Just cleaning up the garage..

Did some cleaning in the garage this weekend in preperation for a house move. Here are some of the random things that I found.

First off, a Dreamcast dev kit. This one doesn’t work – I think the graphics cards is fried. Still a lovely looking unit though.

A large, red Gravis Ultrasound. This was a mighty soundcard back in the 90s. It had on-board sampe RAM and got a lot of love from the demoscene as a result.

Three different types of storage: a 3.5″ disc, a 5.25″ inch disc and a monster 15.1″ disc cartridge. The RL01K-DC holds a whopping 5.2MB and was used in the venerable PDP-11.

Some more storage: a collection of Atari ST software. Some great Bitmap Brothers games here, along with the almost-never-out-of-my-drive OCP Art Studio. Many a non-released game was designed in this..

And now onto ZX Spectrum software. I’ve already shifted a load of this stuff, I think this is the last lot. Greats in here include the expertly coded but slightly dull Cobra, an early word processor called Tasword Two, David Jones’ brilliant Finders Keepers and an epic old EA RPG called The Bards Tale. You can also see HiSoft’s Devpac, which is probaby where I really started my journey into programming. Oh, and there’s a Cheetah SpecDrum in there too, which started me on the road to hacking around with digital audio.

Here’s what those Spectrum games ran on: Spectrums. You can see a standard 48k, a +2 and a +3 here. In the corner is a divIDE with a 2GB flash card, allowing thousands of games to be loaded in mere seconds rather than the minutes you’d have to wait for with tapes. If you’d seen one of those back in the 80s you’d have thought it was voodoo.

And this is what modern kids think of 30 year old computers. Luc is pushing play money into the tape drive of the +2. He coudn’t provide a satisfactory explanation as to why.

Here we have a vintage 2000-era PC. This one I built myself from parts. You’ll notice it isn’t a standard, off-the-shelf PC because the manufacturers bag is a picture of Bagpuss. Bagpuss lasted me quite a few years, finally ending his life as an experimental OpenBSD server.

The inside of the old furry catpuss.

A classic 3COM 3C509 ethernet card. A 3D Blaster Geforce, the first ever consumer level graphics card with hardware transform and lighting – a real game changer this one. Also an Adaptec SCSI card and a Sound Blaster 16.

The other interesting parts of Bagpuss are the Pentium 3, the (probably tiny amounts of) RAM and a pair of (probably also very tiny) Quantam Fireball HDs.

Finally we reach the audio bits – a tuner, a wah peddle, a distorsion stomp box and a lovely little “legendary” Pignose buskers amplifier. The Strat wasn’t in with the rest of junk, before you ask.

Some wicked picks-in-a-business-card from Denki, where I used to work. No doubt these were Colin’s idea, the little guitar fan that he is.

Bow down before the gorgeous sounds of the Lexicon MPX550.

And, finally, what no self respecting musician should be without: a bag full of random cables.

All of this stuff is destined to go. Probably via eBay but possibly via the tip. If you’re interested in anything here then give me a shout. Quick!