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Volume 1, ISSUE 4

APRIL 2005

Welcome everyone to the Fourth issue of the CoCo Lounge online Magazine. What happened to March? It seemed to go faster then February! Well, this Month I will be briefly touching on E-bay and Getting back to better games for the CoCo 1 and 2.

COLLECTING COCO'S AND EBAY Part 3: How not to get scammed on Ebay. -by Glen VanDenBiggelaar

This Month I thought I would, take a peek at the scammers on E-bay. I have been observing the CoCo listings for months, and I have compiled a short list of BAD sellers and the tactics that they use. Please be aware that some of these practices are legit, they (in my opinion) are just plain dirty and being burned a few times by these tactics, I present them to you to avoid. If anybody is interested I have a "list" of sellers to avoid, but I will not list them here, so E-mail me.

ASK QUESTIONS .
One of the most dirtiest thing I have seen is a piece of hardware comes up. you paid a lot of money and won the auction, only to find out the seller has removed the drivers and software to be placed in another auction, so you are "blackmailed" into paying extra. This is not against E-bay's policy, but it is very unethical. Same goes for software. I have had 2 auctions now where the buyer (same guy) has sold me a Manual for software, and after he ships it, the Disks for it pop up in another auction. This is very dishonest.

WATCH WHO ELSE IS BIDDING.
If a seller pops up and doesn't sell his items the first time, and re-list it, and then you bid and all the sudden there is a lot of bidding by someone who doesn't normally bid on CoCo stuff, chances are, they are what e-bay calls Bid shilling. Remember, you can find out what anybody has bid on in the last 60 days and if they only bid on Items by a particular seller, chances are its bid shilling. I found one guy last week doing this. His biggest mistake was he had a silver multi-pak, and his "other ID" out bid me. 2 days after the auction ended, he re listed, so I watched carefully. after 2 days, another person bid on it, and within 3 hours his fake ID was bumping up the bids again. He was caught by his greed, if he would have waited a month, nobody would have noticed . E-bay has now suspended him, but within 48 hours of his suspension, he was selling it again under a new ID. Not only was he selling the multi-pak, but the 2 Auctions I had one from him (an X-pad and a CoCo max unit,) were back up for auction. I e-mailed him and he doesn't plan to honor his previous commitments and he says there is nothing e-bay can do to stop him. Its a good thing I hadn't sent my Money Order off to him yet, but it really bothers me how people can get way with that.

Prices have really dropped over the last month, but that's because I am not buying right now. after my big shopping spree in February and beginning of March, I have to tone it down for a while. Sellers are probably wondering why, but the usual group of buyers are very happy. I have noticed a lot of unique items being posted. Distro Controllers, Rarer "third party" items and software. I will keep you up to date if a cycle does present itself.

Games and the CoCo : Games produced during the CoCo 2 era. -by Glen VanDenBiggelaar

By the time the CoCo 2 came to stores, the software makers had started to make good progress in understanding the limits of the CoCo and started to pump out some better looking games. Its was rumored that a TRS-80 was used in making the games for the Intellivision at Mattel, but I don't know if it was a CoCo or not. Programmers started to learn how to by-pass the normal graphics and P-Mode and "cheat" it into looking good despite its drawbacks. I guess if we knew more about computers (like now) the designers would have put a way better graphics chip in the first two CoCo's, but at that time nobody guessed it would used for both games and "other" uses.
Game manufactures by 1984 were going away from Cassette, and getting more and more into the diskette. While some were still using the cartridge, at was cheaper to produce disks, even though the prices of floppy disks were still high. Also, most games now required at least 32K, if not 64, so with the memory improvements, more games could be produced.
The biggest obstacle was distribution. If a games manufacture wanted to sell a lot of copies, they had to go through Radio Shack. I was never exposed to the Magazines here in Canada, but apparently a lot of games were made for sale through mail order in the popular magazines, and there was a lot of free games, you just had to spend hours typing them in.

Next Month CoCo 3 Games

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