That's a really good looking VHS player, tasuke! Might have to get one my self. I currently only have a Panasonic NV-FS200 (AG-1980 in the US) and a Mitsubishi HS-HD2000U (US player). The Mitsubishi player is a D-VHS player, but does standard VHS playback really well. It is a bit beat up too, scratches and dents as well as missing the cassette door flap. US/JP equipment is just a lot better. Even the high-end stuff here in the PAL region of the world is mediocre in comparison. I do own a fair bit of US/JP VHS tapes, so a good looking player in good nick should be added to my AV rack soon. The beat up player I have is mostly just used to transfer tapes to the computer, doesn't matter if it looks like a train wreck then.

That's not a player, that's a DECK. We always called the good stuff a deck back in the day..

What have you done to customise yours Tasuke?

mostly the set of solid metal-filled, aluminum-shelled isolator feet bummed from a 1987 DENON DCD-1500II CDP,
and the cassette slot door with the Hi-Fi/VHS/HQ printed legend, bummed from the HR-D630U VHS,
in place of the 8000U's own slot door with the simple S-VHS legend.

also, there are numerous clip-on ferrite cores on the major wiring bundles throughout,
and the deck's original, somewhat tired FL display PCB replaced with the fresh and bright,
almost one-for-one compatible FLD module from the HR-D630U.

thanks to the swap-out, i've lost the deck's reception of TIMER PROGRAM transmission from remote control unit to VCR,
but in this day and age, that's hardly a compromise worth even mentioning...

HR-D630U



DCD-1500II





HR-S8000U (STOCK)



HR-S8000U (MacGYVER CUSTOM)

Nice, that display is really nice, clear and bright.

Why the preference for the current tape door? To show more features as S-VHS spec is already represented on the body of the unit I guess?

I have no luck finding S-VHS decks in Australia. I found a JVC a couple of years ago but PAL only which is useless for my old mail order fansub tapes from the '90s that I want to relive. Good decks on ebay US seem to be priced kind of ridiculously(?) I don't actually have any S-VHS tapes but I gather S-VHS decks are more robust with better components in general therefore more durable into the future, especially with some know-how like you have.

Back in the day my friends and I used to rent 2 Panasonic S-VHS decks to copy our fansub tapes for a club. Buying was pretty much out of the question for poor a** uni students like us.

you've got it pretty much right on the nose right there.
to my eye, the S-VHS logo on both the cassette door AND the rightmost corner of the front panel just looks terribly redundant.

at least now, nothing really seems redundant in any real way, merely equal to most every other 1980's VCR out there,
all "Busy" and such in that wonderfully ambitious 1980's Japanese CE sort of way...

Went to the old video store again. Didn't pick up much, but found some curiosities nevertheless. An old screener tape, a weird bootleg of the movie Stripes from 1981. It even says "Pakistan patented", lol. I even found Halloween on betamax. Just a shame it is missing the cover. It could easily be sold for 120 USD if it had it, very rare movie. Got a couple of Robotech tapes too, but again, one is missing the cover. One of the coolest things I found were an old Terminator 2 stand. Looks like it has never been used since the foot on the back isn't folded out. Probably just been in storage for 25 years.

Tasuke - I really respect your passion for this stuff. Thanks for your posts.

Samaron - Is that Superman hanging out with Darth Vader and Donald Duck??! That's the coolest s**t I've ever seen!!! hahaha

Who else?

Clint Eastwood? Frankenstein? Goofy? Pink Panther? It's copyright violation insanity!!

I've never seen that Macross artwork before either, it looks like a collage of images from other sources specifically done for RT?

I think you covered all the characters on the front artwork. Love that bootleg, I think stuff like that is really funny! Reminds me a bit of some of the various crazy Nintendo bootlegs from China.

Robotech, as far as I understand, is a dubbed and edited version of Macross and 2-3 other anime. You read correctly, it supposedly is composed of other anime as well. This is a westernized version of Macross basically. Looks like it became a franchise too with lots of toys and stuff.

I picked up Robotech because it is dubbed in Norwegian. It will never get a DVD release either. Really hilarious dub, no effort put into the voice acting at all. Also really weird to watch anime in another language in general.

Would love to see Chinese bootleg Nintendo carts.

I grew up with RT in America & Australia in the 80s. Yeah it was Macross, Mospeada & Southern Cross stuck together to reach the number of eps required for US syndication.

The art on your cover is all from Macross however. It seems to be a collage of art from different sources though, very different to the Aus RT rental tapes.

I had most of the Matchbox RT toys when I was a kid. They generally sucked compared to GI Joe which was my preferred toy line.

Ok I think I recall the artwork now. It's from a Macross comic done I think by Carl Macek's wife (???) as part of the marketing for Robotech.

*The Comic released by Comico.

A lot of crazy stuff on Famicom Disk System too. Found some really weird hacks. The covers for the diskettes sometimes are really odd in some cases. Many also have just a direct photo of the original cover, so you have glossy photo paper, lol.

It would be just awesome to see a database for tapes ( VHS, Betamax etc. ) like this one. I just sometimes love browsing the lddb database just for fun when I have nothing to do. I am pretty sure i know
a lot of the releases on LD out there and I know which specific title was released in what countries.

Btw, I had a really nice bargain at a flea market. I bought 15 soundtrack CDs from the 80s and early 90s for 8 € ! including a rare German CD of the Terminator 1 soundtrack that's like 40-50 € worth. I also got the soundtracks
Pet Sematary, Robocop etc. I just love finding some rare stuff at flea markets and smaller shops like the one in Norway. Those tapes are really cool. However I do not think I would spend 100 NOK on a single tape
but I guess prices in Norway are different and people earn more over there.
When I was in Paris two months ago a used vinyl used to cost 5 € everywhere whereas in Berlin they cost 1-2 € quite often.

The stuff I bought is older tapes, stuff from the first half of the 1980s for the most part. Those demand higher prices on the collector market. VHS from the 1990s usually is worthless, people won't even accept it even if it is free. Shipping or driving is enough to kill the little value they have. Even if I paid 100 NOK for Savage Weekend (as an example), I could sell it for probably closer to 1000 NOK if I wanted. The big box tapes from the 80s that are sought after, smallbox from the 90s/00s isn't. There are exceptions, of course. A movie from 1998 can fetch some decent money if it isn't released on DVD. A lot of the big box tapes are around the 30 NOK price range too.

The owner of the video store knows the tapes hold some value, but doesn't charge full collector value for them. Stuff like the bootleg and screener tape were free, as they don't have any value among the collectors.

FHE U.S. Ed. 1986 production regular-slipcase version ROBOTECH "BOOBYTRAP" VOL.1 EPISODE 1;



- found this at a thrift, still sealed, many years ago when i was staying at my grandma's house, say somewhere around 1999/2001.

around the same period, a paid about $15 for this MATCHBOX Miriya Sterling at a comics/collectables show held one year at my local Mall.
more recently, i decided, since the figure ain't worth much, to try my hand at improving her paintwork;








finally, i was introduced to Anime by way of ROBOTECH in the very late-80's, thanks to the "VEXAR" VF-1S Roy Fokker transforming 1/72 model kit
that a nephew gave to me;

That is an amazing artifact of the ridiculous rights situation with mecha designs and the Robotech name. Between that and Jetfire, it was downright confusing. Actually no it wasn't, I knew what Jetfire really was and it was the only Transformer I begged my parents to buy me. Now "Vexar", that is really vexing..then throw in the Dunbine mecha and it gets really all kinds of "WTF?! These guys weren't in the show" confusing.

I think you've built up "Vexar" to it's maximum possible quality, well done. I always hated those Matchbox RT figures, you've managed to make Miria less hated by me.



Cool! Good to hear the Chinese were bootleggin' way back in the '80s too. I guess out of Hong Kong?

In the 90's in Australia my friend had a super famicom 1.44 inch FDD from Hong Kong that fit in the cart slot.

He'd rent the carts and copy them to the floppies. Worked every time too, played right off the floppy.

Ah, yes. Got some of that piracy gear. Here are a couple I own in my collection, but also got one for Nintendo 64 that uses zip disks, a multi-system module, and a few others. Notice the FDS disk doesn't say Nintendo, it is just a generic black one with the indentations needed for it to load into the drive.

let's just say that HARMONY GOLD's limp-wristed "efforts" at servicing the Western MACROSS/ROBOTECH fanbase,
apparently a motivation driven by desire to maintain their immoral, downright criminal hegemony over SDF MACROSS rights outside Japan,
couldn't possibly be more succinctly illustrated than by their licensee TOYNAMI's most recent "Transfoming VF-1 Valkyrie/VERITECH toy" product,
disinterestedly tossed out onto the market a couple years back for RT's 30th Anniversary;




contrast that with Japanese company YAMATO/ARCADIA's 2008/CURRENT equivalent product for the Japanese market;






sure, one is a relatively mass-market product in 1/100, MSRPed at $36.99 in 2014,
the other a comparatively limited-production collector's piece in 1/60 MSRPed at around $130.00 in 2008,
ballooning to around $150/$200 in recent years, but that price premium buys you a premium effort
at a cutting-edge high-precision CAD/CAM engineered transformable VF-1 scale replica...

Samaron! That SNES drive brings back memories! I think it's the same/very similar to what my buddy had. Thanks for posting.

The NES disk system stuff I'm far less familiar with but every time I go to Super Potato in Tokyo I look at the stacks of them there for not much
and consider it and then I'm like "nah, got too many systems already".

Tasuke - That Toynami valk is horrible. Weren't there some RT 1/60s released at the same time as well? With inferior quality of course.

I've been (very slowly) collecting the Yamatos since the Hikaru VF-1A Ver 1 I bought in Valks Ikebukuro in 2001. That's sold on now and I've built up a small collection
of v2s and v1 ELINT. I have Miria's Quadluun Rau but it just doesn't look good next to the engineering perfection of the v2 valks so it's on another shelf.

my personal triumvirate of SDFM crown jewels; YAMATO 1/60v.II, BANDAI 1/72 HCM, BANDAI 1/55 2001 REISSUE,
all Hikaru Ichijo/Rick Hunter's VF-1J;

Managed to talk the video store owner into selling me a few of his old pre-cert tapes. I think all have awesome cover artwork, and also fun for historic reasons. All were banned movies. Legend of the Werewolf might not have been, though.

These were rented out in the early days, but I think by 1983 or something they became illegal to rent. Either because they were banned, or simply because they were imports. I've heard that video stores caught renting banned movies (or unregistered movies) were fined around 9000 USD per tape back in the 80s. This is a lot more money today when you take into account the inflation.