i found and purchased the following dragon half items:

appendixclub rufa model kit
3 stencils or trading cards or something
3 RPG books
turbografx16 RPG video game (the not mario party one)
53x72cm poster

i also found issues of dragon magazine (but they were listed at $92 each) and a phone card (but it wouldn't let me bid on it) not a bad haul, i should check out jp auctions sites more often. i never knew a rufa model kit existed (do other characters have model kits?!) and i never thought i'd actually find any of the RPG books, let alone 3 of them. super excited for these to arrive

"Abuse is a run and gun video game developed by Crack dot Com and published by Electronic Arts in North America and Origin Systems in Europe. It was released on February 29, 1996 for MS-DOS. A Mac OS port of the game was published by Bungie and released on March 5, 1997. The game's source code, along with some of the Shareware content, has been in the public domain since the late 1990s and has been ported to Linux and other platforms."

i'm trying to figure out how to speedrun abuse. since it's source was released, it's been difficult to nail down what exact version of the game i should be running. the game came equipped with it's own level editor, so a ton of fan-made stuff like free-abuse was made. these have been ported to work on various platforms, so naturally i wanted to use a port that let me run the game without using dosbox. however, when switching from dosbox to the source port, i noticed discrepancies between the two versions, the most egregious being a completely new and much more difficult level 10. i thought the developers of the source port must have changed things around.

so i emailed this guy who owned the github of the source port. i wasn't really expecting an answer back, but instead got a really great answer back in a couple of hours. not only did the guy explain how to make the port function with other versions of the game, he also illuminated me on the many different versions of the game and development history.

\at some point in it's development, crack dot com decided to change the story from being about an alien invasion (the ending which has an exploding planet) to being about a prison break with mutated inmates (ending is the armor just standing around). the former version is what i played first: it had 18 levels and a hidden teleporter room with warps to levels 1-4. the latter version is what the port was using: it has 22 levels, a completely new level 10, and hidden teleporters only up to level 3. mystified at this point, i purchased a CD of the game off ebay, which claims to have 15 levels and run in 1024x768, which i've been told isn't true, the game runs at 320x200 or 640x480 on the mac version, which has higher res textures.

so the plan is to rip the CD, make it work with the port, and run whatever the heck version that is. hopefully it isn't the shit level 10 version, but i'll make do if so.