Just bought a Saturn for $75...

They sell boxed Saturns with 2 controllers, AV, Power and even a memory card (or 3, in the case if newest one I bought a few weeks ago) for $15 where I live. That's a description of my newest Saturn. It's #4, although I only have 2 of them now.

Don't feel too bad, though. My first Saturn was $200 in... maybe 1996 or 1997. I had a copy of Dragon Force then. Wish I still had that! My current copy of Dragon Force is in Japanese. My second was a Japanese white Saturn with a mod chip, which I got in 2000 for $100 (a hundred or so "backups"). Sold it for $250. Saturn number 3 was $30 last year, Grey Japanese and boxed. My newest was described above.

I have 5 memory cards and paid a total of about $2 for them all. It's just like that were I live.

If Saturns are $75 where the OP lives, then that's obviously what that local market is dictating. Saturns must be rare there. $75 is definitely expensive from my point of view, but obviously I've been willing to pay that in the past myself.

It's a wonderful console.

As for the Master System, it was semi-popular where I'm from in Canada. The NES was by far #1 of course, but there were definitely a few Master Systems floating around. A couple kids in my class had one, while probably 20 had an NES. That's a 1/10 ratio. NES was the winner, but Sega did have a presence. The rental shops did have MS games for rent in my town. Everyone knew what it was. For the longest time, Sears promoted Sega and shunned the NES. That also helped Sega I think.

 

Go to just about any Hard-Off in Chiba, Saitama, Kanagawa, West Tokyo, etc., and you'll find loose Saturns for between 300-500yen. I'm not kidding.

That being said, the loose and fairly yellowed PC Engine sitting in Super Potato right now for about 1280yen was tempting me earlier today. I see tons of cheap Saturns, but no so many cheap PC Engines.

 

Have you ever been to Hard Off? Lukemorse on youtube goes there alot and there seems to be some pretty good deals.

 

Errr... didn't I just imply that in my last post? Hard-Offs can be awesome sometimes. They're worth checking out regularly because there's always a chance of finding treasure there. As you've seen in Luke's videos, there are some great things that can be found there. My Neo Geo AES is from Hard-Off, and so is my PCE Duo, along with a bunch of other stuff. I try to drop by a few near me every week or two. There's usually something worth picking up.

 

I picked up about 20 White "Junk" Saturns for $1 each at Hard-Off years ago. Surprisingly, 17 out of the 20 worked. Sold them each for about $80, considering the weight for international shipping affected the resale price. Even with the 3 dead consoles that made their way to the can, quite a nice turn around.

 

Do you still have one?

 

I got my first Saturn off of a friend in exchange for my old mobile phone. Standard model 2 black PAL affair. I picked up a White Saturn from a local electronics store which was £5 and sold as "untested". Put power board from my PAL Saturn in it with no problems, so then I chipped it. Very pleased.