ITEM OF THE MONTH ARCHIVE

Yup, another series of articles coming to an end because of lack of time. There's another future gamer (a girl this time) in the PKP brotherhood. Maybe one day, this feature will back, better than ever.

Older IOTMs (click on the PIC to see a photo)

Item of the Month / April 2005
OK, first of all, sorry for lack of update last month. I was really busy with work-related boring things. But for April, I bring you the Commodore A570, a CD-ROM drive for the Amiga 500. This was supposed to turn the A500 into the CDTV, Commodore Dynamic Total Vision, the brave future of computing in general and Commodore in particular. It connects to the processor bus on the side of the Amiga. Needless to say, the CDTV tanked horribly, and this thing plain bombed. The thing is, it wasn't really even CDTV compatible unless your A500 had 1 meg of chip RAM. Also, you can't connect a hard drive at the same time (an extension for this was planned but it never materialised from Commodore - a third party unit, Amitrix SCSI-TV, exists but it's rare as hen's teeth). And even if you do get something running, it's mostly 1/8 screen low framerate videos and typical early 1990s multimedia garbage. Even the CDTV remote will not work. Still, for Amiga lovers, a collectable piece of kit - it's original Commodore, not too many around, and you might get one for a reasonable price. This one arrived in a trade from Jon Pollitt in late 2004.
Item of the Month / February 2005 
For the second Item of the Month, I chose something that can be considered a jewel in our collection but has never been really mentioned outside the news: Les Schtroumpfs autour de Monde aka The Smurfs 2, one of the rarest Master System games in existence, and something that we ourselves uncovered for the gaming community. In this first picture, it's shown with the first Smurfs game, something of a rarity as well. In the spring of 2000, my wife (back then, my girlfriend) was working in the Czech Republic for three months. I went to visit her for a week and came across a discount store in the centre of Prague. There was a pile of these games lying around, along with some MegaDrive & Saturn titles. I picked one up, then went back to the student dorm I was living in. I looked at the game again and noticed that it had a copyright of 1996. This was interesting for a Master System game, so I sent Manu an SMS asking what information there was about this game on the Web. Apparently, none. It was mentioned as "unreleased" in one list and that was about it. So I went back and bought a couple more. When I got to Finland I posted a message on rec.games.video.classic, asking whether anyone knew anything about this game. The next morning, I had about 30 trade or buy offers. Luckily, my wife was still in CZ so I could hook a few people up with these games. Later on, my brother visited Prague and picked up what was left of the Smurfs 2's in that shop. All in all, we purchased around 20 copies. All of them, except for this one copy are now sold or traded away, so sorry, no more offers... I sent the last one to Jon Pollitt in England a couple of months ago, in exchange for some rare Amiga & Amstrad stuff. I donated a copy to Omar Cornut, author of the Meka SMS emulator, so that he could dump the ROM and it would thus be preserved. See here for screenshots: http://www.smspower.org/db/smurfs2.shtml Prices, rarity? I paid EUR 0.50 each at the discount store. The last one I sold, or actually, relayed to a friend of mine to sell, went for $600. I have heard of a maximum of 2 copies that have not passed through my hands. That would put the total amount of cartridges accounted for well below 30.
Item of the Month / January 2005 
I thought I'd start off with the Sega History Collection toys. I ordered these from Play-Asia just before Christmas and was immediately blown away by the level of detail. Manu had already got himself a couple of specimens, but I decided to go for the full set of 6. The collection consists of a Mark III, a Master System, a Mega Drive with Mega-CD and 32X, a Japanese Saturn and a Dreamcast. The level of detail on these babies is absolutely amazing. The Dreamcast VMUs have detachable connector covers, the CD lid on the Saturn opens up and you even get a Virtua Fighter disc to place on the spindle, the MegaDrive has a connector to fit the Mega-CD, the Master System Converter has a real slot for cartridges etc etc. For something that costs around 3 euros a pop, this is unbelievable. And, unlike some of the things I'll be showing here in the future, these can actually be ordered by anyone right now.