atari?

I've decided if my life were ever exciting enough to warrant an auto-biography it would be called I need a creative outlet: stop looking at me like that. This is based on the looks I have received after telling people I like writing because I need a creative outlet. The look is either "man, you're fucking weird" or "shit, you're smarter than you look". Or maybe it's something else, I don't know. Of course even in the unlikely event my exciting life warranted a biography I would hardly be egotistical enough to actually write a book on it. And no, I wouldn't consider this blog the same thing.

Don't know why I started this entry off with that. For some reason I just thought of that title the other day. If that doesn't sum up the first 25 years of my life I don't know what would. Insert several clichéd paragraphs whining about how no one has understood me my whole life here...

For the actual entry today was my last day for my part time weekend job. If I never see another bag of soil the rest of my life it will be too soon. Unless I take up the same job again in August. Pffff. Probably won't.

After work I went to the famous flea market which happens to be down the road from where I worked. There I found a few more Atari 2600 games. I over-payed by a bit per the usual but I only bought the 4 out of 10 rarity rated games. I may or may not have paid too much and if I did it surely wasn't by much. The funny thing is I was about to leave because I had seen everything in what is obviously the flea market section but decided to explore slightly more any way. I was walking through the other section that makes a rather large chunk of the premises and happened across a vendor seemingly selling nothing but shoes and a few other assorted items but there for some odd reason was an Atari 2600. So I ventured a bit further in and...damn what must have been 50+ Atari 2600 games and probably 150+ NES games. I was shocked to find a rather large cache of video games in a place I would least expect it. I had my rarity booklet with me so I checked a few of the games I didn't recognize (I've read that list enough times now I'm starting to almost know what to look for).

It was at this time that the vendor owners started talking to me and mentioned a lot of people had come by with with books similar to mine (actually I printed out the rarity guide and put it in a binder, book is close enough) and wanted to know why and what the deal was. So I explained it was a rarity guide and that I wanted to find the good ones. I even let him look at the binder I had for a bit. He didn't (I think fortunately) seem too interested in it. I asked why he wouldn't be and he said he though he was better off saving his sanity and just selling the games as he was as opposed to obsessively keeping track of rarities. I can respect such a philosophy, sure.

The strategy I think I have developed, ya see, is to get as many as the commons as possible via eBay buying in some-what large lots. That I get the carts pretty cheap a piece. Eventually I'll have all or almost all the commons that way and I can pick-and-choose a few at a time at the flea market to fill in the proverbial gaps. In theory. I did just look up on ebay one of the games I got today at the flea market and the sold price was $5.71 with shipping, which is more than I paid (for once). The other two games I got today were a lot less than that however. I should really remind myself the rarity guide at Atari Age is merely an approximate guide and not the proverbial gospel. By the way there's a list of my games at right should such a thing interest you.

In other news I'm still working on the long article about with Windows 98 project but I haven't nearly as much because I was asked by a family friend to work on a malfunctioning PC. It's been about 3 days now and I can honestly say Maxtor MaxBlast/overlay software is really annoying and I wish it never existed. But after three days I can safely assume that's the reason the damn second drive won't successfully get recognized.

Ya see he's using a some-what old AMD K6-III so the BIOS doesn't really recognize 80 gigabyte HDDs. So Maxtor had him install special software so Windows would recongize the whole size but DOS would not. This also screwed up the whole process of adding his old 12 gig HDD as a secondary for access to old files and some external storage. In so far as it don't work. And I can't remove it without formatting one or both drives as far as I know. So it's very frustrating. Of course simply creative two partitions, one 30 and one 40 for instance, would also have solved this problem. Minor detail and it's too late now.


  ¶ 8:34 PM