Tag: Game Room Remodeling Diary

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Gaming Home Base

You’ve got to cut the rope

It’s the end of an era here at der Greenhaus: the rope lights are coming down from the game room shelves. We’re talking about a lighting scheme that I’ve leaned on pretty hard since the last house I lived in, Game Room 2003so… nine years exactly. And the funny thing is, a lot of these rope lights have been around since then, so at the very least it was time to look at replacing some of them.

But that’s not what the plan is. As with every other room in the house, the carpet has to come out of my room, so everything has to be disconnected, moved elsewhere in the house temporarily, and then moved back in when it’s torn down to a smooth concrete floor. Even that is temporary – at some point when we can afford it, we’ll get flooring put in (but not carpet – never again), so it’s kinda like all the fun of moving repeatedly, minus the fun of actually moving it to someplace new and exciting. … Read more

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Gaming

Thus endeth the dream (for a good cause)

Many years ago, I gained a kind of momentary internet fame (if you want to call it that) for my elaborate (and yet, on reflection, kinda cheap) game room setup, originally erected in a room of our old rental house. Rob O’Hara even covered certain parts of the game room (and asked me for a few pictures too!) in his book Invading Spaces, a guide to collecting arcade games and building the perfect game room.

Game Room

Game RoomThe idea was to create an approximation of the stand-up arcade experience without spending stand-up arcade collecting money (and without taking up stand-up arcade space). Two things drove this idea: this magnificent arcade joystick (made for the Playstation 1), and one Playstation 1 each from the U.S. and Japan. The latter allowed me to play the wealth of arcade game collections released in Japan that never came out here.

This also entailed collecting a large number of retro arcade games for the PS1, both domestic and import. Come to think of it, I made a name in video game collecting circles for that too. The game room setup was really neat – actually, it’s still set up that way in my current house, and has been since 2004 when we bought the place.

It’s in the interests of keeping the aforementioned place we’ve occupied since 2004 that I’m now in the process of selling almost all of the above. I’ve been out of work for nearly two months at this point, and we’re definitely on the pain train as a result. I’ve tried getting on as seasonal retail help, but I’ve spent my entire adult life in one industry and I’ve never worked retail before because, well, I’ve never had to. At a time of the year when they’re hoping to hire folks to can get up to speed very quickly, I’m pretty damned useless.

Kick!Anyway, here’s what’s up for grabs: anything that’s not nailed to the wall or on fire! Well, okay, maybe that’s an overgeneralization. All of my PS1 games will be up for grabs – domestic and foreign. My Japanese PS1 will be on sale soon. I’ve even got a small handful of PS2 imports that I picked up years ago in anticipation of modding my PS2… which I’ve never had done, and don’t really care to now.

I’m selling my 30-year-old Kick arcade machine as well, but only to any interested parties who want to drop by and pick it up in person and transport it themselves. Also on the block, and again preferably only to local folkels who can pick it up themselves: my Vectrex and its paraphenalia.

I’ll probably be selling some action figures and other fannish items soon, non-video-game-related.

Am I keeping anything? Yes.

Game RoomAs I mentioned above, the centerpiece of the original game room setup was this glorious joystick that beautifully recreates the feel of ’80s arcade games. I have USB PC adapters for PS1 controllers, and as such I’ll be keeping this joystick for future emulator use. It’s kinda what started me down this road, and I still love it. I’d like for my son to know a little something of the “feel” for these old games I used to spend so much of my income on.

But I don’t want him to know what it’s like to not be able to keep the lights on, so here ends that thing that used to get a lot of people looking in my direction. I’ve said for many years that, as I’ve gotten older, I’m more interested in playing games than in playing the (money) losing game known as collecting. Now it’s time to put up or shut up on that claim. Sacrifices have to be made, and anymore, in the day of near-perfect emulation on a computer or a tablet or the Wii, these games haven’t been opened up and put in an actual Playstation in a long time. If you’re looking to pick up some pieces of a much-loved, well-cared-for collection that are nearly impossible to find outside of Japan, please proceed to eBay with all deliberate speed and level up. I’ll be adding more items through the weekend.… Read more

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Gaming Home Base

De-rezzing the game room

Ever since I moved into this house – heck, the very day that I started moving stuff into this house – my game room has been, for better or worse, probably the most thought-out-in-advance part of the place. Building on the game room I’d put together in our previous rental house, I wanted the game room to instantly say to anyone who walked in, “This is a place where classic video games are played.” But it’s time for a rather major rethink: now this is a place where classic video games are played, and where my little boy lives and plays. … Read more

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Gaming Home Base

Game room redux

My garage-sale-hopping this weekend didn’t produce any games, but I did spend all of $13 on some decent shelves and some baby clothes. Shelves are a good thing: basically, everything of mine that’s in the little bedroom has got to come out of there to make way for baby. That means tons of books, more than a few knick-knacks, boxes full of stuff that’s just been stored in there…and quite a bit of it will probably get tossed out, or set aside for a yard sale of our own that I hope we’ll have the time and energy to hold between now and baby time. So I’ve got my eyes open for storage solutions for the stuff I don’t want to toss.

These two shelves aren’t a bad start.

Earl's game room… Read more

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Critters Home Base

Preparations B.

While working on moving stuff around and hooking it back up today, and realizing that the Doctor Who pinball backglass wasn’t going to be able to adorn the window anymore, I decided I’d like some real live sunlight in the room. This turned out to be a very popular move with my household helpers.
Earl's game room
Olivia seems especially happy with the prospect of being able to sit on top of the computers and watch the bird’s nest that’s been built in the brush that pretty much covers the window. (It’s an interesting privacy screen, but it’s really just a case of me needing to get out from behind the computer and get outside and suck up some allergens to cut it all down. On the flipside, I could always just tell people that my game room is on Kashyyyk.)
Earl's game room
God only knows what the bird were thinking. 😆 … Read more

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Critters Gadgetology Home Base

Preparations.

Today has been all about starting to rearrange the game room for the new gear that’ll be occupying it in about a week and a half or so.
Viewsonic Monitors
Trying to find a way to avoid buying yet another monitor, I pulled down a flatscreen we haven’t used in a while to see if I could get it to overcome a problem it has displayed in the past – namely, starting to display the bottom of a Windows display about halfway up the screen. Turns out that there’s a trick to fixing this (it’s a known bug), and now we’re working just fine. These two monitors will be the Avid edit monitors.
Avid-ready
This is the end result of today’s toil; my main computer (Zen)’s monitor is at the far right, Orac’s is the one in the middle/corner, and the one between them is a 17″ LCD that monitors either cable or the output of my existing (non-Avid) video gear. (Orac’s and Zen’s monitors can also do composite video signals – you may have seen these in action at OVGE.)
Avid-ready
And how do I handle the daunting power requirements of this stuff?
Avid-ready
Kitten power! (ZZZZzzzzzzzzz…)
Only Olivia could crash out while I’m moving stuff all over the place, creating clouds of dust and lots of noise in the process. 😆… Read more

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Gaming Home Base

Game Room Remodeling Diary: Coda

Changes are afoot! As with any venture like this, there are bugs to be worked out of the system, and I’m doing my best to shake them out of the woodwork. I recently got a PSX trakball, and figured out a simple way to integrate it into my “arcade minus the cabinet” setup without having to move the big, bulky twin joystick. I simply turn a small container 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. Also, I’ve found that spending more than 5 or 10 minutes standing a foot away from my monitor’s a bit hard on the eyes, so I pulled my “backup” video fader out of the box and set it up to “dim” the video a bit on a manual setting without having to mess with the monitor’s brightness control, which is set right where I want it for everything else. And here are the results of both additions, from a nice test session with Centipede. You’ll notice that the monitor’s dim enough not to flare out in the photos, which it normally would at full brightness:
PDF Game Room
Here’s a wider shot of the whole setup:
PDF Game Room
Without the upside-down container, which I used to use for newly-arrived, untested cartridges, you can see that this arrangement doesn’t mess with the twin stick buttons at all. In fact, for Centipede, I configure the game to use the player 2 joystick’s buttons for firing:
PDF Game Room
You may have noticed some “friends” on top of my monitors; I had to trade some of my “toy display” space for more useful storage space, and as such some of my toys have had to relocate to smaller, inconspicuous spaces. Some of them, like Dirk and friends here, are boldly standing guard next to the Colecovision where they’re not in the way:
PDF Game Room
(Ambassador Kosh, not seen, is on the other side of the Colecovision.) Meanwhile, others are hiding between the top of the monitors and the top of the rack:
These are the droids you're looking for
PDF Game Room
…and others are just sitting…well, wherever I can find space for ’em:
PDF Game Room
PDF Game Room
(It may seem silly, but I’m as proud of my toy collection as I am of my game collection. Gotta have at least a few on display.)
Also added one red rope light under my PC desk, which creates an eerie little glow; I had to brightness/color-enhance the hell out of the left photo to get this to show at all:
PDF Game Room
That’s all that I’ve really done in the past couple of weeks.… Read more

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Gaming Home Base

Game Room Remodeling Diary, Episode 6

Ahhhh, sweet victory, to have the house in one piece. And this room in it.
Aside from some very minor finishing touches, the new and improved room of doom is done. Here’s a look at the finished Odyssey 2/Atari 5200 section, with and without the overhead light:
PDF Game Room Remodeling
You may have noticed that the light behind the Dig Dug and Kickman marquees also underlight my toy shelf, some of which is game-related, some which…isn’t so much.
PDF Game Room Remodeling
I’ve got a thing for astromech droids and light cycles.
Atop the bookshelf right next to my desk area, I went back to a tried and true idea that’s been there for over a year, the old Star Trek marquee/model display. I had dismantled it for moving purposes, but now it’s right back where it was, and ready to be backlit again. As for the wall you really haven’t seen (because there’s really nothing there, it’s the wall that both the bed and desk are up against), here’s a look:
PDF Game Room Remodeling
The three-head tree light has three different-colored bulbs in it. This means that the only white light in the room that isn’t behind a marquee is the overhead light. And that’s just how I like it.
This brings us back to the A/V rack, where I propped up a few sturdy marquees. I really have no way to backlight these, sadly – I’m quite literally out of power outlets, and out of fluorescent lights to plug into them anyway. But that’s okay. It’s a nice bit of ambience. As is the whole thing, really:
PDF Game Room Remodeling
The gap on the upper right hand of the rack is awaiting an identical broadcast monitor for video duplication work.
All in all, it’s pretty much turned out how I hoped it would. Colorful, dark and bright all at the same time, bursting at the seams with some of my favorite stuff from my childhood and from now, and actually pretty functional and ready to rock when all is said and done. It’s almost as much fun to sit back and admire as it is to play games in here. There are a few finishing touches waiting to be made, but nothing major, and probably nothing you’ll be interested in at this point.
Whew. I’m bushed. OK, it’s someone else’s turn to do this.… Read more

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Gaming Home Base

Game Room Remodeling Diary, Episode 5

What a day, what a day. Cancelled a planned afternoon of thrifting because I got a call from work that severe weather will more than likely mean I’ll be called in tonight (see here to look at my local radar – I’m in Fort Smith, and red = bad). So I’m watching KTUL do wall-to-wall coverage of a major tornado outbreak near Tulsa, feeling unusually strong breezes blasting through my open window, and wiring up a killer game setup. Sadly, I’ve realized that I’m running out of room for systems and may have to revise some plans – and I still have more consoles en route to me from recent trades and eBay conquests. Sheesh. This room ain’t big enough.
But that’s not gonna stop me.
Today’s shots aren’t very photogenic, but they’ll show you where I’m headed. Some of my least-often-played consoles will live in the bottom of the entertainment center, as well computers which need additional dust protection due to keyboards, vents, etc.
PDF Game Room Remodeling
This means the Apple IIc, the 7800, the Atari 400 (still not a single game for the poor thing yet, but ain’t it pretty?), and perhaps the NES will go down there. I have no idea where the Vic-20, C64 or TI 99/4A will go. I’m open to suggestions. I had to find a stable brace to prop up the IIc at an unusual angle so it would fit inside the compartment with its power supply and joystick connected.
You can also see that special sections have been reserved for my frequent flyers, my favorites: the 2600, the Odyssey 2, and the 5200. There’s also some other bric-a-brac sitting there that I’ll find other places for, namely the alarm clock, the stack of VHS tapes, and the TARDIS. On top of the hutch that houses the O2 and the 5200, there will soon be more backlit marquees. The compartment immediately below the 2600 usually has a drawer in it, but the space below that drawer houses a power strip which will drive all of the marquee lights, and will have one slot open at all times for whichever console is currently in action. All of the AC adapters and power cords for all of the consoles and classic computers will live on the same shelf (and yeah, I will be labeling them to avoid things getting too comedic when I try to plug one in and play it). Hopefully it’ll be less of a rat’s nest than it appears to be now. In the shelf below that will sit the dilapidated sound mixer that I now mainly use to monitor audio levels for my video duplication work. It’ll also come in very handy when I start committing direct game footage to DVD-R for use in that mysterious TV project I keep talking about (you see, there is a method to my madness in connecting the games to the A/V gear).
These storms are getting nasty and getting close. Lots of tornado warnings to the west. Hopefully my collection isn’t going to be strewn across the countryside in about three hours, that’d be about my luck.
The home stretch is in sight. More photos soon, hopefully lit up like an arcade and with games up and running. Let me know if you’ve got any ideas for where the Commodore machines can live, ’cause I’m just about out of ideas.… Read more

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Gaming Home Base

Game Room Remodeling Diary, Episode 4

Still concentrating mostly on wiring (and I still need to go pick up and extra power strip), but the Intellivision and Colecovision are now set up in their new homes, complete with backlit marquees:
PDF Game Room Remodeling
Tabletops are topsides with some more marquees (again, backlit). The Four shelves of rectangular objects are the magazines for my Pioneer CD changer.
A look at what’s up and running so far, with and without overhead light:
PDF Game Room Remodeling
All video is now hooked up, and I’m only a few cables away from having some consoles hooked up and ready to rock (I’ll do that on Saturday, in addition to putting the 2600 into the small shelf below the TV seen at right). All of the consoles requiring RF adapters will, as before, run through a VCR with dead tape mechs but a functioning tuner, only this time audio will also run through an ancient Archer stereo reverb unit, giving their audio more presence (and even, if for some reason I’m feeling kinda wacky, lotsa echo; most times I just put a little minimal echo in to give it a stereo effect).
Coming soon: more backlit marquees, more consoles, and an experiment to see if I can keep 10+ consoles hooked up on hot standby without requiring a single wire swap.
My electricity bill just jumped 40% taking these pictures. Probably won’t leave the marquees on all the time.
Here’s a rough floor plan of the room as it stands now, so you know what the heck you’re looking at:
Floor plan of the PDF Game Room
Now, probably of little interest to anyone, a look at the spider web of stuff running into my A/V amp, one two input channels of which are devoted to games of one kind or another:
PDF Game Room Remodeling
I still haven’t figured out how to remote control my amp with the video touch pads.
A look at the now-fully-functional video setup (whose rewiring yielded some tremendous unexpected benefits):
PDF Game Room Remodeling
I’ve tried playing some PSX stuff with that joystick at standing height, and all I gotta say is FREAKIN’ COOL. I wanna get a coin door with the slots and hang it from that shelf just for the feel of it.
And a closer look at the INTV and Colecovision shelves:
PDF Game Room Remodeling
Just you wait, though. I’m not even CLOSE to done here. Though not everybody likes the new look yet. Ever had a big sleepy white cat give you a look that says “Would you stop movin’ everything around, and get Expansion Module #2 out of my damn way?” I sure have.
Game Room Remodeling
More goodness tomorrow. Enjoy!… Read more