One Gamer's Trash

[captain]

Five years ago I was in Savers, not really planning on buying anything, when I found a Sony CD Player C365 for $20. I didn’t know why I wanted it in that moment—I’d never had a CD player of this kind, only boomboxes, and didn’t know why I might care to change that—but it seemed like it was in decent condition, and a cursory internet search indicated that it was worth more than $20. I have a modest CD collection and figured I’d use it someday.

(It is unlikely anyone, especially in the city where I bought it, would have picked up this machine. It would have eventually gone to e-waste or the landfill, I’m sure.)

Five years and as many changes of residence later, I’ve finally hooked it up to my [parents’] entry-level surround sound system.

Certainly old news to somebody, but this is probably the most fun I’ve ever had listening to CDs! You could say it’s more down to playing the music through the surround system/decent speakers than the player itself, but I would disagree: this player has a 5-disc carousel (definitely cool), reads discs quickly, and has a little grid showing exactly how many tracks are on a disc (also cool). It’s fun just digging through old albums and playing things with interesting dynamics. In the case of some albums it honestly sounds like I’m hearing the music for the first time. Lot of fun for $20! (if you already happen to have some speakers, a receiver, and CDs)

Incidentally, if it even needs saying: it’s a great time to be a CD collector right now. Most thrift stores I go to sell them for a buck apiece, and even dedicated record shops are practically giving them away. Have you heard of these things, CDs? They play whole albums of music! They’re small!

When have you gotten a lot of mileage out of something you found in a secondhand store, on the street, or in the dump(!)? Just how good a deal was it? Do you too wonder whether to feel pleased that such nice stuff is being all but thrown away, right into your sweaty fitful hands, or appalled that nice stuff is being all but thrown away, and that such nice stuff will never be made again? Tell everyone why you feel lucky and happy.

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Thread idea courtesy of antillese, robbinhoodie, saddleblasters

[brettch]

Heck yeah. Love this thread. I’ve got two immediate things that come to mind:

1. $20 CD player my partner bought. 5 disc changer like yours. We use it all the time. Cheap CDs are all over like ya said and even buying used higher tier stuff is 5+ cheaper than on record (example: buying GBV CDs). Love the heck out of it. We load up 5 discs and let it rip for a couple hours. It has the same benefits of vinyl: limited choices, discovery via thrifting, and album based. Also they fly easy when traveling and finding them randomly. Also also it’s fun to grab a bunch and throw in the car for road trips!

2. When buying the CD player from a local guy in his basement, he had a wooden drawing desk with other electronics on it. I asked if he’d sell it, he said $20. Boom! I’ve got this drawing desk that’s adjustable that I use all the time and love.

That was a good Sunday when we got those two items. $40 well spent.

[URL=https://i.imgur.com/FwuDHrZ.jpg][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/FwuDHrZ.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

[antillese]

@captain

Sony CD Player C365

I literally had this exact CD player and loved it! It replaced a Pansonic that also gave me years of service until one day it just wouldn’t read discs. I retired the Sony circa 2014 when we moved.

The primary use case for this CD player is to park the original issue of the Final Fantasy VII OST in slots 1-4. This leaves whole extra slot for some other bonus disc! If you want to mix it up, you can put the Chrono Cross soundtrack in slots 1-3 and have two slots for non-Mitsuda music.

[Toph]

I used to live in a college town and during move out at the end of the semester was a great time to go dumpster diving. I found countless laptops, kitchen appliances, ipods and furnished my first apartment almost strictly with pieces I found next to the dumpster. Another trick my buddy Logan and I discovered is you could check the trashcan directly outside of the computer repair office on campus and find at least 1 or two laptops a week that students would just throw away rather than go through the trouble of having them serviced. We ended up cleaning a bunch of those up and giving them away to people we knew needed them.

I often long to visit that town during move out just to do a little dumpster diving, but more often than not I decide against it because its become a fairly competitive practice and most of the people diving are usually poor locals who probably need that stuff more than I do anymore. On one hand its a great resource if you are on a tight budget, but it is sort of disheartening to see the sheer amount of perfectly good stuff that just gets chucked in the garbage for whatever reason.

[JonKScott]

I‘ve got young kids and, instead of just letting them on the internet, I got a karaoke CD player from a thrift store and burned them copies of my old CDs. They get to practice singing, reading comprehension (there’s no pictures), and learn how to handle disc media.

[treefroggy]

My nana had one of those 6-CD changers since the early 00‘s, which she had connected to her intercom system and constantly piped her terrible music into my bedroom during my child & teen years, an actual form of psychological warefare/abuse I endured, lol. Had I the skills then which I’ve garnered since running away from that environment 15 years ago, I would have/should have snipped the wires easily….

I've had a long life of dumpster diving and upcycling. I can't begin to remember... But I did recently dump old photos, so if I come across any old pics I'll put them here like I've been doing in the thrift thread.

As recently as 2020 I was listening to my CDs on my Playstation and Saturn. Game consoles are the only devices I own that have optical drives!

I have a collection of loose CDs in one of those large zipper binders, where I keep one disc for pretty much every console stashed away for testing purposes, music CDs that are worthless so like *why not* have them in there, and some DVDs for that same reason, but also because some stuff is more fun to watch on a CRT. For DVDs I use my Playstation 2. Aside from my PS2, I think my PS3 and original Xbox's all have dead optical drives, my Wii can technically play DVDs with homebrew but it's a shoddy implementation, so *that's it* for DVD players in my van, just my PS2.
So right now I'm on the lookout for a dedicated DVD player to set underneath my CRT for more casual viewing and to save my PS2 laser from the strain! Need to hit the thrifts!

I have the entire Pokemon Gen 1 anime on dvd, some random anime, and I've managed to hold onto my cherished original FLCL DVDs since I was a kid, which look so perfect in 480i on my JVC and have the original awesome artwork. I also have Super Milk Chan! I'd like to have more adult swim DVDs like Space Ghost, Aquateen, Tim & Eric, Harvey Birdman, etc...

Now that I think back to every time I've watched DVDs in my van over the five years I've been in here, it's always been when I have a girl in here! So they're used for Netflix and chill, haha. Comparatively it's a lot of mechanical effort, moving parts wear & tear, and solar power draw (probably anywhere from 50-100 watts) just to watch video, compared to the 15-45 watts used to watch videos on a modern device connected to my 4k monitor! Sometimes it's worth it for the *ambiance*...

most recent CD thrift in memory was [this](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1458-thrifty-garaging-fleas-share-your-thrift-store-finds/75). I was camping in the woods in Norcal at the time, and promptly blasted hampster dance party through the campsite, playing from my Playstation lol.

Most epic restoration/upcycle in memory was [that N64 I found in the junkyard of Slab City](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/1458-thrifty-garaging-fleas-share-your-thrift-store-finds/65)

[captain]

@brettch

same benefits of vinyl: limited choices, discovery via thrifting, and album based.

For a long time I only listened to albums, but in the past few years I've found it very easy to let Spotify do all the work. I never gave up on albums of course—recently I had to effect a purge on the CDs in my car, they were so numerous—but it's been nice to have a new reason to listen to albums at home. Nice desk!

@antillese Incredible! I‘ve recently fallen away from (or else I’ve become pickier about) buying physical game soundtracks, but the joy I'm getting from this thing has me considering Chrono Cross…

@Toph I just visited Providence RI (where I used to live) and it is exactly that time of year: I saw no fewer than five bookcases sitting on the sidewalk, chairs, tables, tubs full of stuff. I bet if I‘d looked in my old apartment’s dumpster I'd have found some horrifyingly unused stuff!

@Jonkscott How does this work, exactly? Does the machine “know” the lyrics to a bunch of songs already, which it can detect from your burned discs?

[JonKScott]

@captain I think there are discs made specifically for it and a video terminal you can hook up but all we have is pretty much a CD player with two microphones attached to it. The mics have a separate volume knob than the music so it still works with music if you're not singing.

[captain]

the thread of this post got away from me but nevertheless i unleash it

@captain

When have you gotten a lot of mileage out of something you found in a secondhand store, on the street, or in the dump(!)?

eBay is a secondhand store, right?

I got a PSP.

Since joining Insert Credit four years ago, I’ve changed the way I think about media generally, but particularly about games, and consumer technology too. It’s hard to make the case that this isn’t a symptom of longing for the past, “back when things made sense” and other thought traps, but I don’t want the whole world to go back to 2006; I just want a dedicated handheld video game console that is cheap and small and easy to use and, perhaps most importantly, to crack wide open in 2024. I suppose the aftermarket status of the PSP is a necessary precondition for it to have these qualities. If it were produced today, by 2020s-era Sony, it would certainly be more of a black box, and at any rate it would not have the best UI yet designed for a video game console.

The virtues of the PSP have been well documented, but I’m posting about it in this thread rather for what it represents as an object the culture has moved past. Certainly there are us 200-odd enthusiasts talking about it here (and whoever else is buying them secondhand, which judging by the eBay and Youtube markets is no small number) but the PSP was, like every other handheld game console, overtaken years ago by smartphones in Western cultural consciousness. Now there are piles of them in warehouses waiting to be bought and sold wholesale by boutique eBay shops.

Before getting this one, I did too much research on which model would be best for me, and watched a lot of Youtube videos on the subject. On one hand, it’s fairly frustrating to look at all the Youtube channels releasing videos about PSPs, (3)DSs, iPods, and so on, because some of them are obnoxious (all caps “I bought every Sony handheld”-style displays of material excess) and seem to be chasing Youtube views more than anything. But others are useful resources which, much as I hate to give it credit, could only emerge from today’s high production value Youtube environment (looking at old forum posts from 2008-2014 yielded mostly disinformation about PSP displays). And anyway, it helped me make a decision, so I can’t complain too much. Going through this whole process (and following my and treefroggy’s parallel attempts to fill the same role with a New 3DS) certainly didn’t give the same feeling as picking up a rejected CD player at Savers, but I hope the amount of fun I’ll have with this PSP will make up for it.

In retrospect, the later PlayStation Vita seems something of a Rubicon for portable games. Though it was arguably more suited to playing every other kind of game developed for it, the (US-)marketed purpose of the Vita was to give players console experiences on the go, which the way Sony tells it means a blockbuster Gesamtkunstwerk which captivates and stimulates a player along as many vectors of feeling as possible. Today’s dedicated handheld consoles, the Switch and Steam Deck, are both bulky, premium devices designed to play high-budget games and provide a similar kind of total entertainment, numbing us to the toil of everyday life.^[1] The other handheld entertainment devices of today, as mentioned, are phones, whose role in the attention economy hardly needs explaining.

What I like most about the PSP is what I like generally about the bygone era of portable video games: in contrast to this idea of the Console Experience, it provides an entertainment that is not all-consuming. Do I want to force adoption of handheld video game consoles on a culture which has moved on from them? No, not really. At any rate that wouldn’t force publishers to produce older kinds of games again. But I do want to recognize how cool it is that it used to be possible to be a big-name publisher and expend time, effort, and resources on something that wasn’t designed to occupy every waking moment of the player’s day (preaching to the converted).

Thinking about what I could do with this machine is almost as fun as actually doing things with it. You can pick up this 20-year-old device and play games for PSP, PS1, Game Boy/Color/Advance, (S)NES, Genesis, Master System, and so on. Or you can play Pac-Man Championship Edition forever. And it fits in your pocket! Remember that?

The PSP is cool!

Its previous owner played Monster Hunter Portable 2nd, MHP 3rd, the first PSP Like a Dragon, God Eater, and AKB1/48 アイドルと恋したから (don’t know what that is)—probably through CFW, which came preinstalled on the machine along with a mysterious comic reader app I don’t know how to use. As you can see in the photo above the device was handled very gently. They named the console P791.

image

I like not just the PSP, but this PSP. Going to play it more than the previous person did.

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1. Humorously, the Australian TV ad about the sad guy whose life gets a little brighter playing Zelda has been scrubbed from Youtube. ↩︎

[robinhoodie]

I recently got my hands on a Pi 4 when the previous user upgraded to a Pi 5.

I could use it as a computer but it barely runs Firefox. I could use it to play games but I have a Mister et all

I instead found the perfect use in turning it into a low res media player on a CRT via OSMC. Which works wonders as it has a build in 480i output mode over HDMI. So going HDMI to VGA to a VGA to Component box I have a lush video player to play not only all my DVD rips but the device can connect to Youtube and (probably somewhat nefariously) Pluto TVs Anime All Day stream

Here is a sample of the colors and clarity from me watching Vacation! (2010) today

If I can crack the code on getting everything to fully boot and run in 480i without having to do a cable swap after boot, this little guy is going to live permenantly attached to my CRT.