THE NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE CAT
$2.50
Okay, this has nothing to do with video games, but I hope you'll pardon the indulgence. I like cats, but I don't like cleaning out litter boxes and mounting vet bills, so this is the next best thing. This guide covers the house cat in exhaustive detail, from its early prehistoric roots to the many breeds of domestic cat available today, all with full-color photographs and illustrations. These kinds of books were a childhood staple, and I still love them today. I love 'em even more when they're half the marked price. Five dollars wasn't unreasonable for a book of this quality, but at two dollars and fifty cents, it's an absolute slam dunk.
INTERPLAY'S TEN YEAR ANTHOLOGY
$5
This is a little more relevant... a collector's edition of Interplay games from the company's first ten years of life. Does Interplay still exist? I don't know, and I stopped caring after the idiotic ClayFighter series. However, this compilation of early games from the developer has promise, including everything from The Bard's Tale (the first one, not the self-aware reimagining that debuted some years later on the original Xbox) and Tass Times in Tone Town, a graphic adventure thoroughly drenched in 1980s culture.
The package includes not only a compact disc with the games and their soundtracks, but an instruction manual that's nearly as thick as the cat encyclopedia referenced earlier. Installing PC games wasn't nearly as user friendly in 1993 as it is now in the age of Steam, and I dread the thought of coaxing these crusty old DOS titles to work with my Windows 7 computers. Still, it looks nice on a shelf, and with one of the games starring the original crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, it'll make a fitting bookend for my copy of Star Trek Klingon.
VARIOUS GAMES AND FILMS
$7.50
Pickins were slim at my favorite pawn shop, but I did manage to find two games and two movies that I really wanted. (Yes, one of them is How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It's a classic, shut up.) Alas, that copy of WWE All-Stars wouldn't work with my Playstation 3, and with the heavy scratching on the underside of the disc, it's not hard to figure out why. I'll have to come up with a plan B for this one, because I detested the PSP version of WWE All-Stars but have been assured the console releases were much better.
Soul Calibur IV worked, but it also worked my last nerve with its insistence on locking characters behind a pay wall. Most of them can be purchased with in-game currency, but those Soul Cali-bucks are difficult to earn in the arcade mode. Generally speaking, you'll reach the kid from Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, get humiliated by him several times, quit out of disgust, and get a whole lot of nothing for your trouble. At least Darth Vader makes peculiar sense as a guest character, and I'm pretty sure that's James Earl Jones' real voice.
M170CP2 MONITOR
$2
Here was the real prize of the trip. It's just a monitor... no big deal, right? Ah, you would think that, but look a little more closely...
This monitor comes with two S-video and two BNC ports along with the usual VGA connector, suggesting that it was designed for professional use. It could have been a security monitor in a store, or used in the production of a news broadcast for a local television station. What this means is that the quality of the picture is especially high for an analog display, and you'll notice this in the following snapshots...
This is Space Harrier from the Sega Ages collection, released for the Sega Saturn in the late 1990s. You might want to click on the image for a closer look, but even the thumbnail suggests a picture much cleaner than you'd get out of an ordinary television. My Vizio shows distracting white noise in some areas of the screen, especially on the edges where two colors meet, but the M170CP2 doesn't have this issue. Let's zoom in on the logo...
The Saturn's pixel game is really strong on this monitor, to the point where each little dot stands out from its neighbors. I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that this is HDMI quality, but considering the age of the system and its fairly coarse resolution, it's more than good enough.
Digital Pinball: Necronomicon is one of the rare games on the Saturn that uses a special high resolution mode... or as high as the Saturn can muster, anyway. It looks fine on this monitor too. Check out the gleam on the chrome bumper slides! Unfortunately, you won't be able to enjoy the frantic metal soundtrack by Dream Theater's John Petrucci, since the M170CP2 has no internal speakers or audio jacks. I've found that a Bluetooth speaker (connected to the Saturn with an adapter) is a pretty good substitute.
Wait wait, I've got one more! This is Kart Bradfield from Elevator Action Returns. Notice the sharp contrast on his eyepiece, the highlights in his hair... just about everything, really. It's a really good picture coming from a 20th century game system, is what I'm saying. I haven't tried other consoles with this monitor, but I'm expecting the same sterling performance.
The only problem with the M170CP2 is that it's hard to find more information about it. Who manufactured this, and why? Why would someone build an LCD monitor in 2011 with nothing but analog display ports? Even the power port is weird, using a tiny single pin jack instead of the square, three pin connector used in most monitors and televisions. I could only make this display work in short spurts until I switched to a power supply with a higher amp rating, borrowed from one of my other electronic devices. This monitor hasn't exactly been user friendly, but it's hard to argue with the results.
I think it was fairly common for monitors to have external power supplies, something like 12V @ 3A and not until later years they went back to including a switching power supply inside the monitor so you get to feed it with all the juice your wall outlet has to offer. Besides that, a nice find for sure though you'd probably be even happier if it also supported RGB in some way. (Or perhaps the VGA connector would accept RGB signals below 31 kHz?)
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