The SHMJ sweet l00t post

OR “How I destroyed my wallet”.

Well. It’s here. After being stuck in some kind of weird shipping limbo, the last package and missing piece has now arrived.
I believe I’ve learned a very important lesson through this whole ordeal, and I will talk about this shortly however, showing off the l00t first might be a good idea.

This is a long a long one, so lean back & get comfortable.
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A box appears! I wonder what’s inside….?

Ta-daah! Actually, there’s a hint of things to come somewhere in there…

Taking a closer look at the stuff:

There’s some really cool stuff in there, especially among the books & LDs. Being able to own both the Ten Little Gall Force OVA as well as Scramble Wars is maybe can be considered a personal milestone for my LD collection. Not sure if they’re actually rare or anything but, it’s something I don’t see very often that I’ve felt would be very cool to actually own, instead of just having them downloaded. Ten Little Gall Force is a sort of bonus episode thing for the original Gall Force OVA-series, in which the now super deformed cast play out some key events from the show as actors were it a live action production. Scramble Wars is a sort of Wacky Racers styled romp which features a lot of characters from popular older shows at the time. The main focus lies on the Gall Force & Bubblegum Crisis cast however.
Getting Burn Up! is cool as well. Not because it’s all that great, but it’s one of the things I watched when I was getting into “oldschool” anime. So, yeah, it’s more of a personal thing.
And last but not least, the Macross-movie. I need to find some time to sit down and watch this sucker again. Absolutely stoked to own it tho’. It’s a beautiful box.

Also picked up some very nice artbooks. Being a big fan of Kenichi Sonoda’s older artworks, I find this “Gallant” artbook to be very cool. Aside from a few original illustrations, it’s mostly Gall Force stuff in here to, both character artwork and mechanical designs – very cool. Also very happy with the Dirty Pair Flash artbook and that book by artist Akitaka Mika, from Galaxy Angel fame, which is filled to the brim with so called “MS Girls”-illustrations. That is to say, illustrations of different Gundam robots depicted as girls, all this done in a very 80s style. Been wanting a real copy of this for some time.

I could talk about the games & music CDs as well but let’s move on to package nr. 2…

WHAT IS IIIIT?

BAM!

Sharp X68000 Ace HD. Pure pr0n. This sucker’s big & heavy, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t one of the coolest looking computers of all time. OF ALL TIME.
Came with a SCSI card installed, which is…cool, I guess? 😀 I really have no clue about these things.
At this point, I should probably also mention that this unit was sold as mostly untested, except that it powered on, and I have no real idea how well it actually works. After confirming that yes, it does indeed power on, I tempted fate by inserting those “Detana!! Twinbee” floppies and it shut down, refusing to power on again.
Disk 1 is still in there ;_;

Ah, well, actually, the power supply is notorious for failing on these units, at least on the twin tower models, so I was sort of expecting that to happen at some point anyway. I spent a bit of yesterday to open this sucker up (it’s only 3 screws per side, but those side panels are some truly tricky bastards). So in less than 24 hours of me receiving it, it ended up like this:

^ Removed the power supply ^

Ah…well, I’ll look at this like a project of sorts and hopefully will be able to get this bad boy up and running again. Or at least just enough to spit out that Twinbee floppy. 😛
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And now for the serious bit:
I paid through the nose for this. For the items and for the shipping.
So here’s a little piece of advice for anyone wanting to go wild on Yahoo Auctions using Shopping Mall Japan or similar proxy services. Get what you need and get out.
Don’t buy a lot of stuff just because it’s “cheap” – because it isn’t going to be, in the end. Sure, it may just cost 500yen but then it will have to get shipped twice and usually putting down a bid costs a little bit in itself. SMJ takes about $6 if I remember correctly.

In short: it all adds up, and then, if you’re impatient like me and don’t want to wait 3 months or risk shipping all that cool stuff without insurance the shipping charges will hit you like a fist.
Not saying there’s anything wrong with SMJ and the like, but…one should be careful and think things through.

However, the most devastating realization is probably this. I bought a lot of stuff that isn’t especially rare at all – they just happened to be sooo much cheaper then I’ve seen them for on eBay it was almost hilarious. Like, I couldn’t let these awesome deals pass me by, right? Turns out, I probably didn’t save anything at all. Actually it might’ve been cheaper to just get them off eBay.

So…uh, there we have it. I’ll be more careful next time.
Aaand, this might sound stupid after all this but I actually have another piece of hardware coming in, unrelated to this purchase, so that’ll hopefully show up in the coming weeks. See you when that happens. 😀

PCE – All opened up

After hearing a rattling noise inside my Duo-R, as if something was loose, as well as wanting to see what shape the capacitors were in*, I opened it up. Turned out the noise came from a loose bit of plastic of unknown origin and the capacitors looked fine to my untrained eyes. However, one of the small stick-things that keeps the CD-unit in place had snapped, some glue did fix that though. The box the unit came in was a bit roughed up, perhaps that was the cause…?
Anyhow, I thought I’d post the pictures I took of the inside of the unit, should anyone find it interesting :p

Unit seems to work fine otherwise, I need more games for it! 😀

* A common problem for normal Duo’s are that the capacitors go bad. Duo-R and RX’s are usually not effected as often and are generally seen as more reliable but you never know…