Jan 30, 2010

Gotcha! The Sport

Check it out: it's the Gotcha! The Sport brand Commando Double Gun set.


Just like in that 80s movie with that guy from ER.
Made by Entertech, whom also made those realistic looking automatic water machine guns in the 80s.


We never actually did get a paintball battle going on in the sorting room.


Jan 24, 2010

the TI99/4A

May I present to you, for your consideration, the height of 1981 home computing technology, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.


"The Texas Instruments TI-99/4A was an early home computer, released in June 1981, originally at a price of USD $525. It was an enhanced version of the less-successful—and quite rare—TI-99/4 model, which was released in late 1979 at a price of $1,150. The TI-99/4A added an additional graphics mode, "lowercase" characters consisting of small capitals, and a full travel keyboard. Its predecessor, the TI-99/4, featured a calculator-style chiclet keyboard and a unique style ofASCII that lacked lowercase text."

We have here the console (with keyboard), some game controllers, some monitor cables, a few game cartridges, and a nifty vinyl cover. Not donated were such heavy-duty peripherals as the speech synthesis card, the 5 1/4" floppy drive, the thermal printer, the acoustic coupler, 32Kb memory expansion card, or the amazing tape drive that used standard audio cassettes as media.


This sucker might have costs you $525 in 1981 ($1249.50 in 2010 dollars when adjusted for inflation), but we couldn't sell this sucker for five bucks at the Junk Store this past holiday season. These spoiled kids with their PlayBox 180s and Nintendo X-Stations.



Jan 22, 2010

slightly expired jackpot

I really thought that, other than a Polaroid camera with a few pictures left or maybe the occasional unopened by very expired film pack, I would never come upon a big score of Polaroid film again. They aren't making it anymore. It's all expired as of late 2009. It sells on eBay for a ton. It just wasn't gonna happen.
Then The Jammer sorted what looked to be a box of dusty paperbacks and looky here...


Hot damn! And most of these are two-packs! Were talking, like, 300 or so pictures here. And this was what the stash looked like after The Jammer took his cut. Sure, the film all expired in 2004 so the pictures come up a bit light and yellow, but I'm not complaining.

Jan 17, 2010

Old

It's a cold, rainy Sunday morning and instead of snuggling in a nice warm bed (like a toasty cinnamon bun) or eating a delicious brunch (like some toasty cinnamon buns), I have to slog it over to the Junk Store to participate in some "Vintage Sale" fiasco. Eight or so hours of watching suckers angrily hand over big bucks for for baggies full of broken sixties shit. And when they tell me the prices are too high I can't really argue. They are. But when you slap those seven magic letters on the label, the sky's the limit.

Not like in the old Junk Store days, when "OLD" was good enough...


Jan 11, 2010

America's Fastest Action Game: SHAKE



Any game that uses dice imagery to this extent must be great. I could find very little info on "Shake" on the interweb (or at least in the first few pages of a google search), and this particular near-mint copy of "Shake" was squirreled away upstairs in the ongoing vintage hoard stash before I got a chance to figure out how it is played. I did manage to sneak these two pictures and then steal the green dice, though, so it wasn't a total loss.

Jan 6, 2010

pop-pa-pop-pop...pop


While not the showers-of-sparks blasters we picked-up for July 4th 2005, still a good haul for a little decade send-off this past New Year's Eve.