After selling my last one on a boot sale I've picked up one from the ropiest game shop I've ever been in.
Just off London road is a side street that looks like it should be in the shades (Pratchett reference) and not in Brighton, on this particular street is a place called game hive, the grimiest, dirtiest crappiest video entertainment emporium you will ever find (except maybe gamestation Worthing).
In the window of said flea pit was a Dreamcast, sun damaged dusty and yellow maybe but for a tenner you could not say fairer...or so I thought.
I went inside and the guy in army surplus combat trousers and a grubby quicksilver hoodie glared at me over his copy of Metro.
"How much is the Dreamcast in the window?" I asked. "you cant buy it, its show only"
"okay, do you have any for sale?". "maybe, you buying?" okay this was not going easily, at this point I notices the a sign on the counter, well I say counter, more of a pasting table with a crap till on it. The sign said "closing end of April". so this place was going out of business? there was a surprise.
Turns out he had a box load of Dreamcasts, an actual box full, they were thrown in a brown card board packing box , wires curled round each other and the consoles smashed together by which ever Neanderthal had decided this was the best way to store complex ageing electronic goods.
I convinced the ape behind the till to let me test them and find one which A, looked okay and B, actually worked at all.
After 40 mins of me rigging up several consoles Donkey pong announced he was closing the shop early (it was 2 in the afternoon) so I picked the one that was not too smashed, yellow and stinking of fag smoke and actually booted a game and paid him the sum of £20 for the console, a broken one for spares and some games that looked like someone has gone over them with an angle grinder. as I left I picked up a pad and 2 vm units as he tried to get the till open by repeatedly swearing at the stuck draw, I'm not paying £20 just for a yellow stinking console!
I got it home, took it apart and vacuumed the inside, ran a lens cleaner over it and reassembled it.
I gave the plastic a good scrub with bleach and toothpaste to it came up nice and white (toothpaste will clean any sun yellowed plastic, SNES consoles and pads look great after 5 mins of scrubbing).
Here's a pic of the results, not to shabby if I do say so myself.
Update, 20/12/2012
I walked past Game hive today and it is now boarded up and empty, as is gamestation Worthing, I think this is probably for the best.
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