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Japan has no ebay. Yahoo is the #1 auction site. Japanese only though. Most sellers don't ship overseas. And payment is via a Japanese CC, or convienance store or Japanese bank.

There are 3rd party sites that will buy products for you for a fee.

colorcomputerstore wrote:Japan has no ebay. Yahoo is the #1 auction site. Japanese only though. Most sellers don't ship overseas. And payment is via a Japanese CC, or convienance store or Japanese bank.

There are 3rd party sites that will buy products for you for a fee.

So...no real advantage then?

Not sure I get your question. If you are keen on retro computers from Japan, than Yahoo Auction is the place to be. The alternative is to pay higher price via a seller from Japan that happens to sell on ebay or use a 3rd party that buys on your behalf on Yahoo Auction. Yahoo Auction has hurdles to buying direct if you don't live in Japan. But, the prices are great... for Japanese retro.

If on the other hand, you're looking for an Amiga, C64, there's no point to use Yahoo Auction. Stick to ebay.

Make sense?

colorcomputerstore wrote:Not sure I get your question. If you are keen on retro computers from Japan, than Yahoo Auction is the place to be. The alternative is to pay higher price via a seller from Japan that happens to sell on ebay or use a 3rd party that buys on your behalf on Yahoo Auction. Yahoo Auction has hurdles to buying direct if you don't live in Japan. But, the prices are great... for Japanese retro.

If on the other hand, you're looking for an Amiga, C64, there's no point to use Yahoo Auction. Stick to ebay.

Make sense?

It made sense the first time, however I didn't see how it would be useful to most weterners given that you say.

colorcomputerstore wrote:Japanese only though. Most sellers don't ship overseas. And payment is via a Japanese CC, or convienance store or Japanese bank.

There are 3rd party sites that will buy products for you for a fee.

I'd call that a lot more than mere "hurdles". Hurdles is something like overcoming a language barrier or navigating a poorly designed interface like Taobao. This sounds essentially unusable unless you live in Japan and have a Japanese bank account.

Having a quick look through it I don't really see a big price difference, certainly in terms of Wonderswan stuff that would make a 3rd party site and all that headache worthwhile.

Betagam7 wrote:I'd call that a lot more than mere "hurdles". Hurdles is something like overcoming a language barrier or navigating a poorly designed interface like Taobao. This sounds essentially unusable unless you live in Japan and have a Japanese bank account.

Having a quick look through it I don't really see a big price difference, certainly in terms of Wonderswan stuff that would make a 3rd party site and all that headache worthwhile.

Without having someone act as intermediary for you, it's pretty difficult to take advantage of, yeah. Even when I had addresses in Japan, I never actually used Yahoo Auction. There was never really a scenario where I couldn't find something I wanted on Amazon.jp, through an online storefront, or in a brick and mortar establishment, for a good price.

It can depend on what you're looking for, though. The third parties that work with Yahoo Auction don't really put you ahead until you start dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars on auctions. Say you wanted a really specific model of PC-98 computer: From my experience shopping around, in the past, your likelihood of finding it on Ebay is probably in the neighborhood of 0.01%. It's probably much more likely found, at some point, on Yahoo Auction, though. The fees and shipping associated with it would potentially be understandable for something like that, considering the price you would likely have to pay. Personally, I would probably just resort to negotiating with an online storefront for PC-98 hardware that I had stumbled onto, though.

I got a reship account. It isn't cheap, but it is very user friendly. I have previously made deals with forum members here who live in japan for trades vs hassle to buy and ship for cost. It worked out well for both of us vs the cost of a re-shipping service.
I've always had an easy experience with Reship. I know there is slightly cheaper, but I couldn't chance rare hardware with a different option.
Also, yes - the Swancrystal is definitely worth the premium price. The deficiencies of the previous models have all been significantly improved with no compromise, and the Crystal version is the penultimate hardware.
Unless you really like (I do!) the gameboy-like passive display matrix ghosting, or the washed out interlaced-like tft display the WSColor has, you definitely want the Crystal over any other model. I only love the older models for their deficiencies; I wouldn't ever recommend them for enjoying a game.
You know how the GBC has a B&W palette that still had just the right amount of passive-ghosting to enjoy a great shmup like ZAS for the GBM. That's still there on the Crystal - the mono games still have 50% shading on the interframe-blending effects, but it has not-shitty color too, on which the previous models fail.
I love how the display fails on old systems to the point that and I have some specialty lighting set up like a photographer might to enjoy gaming on old handhelds.
I don't recommend it if you don't have to go to that extreme (it's kinda hot on the hair). In the WS case you do not need to do that. Just get the Crystal model and be done.

I'm still kicking myself in the ass for missing the first round of Flavor's WS Flashmasta. I'll definitely snipe it next time...

At some point in the far future, Kevtris will have an early prototype of his ultimate FPGA handheld which will perfectly reversed-engineered-clone all early handhelds (Holy shmit!). I'm mesmerized by his WIP videos.