It's scary to think about it, but virtually everything you see or read in Phosphor Dot Fossils and theLogBook.com
is written, screen-grabbed, coded or designed in a small room measuring
approximately 11 x 11 feet. This tiny space, also serving as a spare bedroom,
is called the Escape Pod, and it's a bit of an arcade-in-miniature - a nice
little place to get away from it all.
The centerpiece of the Escape Pod, with and without room lighting - as you can
see, it lights itself just fine, thank you. The big rack on the left
contains A/V gear, monitors, processing equipment, and a Playstation setup
arranged at a perfect standing height for that vintage arcade feel. The
entertainment center at right houses various game consoles (you can see the
Atari 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision here, though there are several others
in the closed compartment at the bottom) and most of my CD collection (in the
form of Pioneer CD changer magazines). The
backlit marquees throw some colorful light without being blinding.
The main feature of the steel rack is the
Playstation setup; an unmodded U.S. machine is on the left, a Japanese one
on the right and a big honkin' twin arcade stick sits in front of them;
cables are swapped to whichever machine is currently in use. I
seldom use the turbo or slo-mo buttons, if you're wondering what the
controller cables seem to be blocking. The drawer unit, filling the corner
between the foot of the bed and the end of my computer desk, holds the vast
majority of my cartridge-based games; take a look inside those drawers here.
I recently got a Playstation trakball, and figured out a simple way to integrate
it into the above "arcade minus the cabinet" setup without having to
move the big, bulky twin joystick. I simply turn a small plastic container - one
I used to use for newly-arrived, untested game cartridges - upside down (after
washing and drying it, of course, to get any loose dust off) over some of the
buttons on the twin stick, and put the trakball (a fancy little number by Nyko)
on top of that. It only covers the left button cluster, without pressing or
harming any of them, and allows the player 2 controls to be used for fire
buttons or other actions. For stuff like Missile Command, Centipede, Crystal
Castles or Marble Madness, this arrangement is pure bliss.
A very difficult thing to photograph, but here goes: the blue lights make the
twin stick's buttons glow in a very cool, very 80s blacklight kind of
way. This is as close as I could come to capturing that without any
light except for the rope lights, and it's really not even remotely doing the
brightness of the effect justice. Think of the arcade cabinet from
Tron - if you see it with your own eyes, it's about that cool.
The "frequent flyer" consoles - Intellivision, ColecoVision, Atari
2600 and 5200, and Odyssey2 - all live "outside the box"
on permanent display, and always hooked up and ready to play. In the closed
lower compartment of the entertainment center, also permanently hooked up but
hidden from view most of the time, are an Apple IIc, Atari 7800, NES (perched
temporarily on a box of game boxes in this photo), and an Atari 400.
Since these other consoles are at a 90 degree angle from the two main video
monitors, I've kept the 13" TV in here that I was using prior to
remodeling the room for those games. Beneath that, there's a drawer (mainly
full of spare cables and adapters), underneath which is the power strip that
controls all of the marquee lights. One "transformer sized" outlet
is left open on this strip for whichever console is currently in play; all of
their AC adapters live on the same shelf, ready to be plugged in. The mixer
in the shelf below is used to monitor sound levels during video work. Squeezed
tightly between the entertainment center and dresser are two plastic drawer
units, holding extra controllers, extension cables, empty CD cases, and all of
my vintage floppy disk games.
Video gear, good for gaming or just about anything else. A four-VCR stack
shares one shelf with an audio CD recorder and a DVD player (one of the VCRs is
the infamous "dead" machine that makes this site's screen grabs
possible, while another is an international format-conversion deck); below that,
next to the big joystick, is a DVD recorder and an 18-disc CD changer, along
with an old Realistic stereo reverb gadget that gives my old monaural games a
jolt of suitably lo-fi spacey stereo.
Meet the Top-Of-The-Monitors gang. They live in that slim gap between the two
broadcast monitors and the top shelf of the rack. On the left, R2-D2 and a
variety of other astromech droids observe whoever's looking at the left monitor,
while Max Rebo, Yoda at various stages, and G-Force guard the right
monitor.
Bacta the future, baby. Sitting on top of the processing gear between the two
monitors is Luke Skywalker, taking a little bacta bath under the watchful
eye(s?) of FX-7; what I can't tell you is why VINCENT from The Black Hole
is waiting nearby. (Needless to say, what with the "tank" sitting at
the top of a heap of a few thousand dollars worth of A/V and game gear, I've
opted not to fill it with water.) Elsewhere in the room, the relocated
computer desk - formerly facing two walls - now sits next to a window, from
which my game-room-guardin' kitties survey all that they control.
More toy shelves; some Tron light cycles race on an appropriate gridwork in
front of the incredibly cool Discs Of Tron marquee, while some of my
favorite spacecraft grace the top of my bookshelf: the Apollo lunar module
and command module, Doctor Who's TARDIS, and Space Battleship
Yamato.
Left: who better to guard the ColecoVision than Dirk the Daring,
Q*Bert and Slick?
Center: the back of the rack's A/V amp during setup. Keep in mind, only a
couple of the things plugged into that nest of wiring are game related.
Right: Iago impatiently waits for the remodeling to be finished, and for
Expansion Module #2 to be removed from his sprawlin' space.
On top of the rack: various standalone systems that don't need to be
hooked up all the time, and a nifty use for a Star Trek arcade marquee and a
couple of models of the Enterprise.
This is the other side of the room, containing a spare bed, my computer desk,
my dresser, and the room's one accessible window. Q*Bert can be seen hanging
from a tree light which has a different colored light bulb in each head. On
the picture at right, which uses the camera's flash, you start to get a sense
of how crowded the room really is: the bookshelf which is holding up the
Apollo/TARDIS/Yamato display is in the way at far right. There is perhaps a
foot and a half of useful walking space between the dresser and the bed. The
photos may not do it justice, but this room is tiny.
One more string of rope lights, this one red, provides a slightly eerie glow
underneath my computer desk. Not sure what this really does as far as serving
a useful purpose - does it really help anybody to look down and see their
crotch glowing red? - but it sure looks cool. The rope lights are attached to
the desk via cable ties. Also found under the desk are two fairly large drawer
units on casters which contain the bulk of my action figure collection.
There are about four inches of space between the top of those drawers and the
bottom of the desk, useful space for storing blank CD and DVD media, pens and
tools, spare batteries, and a couple of power strips.
Read about the remodeling of the Escape Pod here.
Earl's Cool Stuff
See my collection
How to run your games through a VCR
Drop me a
line
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Phosphor Dot Fossils.
