Video Game Collecting

In this video I show the four games I found in a buy it now auction on eBay for $1.25

What you see here is one of the greatest treasure maps ever.  Its a screen grab of the Broad Acre Swapmeet here in Las Vegas.  The highlighted lines is a mostly accurate portrayal of the path I took this past Sunday.  Below is the key:

1: The starting and ending point of the journey.  I followed along the Red

2: Location of where I got the unlicensed games Metal Fighter and Raid 2020.  The woman didn’t have her A stock merchandise out yet so I had to return.  I actually found the games in her B stock.

3: The approximate location of where I picked up Gauntlet II.  There were other games, 4 bucks each.  Also the location of an $8 Balloon Kid

4: Location of the lady with the huge rack.  Of Nintendo games.  I picked up After Burner and Back to the future.  She had plenty more but I ran out of money.  All games were $3.  Even Rescue Rangers, which sadly I paid $5 two weeks prior

A: Didn’t buy anything but the seller had about a dozen NES games at various prices.  He said they started at $5.  Meh

B: There are atleast 3 vendors in this area selling Game Boy, Nintendo NES, N64, and PS1, PS2, and XBOX games.  Labels are mostly faded

C: A booth ran by a bunch of ladies.  Bought a Lufia 2 for $8 here once – been dry ever since.

D: Huge booth with hundreds of games – mostly all newer and over priced.  This is THE place to pick up a Super Joy.

E: Location of the new free-admission arcade.  I posted a video of it that you can view here: swap meet arcade

F: This was the first time I saw games along the southern perimiter – there were actually two booths.  One with “bagged” Atari 2600 games that were in excellent shape with their manuals, and the other had a variety of all systems.

G: This seller had a small booth with a PS3 and a Lime Game Boy for sale.  He insisted the Game Boy would be worth something some day.

H: A variety of games both old and new.  This booth has moved a few times.  I once got a Blues Brothers for $5 from here.

I: Seller usually has NES systems and 32X systems available.  Weird thing is I’ve never seen a seller in this booth.  They set up and then disappear.  Weird.

So anyways, this is a general idea of what I see at the swap meet on a typical Sunday.  Sometimes there is considerably less stuff, but this past Sunday was the best!

Sundays are always the best day to find video games at the Broad Acres swap meet. Today there were games EVERYWHERE and cheap too. Below is a quick video of some finds including Back to the Future for $3, Gauntlet II for $4, After Burner for $3, and Metal Fighter for $5 and Raid 2020 for $5. I’ve never been interested in unlicensed games outside of the Tengen variety until I stumbled upon Firehawk, and now I’m more curious than ever before.

Don’t even think of trying this Atari 7800 controller mod.  What I really mean to say is don’t follow MY instructions on how to do it.  As you will screw it up.  Not because the information in wrong, but I did this half-assed.  Anyways, in case you don’t know SEGA Genesis controllers make a great substitute for an Atari 2600 controller.  However, that isn’t true for an Atari 7800 controller because it has 2 action buttons (left and right) but only the left button gets mapped to the SEGA Genesis controller.  This makes games like Double Dragon difficult to play, and Xevious is infamous for bunk reviews simply because who ever did the review either used an Atari 2600 controller, or a SEGA Genesis controller, and attempted to play with just one functional button.

So anyways, following instructions I found on www.atariage.com I got parts from eBay and rather than make an adaptor like I promised to do, I decided to modify a SEGA Genesis controller instead.  The controller is a crap one that I got at a thrift store, with a 2 foot long cord, and sticky buttons.

So here are the parts I got from Hong Kong:

This is the sacrificial SEGA Genesis controller:

Crappy or not, the pins were labeled!  Yay SEGA!

This is the circuit you need to make.  My soldering skills are not the best, and I was rushing.  You need to make two of these circuits.

This is the last steps before I started craming it all together:

And guess what it worked:

 Once I get the remaining parts in I’ll make the actual adaptor!

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Behold the amazing and cheap unlicensed original PlayStation joystick.  Featuring turbo and slow motion the real benefit of this stick is that it feels exactly like a Nintendo VS arcade stick.  That could be good or bad.  The buttons, although smaller, feel arcade perfect.  And it cost real low cheap: $2.50!

See this:

$4 4 x 220659728433 D Subs Male/Female
$3.55 1 X 320537735690 10 D-Sub Hoods
$1 1 X 260807379026 30 PNP Transistors 2n3906
$1 1 X 250840393958 50 620 ohm resistors
$1 1 X 260807469052 50 1k ohm resistors

It’s a shopping list. Rather than mutilate a SEGA Genesis controller for use on the Atari 7800, I’ve decided to take the sensible approach by simply making an adaptor. Plug in the SEGA Genesis controller into the adaptor and plug the adaptor into the Atari and I should be good to go, right? Well sorta. It’s a wee bit more complicated than that. All of the parts are coming either from Hong Kong or Thailand so its going to take 2 – 3 weeks just to get the parts – just enough time to actually build up the gumption to complete this project.

This evening I got to spend more time with Double Dragon for Atari 7800.  I had anxiously waited for this game and thus far I’ve been pretty impressed.

Tonight I got more experience with the controls – they are unique from all other versions of Double Dragon sans the Atari 2600 which has a similar control scheme.  In the arcade version you have your standard punch, kick, and jump button and pressing certain buttons together creates additional moves.  Since the 7800 has only two buttons the additional moves are performed by holding the controller in a particular direction then pressing a button.  For example a head butt is performed by pressing down and towards an enemy and pressing punch.  The spinning kick is performed by pressing down and away and pressing the kick button.  The whole system is kinda clunky but I blame the controller and not so much the game.  The 7800 joystick controller is not very forgiving and this game, being as action packed and quick as it is can be brutal.  To my dismay and out of desperation I did find a cheap way to advance in the game… Simply keep doing spin kicks, especially on the lower left hand side of the screen.  The enemies will crowd there and you can beat them quickly.

Yeaterday I posted that I was impressed this version could have three enemies on the screen at once, but early in stage 3 you can have four enemies on the screen!

Using my cheap trick I made it to the third stage.  The layout of the second and third stage is near exact to the arcade – something the NES version could never claim to have.  You can climb the chain link fence and jump over the broken bridge.  The second stage didn’t have the industrial theme however – instead it was the forest theme from the third stage and the third stage had the music from the first stage.  But mentioning the music reminded me that the game has the boss theme music from the arcade – again something the NES version didn’t have.

I also got to experience weapons, the knife, the whip and bat to be exact.  They were functional but didn’t help me kill the enemies any quicker.  I did not encounter any barrels or dynamite.

I fought Lindas tonight and the green boss at the end of the second stage – again taken from the arcade version.  There is very little difference between the bodies of the Lindas and the other characters except they show more skin.  Abobo looks great but boss Abobo looks even better.

Since I got to see more of the game I have concluded that the backgrounds in this game are above par.  The programmers made good use of contrasting colors in the sky scrapers and tree lines to really give you an illusion of depth and distance.

I will need to play Double Dragon for Atari 7800 more to make a final conclusion about it but outside of the clunky controls it has been a skull crushing adventure!

As promised, Double Dragon for the Atari 7800 has finally arrived.  Here are some quick impressions: 1.  The controls are awkward – not saying they are bad but when you’re used to NES controls you have a specific expectation.  2. The game has spirit of the arcade game – you can feel the programmers put an honest effort into it.  3. More enemies than the NES version… This has three at the same time, the NES had only two.  4. The music is limited and repetitive but its Double Dragon no doubt.   More details soon…