Calavera's Goodwill/Flea Market Finds 2: Resurrection

[Calavera]

Got quite the deal today. A huge lot of Digital Micro Tapes



Around 70 brand new sealed Sony Digital Micro Tapes. Around 50 NTC-90s and 20 NTC-120s. Each box contains 5 tapes.

On Ebay each individual tape seems to go for around $10-$15 a piece. Around $10 for the 90s and $15 for the 120s. And that is looking at completed auctions for what they actually sold for.

If we use those prices then that comes to $500 worth of NTC-90s and $300 worth of NTC-120s for a total of $800.

How much did I pay for them you may be wondering? Well hold on to something because this is one of the best deals I've found in a long time, if not my best deal ever. The total price I paid for this whole lot of Digital Micro Tapes was.........$10

I'd say it was a pretty good day for The Calacera and his Ebay sales

[Dr. Zoidberg]

That's a good deal.

I know you got them to resell, which is cool, but do you have a micro recorder if you wanted to use them?

[Calavera]

That's a good deal.

I know you got them to resell, which is cool, but do you have a micro recorder if you wanted to use them?

No, I do not have a machine to use them in. I have several micro cassette recorders but these are quite different from those. Apparently there was only ever two models of recorder ever made for these kinds of tapes. The Sony NT-1 and NT-2.

It seems they were mostly used for police recordings. I don't know if you watch any of TechMoan's videos but he actually did a video about these tapes.



It is only 5 minutes long and worth checking out if you'd like to know a bit about it.

And he mentions a bit more about it in this video starting at 4:22 and shows a rare pre-recorded music tape.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

I do watch TechMoan's stuff although I haven't watched that one. I'll check it out later.

[Big Boss Man]

Cool find Cal. I wonder if it's old Police stock they gave away to Goodwill?. Will check out those vids as I've watched some of Tech's stuff before.

[Calavera]

Cool find Cal. I wonder if it's old Police stock they gave away to Goodwill?. Will check out those vids as I've watched some of Tech's stuff before.

Actually I got this from a county auction. The box it all came in was originally addressed to the sheriff's office. They must have had them laying around for awhile and finally decided to get rid of them. I'd be interested to know how recently they were still using them. Hopefully they will decide to get rid of the recorders too and I can pick those up. But maybe they still keep them around incase they need to play some older recordings for whatever reason.

[Big Boss Man]

Yea that would be interesting to find out. I'd imagine its all digital recording now & any important recordings have been digitized, although they could have used them in the past 5-10 years, depends how up on technology the PD is. I'm assuming they would have used a specialist type of recording device for like confessions, collecting evidence etc. Unless they used the smaller recorder devices for undercover operations etc. On the other hand they might have just been used for like note taking etc so they can record things on the job so to speak.

This is from 2012 and it's UK based but might be of interest

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20556330

In the US they seem to use these types of devices now

http://www.pumarecorders.com/

[Calavera]

So far I've sold just one box. So 5 tapes total. But I sold it for $50! I can't believe I got them all for $10. They have some regular cassette tapes for sale on there now.




They have 3 different listings. $13 for a box of 10. $15 for a box of 10 plus 2 loose ones, and finally $25 for 2 boxes of 10. So $53 for 42 cassette tapes. It seems odd they are listing those so high when they really aren't worth much but let the digital micro tapes go for $10.

[Calavera]

Found something pretty cool today in the cassette/CD section. A pre-recorded MiniDisc! I don't know a lot about MiniDisc but I thought it was mostly to make your own recordings as it was a very high quality way to record audio at the time. Much better than cassettes. I didn't know there were pre-recorded MiniDisc albums you could buy. The one I found was "Joe Cocker - One night of Sin" can't say I'm really familiar with him or any of the songs but that doesn't matter, I was just excited to find a MiniDisc!





Several years ago, probably around 2013 I bought a Sony MDS-JE510 MiniDisc player/recorder for $10. I had never seen one for sale before so I figured I'd add it to the collection since it was only $10. I kind of remember something being wrong with it though. So it has been sitting out in the garage for the last 5 years or so because I never found any MiniDiscs for it. Until today!



I brought it in the house and cleaned it up and plugged it in. It immediately started making a horrible clicking sound. Well this kind of sucks, I really wanted to be able to play a MiniDisc. So I look it up online and find several other people with the same problem but no real solution. I do see that a lot of them are saying it only clicks when there is no disc inserted. That if you leave a disc inserted it will play it fine and stop making that clicking noise. I was afraid to put the disc in before as I thought it might damage it somehow. So I plug it back in and pop the disc inside. It loads it just fine and shows Joe Cocker on the screen! I plugged in an old set of headphones and it was playing it perfectly. I skipped through the tracks and they were all playing fine. It even tells you the title of each track on the screen of the player.

Even though I wasn't really interested in the music of Joe Cocker it was fun to listen to music on a format that I had previously never used before. The Joe Cocker MiniDisc album only cost me 35 cents. So it was well worth the price I put in a bid on a cheap 3 pack of blank MiniDiscs. I'll probably end up selling the player/recorder and Joe Cocker, but before I do I thought I'd try out recording some of my own discs just for fun.

[Big Boss Man]

That's cool. Joe Cocker's one of the best blue eyed soul singers in my opinion. The Madman across the Water movie/doc I would recommend since IMO Joe made his best music in the early 70s with Leon Russell.

As for Mini Discs I vaguely recall seeing them being for sale. I think it was mainly major labels putting them out. Found this from 2001
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/commun ... lity.9177/
and someone mentions a LP format of MD that care store 560 minutes (9.3 hours) which I think even today would be an good option if you've got a portable player plus it would be lossless and similar toCD in terms of sound quality.

[Big Boss Man]

Found this too on Discogs

https://www.discogs.com/search/?format_exact=Minidisc

[Calavera]

Found this too on Discogs

https://www.discogs.com/search/?format_exact=Minidisc

I had no idea that many albums were released on Minidisc. It would be a cool format to collect but they are far to expensive. The Joe Cocker one I have is worth about $30. Looking at a few others that seems to be about the average price. They are neat but not worth $30 a piece. Not to me anyways.



I still have the slot car set



It is getting close to Christmas but still it seems nobody wants it! If anybody here that is in the US is interested in it I'd sell it for a reasonable price. I'm never going to open it, so I don't really need it.

[Big Boss Man]

Yea would be fun to collect. A few more might pop up occasionally in Goodwill etc. Seems they are majority Sony/BMG artists music available though. Haven't seen any Universal, Warner Bros etc ones.

Article here about Mini Disc
https://www.theguardian.com/music/music ... c-20-years

[Calavera]

I bought this about a week ago or so but didn't add it as it isn't an amazing buy or anything. A Microsoft Sidewinder Precision 2 Joystick



It was $4 and was still in the box and looked like new so I picked it up. I already have a few old joysticks but they all connect with the gameport. This was is USB and I figured it would be good to have if I ever play a flight simulator as I don't have a USB joystick. It works great. I mainly tried it out on some emulators. I tried Starfox 64 and while it works fine it makes it much harder! It is kind of fun to use it on games that weren't really meant for a joystick. I've already got $4 worth of fun out it.

The box says it was made around 2000. Wow, I thought it was probably around 2005 or so. Almost 20 years old, still works perfectly and is still very useful as a PC game controller!

[Calavera]

I've picked up a lot of stuff here and there, just haven't been listing it. My last post there was about a joystick,so why not post another joystick related post? I was actually using that Microsoft Precision Pro quite a bit. Shortly after I found a Logitech Extreme 3D pro joystick. Complete in box for only a couple of bucks.



So I've switched to using that now. My gf like to play Mario Kart Wii so I play a lot of that on the Dolphin emulator. Believe it or not my preferred controller for Mario Kart Wii is now the Logitech Extreme 3D pro! It works really well and I can play one handed so I can still smoke a cigarette while I'm playing!

After getting that Precision Pro I remembered back to my Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick that I had in the late 90s. It was pretty cool. I'd like to find one of those and mess around with it again. Well about a week ago I actually found one! It was at goodwill for $7 which is a little more than I'd liked to pay. No box and no AC adapter. The AC adapter uses a weird kind of plug, I looked through all my extra adapters and actually found one that had that kind of plug. It wasn't enough Amps though so I just wired the end plug onto an adapter that was compatible. It uses a gameport plugin but I have a gameport to usb adapter. One problem, it seems the only joystick that isn't compatible with an adapter like that is the Sidewinder Force Feedback! So I've got this force feedback joystick and no way to use it. I'm probably going to end up hooking up an old Win98 or XP machine I have just to try it out. It sucks it can't be used with modern systems. Sure it is 20+ years old but it still works just as well now as it did back then. Even if I did have a gameport card it still wouldn't work with anything above Windows XP. There is no reason there shouldn't be drivers for it!

[melancholy]

I bought that exact same Logitech joystick at a Goodwill for $3 years ago. Never got around to using it, though.

[Bandit]

Calavera needs to get in on this hustle.

[melancholy]

He knew the day would come. He’s been stockpiling vintage junk, knowing that time is not a straight line, but a circle. Many assumed he was just stuck in the past, but he knew he was actually stuck in the future, waiting for his time to come once again. Yes my friends, Calavera is becoming the trendiest person alive.

[Calavera]

He knew the day would come. He’s been stockpiling vintage junk, knowing that time is not a straight line, but a circle. Many assumed he was just stuck in the past, but he knew he was actually stuck in the future, waiting for his time to come once again. Yes my friends, Calavera is becoming the trendiest person alive.

Local Indiana man becomes millionaire by hoarding VCRs and cassette players for the last ten years! I did actually sell an S-VHS VCR about a week ago that I picked up for $5 for $100

I've still been buying stuff here and there, not as much as I used to but I'm still out there Goodwillin'. I just haven't been posting about on here much. I do have a random item to post now for a couple of reasons.

I thought this calculator looked pretty cool. It is a Unisonic XL-99. It just has a nice look to it and the keys are very satisfying to push. They are hard plastic keys that kind of click when you press them. It was $3, I thought it could be worth a little bit maybe $20 or so but if not it just looks cool as a display item.



As you can see it powers on and works fine. An interesting thing about it is that it take 2 D batteries to power it. I don't believe I've ever seen a calculator that takes D batteries! One other interesting things about the batteries. The batteries were in it and are powering it fine. But check out these batteries......





BEST IF INSTALLED BY JANUARY 1996! Over 23 years ago! Also batteries are usually dated many years ahead of when you buy them. So it is possible these batteries were installed somewhere around 1989-1992! Almost 30 years and still working!

Another thing about this calculator is that I can't find any information about online. When I do a google search for "Unisonic XL-99" There are only two results, both from newspapers.com from 1982 you need to make an account to view it but it is just an ad for it. Besides that I can't find anything, which really surprises me. There are websites out there dedicated to vintage calculators but none of them have any information about this one. The closest one I can find is the XL-101 but it is a 10-digit and has a different button layout.



Upon looking a little more I did find this page http://www.calcuseum.com/SCRAPBOOK/BONUS/16584/1.htm It doesn't give much info though.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

It's amazing the batteries haven't leaked and corroded the calculator.