Most liked posts in thread: Computer Space and beyond

Here's my space now slowly gathering pace.

I thought about the new trendy glossy white units look (wanted Space 1999 flavour at one point), then I was gonna go ash black but then you get DUST showing up ever so quickly so in the end I've stuck with 70s formica brown cos I feel our old gear blends in well with it but that's just my take and of course it wouldn't do for us all to show the same look else that'd be the death of individual taste and that's what it's all about - what you prefer.

I'm not sure how long I'll keep this look and it aint anywhere near finished yet (I reckon I need another one of these Habitat shelving units) but it's a START, fellas.

Comments & constructive criticism, please:











So, other than the arcade table top, nothing yet wired-up, connected to any monitors/CRTs or anywhere near the final look but when I saw that unit for £25 it was screaming out BUY ME BAZ for your beasts.

I hope I made the right retro choice, guys.

King Eric thinks so.

What do you think?

 

LOL!

I'm enjoying the comments, fellas.

Thank you.

It's just a start.

What you can't see in the pics is Bev's keepfit bike so it's only a small room to begin with and sharing it with a bike and her fitness gear means there's even less space so any plan to set-up numerous CRTs and LCDs etc just won't quite fit.

Plus, maybe too many screens would equal clutterville.

It's such a dilemma, guys, when you want to show your collection but also need an area of at least one of the machines set-up and working so trying to achieve a balance between some half decent aesthetics and having a working zone - but not too cluttered / too close to the exercise bike!

Yes, the bartop arcade is a great machine and I got it really cheap, Al, as the guy selling it pointed out it had a few dead pixels on the screen - it really makes no odds as it's barely noticeable and saved me £150 off the RRP so I bit his hand off.

Dazza has correctly identified that some of these machines are at different heights on the display unit to accommodate the reach of the different kind of "guests" we get here, ie. small folks, strange folks, shapeshifters, lanky folks, loblolly men and awesome Atarian cool dudes. Amazing who you get passing through here when you're on mind-enhancing diet pills etc.

He also spotted a hole in the wall where I had to remove a nail holding up Brian Clough (as in "Clough, I've had enough". It's not every day, even in a half-finished disused tram shed like our house, that famous football managers get taken down a peg or two but as you point out, Dazza, ongoing works mean constant workarounds and a multitude of mutterings like "Where's me hammer gone?" etc.

One of these days we'll all have a retro space that we're proud of and ticks all the boxes (we hope) but until then, the search for vintage pleasure continues.

More pics to follow as various combinations and permutations are tried out.

Enjoy your cave dwelling, fellas and watch out for invading exercise bikes making a beeline for your space - they have no place in a true retro zone as they encourage flippant activities like fitness(!)

 

Couple of extra pics - 1st up, the state of the dust from the works here that's settled on all the gear in the attic can be seen on my Atmos' keyboard:



and on the breadbin:



The gaffer making sure his space aint been invaded:



Finally, I need to make a bit more space inbetween the retro formica units and Bev's bike...



...or put the bike on the roof.

I'm just totting up my survival chances after the latter suggestion....hmmm...

 

I can see from the last picture that even Eric is a bit puzzled by the current organization of the old 8-bit teasures. They definitely deserve a lot more space with a true and wide horizontal desk and at least 3 CRT monitors to be shared by different machines. Or even one at least 24" TV with a multi-scart socket (6 or 8 ports will do) so every computer can be switched on and put at work to a nice play of your favourite games whenever you like.

You can even employ Bev's bike and let her periodically pedal around the room while you delight yourself in the best titles for Atari, C64, Amiga, BBC Micro, etc. I'm sure she could supply power to the whole retro system and even pour extra energy back into lighting the cave or house. Is that green economy or what?

Don't mind my words. I'd love a room dedicated to my beloved 8/16 bits (like yours), with a nice table running along the walls, monitors everywhere and all the accessories at hand, workstations wired and ready to use, one for each model. At the moment this is destined to remain a dream. Maybe in the next house, but to cover all the needs of the family it would have to be a castle!

 

Hi Matt, yes I remember my comment on that and yes that 360 screen looks nice, in fact very nice. The fact its a projector allows for a slight blurring in the focus (sort of built-in anti aliasing ) so It's sharp but not pin sharp, which is a look I love. I always apply bilinear filtering to my PSX emulation, as the PC hires look shows almost knife sharp edges, which just feels wrong for me.

As for Alex, forgive me, I have a big old memory of things from the past that I pull up randomly and include in my posts, I never remember that not everyone is as old as I am so references may be lost on many

MFI was like a budget IKEA back in my days, they sold flat pack that fell apart quite quickly after purchase but when you were poor they did a budget computer desk and budget wardrobes (as well as a great many other things) which you could just afford and drag home on the bus. The Gibbon reference is based around the UK comedy trio of The Goodies, 3 guys who in the 70's were everywhere on brit TV, they also made comedy songs which the above named, Funky Gibbon is one. They performed this on Top of the Pops, such was their draw.

I think only Richie, Andy and Graham would have clicked on these with Alan knowing the Goodies thing

Must remember that I'm an old git (not at heart though), speaking of looking old, I saw Parkinson at 50 (Michael Parkinson, TV interviewer (for Alex)) on TV last night and BOY did he look almost dead, he was soo gaunt and had trouble speaking at times. I know he's not a young man but I fear we are about to lose another TV great. It's really hard when you get to a certain age, you start seeing people you loved watching on TV or in films etc etc
start dying on almost a daily basis, kind of puts things in to perspective as you realise you are not terribly far behind them.

Sobering thought, but not one I'll dwell on, I still feel young at heart and I still get around thanks to the meds but I still like the things I used to and I have lots to be happy about (40yrs married just gone, lovely daughter, great friends around the world and I can still enjoy a great game, was playing Breath of the Wild the last few days...Fantastic game)

 

I like it Andy
What's the plan for screens, LCD or CRT? Will whatever computer you are currently using get moved out from the cabinet to make it easier to use?

The tin Atari sign looks pretty smart as well. Very jealous of your bartopm always fancied one of those.

What else do you have planned for the mancave then?

 

I like it too. Well done, so far.
I understand that the Amiga and the BBC will be used by the dwarves that usually come into your cave when they stop working in the woods / mines around Hull. The Ataris will be destined to the wise hands of normal people living in your house, but then again, do normally tall people live actually in your house, I mean, Bev set aside? ;-)
Finally the C64 is clearly there for basketball players and giant monsters who want to have some fun with ghosts'n'goblins.
Last but not least, the Oric is simply there for aesthetic reasons (i.e. To cover the holes caused by recent works on the building). What other use can you frankly imagine for an Oric Atmos after all?



P.s. I'm curious, what are you going to buy for £25? An old CRT tv with 6 scart input sockets on it?

 

Hehe.

Yeah, no worries, Paul - just PM me for the 1200XL and we'll haggle downwards as a tenner is more than enough and I will even throw in a dozen Orics(!)

Like you say, who needs a fitness regime when your bod is screaming out for rest & relief most days anyways? Leave well alone I say and if it aint broke then don't try to fix it the wrong side of 50.

Many thanks from the three of us for the best wishes re everything still being upside down, Paul.

We are now getting towards the end and some new flooring arrives tomorrow.

We're then just waiting on Jeff to come and put the rads back on, a bit of carpet putting down on the stairs, landing and in our bedroom and a new front gate and bloody hell,. we'll just about have rebuild the chuffing establishment in the past 14 months.

It's deffo kept us busy during shackdown but I don't recommend the increase in grey/white hairs.

The cat's got the right idea - sleep it out where possible, fellas.

PS. Some grateful thanks at this point to - Vyper Richie for regularly fixing various Oric faults and upgrading my Atari 130XE with stereo Pokey etc; Klyde Manu for the lovely Atari fuji tin sign gift; my mate Shaun in Cottingham for donating a working PSU for my CBM64 breadbin and Brenski for giving me the chance to actually acquire a 1200XL as I know these are much sought after.

 

The sad fact, my friend, is that YOU were different at that time when you played Pacman on a 12" B&W TV, and your imagination was running at full speed, and everything new in computing sounded like a completely unexplored world. Because it was, actually. And that kid has survived and he's still a part of you, fortunately. ;-)

 

Here's a pic I have in my computer space..

It's a younger me with Serena in Disney Land Orlando..

Quite clearly you can see I was enjoy the food WAYYYYYY too much and you can see why I was called Bruce Willis by mates ( I was a tad thinner than the pics when they did it..)

 

Nice start Andy, I'll give you a tenner for the 1200

Fitness bike...No chance, I can barely get in and out of the car without extreme pain. Nice set of machines though, nice use of the old wood effect for that retro feel but it's so good to see the man cave and entire house finally start to be a house rather than a building site.

All the best to you and Bev (and puss cat)

 

Hehe.

I'm lurving those comments, AlexDrito / Dazza.

So true, especially about the green pedal power energising the old retro machines - LOL!

It would be so good if we all had the physical space we actually needed for our caves... back in the real world, we're all fighting for every square inch we can lay our hands on.

I DREAM of having room for just ONE CRT, mate!

 

I'll get you a pic next time I'm up and out there, Matt.

Done some more tweaking but still nowhere near how I want it:

 

That's why I love projectors. Most people imagine a projector and where it would be placed in a home thinking you need a lot of space, like a theatre room. Now of course that is optimal, but with a projector you have a box the size of a game console, that is portable and can be put on a TV tray, a shelf, or most anywhere out of the way (like mine hanging from the ceiling). Then just point it at a wall, and you have a made-to-order screen size, with the average projection range of most projectors being 50"-200," and you only need about 4-5 feet of space between the projector and screen to achieve a 50" image.

My projector is currently set up in my bedroom, just opposite my "XL command center." It is hanging from the ceiling pointing at the wall opposite, at about 8 feet away from the wall and I have ~110" screen image. I bought a $25 cloth projection screen from Amazon and it is held to the wall with thumb tacks. It gives a great image. But I also used my projector when I was living in a 23 foot travel trailer for the first few years and managed about a 50-60" screen and that was side-to-side, not length-wise.

The dark rectangular object in the lower left hand side of the screen is my Atari 2600 for size reference:



And @Paul "Mclaneinc" Irvine , do you remember when you commented that old low-res 8-bit games would probably look shite on a huge screen because of the hug blocky pixels, etc.? Well, actually it's not bad at all becuase it's all about perspective and relative distance.

I'm sure you seen in shows or movies or even real life when an artist or photographer holds up their hands in front of them and extend the thumbs out "framing" a scene? That gives perspective and relative distance to the artist as they do that with a view were the focus or focal point is many feet or yards or more away. Then they do the same "framing" with their hands when looking at the canvas just a couple of feet in front of them.

The same is true depending on the size of a screen you are watching, and how far away from the screen you are sitting when watching. For example, sitting 10 feet away from a projected image at 100" diagonal gives you the same perspective of the screen and relative distance as sitting with your face 2 feet away from a 14" monitor. The pixels appear the same size to you in both instances.

 

Don't worry Matt, it was a critique of the setup, I think it looks great, and I know you were not trying to show how sharp it was (I did read the bit about the 2600 for size). I think I've said before than newer more hi res systems look great on these things and big big TV's, but I personally just don't get on with low res stuff on huge displays. When you can visually count the number of blocks making Pac Man I think its too revealing and destroys a bit of the charm from when we saw them on 14" TV, back then..

Again, it's a personal thing... I played Breath of the Wild on my 42" TV in the front room, and it looked amazing, same with Mario Odyssey, the detail was just great and that is where the higher res works.

 

Matt, I hope you realised that the first line of my reply was messed up, I said it WAS a critique and I meant it WASN'T a critique ...

As for the Sophia 2, I've been meaning to build the RGB lead for it for ages, I have the parts but started the lead, and it's sat in a box since.

Sigh, warring family members, never have I seen so much backstabbing.....Takes the enjoyment out of anything..

 

Bruce Willies??? That's a whole new Bruce

Back in the day when I was thinner, I got called it a lot, that pic is about 17yrs old, I was started to plump up and all the circuit training had stopped. The guys in the gym just called me Bruce back then.

There's a pic of me climbing in the Jurassic sandpit truly looking very red and very unfit but the US ladies loved the UK accent so they over looked the lardy sweat dripping red bloke and chatted away with us.

These days the redness is a cause of both eczema and rosaria, both make my body very prone to being red, especially my nose and cheeks which have flakes of skin all the time.

Love Florida, just a bit too dangerous for me now from what I've seen in the news. Unlikely I'll be going back anytime soon unless the lottery gives me a bit of help

To be honest, no place looks safe these days, if there isn't a myriad of loons trying to kill you for various unhealthy reasons there's a pandemic trying to kill you for no reason at all. Me, I'd just want a place in the country and a working car, sounds like bliss to me..My luck, I'd pick a place where the police are in droves trying to kill the local Alpaca (current uk media story, poor bugger)

 

Like the dedicated Atari section Andy

 

I think the £25 unit is the unit that the computers are on....

 

MFI saw you coming

From the era of "Do, Do, Do... The funky gibbon...(Funky gibbon)

 

Oh.. I must have lost something in translation... That is the translation of your posts into my brain, which due to unstoppable age is understandably going dead in many areas. Well, that piece of wood for £ 25 is certainly a good deal. IKEA is going into bankruptcy soon...

I was hoping for a little led monitor so you could have at least a chance to get one screen in that room. Otherwise you'll have to use some sort of machinery directly linked to your eye retinas or the centre of sight elaboration in your brain. So far, no video peripheral showed up in the pictures...

 

Well, the picture of the projection screen with 360 on was to show how big a screen image I get when the projector is only about 8-9 feet away from the screen, with the Atari 2600 for size reference. I wasn't attempting to show how sharp the image is or whatever, especially using the 360 which is displaying in 1080p so you are not going to be seeing big pixels or sharp edges anyway.That lack of perfect focus you are referring too with projectors was just the way it was back in the days of CRT projectors, as CRT TV/monitors were never razor sharp either.

But modern LCD/LED/DLP projectors can be focused razor-sharp but the resulting image when in perfect focus, that might appear slightly blurry all depends on the quality of the screen you are projecting the image on; light refraction and de-fusion from the screen causes any blurriness and if you have a perfectly smooth-surfaced (no texture at all) silver-phosphate coated projection screen, the image can be focused as sharp as the actual screen on an LCD/LED/DLP TV/monitor. I of course have the cheapest screen I could find, which is fabulous for the price, and the cloth that is used for my screen is very good, better than projecting on a white wall, but it does cause light de-fusion and refraction so it is a bit "blurry" or "soft" on the edges, but as you say, still looks fantastic.

 

There was nothing quite like playing 2600 Pacman on my 12" portable B&W tv

And MFI. Now there is a name from the past Paul.,,

 

I know what you mean about knife sharp edges in emulation, or even with some of the 8-bit video upgrades like Sophia 2. I love using the DVI out for text, especially when I'm using software 64 or 80 column then that knife sharp edges allows me to stare at the screen longer as my eyes don't work as hard focusing.

But when I'm playing games or previewing Rastaconverter art, etc., I still switch back to S-video out on my 800 and I send that through my Svideo2VGA converter-upscaler which has the option for a razor sharp edges as well, nearly as sharp as Sophia 2 DVI/HDMI. But I can also turn on the converter-scaler's advanced HD video processor with powerful 3D digital comb filter and 3D motion adaptive de-interlace processing which smooth out all the jaggies and edges, similar to your bi-linear filtering on the emulator. The perceived resolution is also doubled after the filtering. I especially love looking at Rastaconverter images this way as the 160x240 (PAL) graphic mode it uses, after the anti-aliasing, and filtering looks like 320x240 on the screen which of course really improves the images.

I have been seriously contemplating re-programming the Sophia 2 for RGB output (not VGA) as I also have another converter-scaler exactly like the first, except it's for RGB and YCbCr component input which is then converted to VGA. This way I get to use the 3D de-interlacing and filtering to massage the RGB signal allowing for the same options of razor sharp edges or turn on the filtering for the same effect as above, but even better because the RGB video source is cleaner.

 

I understood you meant you were not critiquing it out of context. But you were spot-on with your observations so it didn't matter too me either way. My projector, for example, is in focus, but not razor-sharp like your experiences. It's due to the screen though, not the projector, but I like it that way too.

As a matter of fact, I've been meaning to get another video2VGA converter like my one as I want one for my projector too, as I don't care at all for the image I get with a cheap $20 video2HDMI converter I have that has no advanced 3D filtering like the video2VGA I have which will make the images for my composite/Svideo equipment look even better on the projector.