In this second post, I’ll take a very quick look through the attic gaming room. This is where all my old consoles and computers live and is a major improvement over the old room where I simply didn’t have enough space for all this stuff. Everything is set up and working although I do still need to tidy up and label all the SCART switches which are still strewn about the place.

Starting at the stairs, I was wondering where I was going to put all the larger posters since I don’t really have that much wall real estate so the stairwell is now a very miniature gallery of sorts with some of the standups, posters + my giant Origin sign.

I’ll gloss over the bookcases which tend to contain all the games that came with each machine and concentrate on the hardware. This left hand corner has a giant Bang & Olufsen TV I picked up cheap last year which I thought would be perfect for gaming. I was only half right as some of the machines refuse to work with it but the majority of the old consoles are plugged into this via a load of SCART switches. There is a serious mess of power extensions and PSU’s piled up behind to power all the consoles.

Going vaguely from left to right, there is a Binatone Pong machine, Intellivision, PS2,  Dreamcast, 3DO, Saturn, CD32, NES, SNES & N64, Wii, Megadrive 2 with MegaCD & 32X, a CDi, and a Gamecube.

The computers on the desk in front are all connected to the same TV (apart from the Commodore PET). Most of these have featured on the blog at some point already but I really should have a look at some of Origin’s Atari 8 bit ports one of these days. My old hifi is in the back acting as an oversized cassette deck for the rare occasions I want to load something from tape.

Starting from the left we have an Atari Jaguar, BBC Master, C128, Atari 800XL, Vic 20, Dragon 32, Toshiba MSX, Atari ST, ZX81 and the Commodore Pet. There is an Atari 7800 in the background.

The right hand corner has my old TV and the machines that refuse to work with the B&O TV. The Amiga and Spectrum are the plugged into here along with an MSX2, Fairchild Channel F and a Videopac 7000. The MSX2 was another machine that saw loads of Origin ports which I should try out on the blog one of these days.

Probably my favourite section next which has all the machines that use their own monitors. It’s a little strange in that the monitor for any given computer is usually to the left of the machine in question to keep space used to a minimum. The IIGS is actually connected the nearest TV via a homemade SCART cable, with the CGA monitor on top used by the Tandy TX. The Tandy has a composite monitor sat on it with my CGA 286 on the far right driving it. That has the Amstrad CPC monitor on it. The FM Towns in the middle had to sit on the floor in the last hose but now finds some deserved desk space. There isn’t enough space for all those keyboards so they have to get shuffled around a bit depending which system is being used.

The magazine cover disks are hiding out of sight in this little alcove to the right. Finally the Vectrex gets a spot by the stairs on top of the bookcase with all the spare controllers and other bits and pieces.

Now that I have the room for all of these, what is desperately missing is some seating. I had a big sofa in the last room but would need to have demolished part of the new kitchen in my last house to get the thing out again so I had to leave it behind. Given how strewn about all of these machines are, I need something more mobile for in here anyway. All I have right now is my old office chair which is OK as long as it’s just me but not so great for anything multiplayer.

That’s the collection as it stands for now. I’ve got jobs to pay for on the house which will stop it expanding further any time soon and I’m at the stage where there is very little I want any more anyway. Too many of these machines have been barely touched as it is. The definite exception is that I don’t have an Apple Mac anywhere in the collection and really should so I hope to remedy that at some point. I’ve also got a Spectrum Next arriving whenever they get released. In the meanwhile, I’ll see if I can’t play a few more of the games I’ve been meaning to get around to for years.

It’s two years since the last one so it must be time for another look at the games rooms. It has to be said that game playing and collecting has taken a very backward step to real life in the last couple of years and this collection will be much the same as the last time I did this. The biggest change is the location itself now that I’ve moved into a more sizable house.

Speaking of which having recently gone through it myself, I’d be genuinely interested in how fellow collectors get on when moving home. I would guess that 75% of my time packing/unpacking was spent dealing with the collection adding days/weeks of work not to mention doubling my moving costs. The final house I chose was influenced hugely by where I was going to put all this stuff with the large attic room (see part 2) being one of the main selling points. Even before then, you have the interesting experience of trying to sell a house where a third of the rooms are crammed to the rafters with gaming ephemera. During the move I had to dismantle and then rebuild dozens of bookcases, cope with removal men cursing about having to carry massively heavy boxes crammed full of magazines down/up flights of stairs, and sort through literally hundreds of tangled cables when putting everything back together. All this can make you question the notion of having a collection in the first place. Of course, I’m starting to enjoy it all now everything is sorted out and I have some time for myself again. It’s fair to say it’s a lifestyle choice when a collection gets beyond a certain size. I wouldn’t have it any other way but I really, really hope I’m not moving again for a good while now.

This post will cover the office/pc games room which is primarily where the piles of big box PC games are all stored. As should be clear, I can’t get enough of big box PC games which are the PC gamer’s equivalent of collecting vinyl except even less efficient in how much space they take up. Back at the end of November just after moving this room looked something like the above with a large pile of boxes and very little space to actually unpack anything.

This is the mostly finished version in dodgy panorama. Google Photos can’t cope with curved window bays by the looks of it. I still have piles of games on top of all the bookcases but there is quite a bit of room to expand compared to what I used to have. Not having to duck in the back half of the room is certainly nice also. It has to be said that the games aren’t anywhere near as organised as they used to be but I have put a little effort into restoring some order to things since the move. I’ll get around to the rest eventually but it’s seriously low priority.

Starting by the window, this is most of the Origin collection which should contain at least one copy of every game (assuming they haven’t strayed to another shelf). The Might and Magic series is up top. It’s a North facing window so I should be reasonably safe from sun damage – this is definitely something to watch out for.

The next two cases are far more random. The Bullfrog and Infocom collections are in here along with the SSI gold box games but most of this hasn’t been sorted yet.

This corner is even less organised with a bit of a Westwood section + a Legend Entertainment shelf among the randomness.

This section is more orderly with a couple of shelves of Lucasarts, a load of the larger clue books and the Alone In The Dark/Call Of Cthulu series.

Finally all my Sierra games are in here. They were one of the most prolific PC game publishers and this is the largest section with near enough all the AGI/SCI games included. There is a Star Trek games section of which I’ve still played about one of them and finally a load of FPS’s.

At a rough guess, I’ve finished maybe 1/3 of these games over nearly 30 years of PC gaming. Most of the rest may never have even been played which is where this blog is supposed to come in. It worked for the Origin games but how many of the rest of these I’ll ever finish is yet to be seen.

My old computer desk looks unnecessarily small in this room and might get replaced at some point. What I do like about it, is that it houses a 19″ CRT underneath the glass which I use with my old games and a more modern LCD above for everything else. This sort of desk was briefly around in the days of CRT’s as it was allegedly easier to look down through the desk like reading a book. Pretty much everyone hated the design but I kind of liked it and it works well for housing two monitors in a small space.

The giant purple box is my regular PC which is showing its age these days and due for a major upgrade at some point. The white box under the desk houses a 400Mhz Pentium II which dual boots DOS/Windows 98. By fiddling around with cache settings this serves for running nearly all old DOS games. I’ve some alternative machines for the really old stuff but they are in part 2. There is an MT-32, CM-64, and SC-155 piled up to provide the audio for all these old games with an extremely complicated wiring arrangement whereby the midi from both PC’s gets fed through these with the output from all soundcards ending up coming out of my main PC headphones or through the VFX-1 if I have it connected. I may do a detailed post on the setup of this machine at some point but it would definitely need a whole post to itself.

There aren’t any pictures up on the walls in here as of yet so it still looks a little bare. I’ll probably add a few of the smaller ones but this room is on the ground floor so I’d like to keep it normal-ish. As it stands I can just about get away with it as a “library” room. I am definitely going to put some pictures up in the attic so I’ll see what I have left over when I finish.

As a minor aside, the old PC magazines have been moved to what is currently my storage/dumping room along with a load of blu-rays/DVD’s. They didn’t cost much but the magazines are one of my favourite parts of the collection these days. I really like being able to (fairly) quickly look up contemporary reviews on old games when I play them. The only problem is that PC gaming mags didn’t start until the 90’s in the UK so I’ve nothing much from the 80’s.

That covers most of the PC gaming stuff. The old computers/consoles are in the attic which I’ll take a look at in part 2.