Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyRyYTDfO_o
TINY Game Room / YouTube Studio Tour (2.3m x 2.9m / 7’6 x 9’6) - 2021 Update!
Introduction
Back in March 2020 I released a “100 subscriber special” game room tour. It’s changed a lot since then, so now it’s time for an update!
Featuring an awful lot of Atari stuff, DOS PCs, Nintendo Famicom, N64, Xbox and more!
Script
Hey everyone, Rees here and welcome back to ctrl-alt-rees
and in this video we’re going to be doing a bit of an updated tour of this room - my office / man cave / YouTube studio.
Obviously because of the events of the past year or so I found myself working from home even more than I had been before, and also with a bit more free time to be able to work on my YouTube videos and stuff, and this room’s actually changed quite a lot since I did my previous tour back in march 2020 I’ve had a few people ask me about it so I thought why not do an update - so here we go!
So as you’ll know if you’ve watched the previous video, this room is actually very small - it’s 2.3 x 2.9m, which is 7’6 x 9’6, and it really is just a tiny little box room in the house that I own with my wife, and since I did my last tour back in march last year I’ve kind of had a bit of a change of focus really with my my collecting and my YouTube stuff.
I found myself buying a lot of stuff just for the sake of it, and to be honest a lot of it’s in storage up in the loft and I’ve kind of started bringing that down and sorting it out and putting it for sale on ebay and that kind of thing - and yeah, it’s fun to to buy the the odd thing - you know - like the Acorn Archimedes or the Famicom or something that I don’t really have any history with and play with that and make a YouTube video about it, but ultimately collecting-wise, long-term wise, you know, I want stuff that kind of tells my story and and the story, you know, of me growing up and the kind of computers and games that I enjoyed.
That I have enjoyed throughout my life so far and of course off into the future.
So that’s kind of the theme and that’s something that we’re going to touch on a little bit more in the tour itself.
But I think, without further ado - let’s get on with it!
So one thing that I did change completely back in August of last year was my storage situation in here.
I’m sure you haven’t failed to notice the industrial blue and orange racking that kind of dominates the room now, and also this shelving that I’ve put in at the back here, and I had my cubby holes as I used to call them on the walls before which were just some cheap Argos storage unit / display unit type things.
I’ve still got those, and you’ll see that I’ve actually adapted one of those into a bit of a project and a bit of a storage thing which I thought was quite cool and quite interesting - and we’ll have a look at that in a minute.
But of course, I thought the logical place to start would be here at the desk where I film my videos. So at the moment I’ve got my STE set up - this is my actual childhood Atari STE.
I got this for Christmas back in 1991 when I was seven years old, and yeah, so it’s kind of pretty much permanently set up on the desk here because it is probably the most important computer in my collection.
I also have the Discovery Xtra - that’s an actual Discovery Xtra box there - which is the pack that I had as a kid. I also tracked down the original disks that came with it, and that box was very kindly donated to me by a viewer of the channel and a patron of mine, Woz.
Thank you very much Woz - I know I thanked you multiple times in multiple videos for that but obviously as you can see it does have pride of place on the wall and it is important to me so it’s really nice to have that there as part of that display with that computer.
The other obvious thing here of course is my Video Music clone - of course that doesn’t live there, that’s just the last project that I finished a couple of days ago.
That’s the last video that I put out - so that’s a clone of the Atari Video Music which is a music visualizer from the 1970s that Atari made.
So yeah, you plug it into your Hi-Fi and into your TV, play your wacky psychedelic 70s music, and it makes wacky psychedelic 70s patterns appear on the screen.
Just the other thing that we have in the PC spot here on the desk - as I like to call it because this is where I tend to put the PCs that I’m working on - which is kind of the other big passion of mine other than Atari, we have the IBM 5162.
Now you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was an original IBM 5150 PC but it’s not - it’s the 5162, which was actually a 286.
So an AT-class PC in an XT-style case. It’s also known as the “XT Model 286” and this is going to be my next project, I think. This has a 6MHz 286 CPU in it, but I want to strip this down - I’ve barely looked at this to be honest since it arrived, and I really want to do it justice and strip it down and build it up into a kind of a 286 era gaming machine, see if I can overclock it.
I know Adrian Black has been doing some work very recently on a similar 5170 - unfortunately it’s not exactly the same motherboard so I’m not sure if the same principles apply when it comes to overclocking or upgrading it but yeah.
It’s an AT-class 286 machine so it should be nice to work with, and it’ll be interesting to learn a bit more about the history of this computer as well because obviously it’s quite a rare machine, and one that not a lot of people have heard of.
I’ve also got my Model F keyboard here - this is the XT Model F keyboard that goes with my 5150. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with this computer - I have it here because it looks the part but I’m going to have to track down some kind of XT-to-AT adapter or something to be able to hook that up, or possibly even an AT version of the Model F.
The model F is the correct keyboard for this machine, so I’d really like to get one just because I like to have full sets of stuff that matches.
So, just very quickly we’ll have a look at the back wall here, and just a couple of things on here before we move on to the slightly more interesting stuff further up.
So I have my Sunnyvale “Heavy Sixer” Atari 2600 - that’s the original NTSC model.
That’s one of the first production run, I imported that myself from California. It’s got a UAV mod in it, which is a really cool video output mod, and I do use that all the time actually.
That’s a really nice machine just to play on and still holds up very well today, and kind of one of my favorite things - one of the things I’m kind of most proud of in my collection, hence it has pride of place on the back wall and in every single one of my videos.
I’ve also got - that’s a Japanese laserdisc there - obviously that’s Alien. I’ve got a bit of a collection of those - the plan originally was to have them kind of on the walls on display in these kind of LP frames, but to be honest I don’t have all that much wall space in here and it’s kind of all been taken over by other stuff as I’m sure you can see.
So I had to compromise and just basically pick one and just kind of occasionally rotate it.
Next to that that is a Famicom Disk System poster - obviously that’s for Zelda, the original Famicom Disk System version, and Famicom games as you’ll see is one of the things that I collect, and also the Disk System games and the Disk System units themselves actually came with these game posters in the box, so that’s an original one of those.
Just a couple other things, a couple of things for my fellow RMC Discord members.
“Instant MIDI upgrade stickers”, that was part of the RMC Secret Santa, that was my gift from Pillock - thank you very much Pillock - and also a nice picture from Rich of Elmo and a Christmas elf, and yeah, that’s also me in that picture!
So thank you very much Rich, and you’ll see that actually came as part of a donation to the channel which I’ll show you slightly later on in this video.
So let’s move up to the next level up and see what we have up here.
So this middle back shelf here is kind of a more of a recent addition, and the purpose of this shelf is really to show off some of the things that I’ve covered on the channel that I’m kind of proud of - stuff like the Atari 260ST. I made a couple of videos about that that were very popular, really interesting machine, obviously very very early example of an Atari ST, in fact the very first run of Atari STs.
Also the Neo Geo stick here - very early on in the history of my channel I made a series of videos called “One Joystick To Rule Them All” where I built a series of joystick adapters to connect the Neo Geo arcade stick to various different machines. Also of course one of my favorite joysticks of all time, a really lovely thing to use. I don’t own a Neo Geo console and I don’t know if I ever will, but it’s just a nice joystick.
I also have the other model - the “kidney bean” style Neo Geo joystick as well.
Moving along…
Some Atari calculators, that’s something I want to cover on the channel at some point in the near future - I don’t think they were actually manufactured by Atari, I think they were produced under license but there’s quite a range of those and I’ve been picking those up over the past couple of years and I think that would be a really interesting topic to cover in a video.
ORIC Atmos, this was featured on the set of “The IT Crowd” - I won this in a charity auction a few years ago, one of the early videos on my channel was about this particular ORIC Atmos, and yet again another one that was quite popular with people and it seemed to go down quite well, and also again one of my favorite machines in my collection - hence it has pride of place.
…and then my Doom figures, which just basically represent my love for all things id Software and all things Doom. Quite whether I’ll make a video specifically about Doom at some point in the future I’m not sure - quite possibly - but I just love these things and I think they look really cool there on display.
So while we’re on the subject of my favorite things that I’ve covered on the channel so far - my favourite videos that I’ve made - we have my Sparrow prototype.
So this is a prototype of the Atari Falcon030. It’s a genuine ex-Atari engineering prototype. I put out a video back in November last year where I took a close look at this. I did a huge amount of research just looking up all of the custom chips and things that were once on it.
There are some working examples of these out there - obviously this is not one of them - and there was a whole debate at the time about whether I should rebuild it or whether I should just keep it just as a wall ornament.
As you can see so far I’ve gone with the “wall ornament” option, although it has also gained a CPU and some RAM and I’ve also tracked down some more of the custom chips for this. I don’t really have any immediate plans to rebuild it, and to be honest I told the story of how these were kind of cannibalized for parts in that video and a lot of people seem to agree that rebuilding it would would kind of erase that history.
You know, it tells a story in its current state and though trying to rebuild it to kind of be brand new and working - while it would be a very interesting engineering exercise and of course should be perfectly possible - it’s probably better left as it is as a historic artifact, and I think at the moment and so far I’m inclined to agree with that - and that’s also the easiest option which is always a good thing.
…and just above that I have my Astro City control panel. I was just going through a spree of buying things on Japanese auction sites and just thought “wow”, you know, how cool is that! An actual one from an actual arcade in Japan.
…and next to those, what appears to be just a random MultiTech modem. This is actually the very first modem that we had as a family when I was a kid, and my very first online experiences were as a result of this modem. Going on the AOL chat rooms and stuff back in - I think it was kind of 1995-ish - on our 486 PC running Windows 3.1.
So I found that in a box when I was clearing out some stuff at my parents’ house and just thought yeah, you know, considering I am a developer in my day job now and of course a huge amount of my life is spent online with the YouTube channel and everything else that’s kind of a really important part of my my backstory and my history really - my very first experiences going on the internet, and I’ll probably use that at some point in the future just to put together a video about those kind of early days of the 90s on the internet and just to - you know - just to make sure that that’s all documented.
The idea with this shelf was that this was going to be in shot in my actual videos. The trouble is with it being such a small room, and with the lens on my phone not being a particularly wide field of view, is this stuff just doesn’t fit in the shot.
So you never get to see it, and if you’ve seen my video on my second channel about my overhead filming rig that usually fits across here, so that’s usually in the way anyway.
Obviously I’ve taken it out to record this video.
So just to kind of go over some of the stuff that we have on the top shelf here - the Atari 2600jr is actually the console - not this specific one - but the 2600jr console was responsible for my very first gaming experience - or certainly the very first one that I can remember - which was at my cousin’s house one Christmas, and it must have been a couple of years before we got the ST, so obviously I had to pick one of those up.
I have my Harmony Cart there, which is the flashcart for the 2600s, and that’s obviously loaded up with a complete set of games for that console.
Dotted about up here I have some Lynx games - I’m by no means a collector of those but I just picked those up relatively cheap on ebay. I need to do something with those really, they’re just kind of shoved up there out of the way. I do have the Lynx which I’ll show you in a moment, but one thing I do have up here which I am particularly pleased with and particularly proud of is my Atari 5200.
Now, not many people know about the 5200, and that’s because it was particularly short-lived which is a shame because I think it was a great console.
It was let down by its controllers - which were kind of notoriously bad - although of course Atari could have changed those at some point. But they just decided to pull the plug and cancel the whole thing instead, and the 5200 is based on the same architecture as Atari’s 8-bit home computer line.
In fact, it was originally going to be released as a replacement for the 2600 back in 1979 and Atari changed their minds and said “no, what we’re going to do is turn this into a computer instead” and turned it into the 400 and the 800, and then they sat on this for a while.
..and I want to put a video together telling the story of this console, purely because of that whole inner sort of conflict thing at Atari, and I think it’s quite an interesting story, just about how their gaming division and their home computer division didn’t really see eye to eye on that decision, and when the 5200 did eventually come out the home computer division basically forced them to make some changes to it that would mean that it wouldn’t be compatible with the 8-bit home computer software without rewriting it slightly, and as it happened that’s just a case of repointing a couple of memory addresses and that’s it, because it is literally identical hardware apart from that.
So an interesting story.
I also have this Pac-Man prototype cartridge. I love prototype stuff - obviously it’s very rare - so this is a prototype of Pac-Man for the 5200 and that’s going to be a video that I’m going to be making very, very soon: just having a look at that cartridge and hopefully trying to dump the ROMs from it and seeing what’s on there and whether it works. No spoilers but hopefully that should be a really interesting story to tell.
So just moving along, just a few more interesting bits and pieces. The joysticks - I’ve got a nice collection of Atari joysticks, and I like to pick those up whenever I see them. Quite a few different designs on those boxes over the years.
There’s also the keyboard controllers up there and the box for my 2600 Heavy Sixer - and obviously some games as well.
So that’s the original box that that came in, it’s not the ultra rare “chess piece” box, it is the slightly later version but still a very early example.
My Pong machine - this one’s been composite modded by myself. That’s something that I want to do a tutorial on at some point in the future, because that’s quite hard to find the information on that one and that is the original C-100 pong from 1975, which was Atari’s first sort of home TV console, so interesting piece of history that.
I also have the Super Pong which is the second model of Pong that came along, and that’s probably the one I’m going to be using for the tutorial when I put that video together.
As you can see I also have the “Touch Me”. That’s something that I covered in a very early video on my channel, just having a play with that, having a look at that, a very interesting little handheld console.
So one thing that a lot of this stuff has in common is that it was all imported from the US - indeed the 5200 wasn’t even released here, the Touch Me also was a US exclusive, and the Stunt Cycle, the Pong machines - I think they did release those in the UK but they just didn’t sell particularly well over here. So these are all kind of us imports, as is my VCS.
The Stunt Cycle’s quite an interesting one - that’s an early dedicated TV console which Atari made based on their arcade game of the same name of course, and that’s a game that was created - I think that was 1977-ish that was released - and that was created to cash in on the whole kind of daredevil stunt motorcyclist Evil Knievel craze of the 70s, which was obviously huge in America at the time.
A really interesting game that - that’s RF only and it’s NTSC so that’s another one that needs to be modified, but I think that’s quite similar on the video side of things to the Pong machine so it shouldn’t be too complicated.
I have stripped that down and had a look at it and it is in absolutely immaculate condition - it’s basically brand new inside that box. I don’t even know if it was used or perhaps some kid got it for Christmas back in the late 70s and played with it for five minutes and shoved it back in the box and that was it. But I don’t know. But yeah, so that will be a really interesting one to take a look at.
So in this corner I want to start with something that was actually quite an important part of my childhood, and that was my original joystick. So here I have my Wico Command Control joystick, and that’s the actual one that I had with my Atari ST when I was a kid, and I managed to hold on to it for all of these years.
It’s still working great - I still use it even today when I’m playing on some of my old Atari consoles and stuff, it’s still a really great joystick.
As you can see, there’s also my Atari 7800 collection here - a later Atari console, late 80s, that was very similar technically to the 2600. Essentially all they really added was an upgraded graphics chip. Not one of Atari’s finest moments in my honest opinion, but a very cheap console to collect for and graphically some actually quite good arcade conversions on that system, and if someone’s looking into getting into collecting old consoles and old games and Atari stuff I could actually recommend the 7800 because it’s quite a cheap system to collect for and still quite a lot of decent quality boxed games around for that one.
…and just tucked away up in the corner there is an original Atari Flashback console, which is one of the very first examples of plug-and-play TV consoles from kind of the early 2000s. That kind of kickstarted the whole mini console revolution that we still have going on today, and the interesting thing about that is that it’s not even based on the 2600 - it’s actually a NES on a chip or NES on a chip, a Nintendo-compatible console and it was somebody’s job to port all of the original 2600 games (or at least the 20 that they have pre-loaded on this console) to the NES just so they could have versions that would run on that.
I wanted to go over that - that is something that I did actually specifically buy for the channel - and I wanted to go over that and just compare the games to the originals and see, you know, how similar or different they are, and it’s just something that I haven’t got around to yet.
But it’s quite an interesting thing, quite an interesting story.
…and just tucked away behind that is an Ultra Pong Doubles, which is a slightly later example of a Pong machine. This one I bought boxed without really seeing what the condition was like, but it had quite severe battery damage - in fact the original early 80s batteries were still inside it when I got it - and the motherboard was incredibly badly corroded.
So I’m not sure if that’s repairable, or if I need to find another one of those that I can strip down so I can use the the motherboard from that. But that project’s kind of on hold at the moment.
Just to round this off, we’ve got the XEGS here, which is Atari’s consolized version of their 8-bit computer line. I also have another one of those on display on the shelf which I’ll show you shortly. A really great console that - I love the styling on it - and it also came with a light gun which is very cool. It does have a keyboard with it, and because it is compatible with the 8-bit computers you can use all the modems and printers and disk drives and even tape drives and stuff with it that were also compatible with those 8-bit home computers, so a bit of a an oddball that, for a games console, and a very interesting thing.
Next to that, as you can see, the Dragon32. Completely unrelated to Atari, but it is from my homeland of Wales, my ancestral homeland.
This is a computer that I covered on the channel not all that long ago - just telling its story and seeing what it was all about and trying out some of the most popular games on that computer. I was really proud of that video, I thought that was definitely one of the better ones if I do say so myself.
Then just a couple of bits and bobs - the excellent “Art of Atari” book, and another book all about collecting Atari stuff that I picked up at some point, I think that was from a charity shop actually.
The 5200 trackball controller for the Atari 5200 console, a really cool controller that is a proper kind of heavy-duty arcade quality trackball controller for the 5200. It more than makes up for those rubbish controllers that actually came with it, but unfortunately it’s not supported in all games - or doesn’t really work well in in all of the games on that system - so it’s not a complete replacement.
So, Mr. Drillers, as you know Mr. Driller, one of my favorite games of all time, something I’ve made a video about in the past.
“Puckmangame” - that’s that’s a silly little thing that I imported from the Japanese auction site. I’m sure I’ll probably make a little video about that at some point.
…and I think we shall move down to the Jaguar and Lynx section next.
So, just framing this section are these wonderful Atari Hot Wheels cars. I have no idea why I put these here - it’s a very stupid decision, because they’re right next to the desk and I’m constantly hitting them with my elbows, and a few of these have even been knocked off the cardboard backing a few times and had to be glued back together.
Thankfully you can’t really see that they’ve been repaired, but I should probably find a safer spot for those.
But the main focus here really is the Jaguar or the Jag-wah if you prefer, which was the last ever console that Atari released, of course, back in 1993, and this one kind of means a lot to me, because I saw it advertised in the Atari ST magazines a lot when I was a kid.
Obviously we got our ST in ‘91 and this was released in ‘93 so there’s there’s that overlap there, and I really really wanted one as a kid because the marketing really pushed it heavily as, you know, “the next big thing” and this revolution in 3D and VR gaming was kind of the buzzword of the day.
They did actually make a VR headset for this, although there’s only a couple of them in existence - basically prototypes. That would be a very cool thing to own, obviously bucket list kind of stuff, but yeah, as well as being a console that I always wanted as a kid the Jag’s also important to me because when I first started collecting Atari stuff 20 years ago it was one of the very first consoles that I collected for really.
Back in those days you could buy the console for sort of £20 or £30 and that was brand new in a box, and you could buy the games for like £2-3 sealed, brand new in boxes, and so I picked up quite a lot of them and people bought me them as presents and all sorts of stuff, and then I went to university and I was a poor student and I sold the whole lot for not a lot more than I paid for it, and in the past couple of years I’ve had to start buying it all back again.
So the moral of that story is to never sell anything - and yeah, then one day you’ll be like me with a whole room rammed full of stuff. Yeah. So perhaps perhaps don’t take that advice.
Also on this shelf is the infamous Atari Lynx of course, a fantastic handheld console developed by Epyx actually, a gaming company that was quite big in the 80s, and there’s a really interesting story there - as there is with a lot of Atari stuff - just some really dodgy business wranglings and things that meant that Epyx basically ultimately ended up going bust as a result of developing this console for Atari and Atari picked up the rights to it and all of the games for next to nothing, and then of course slapped their logo on it and sold it for a lot of money, and that was actually quite a good console.
Two revisions of that - that is the later Lynx 2. I don’t have one of the earlier ones, but maybe something that I’ll have to pick up at some point in the future, and yet again the reason for having that is because it’s something that I saw advertised a lot when I was a kid. It was around that kind of era.
…and last and definitely by no means least on this shelf is the Atari 2800, and the 2800 is the Japanese version of the 2600, and they didn’t sell many of these at all.
Atari weren’t popular at all in Japan and the stuff that they made specifically for the Japanese market is very rare now. Of course this is one that I’ve imported - it’s in its original box with the manuals and everything else, and the interesting thing about this console is that the joysticks were actually joysticks and paddles together.
So the joystick part works as an actual joystick, but then you can spin them around and use them as spinners as well for all those paddle games that were on the 2600.
So a really interesting console that, and definitely something that I want to cover in a future video and just tell its story, because I think it’s a very cool piece of Atari history.
…and just tucked away in this corner behind the PC, but by no means forgotten about, is my Atari Mega ST.
Now of course the Atari Mega ST was the “professional” version of the Atari ST. It came in a desktop form factor - a really nice piece of design. As you can see, I’ve got the Megafile hard disk, and I’ve got a third-party hard disk here made by a company called Progate, and I also have the SMM-804 dot matrix printer, which was actually manufactured by Epson and Atari-branded, and I actually use this computer when I want to capture footage of Atari games and software because the video output on that is really nice - it’s really really sharp and really good quality compared to the other STs that I have and also it’s set up to be really easy to switch between the internal floppy drive and an external Gotek, and also I can use my UltraSatan hard disk emulator with that.
So a really nice all-rounder really, a versatile example of the Atari ST there. Yeah, a really great machine and also one that has featured on my channel a fair few times over the years - probably the most famous example being my “Sandstorm” video.
So another system that has some personal connection for me, and another system that I collect for of course, is the original Xbox - as I very briefly mentioned earlier - and this is my actual Crystal Xbox that I got back in 2004-ish.
My girlfriend at the time - who’s actually now my wife - bought this for me for Christmas, which is very very kind of her, thank you very much, and yeah, so most of the games that I have here for the original Xbox were actually my originals that I owned back in the day.
The only extras that I’ve picked up really are the launch lineup - the PAL launch lineup from here in the UK - so any of those games that were released in the first week of the Xbox’s launch. I specifically bought those because I want to cover those in a video, like a lot of the stuff I have here, and on that note I also have the XboxHDMI modification, which is an internal upgrade for the Xbox which adds HDMI output and upscaling. I think it’s recently been rebranded to the XboxHD+ or something like that.
But that’s also something that I’m going to cover at the same time, and of course a fantastic excuse to get back into the original xbox and revisit some of those games that I used to play in my kind of college and university years. So very much looking forward to putting that one together.
Now, the other thing that I’m sure you’ve spotted - just in these lovely custom shelves that I made from the remains of my old cubby holes - are my big box PC games, and a lot of these games are, well, most of these games in fact, are games that I played growing up back in the day.
So they’re all kind of 90s and very early 2000s kind of titles when I was into PC gaming.
They’re not my originals I should say - unfortunately - although I do have a lot of the original CDs and stuff from those days - we never held on to any of the boxes.
With that said, I think Ultimate Doom, I have two copies of that because I bought one a few years back and then actually found my original one, and I think Quake is also - that’s also my original one from brand new.
But apart from that, like I say, it’s all stuff that’s kind of been rebought to try to relive that experience.
The exception to that, and one thing that I really wanted to point out in this video and just give a really big shout out to someone because I haven’t actually acknowledged it on video yet, which is really bad of me because I like to at least thank people personally in my videos for any donations to the channel and that kind of stuff.
So yeah, one thing I really wanted to mention in this video were the Screamer games, which were incredibly kindly donated to me by my good friend Rich. So thank you very much Rich for those, that’s really really really generous of you.
I covered the original one in my S3 ViRGE video, and then off the back of that we had a bit of a conversation about how I’d never played the Screamer games before and he said, you know, “they’re some of the best examples of DOS racing games” which of course I have since discovered and since come to appreciate.
So my big box PC games, and pretty much the story of my teenage years laid bare there for all to see on that shelf - and a really nice nostalgic reminder for me as well.
On the next shelf down here, pretty much the same story as per the PC games, I have my Atari ST games, and yet again most of these aren’t my originals from back in the day - a few of them are - but they’re basically a representation of some of my favourite games on that system back in the day of course.
Perhaps not all of the games that I had were - legitimate - shall we say. Some of them were on menu disks and stuff like that, as was very common with those home 16-bit computers at the time, like the Atari ST and the Amiga.
But now I’m atoning for my sins by buying them all back - of course the original publishers won’t get a single penny from all of these second-hand ebay sales - but it’ll help me to sleep at night if I keep telling myself that.
So just a few personal favorites here: I’ve got the complete collection of Bitmap Brothers games, Magic Pockets, Gods, the Xenon games, Chaos Engine, Speedball 1 and 2.
I’ve also started picking up the Dizzy games - of course really great games on those 8-bit and 16-bit machines. Treasure Island dizzy was a particular favorite of mine when I was a kid, in fact I don’t think I really played the others at the time, so it’s been really great to pick up that series on the ST.
You don’t really see these for sale all that often - the boxes are quite small and kind of fragile and just not very common games to come across, so it’s always nice to pick one of those up when I see them.
I remember them actually selling these at Toys R Us, and my Dad occasionally taking me to Toys R Us, and kind of picking them up, and the great thing about these games at the time is that they were kind of slightly older games that were being sold for a little bit cheaper so I could spend my pocket money on them, and that’s the way I experienced a lot of the legitimate games that I owned on the ST through that budget label.
So that’s another thing that there’s very very very little interest in collecting, and when you do see them for sale people just basically can’t give them away, but to me they actually have a lot of nostalgia value.
…and then just a few more games here on the end, just yet again representing some of my childhood favorites. So we’ve got 9 Lives, Batman, Escape From The Planet of the Robot Monsters and Ghostbusters 2 and Rainbow Islands, Sim City, and a few others, and yet again all of those games are kind of hand-picked because they’re games that I enjoyed as a kid.
So now just moving on to my little Acorn corner here, and we have a BBC Micro. I think it’s probably the most obvious thing I have here in this corner, and this machine is something that will be very familiar to British people of a particular age, because for a lot of us it was our very first experience of using a computer - because they were in British primary schools throughout the 80s and actually a lot of primary schools actually held onto them later on into the 90s as well.
But a really fantastic 8-bit machine, it uses the 6502 CPU, the same as the Atari 8-bit computers and the Commodore 64. Really well-designed - lots of input options and peripherals and stuff like that.
Also very graphically capable computer for its day, so really nice to own an example of one of those. Not just because it’s a great machine, but also because of that historical aspect as well.
I also have an Acorn Electron, which is tucked away up here. This is another one that’s very important to me and these two are actually compatible with each other to some extent.
The Acorn Electron was essentially kind of the cut down home version of the BBC Micro, and was the very first computer that we ever owned as a family. So some of my first kind of text adventure experiences and gaming and that kind of stuff was actually on the Acorn Electron, and to represent that I have a bit of a collection here of the Acornsoft games.
A lot of these - Boxer and Sphynx Adventure and stuff like that - are games - Starship Command was another favorite - when I was very young, you know, examples of games that I played as a kid.
So it’s really nice to have those.
Of course Elite - a fantastic title, that one actually passed me by back in the day to be fair, I was probably a bit too young for it. Anyway, but yeah, Elite, a really legendary game on the BBC so a nice boxed example of that as well.
…and the other thing I have here of course is the Acorn Archimedes, and this is the A305, which was the very first Acorn Archimedes, and it was the very first computer to use an ARM CPU, and this was released back in 1987, and Acorn actually invented the ARM CPU of course.
It originally stood for “Acorn RISC Machine” and it’s the CPU that’s now in your mobile phone and in all sorts of different things - the new Apple Silicon - the Apple laptops and stuff are using a CPU that was derived essentially from the CPU in this machine back in 1987.
That’s a really, really revolutionary machine this, and something that unfortunately I don’t really have a personal connection to, and to be fair I think I’ve probably gone as far as I can with it as far as restoring and upgrading and playing with it is concerned, and it’s probably one that’s going to be sold very soon just to make some more room in here for the kind of stuff that I do have a bit more of a personal connection to.
Which is - kind of like I said earlier - the theme that I’m kind of working towards.
So yes, if you know anyone who wants to buy a very heavily upgraded original Archimedes get in touch and maybe we can do a deal!
I also have some nice magazines here - obviously RISC User magazine and Archive - which are both magazines dedicated to the Archimedes.
Just a few examples here of some of the kinds of games on the system, I just bought these really to demo it and show it off for the videos that I made on it. But yeah, some of the best versions of those games in my opinion.
Obviously the Archimedes was a much more capable machine than the Atari ST or even the Amiga, so good to show those off in all their glory.
…and now to the complete opposite side of the world for my Famicom collection!
Now, if you’ve seen my previous tour video that I did back in March last year, I had a lot more Famicom stuff than this - I had pretty much a whole wall dedicated to it - and I’ve really thinned this out a lot and the reason for that is on the Japanese auction sites you can pick up these boxed Famicom games for not a lot of money at all.
Obviously the shipping is something that you have to take into account, but the fact of the matter is obviously if you’re buying kind of lots and lots of them the shipping kind of averages out over all of them and they still end up being very cheap, so I bought a lot of them just for the sake of it just because I hadn’t really had any experience of the NES - or the Famicom of course - and it was just a console that I wanted to kind of experience and have that proper authentic experience, and I knew that if I did import those games that i’d be able to sell them on, and I have since sold them on.
So I thought why not - let’s import a load of Famicom stuff! I also used to do composite mods on these and sell them on ebay, and I do still have a few in the loft that I really need to sort out and finish modding and just get moved on. There’s also a guide to that on my website - which is by far the most popular page on my website as well.
But I have quite a few interesting Famicom items here so I’ve got the original power glove -
[The Power Glove for your Nintendo Entertainment System - now you and the games are one!]
I’ve got the data recorder and the Family BASIC, so you could actually turn the console into basically an 8-bit home computer and do some programming on it, and save that to cassette, which is something that didn’t make it to the NES in the west - something that was exclusive to the Famicom.
As was the Disk System, which were of course the disc-based games.
I also have the Famicom Robot, which was branded as R.O.B. in the west, but in Japan it was called the Family Computer Robot, and the two games that go with that, which I believe are Gyrodyne and Stacking, which were of course also released in the West, and the Family Computer Robot is definitely something that I want to cover in a future video.
I know I keep saying this, and to be honest it’s probably something I’m going to move on, same as the other stuff once I’ve covered it in that video because there’s not really much point in just having it sitting around on a shelf - it has no nostalgia value for me in particular.
But again, it’s something that I bought with the channel in mind and something that I think would make for a really interesting video, so I definitely want to cover that at some point.
There’s also the gun - the light gun - and the story that goes with that. The huge pain that it was to import that and how the Japanese auction site service that I use decided that it was an imitation firearm, and refused to export it from Japan until I argued with them quite a lot.
But thankfully it did eventually arrive, and yet again, it is something I want to cover because there were some quite interesting light gun games on the system, and it’s a really cool looking thing.
…and speaking of light guns, I’m sure you haven’t failed to notice the light gun that I have here with the Atari XEGS of course. That came packaged with that console, as I mentioned earlier, and the really interesting thing about this kind of little display here is that this is the computer that kind of started it all for Atari as far as their home computer division is concerned.
So, released in 1979, this is the Atari 800. It was released alongside the 400, which had the not so good membrane keyboard, and I just have some examples of some of the accessories for this system here - so I’ve got the original cassette player, which is the Atari 410, the 810 5.25” disk drive, the trackball for it - that was a very kind gift to me from Neil at RMC, when I went to visit him last year in his in his cave, in his YouTube studio.
This keypad thing which is completely useless to me, but I just thought it was really cool and it was quite cheap.
So I’ve also got a bit of a collection of the games and the cartridges for this machine, but the interesting thing about this and the XEGS is that, like I say, this was the first of Atari’s 8-bit home computers, and this was the last computer in that range - or should I say console in that range - because although it does have a keyboard it was very much marketed as a console, but it ran all of the Atari 8-bit home conversions of all of those cool arcade games and stuff.
So yeah, a bit of a slice of history there and an interesting couple of examples of Atari 8-bit machines.
So moving down to the bottom shelf now we have PCs! Lots and lots of PCs as I’m sure you can see.
We got our first family PC in 1994, and it was a 486 DX2/66, and shortly after that it was upgraded to a DX4/100.
This machine here is actually kind of a kind of a recreation, kind of an homage to that original family PC that we had. This is a DX4, it also has an orpheus sound card in it which obviously we didn’t have back in the day - we had an ESS AudioDrive - and this as you’ll probably have spotted if you are British and of a certain age, this is an RM ex-school PC, and these were really popular in schools in the in the 90s in Britain and that’s where a lot of people recognize that from.
A lot of people think that it’s an RM Nimbus, but in fact it isn’t, it’s an RM Window Box which was the successor to the Nimbus.
But yeah, all of my other PCs here - we have the Pentium 233 MMX which was featured in my S3 ViRGE video, that also has a Righteous3D- Orchid Righteous3D Voodoo card in it.
So I would love to make a video all about the history of the Voodoo cards at some point in the future, and in fact I actually recently found my old Voodoo3 from when I was a teenager so it’ll be interesting to cover that I think.
Next to that, we have the Pentium 4 NetVista which I won in the RMC charity auction last year, a really cool PC this, I’ve quite heavily upgraded this since I got it. It’s kind of a very similar spec now to the first PC that I built with my own money back when I was at college, so it’s Pentium 4 2.8GHz, it’s got a GeForce FX5700 card.
Just next to that, we’ve got all the accessories for the NetVista - that’s a nice early example of an IBM TFT screen there, and of course the infamous set of speakers - the 2.1 speakers made by “The Jazz Hipster Corporation”.
Next to that, another IBM of course - the iconic IBM 5150 - which was the first ever DOS PC. Released in 1981, I’ve made a couple of videos about that on my channel - that’s quite heavily upgraded - I also have- it has an overclocking solution in it called the PC-SPRINT which I also made a video about.
…links will be down in the description for any of the videos I mention in this particular tour, if you’re interested…
…and then of course the RM monitor which goes with the RM machine, and next to that is something that hasn’t really been featured on my channel or anywhere yet, and that is a Slot A Athlon 650 machine - and that again is an actual ex-family PC of ours which I rescued from my parents’ loft, and it’s an Athlon 650MHz.
It’s the Slot A, it’s a Thunderbird processor, and I think it would be interesting to make a video at some point in the future about the the history of the kind of slot processors - and obviously Intel had the slot 1 and Athlons had the slot A - and that kind of interesting period in history and how that came about and and why.
So you never know, that might be appearing at some point.
That’s kind of obviously like a Half-Life, Deus Ex kind of era machine which is absolutely right up my street, it’s my era and a fantastic little machine that so it will be interesting to cover it at some point in the future.
Over to this side of the room now, and if you watched my previous tour last year these are what I used to refer to as my “Atari shelves”, basically because I had my complete Atari collection out on display. As you can probably tell it’s kind of outgrown this area now, so this has been used just as storage until quite recently. I had a load of tools and just a load of mess on here, and finally decided to sort it out which is kind of what prompted the recording of this updated tour.
So we’ll start with the bottom shelf - here we have the Dreamcast of course, the iconic console by Sega, and I didn’t actually have a Dreamcast back when they were brand brand new. I had a couple of friends who had them and I played on them quite a lot, but because I was basically always around their houses I just basically didn’t splash out on one because it didn’t really seem worth having my own.
So this is my actual one from back in the day, that I picked up when the Dreamcast was discontinued, and they were actually selling the stuff off pretty cheap, and a few of these games are mine - obviously I borrowed a lot of games back in the day - and also it was very easy to play copied games on the Dreamcast - so I don’t have a huge amount of them.
Some of them are mine that I picked up at the time when they were when they were cheap, some of them were games that a friend of mine basically donated to me when he sold his Dreamcast off.
So a fantastic console, one of my favorites of all time. Not really sure what the longer term plan is for this: it’s let down a little bit by the the video output, but then of course there are modern day upgrades as per the Xbox where you can add the HDMI and stuff like that to it.
So perhaps a potential future project there.
It does have a GDEmu in it, which is an SD card interface that allows you to load games from SD card, which is how I use it nowadays. Obviously those old drives are kind of starting to fail now so it’s fantastic to have that as a nice reliable modern option.
So just moving up to the next shelf, there’s something here that you might be a little bit surprised to see knowing that I’m kind of into my more retro stuff on original hardware - and that is the Evercade.
Now this is something that I’ve resisted for the longest time, because I just thought it seemed really gimmicky and a bit pointless, and I was also a bit suspicious that a lot of big YouTubers seemed to suddenly have these land in their laps and suddenly started putting out glowing reviews of it.
So yeah, I resisted it for the longest time, but after having spoken to a few people that actually own them I kind of started to warm to the idea, and I was I was just browsing through ebay a month or so ago and someone seemed to be selling off their entire collection.
So I thought “Why not? I’ll buy it” - it was a reasonable price, you know, if I didn’t get on with it I could just part it out and sell all the bits individually and probably easily make my money back, and maybe even make a bit of profit as well.
So it seemed like quite a low risk way of trying it out - and actually, I have to say, I’ve been really impressed with this, and I’m going to be doing a proper review on this pretty soon.
If you’re not familiar with the Evercade, it’s made by a British company called Blaze, it was released last year, and it’s basically collections - curated collections - of games on cartridge.
So each of these cartridges will have kind of 4 or 5 or maybe up to 10 games on them, and you’ve got a good mixture here of arcade classics from the likes of Namco and Atari, and some of the big names in the arcade industry.
You’ve also got more recently Worms - there’s a Worms collection, I think that was the most recent cartridge to come out. So I actually bought the latest two cartridges brand new, and it’s an emulator, so it’s an ARM-based handheld that just runs a version of Linux, I think, and you stick the cartridge in, you play the games, and you would think well, okay well why not use something like a PSP or a PSPGo or a Vita or something like that?
…and like I say, it’s not really about having the actual games and playing the actual games - although the selection of games is excellent and the level of emulation is is very very good as well - it’s more a collector thing.
You know, some people collect stamps, and people collect coins, people collect Funko Pops, and all sorts of stuff, and this is - you know - a very nicely sort of curated collection of games and things, and now I’m starting to sound like one of those YouTubers that was sent this thing for free and singing its praises.
But that’s something I want to cover in a bit more depth in a proper review, and I’ll do a load of game captures as well and just compare the various different games available on here and kind of show them compared to their originals and just see kind of what they look like.
But as a whole: Excellent piece of hardware, really nice buttons and D-pad and stuff on there, really well put together and relatively cheap to collect for as well.
So actually as a system for collectors, like I say, I’m actually on board with it now.
So this is something that probably needs no introduction, and I’m sure you’ve probably already spotted it - it’s the N64 of course!
…and this I actually imported myself from Japan, and the reason I bought this was kind of as a bit of a cynical marketing ploy for the channel actually, and I was in the very very early days of my YouTube channel, I was thinking what can I do to kind of draw some attention to myself, and try to get some subscribers and build stuff up?
…and I thought what I could do is, like, you know, I can import this, RGB modify it, make a video about it, and then give it away in a competition - and as you can probably tell, that competition didn’t happen, and the reason for that was I kind of got cold feet about it all.
I asked a few people online, and people were saying well, you know, it’s cheating the system a bit and YouTube kind of frowns upon it, and you don’t want to kind of fall foul of their competition regulations and stuff, and I really went off the idea.
…and the thing about the N64 is that I didn’t own one back in the day, so it’s not really something that I have much kind of nostalgic love for. I had one friend who had one, and we kind of played the - obviously - the usual stuff: Goldeneye and Mario 64, and that kind of thing.
But it was just never a console that really really appealed to me at the time, so I think what I’ll do - I have the RGB mod board ready to go in, and I will still be doing that modification and making a video about it, but yeah, longer term I think once that’s done and I’ve obviously put together a bit of a video about these games and maybe compared them to the worldwide releases - if there’s any differences, I’m not really sure, it’s not something I’ve put that much research into yet - I’ll probably be shifting this one on like a lot of stuff.
Whether I’ll still go ahead with that competition I’m not sure, whether I’ll just sell it on ebay we’ll have to see. But the Japanese versions of the N64 boxes are obviously really colourful, they look really nice on the shelf, so if nothing else it’s made for a nice little display in the meantime.
So, last but by no means least: just some reading material up on this shelf, and so these are IBM manuals.
These were mostly imported from the US when I got my IBM 5150, so I’ve got the original manuals for that, the original version of DOS - well, I think that one’s actually a slightly later version, that’s 2.1.
BASIC 3.0, Operations and Technical manuals and stuff, and the cool thing about these is that they go into quite a lot of technical detail all about how the actual hardware works, and memory addresses and registers and schematics and you know - even, I think, even the source code for the BIOS is in one of them.
So yeah, not like the computer manuals of today, and they’re in these really nice high quality ring binders which are very cool to look at, very cool to own, and yeah, very interesting to flick through as well.
…and next to those, my ST Formats, which I actually bought these as a complete set not that long ago - well, maybe six months ago or so - and these were actually bought from a subscriber who must have subscribed from day one and actually went through pretty much all the way through to the end of the publication of this magazine.
So, this is a British computer magazine dedicated to the Atari ST published by Future Publishing, and I did a recent video on this where I was actually flicking through a promo copy that was very kindly donated to the channel.
Because I got these from a subscriber, I also have all of the subscriber exclusive newsletters and cover disks and stuff that came with these as well, so really really good find that and they’re in really nice condition.
A couple of the binders are kind of starting to fall apart, but the magazines themselves are in really nice condition.
…and just tucked away at the back here we have Atari User, which is a kind of an older Atari magazine which is actually dedicated to the 8-bit machines. So very interesting to flick through those and just kind of see the 80s, and kind of the 8-bit era that I kind of missed growing up.
I was just ever so slightly too young for that, so yeah, an interesting period in Atari history and nice little library of magazines here.
Longer term I actually want to do some videos where I flick through these, and just kind of focus on some specific things, but yeah.
For now just interesting reference material, I do actually read them occasionally and it’s interesting to look at the the old game reviews and stuff like that and maybe get some ideas for stuff to do with my Ataris.
…and so that brings us to the end of the tour.
So I hope you’ve enjoyed this slightly more off-the-cuff, unscripted style of video from my channel - of course normal service will resume next time.
If you’ve seen anything at all that’s piqued your interest or anything that you have any questions about, or maybe suggestions on how I can cover some stuff in some future videos like I’ve suggested, I would very much appreciate that feedback - I do read every single comment on my videos, and I do reply to the vast majority of them as well - if they’re positive anyway - and yeah, so if you enjoyed this, please do give it a thumbs up, it really helps me to grow the channel and improve the visibility of my videos.
If you’re not subscribed already and you want to see retro gaming, vintage computing and electronic stuff from me please do hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss out on that.
So finally, all that’s left is to thank you very much for watching as always, and I’ll see you again next time.
Original Video Links
Support the channel!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ctrlaltrees
Become a Member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe7aGwKsc40TYqDJfjggeKg/join
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/ctrlaltrees
Original 2020 Tiny Game Room Tour: https://youtu.be/klC8KNKZvxo
2021 Tour Playlist - see all of the videos referenced in this tour: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLJ-Nv_tKpJkw4zQPf_X3jocp3aVmE3P2
Relevant Links:
Clear console display stands: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B078N4M11R
Black wall hooks: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07PYG6PCL
Racking / Shelving: https://www.rapidracking.com/en/rra/brand/rapid-3
Nintendo Famicom Composite Mod: https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2019-01-26-nintendo-famicom-composite-video-output-mod.html
If you liked this video please consider subscribing to ctrl.alt.rees on YouTube!
