I hope I'm not becoming this guy. I stepped in to a situation to save a warehouse full of media from being tossed in the trash, and now I'm dealing with a lot more than I ever thought I would.
There have been unforseen delays, and it's been over a year with no progress. Everything is stable, and I'm trying to do the right thing for everyone, but there are some customers that are rightly annoyed by the delays.
I've had to tell some customers off... Basically you'll get your stuff when you get it, and not before. It's really an issue of I can't get their stuff out first no matter what they pay because it's buried somewhere in the middle of a container I can't unload.
It's frustrating on all sides, but my challenges are made more difficult sometimes when I feel like I can't ever satisfy some of the people I'm trying to help.
It was more a case of "someone else sold a service to people, failed as a business, all the physical media of those clients was close to being trashed, and he stepped in and took it on." http://www.crossies.com/murfie/crossies_history.html
It sounds like OP's in possession of an uninventoried stack of specific customer data that they're working their way through, and more out of kindness than profitability.
This seems to happen a lot in these sorts of circles. My dad has a classic car and if you want a certain refurbished part, you basically have to order it from this one dude in Australia who doesn't answer email, rarely answers the phone and has a delivery time of 2 weeks - 6 month.
However everybody who has successfully ordered from him agree that his refurbishment jobs are the best you'll get, so everybody kind of puts up with it.
Yes it's amazing how much of the automotive industry runs on word of mouth, ancient web forums, and "call this number" type deals. I've got some old Subaru transmissions that I use in rally and there's basically one guy in Japan who speaks just enough English to help you source OEM gear replacements for it. It's always cool beneath all the corporate conglomerate 1-800 hustle-and-bustle that there's so many small businesses and underground connections that drive the economy.
Vintage/Antique woodworking tools are like that, too.
To get a piece for a tool I'm restoring, I had to figure out the cell number of a guy who bought the property that had the warehouse from a defunct dealer on it, and beg him to go through it for me. He runs an actual business, and bought the warehouse as somewhere to store his day-job machinery, not realizing it was the go-to for this particular brand of vintage machinery.
I've run into some interesting business practices since I've gotten into Woodworking/woodcarving. There's a business I buy carving wood from where his process is you place an order, he ships you the items, and then also mails you an invoice and then you have to send a check or money order.
The most fun experience I've had was when I ordered a Vega fence for my tablesaw. I'm like 98% sure the guy in Illinois that I talked to is also the guy who owns the company, makes the fences, packages them, and physically walks them to the UPS store.
It was legitimately interesting to hear his perspective when I had an issue with my shipment. He literally remembered my order off the top of his head and helped troubleshoot without any sort of reference material.
In a way this parallels IT, with the cranky old person as the old time mainframe/old system admin, the only one left with the tribal knowledge accumulated to know how to keep it running, so the company just puts up with them.
Anything newer than 1975 generally happens on Facebook Marketplace now. Even a lot of the enthusiast forums have been dying and seeing their traffic move to Facebook groups.
Probably half of the rotary Mazda parts/car sales happen on Facebook now.
Sucks for those of us who choose not to have Facebook accounts.
Same with my dad and his car, he is restoring an old Ford and its taken him at least 6 years to get all the parts from a wide variety of sources all over the country. He was very lucky to find some of the OEM trim for the car from a guy a few towns over, in basically new condition. Apparently said guy has a huge collection of parts for old Ford vehicles.
There a few patterns I have observed in the vintage car parts industry, depending on the demand for the parts (tied to collector demand for the cars). I'm sure these apply to other industries like the Atari guy.
Consistent demand, med-high value: the business' inventory is bought up by a larger business that supplies a related niche as part of an expansion plan. This can result in poorer availability/service as the tribal knowledge of inventory organization and item details is lost in transition.
High value but demand is inconsistent/slow: parts bought up by a collector or restorer, they go off the market into storage in order to keep a specific collection going. They may in theory sell parts to others but usually difficult to deal with and almost always requires an "in".
Low demand low value: Scrapped, or stored in indifferent conditions (outside or piled up in storage units) until everything degrades.
Of course, if another "that guy" appears there is a possibility for a stable transition. But as other commenters alluded to, these folks tend to have idiosyncratic personalities and lifestyles so that happens very rarely in my experience.
You're SOL unless someone else decides to take up the mantle of the last guy. So basically every 90's comic book reboot, except they turn into a jaded parts guy instead of jaded super hero.
Far fewer moving parts in consoles. I deal with vintage SNES consoles, and as long as you replace the capacitors and the 7805 voltage regulator, the vast majority work perfectly. All these parts are trivially sourced brand new, of course.
I guess the original proprietary ICs won't last literally forever, but probably long enough for anyone to still care.
I've bought from both of them and there is a stark difference. Lance is a gentleman and a pleasure to do business with. I've bought thousands of dollars of Atari stuff from him. I always enjoyed our conversations. Lance is great. Bradley is a dick and an asshole. I made one purchase and that was it -- I never went back.
I agree. I followed his unusual email instructions to order something and got no response.
So a week later, I called twice a day for three days and he didn't answer the phone. His answering machine says he'll return the call, but he never did.
The next week I got him on the phone and he wouldn't sell me the item I wanted unless I also bought some other things I don't need. It's not like I was trying to get a deal, or free shipping, or something. I just didn't want to feel cheated.
I ended up buying a cheap Chinese knock-off part online.
> he wouldn't sell me the item I wanted unless I also bought some other things I don't need.
Was this an assembly perhaps? That happens a lot where a part in an assembly is prone to failure and cannot be purchased outside of the assembly which which is usually 10x the cost of the part itself.
Nope. Nothing complicated. Just a very common part that plugs into another very common part. I wanted to buy from him to keep everything period and authentic.
The part was $x. His minimum purchase was $y+shipping. I told him that I was happy to pay $y+shipping for the single part. But he then insisted I also buy completely unrelated items $a and $b, which would have increased the price well beyond $y+shipping.
In my case the instructions were actually technically self contradictory and so I just emailed saying what I wanted as best I could resolve within those peculiar rules, and he of course told me I was not following the rules, so I said fine I'll take whatever you require me to take in order to get $x however you want to do it. But for the record your web site said x rule, and y rule, and I actually tried to do those as you can see.
His next email was to cancel the order, complete with a smarmy "I'm sure you will be able to find a source for those plotter gears somewhere else."
Well I fucking did as a matter of fact. And pens too. New ones, not dried out old stock.
I wasn't trying to get any thing special or get away with anything or buy up too much of a limited supply or anything like that. Just a set of plotter gears and one or two joystick cables and their new replacement joystick pcbs with better buttons. I think I only really needed a single pcb and either no cables or a single cable, but he insisted one sold in pairs and maybe the other limited to one, something. I didn't really care. I was willing to buy whatever and the prices were fine. There was absolutely no reason I can fathom to treat me like a dick.
The only reason I even tried to limit what I ordered was so as not to waste something someone else could have. I wasn't using an Atari joystick on an Atari. I was using it on a TRS-80 model 1 with an add-on that only provides a single joystick port. So I really only needed 1 of everything, and I really didn't even need that. My joystick actually worked fine, I just liked the sound of that upgraded new design PCB, and I was hoping maybe a new cable would be more flexible. I was just trying to patronize a business. I mean, I was trying to be as considerate as possible in every dimension possible, buy extra stuff just to make more of a sale, yet don't waste stuff I'm not actually going to use... I was not doing that much thinking for MY convenience.
Every time I see one of the comments that says they had a great experience, all that means is not only is the guy a dick, he's a capricious unfair dick.
Oh my gosh, thank you for this -- I have an old CGP-115 and found the replacement gears awhile back, but hadn't found a source of pens other than Bradley and had a couple unsuccessful attempts to purchase them from him. The mini pen plotter shall live again!
Back in the day (When I was an apprentice Elecronics/Instrumentation engineer at an atomic installation in the UK) there was a company called Bull Electrical who stocked only surplus equipment from large industrial sell-offs. It was a complete treasure trove of "what the hell is this?" moments, and the only way any of us had an interface with it was with their by-mail catalogue which was as disorganised as this website, and a complete joy to spend time with. You'd find things you never even thought existed, all at knock-down prices. I never bought anything crazy from them, just mundane stuff at low prices. But getting the catalogue from them was always an event - maybe once every six months - and it would spend all its time being borrowed and thumbed through on the loo during breaks.
Happy days!
I think this is their current website [1]. Certainly looks about right!
This looks like they're the spiritual siblings of this company [1]. Apart from all the tat, they used to be the main source of electronics parts for more casual hobbyists in Norway, though new rather than surplus.
I grew up going to his shop, and getting their print catalog of several hundred pages.
When they went online, they spewed the print catalog onto web pages, and added animations. He sold the whole thing to someone who wanted make it into a more serious business - said acquirer ran it into the ground, and the original founder bought it back.
It would be a fascinating dive into his finances to understand how he makes it all work. The warehouse costs alone must be astronomical, and the addressable market is very small.
His work is seriously amazing. In some cases priceless for people who have never been interviewed and pass away not long after he talks with them. The collection of interviews he's amassed provide an absolutely unique and invaluable insight into the beginnings of the computing industry that have ramifications all the way to today.
Funny, exactly the same attitude as Vintage Planet, a guy that has spares for most vintage synthesizers: https://www.vintageplanet.nl/
He also has his own system for ordering, where you select the items, then he weighs them, then he’ll give you a price and a payment link.
No better way to annoy him than to refuse to read his FAQ and ask for a total price including shipping, or anything outside the possibility of his rigid system.
Talked to him about helping him update his online shop 10 years ago or more. Clearly, judging by the layout and functionality that still didn’t happen yet.
He already talked back then to a generic shop builder that wanted to sell him a shop for about 500 bucks or something.
The problem of course was that his unique checkout system was sacred and they refused to implement it his way. I told him it was possible, but a custom checkout could cost up to 5000.
Clearly, I was out to defraud him charging such an outrageous rate for a small change to a 500 dollar website! We never became friends. And he never found a honest shop builder.
He seems like a fan of the system operating for the good of collectors and not willing to put up with crap - the $5 item isn’t about the $5 but having to wait for someone who never showed up.
>the $5 item isn’t about the $5 but having to wait for someone who never showed up.
Of course, but then again, it seems a bit unreasonable to hold these grudges forever.
People make mistakes, forget appointments, have a busy life outside of their hobbies. Expecting perfection is unreasonable. Especially since this was a loyal customer for years.
Of course he has a monopoly so there's nothing to stop him.
I recall buying some parts for my Atari Falcon from Best back in ... 2000. It was ridiculously difficult then, and I'm amazed it's still exactly the same now.
But I do recall that I had email exchanges where he seemed quite friendly. Looking through my archive I see that I had an interaction with him in 2014, and it was cordial, but slow. (1 month delay in reply).
This happened to the borgward car owners in the UK. One guy ponied up to warehouse all the parts and then gatekeeper mode went to stun: you had to be worthy to get a prop shaft, he set the prices.
This person seems to have absolutely no grasp of the concept of forgiveness.
People make mistakes. Penalizing people for arcane ordering snafus for prolonged periods of time seems like the classic definition of power tripping, nothing more. And penalizing people when you know they cannot get the part they need elsewhere is just cruelty.
The problem that causes this is that the supply and demand curves drift farther and farther apart until they barely intersect at all. At some point they will no longer intersect, and that will be that.
I wasn't just making a joke. I suppose that the strict rules for ordering, and the temporary banning of people, might've been inspired by the 1995 Seinfeld episode. The timeline might also fit.
> Prior to Atari’s collapse in 1996, Koda’s catalog was 46 pages long. After Atari folded, he released a new version, with 228 pages. But none of this explains the endless rules and stipulations, the blacklisting, or the website.
Order minimum $50, order maximum 3 parts. There is not much margin for profit in there.
1 order inventory catalogue 20 years of date + X pages of "updates". This person doesn't suffer fools and I would venture it's more of hobby than a business.
Given the monopoly he has, he could probably get away with multiplying the price of items and trying to transform it in a profitable business. It's more of a choice to make it a hobby.
Generally speaking, at least for me, respect is earned, not demanded. If you have to demand it, it's not respect you are asking for, it's... fear(maybe?).
Two different meanings of the word. Respect is earned, but respect is also given [out of respect] and respect is also given [out of good upbringing, e.g. to old people].
Bradley sounds like a crotchety old asshole that would be happier if he'd get with the times and use an digital system instead of limiting customers to 3 items and not accepting paypal unless the total is over $50/
I wish I had had the foresight to get my own dragon hoard. It seems like anything I was ever interested in (and I'm not young) has become a 'collectors' item' in the last few decades.
It's a bummer to get bid out of everything over time.
It's happening now with Japanese bubble era cars, and it's funny to watch the cars everyone thought were terrible suddenly become pop culture icons. I have stock parts in my shed that you couldn't give away, and now people are paying through the nose for them.
I sold a car for 4k that's now selling for 30-40k just four years later, it's judicious. I am kicking myself, I may never own another because I wouldn't reasonably pay that much for something that's objectively not worth it, but that's the market.
Driving a 90s honda/nissan/toyota/mazda? Check the market price right now, you might be sitting on a cheeky house deposit.
I knew a lad who went to buy a field from an elderly farmer. The old man quoted 1.2 million euros and my acquaintance, thinking what harm could there be in chancing his arm said he'd give him 1 million.
The old man said the price was now 1.4 million. And he got it.
Sometimes people just like to do things their own way. I don't think you have to Neuro divergent to care more about your principles than money.
Anyone raising price after getting a perceived lowball offer sends a clear signal that they don't know what they're doing. Real estate is often listed much higher than the sale price since it's (usually) much more difficult to go higher than it is to go lower. The seller has to set a price up front which is a disadvantage when negotiating. So sellers often set the price higher than what they would accept hoping that they can find a high price but having some wiggle room to negotiate down without being disappointed.
If you are given an offer that is below what you would accept, a polite no will suffice.
Depends on how you view transactions. I like term "non negotiable" for exactly this clarification.
It can be simple: thing that person is selling they personally value at X. If person buying wants to pay X, they get it.
If I can afford not to do some weird social negotiation dance - I won't. I do realise though that sometimes I really want the transaction to go ahead so I have to do the dance.
So while I am not about to endorse screaming "Did I fucking stutter!?" I can absolutely understand a person saying they want more now because you are making this process harder than it needs to be.
How would you feel if it was during a job offer negotiation? If a company offered you 100k, you counter-proposed 120k, and then they came back saying it's gonna be 75k now, take it or leave it?
In general, I cannot condone punishing people for negotiating. It's not about business, it's making sure people feel small; making them feel your power and feel their powerlessness towards you. It's making people feel bad for the sake of making them feel bad.
I've actually seen it more the other way - like they ask you what you want, and if you say, then they will be like okay how about 90% of that?
I had one job offer where I absolutely nailed the interview and basically walked out with a verbal offer, and then the founder decided to offer me $10k less than what I asked for. I didn't respond for a week, and then he offered me what I asked for. But because of that, I didn't even respond to the second email, I don't want to work for someone who will screw things up over small points like that. Again, like you say it was just about them trying to screw me over because they felt like they could.
In the case of employer and employee, the employer is in the position of power. Even in tech where employees are in demand and have much more power that in other sectors, employers are still more powerful.
In the other cases discussed, the seller is in the position of power. And they rub their power in the face of the less powerful party because that party was operating on the assumption of equality of power and dared to negotiate.
I’d to the same to anyone trying to short change me.
I guess it really depends on what your local market looks like. In some places the price you list land or real estate for is highest you could possible hope of getting and you go in with realization that you will almost certainly get less. There it is common to start the 'bidding' ~20% under asking.
In other places the price you list is the lowest price you will consider selling for and you'll never seriously consider an offer under that. There you normally start bidding at 0-10% over asking.
I did that exact same thing, highly effective. It essentially tells your opponent during the negotiations that you have the advantage and that now you are both aware of it.
Plus the emulators, despite being very good, aren't perfect. It's not unusual to have minor timing issues cause weird glitches in software that was written when the developer could expect little to no variance.
Unfortunately, it looks like the emulation community also has a lot of people who are just like this guy. I've read about emulation code for obscure systems being removed from MAME because it offended some collector and he threatened to never release anything again. There's a huge amount of counterproductive drama and politics in the community.
Dont think that has happened in awhile for MAME. But yeah the emu community has its share of people like that. Grouchy guys who if you do not play by their rules they just ban you. There are other emu guys that are great to work with. There are also some reformed grouchy guys. But you can still tick them off. I think the guys who are holding onto the old hw are starting to realize that the stuff just is not worth much and yes that stuff is rotting. It was just not designed to last 40+ years. There was a point in the early 2000s where it seemed like every other week someone was mad someone else had dumped/emulated something that made someone else mad. Not so much anymore.
MAME itself has some of this too despite basically being a GPL2/BSD codebase.
There are a lot of rare things that are completely unavailable only in the hands of a sole collector (usually Japanese). Then they'll mail it around to friends under a strict "no dumping rule". They like showing off what they have.
Now of course those "no dumping" rules have been violated over the years and usually to disastrous effect but also you have situations where the rom dump is ALSO only in the hands of a few people.
Like what? I honestly don't see why these collectors have enough leverage to impose any disastrous consequences. The rare stuff is in most cases merely a curiosity. In the long run it doesn't really matter if those things are preserved. It would be nice but it certainly doesn't justify bending over backwards for a collector and their "rules". Devkits for example would be extremely important items but I don't see people talking about stuff like that very often.
When Labyrinthe/Horror Tour 3 leaked, the collector went absolutely apeshit and stopped giving anyone access to anything. And that was a ROM collector downstream of the collector with exclusive physical copies. It was someone who wasn't supposed to have those dumps and probably burned a lot of (if not all of) their connections. https://kotaku.com/collection-of-rare-japanese-games-leaks-o...
Keep in mind that a lot of the rare stuff ends up helping contribute to emulator development/accuracy.
The importance of devkits (and these are still hotly collected) only goes so far as decapping ICs is hard work. A finished game might show you new valid opcodes or undocumented system call you weren't aware of.
Keep in mind that the way collecting works in Japan is more about archiving and a rare few people get things into their collection because they are trusted. They're trusted to preserve it, but also entrusted not to make it available to everyone who wants to download it for free. Creators revisit prior works (or make available for resale) far more frequently than we tend to here.
Don’t forget the incredible amount of work that goes into releasing an even halfway decent emulator. Just for pirates to run with it sending thousands of useless bug reports your way.
I thought non-commercial licenses were an old tradition in the emulator community. Snes9x and MAME code were licensed as such for a long time. I've seen developers release code under GPL/MIT/BSD and then object to how other people using their code. Is this what you mean?
In the end, none of these licenses matter anyway. I seriously doubt anyone in this community will ever sue somebody over license violations. People do nothing while corporations file DMCA claims against screenshots despite Sony vs. Connectix.
MAME had one of those style licenses. They switched to GPL/BSD because of your second point. It did not really matter as the companies making these knock off devices/packs had zero intention of following the law anyway, and the people making the emu did not have the money to go after the offenders. It was also a pain if they really wanted to have someone make one of those devices with your code. For example if one of the orig rightsholders to the roms wanted to use MAME they basically couldn't because of that license. For a large company it does matter for import/export and risk management.
People releasing code GPL/MIT/MIT and then getting mad when someone they do not like using it is always going to happen. Not everyone agrees on everything. In the emu case it was more they just did not want to get sued.
What I think is more interesting is there are still devices being created that are using the older code before the switchover that has the restriction and the emulation is worse!
Also Before that Sony v. Connectix it was not very clear, with takedown notices every few months to the sites. Now you pretty much only see the notices on the rom sites. By the point the case was done the license was already mostly in place. Even switching over to the new one was a large undertaking that they put off for a long time. I think a small handful of drivers they could not find the orig authors to ask and they pulled them out and re-wrote them.
I'm not trying to defend actions like that. But it can be tough to be in those shoes. The video game world now has a good number of small outfits serving up very desirable items. Such as TerraOnion, Analogue, Black Dog, Game-Tech, etc. They are just a few people trying to please thousands and thousands of customers. I'm sure dealing with that many angry people gets old, fast.
I recently switched from high-end Atari emulators to real hardware, and there's no comparison. Even the best emulators have latency issues, and compatibility issues.
When I switched from emulators to actual hardware, suddenly my paddles work perfectly, and the screen artifacts that appear in some games disappeared! I guess emulators just can't handle the A/D conversion well.
There have been unforseen delays, and it's been over a year with no progress. Everything is stable, and I'm trying to do the right thing for everyone, but there are some customers that are rightly annoyed by the delays.
I've had to tell some customers off... Basically you'll get your stuff when you get it, and not before. It's really an issue of I can't get their stuff out first no matter what they pay because it's buried somewhere in the middle of a container I can't unload.
It's frustrating on all sides, but my challenges are made more difficult sometimes when I feel like I can't ever satisfy some of the people I'm trying to help.