exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Bah, sniped at the last second

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/115113515012

£150 for the bottom half of a Falcon030 case. I think I was 3rd in the end.

My Falcon030 is in a Lighthouse Desktop case which is really nasty and I've wanted a real case for a while. This is the only one that has been on eBay for a while. I think Atari ST top halves fit on Falcon030 bottom halves? I don't know for sure but that is what I was going to try.

Anyway it was not to be.

I got sniped on a Super Gold Card for Sinclair QL, it went up to the price of a modern cloned one, so I gave up. Checking the bids, it was an unusual name so hence why I think I was sniped.

:cry:

It is just a vicious circle all the time with evil bay. I have bidded on basically scrap machines which ultimately gone for £100+ . Most look like they have been buried at the bottom of the garden for the past several years not even in good condition. No thanks.

Evilbay is not like it used to be with them screwing over the sellers all the time, people just do not list stuff like they used to. So there ends up being more competition which drives up prices more. Then you get people who have machines you want to sell outside of eBay, then expect the same silly high prices or more. Then people end up buying the stuff out of desperation..Rinse and repeat.. :roll:

Several years ago I could pick up a scrap machine for like less than £10 Including postage. Evil bay was flooded with them. I wish I had more money at the time to buy more of those machines but sadly did not :cry:

I sometimes see "lots" which will be 3,4,5 machines for example. Bizarrely these seem to go for more money than they would ordinarily sell for individually :stars:

Of course not trying to hijack this thread, but there is not much working stuff, at least for Atari machine, on evil bay these days. It is just getting very expensive "junk" . This is why I think the remake project comes into play as at least you can reuse the chipset on a new motherboard and get up and running without all the "pain" etc. It will be far cheaper than trying to diagnose and repair original machines (unless you have the time and patience and want to repair the originals that is which is also perfectly fine).

I think before you find a proper one, for the time being, if you get a half-decent bottom/top STE casing, with a dremmel for some port differences I think you could do a pretty good job? Then get a Falcon badge and you're singing :)

I've got some top/bottoms laying about for various machines I'm working on, I'll have a little look for you later if you want.

My usual trick with snipers is to slowly increase the bid to max out what they have to pay. It's never failed yet leaving me to buy something more expensive than it really should have been.

Stuff is getting crazy expensive on eBay right now, I have been looking for Mattel Aquarius and Vic20s, but the price is a joke these days.

@alexh I think you were lucky losing out.. you didn't have to clean the 'food membrane'(?!) whatever the hell that means.

I must admit that my two most recent Apricot machines I got via Facebook Marketplace.

The Amstrad CPC6128 which I picked up earlier this year was a reasonable price on eBay, probably because the seller put too high a starting bid price (i.e. a reasonable amount and not sillily low) so it didn't get the bidding frenzy effect, which flags the bots. If there are lots of bids then the algorithmic bidders will latch onto the auction.

@alexh given how things goes, it will be quicker to wait for @Icky to finish it's move, reinstall it's huge 3d printer and finish the case project (plus you will be able to choose your color :) )

Me, I really regret having let go of the falcon I had 8 years ago... found at 400€ at that times

I'm going to keep looking. The problem is there are more Falcon 030 motherboards than there are cases. Why? Because so many musicians rack mounted theirs and the original cases have been lost or destroyed.

I'd be ok with a reasonably modern tower conversion. The lighthouse tower case it's in is just nasty. I'm sure there are people out there who collect 3rd party period correct cases and are interested in one but believe me it's not nice to move and even worse to open for modifications. Once it is set up it's fine