTSC compatible TV. Why did I opt for a Japanese machine instead of Euro/US one? The price - which is pretty good and includes shipping to the UK. Also, it has a number of technical advantages over the others.

I also found a further bargain in the form of this listing:

L0js7Lf.jpeg


Two games for £13 GBP - which includes shipping from Japan and is still cheaper than UK listings for these games individually, let alone as a pair. Apparently the condition of these cartridges ranks as "D" quality but they look good enough to me and as long as they work, that's the main thing!

All I have to do now is wait for these goodies to arrive. :D
 
There's been no activity in here for ages. This is what happens when I'm absent! :D

Let's clear away the cobwebs and start discussing eBay bargains again… I fancied a bit of retro gaming and here's what I snagged from Japan for £58 GBP including shipping costs:

XpFTQVu.jpeg


Better known in the West as the SNES. We use 220-240v in Europe so I'll have to replace the 100v power supply but that's not an issue as I already have something suitable at the ready. Likewise with an NTSC compatible TV. Why did I opt for a Japanese machine instead of Euro/US one? The price - which is pretty good and includes shipping to the UK. Also, it has a number of technical advantages over the others.

I also found a further bargain in the form of this listing:

L0js7Lf.jpeg


Two games for £13 GBP - which includes shipping from Japan and is still cheaper than UK listings for these games individually, let alone as a pair. Apparently the condition of these cartridges ranks as "D" quality but they look good enough to me and as long as they work, that's the main thing!

All I have to do now is wait for these goodies to arrive. :D
SF is one of the consoles I’d like to add to my collection. Nice score!
 
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SF is one of the consoles I’d like to add to my collection. Nice score!

Thanks. :)

The SF made it to the UK a year earlier than the PAL SNES thanks to the grey-import market. Nintendo wanted to maximise sales of the 8-bit NES before transitioning to the 16-bit machine.

Although I'm adept with soldering, I can't be bothered with the hassle of modifying my PAL machine for 60hz and region free operation when a SF can be obtained from Japan and will give me everything that I want - straight out of the box.

Just bought this cartridge for almost £10, with free shipping. It was the best price that I could find for the Japanese version.

jgOMhAm.jpeg
 
There's been no activity in here for ages. This is what happens when I'm absent! :D

Let's clear away the cobwebs and start discussing eBay bargains again… I fancied a bit of retro gaming and here's what I snagged from Japan for £58 GBP including shipping costs:

XpFTQVu.jpeg


Better known in the West as the SNES. We use 220-240v in Europe so I'll have to replace the 100v power supply but that's not an issue as I already have something suitable at the ready. Likewise with an NTSC compatible TV. Why did I opt for a Japanese machine instead of Euro/US one? The price - which is pretty good and includes shipping to the UK. Also, it has a number of technical advantages over the others.

I also found a further bargain in the form of this listing:

L0js7Lf.jpeg


Two games for £13 GBP - which includes shipping from Japan and is still cheaper than UK listings for these games individually, let alone as a pair. Apparently the condition of these cartridges ranks as "D" quality but they look good enough to me and as long as they work, that's the main thing!

All I have to do now is wait for these goodies to arrive. :D
I hope you have touched up on your learning of Japanese hehe :)
 
I recently bought the same exact model laptop that was the first I ever had as my own… a black MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz mid 2007. Somehow in current year it has a 3rd party battery that is black as well with 0 cycles.

My mother bought it brand new in 2007 and by 2012? some update had rendered it unbootable to tiger. She said if you can fix it you can have it… so 11 year old me did research and decided that buying a snow leopard dvd from Apple (we actually found the tiger dvds months later I was so upset🤣) and a new HDD would fix it. And looking back, new HDD was probably overkill but it sure did fix it.

I daily drove that thing for years, upgraded it to an SSD? Definitely maxed the RAM to 4GBs for free by a guy that did a keyboard replacement to the Santa Rosa version when I spilled something on it. Looking at how easy that repair was and what I paid for it to be done ($200, was I think my birthday present at 13) I see why he did that for free.

I regrettably sold it to a friend in like 2015? Then I ended up buying 2006 white MacBooks later because this specific model and color are so rare but they are almost the same and even now they go for like nothing.

Good old GMA 950 “GPU” which didn’t even have hardware TnL so you had to run a program that would fake having that done by cpu to run Max Payne 2 terribly. Vividly remember playing unreal (1998), messing with winebottler and ancient wine before it was cool/worked, watching YouTube on tiger safari in 720p (GMA 950 can’t handle 1080p without framedrop) even though the thing had a slightly better then 720p 16:10 ratio display (1280x800). Sixtyforce emu and OOT barely ran but was so impressive to me, you don’t understand a GMA 950 unless you have used one. It can barely run half life 2 with lots of tweaking… OpenGL 1.4 (keep in mind 2 years difference of the mid 2007 MacBook was the late 2005 iBook G4 which I also now own, with open gl 2.1 on leopard or later and that’s such a huge difference I can’t even do it justice). Open GL 1.4 is literally from 2002. I couldn’t even run the original glide plug-in for pj64 1.6 because the wrapper required Open GL 2 I believe back in the day.

But yea, these are excellent machines, at this point the GMA 950 is nostalgic not limiting in my mind. This is how my love of late 90s games came to be (because I literally had no GPU with hardware TnL). Also this is how I fell in love with macs. I remember watching the last season of lost on some sketchy website on that model of Mac. I found out how to download music. Use emulators. Boot camp windows XP. Use wine before it was cool and was super broken. Watched wolf of wall street when it first came out…

Sry for the rant I guess, I don’t even have it with me yet but for all of the above this was an eBay bargain for me at $120. I’m literally dead serious going to daily drive this like it’s 2019 back when I had an even older early intel MacBook. Between chromium legacy, probable boot camp to win 7 32 bit, and the immaculate support these things have on Linux I expect 0 issues.
IMG_0344.png
IMG_0345.png
IMG_0346.png
IMG_0347.png
IMG_0348.png
 
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I recently bought the same exact model laptop that was the first I ever had as my own… a black MacBook Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz mid 2007. Somehow in current year it has a 3rd party battery that is black as well with 0 cycles.

My mother bought it brand new in 2007 and by 2012? some update had rendered it unbootable to tiger. She said if you can fix it you can have it… so 11 year old me did research and decided that buying a snow leopard dvd from Apple (we actually found the tiger dvds months later I was so upset🤣) and a new HDD would fix it. And looking back, new HDD was probably overkill but it sure did fix it.

I daily drove that thing for years, upgraded it to an SSD? Definitely maxed the RAM to 4GBs for free by a guy that did a keyboard replacement to the Santa Rosa version when I spilled something on it. Looking at how easy that repair was and what I paid for it to be done ($200, was I think my birthday present at 13) I see why he did that for free.

I regrettably sold it to a friend in like 2015? Then I ended up buying 2006 white MacBooks later because this specific model and color are so rare but they are almost the same and even now they go for like nothing.

Good old GMA 950 “GPU” which didn’t even have hardware TnL so you had to run a program that would fake having that done by cpu to run Max Payne 2 terribly. Vividly remember playing unreal (1998), messing with winebottler and ancient wine before it was cool/worked, watching YouTube on tiger safari in 720p (GMA 950 can’t handle 1080p without framedrop) even though the thing had a slightly better then 720p 16:10 ratio display (1280x800). Sixtyforce emu and OOT barely ran but was so impressive to me, you don’t understand a GMA 950 unless you have used one. It can barely run half life 2 with lots of tweaking… OpenGL 1.4 (keep in mind 2 years difference of the mid 2007 MacBook was the late 2005 iBook G4 which I also now own, with open gl 2.1 on leopard or later and that’s such a huge difference I can’t even do it justice). Open GL 1.4 is literally from 2002. I couldn’t even run the original glide plug-in for pj64 1.6 because the wrapper required Open GL 2 I believe back in the day.

But yea, these are excellent machines, at this point the GMA 950 is nostalgic not limiting in my mind. This is how my love of late 90s games came to be (because I literally had no GPU with hardware TnL). Also this is how I fell in love with macs. I remember watching the last season of lost on some sketchy website on that model of Mac. I found out how to download music. Use emulators. Boot camp windows XP. Use wine before it was cool and was super broken. Watched wolf of wall street when it first came out…

Sry for the rant I guess, I don’t even have it with me yet but for all of the above this was an eBay bargain for me at $120. I’m literally dead serious going to daily drive this like it’s 2019 back when I had an even older early intel MacBook. Between chromium legacy, probable boot camp to win 7 32 bit, and the immaculate support these things have on Linux I expect 0 issues.
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Nice blackbook. I always liked them when they were released.
 
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Some more Super Famicom bargains from eBay! :D

£20 GBP for the entire Super Donkey Kong (aka Donkey Kong Country) trilogy - which includes the shipping costs from Japan to the UK. The going rate is at least £10-15 for each game separately, so this is a total steal. :)

ZsPDuje.jpeg


This one cost 99 pence. Yep, not even £1 GBP! There was no other listing even remotely close in pricing. I added it to my watchlist, placed the minimum bid at the very end and there were no competitors so I won what has to be amongst my best eBay bargains ever and you can't go wrong with Street Fighter II on a 16-bit Nintendo.

vDGe12a.jpeg


As an aside, many Japanese games are English friendly or if you've played the Western versions you'll know what's being displayed in the Japanese text. ;)
 
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During last couple of weeks I've been on a bit of a shopping spree.

Bought a MBP 17" i7 2011, another Elgato TB dock 2, a Firewire iSight camera, a new logic board for my 27" TB display and some cables to it (for TB3 conversion), a PWM controller and a fan to my G4 Cube and bunch of other little bits.

And a pic of the iSight and the Cube stuff:

iSight.jpg
Cube fan and controller.jpg
 
And now a Quicksilver and a MDD. Had no plans to get any more but... while already in bead last night I made again a mistake to check our local classifieds and spotted them both. Sent offers to both sellers. They contacted me today and we negotiated and reached an agreement... So, now I am expecting couple of more. :cool: But, I must start selling something off - I am totally running out of space for full size towers!! :eek:
 
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Actually, I am planning to build an extra building for all my hobby stuff some time in next few years. I really need one for my cars, mopeds etc and while I am at it I plan to put my old Macs, consoles, vintage hifi and all other weird gear to display and use. 👍 It's been a long dream of mine.
 
Actually, I am planning to build an extra building for all my hobby stuff some time in next few years. I really need one for my cars, mopeds etc and while I am at it I plan to put my old Macs, consoles, vintage hifi and all other weird gear to display and use. 👍 It's been a long dream of mine.

I'm in a similar boat to you. In a few months I'll be moving to a larger place where I'll have one room dedicated for my indulgences and everything will be organised with the extra space so that I can use stuff at my leisure. Though I'll have to impose on myself a rule that there'll be no further additions unless they're compact or I offload something else.
 
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I was holding off on posting until I actually fixed 'er up, but now that I have:

IMG_20250826_062332121_HDR.jpg

$30 shipped got me this complete (but no box) Creative Zen Touch. Listed as not working, the only issues were that the power button wasn't working and it needed a new battery.

One board repair later and it still doesn't turn on, yet. I noticed the little light on the power supply start to flick a bit. I wondered if it couldn't deliver enough juice to jumpstart it, so one makeshift 5V supply later, and it actually turns on no problem.

IMG_20250829_121346100_HDR.jpg

So I get it to firmware update and sync off my music, and I noticed that it powered down after, and there was a suspicious charging indicator in the corner.

That's right, the battery actually did work, but it was the stock power supply that caught the sads and couldn't deliver enough juice. No matter, I can keep the new battery I had coming as a spare.

But I got a working nugget out of it! First successful board repair.

IMG_20250830_044829233_HDR.jpg

Flash mod is possibly next, but for now the Zen jams again. :D
 
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