Age: 23
Height: 6'1
Nationality: Australian (with a weird accent, thanks Japan...)
First Mac: PowerMac 7200/90... in 2013!
Fauvorite Macs: 512Ke and SE/30
Favorite classic Mac game: Crystal Quest (Prince of Persia is a close second)
Favourite stuff: Pop-up headlights, draft beer, classic cheeseburgers, 60's - 90's rock, and anything that can run Doom. Also CRT TVs and monitors.
Stuff I hate: CRT TVs and monitors. It's a complicated and unreliable relationship, just like CRTs in 2021.
Favourite movie: Transformers The Movie (1986)
Favourite computer: I don't know why I put this here because it's almost impossible to answer, but the machine I have the most time playing games on is probably an IBM PS/V Type 2405 486DX2 66MHz as It's smack bang in the middle of the system requirements for the types of DOS games I enjoy playing. With that and my Windows 98SE Pentium III Voodoo 2 SLI setup, I could get away with not owning any other IBM compatibles and be content. Regretfully, I sold my PS/V 2405 a few years ago and have only just found another one in Japan, fingers crossed it arrives intact!
Hi all, happy to be here for the launch of a new forum! I used to be a regular on the AssemblerGames forums before they imploded and haven't consistently been active anywhere else since, what with the advent of Discord, so I'm hoping this will be my new internet home.
I've been collecting, repairing, and restoring vintage computers and game consoles for over 10 years now. I started by importing an NES from the US in 2009 after having been a fan of the AVGN YouTube videos; emulation let me play old games perfectly fine, but I felt that I was missing out on the analog aspect of the whole experience. Naturally, it snowballed from there and I imported a Super Famicom, found a Nintendo 64 locally, Sega Saturn, PS1, etc. until my father told me that I should get a Commodore 64 like he had in his early 20's, because he had fond memories of playing Zork and space shooters. I ended up winning an eBay auction for a C64C bundle with a 1541-II disk drive, a hundred or so copied floppies, and a Cheetah Annihilator joystick - the rest is history. I remember paying roughly $100 AUD for the bundle after shipping, which is completely unheard of today if you take a look at completed listings on eBay AU (who on earth is paying $150 - $200 for a 1541?! Reveal yourself!). A lot of machines and games have come and gone in my collection, but I'll always hold onto that C64C. It's still going strong with all of its original ICs and the 1541-II still reads all of those floppies reliably!
In 2013, my father was sent to Tokyo on assignment by his company and brought the family with him. I very quickly realised that there was a huge disparity in price between what I could find in local stores and on Yahoo Auctions, and what things were selling for on eBay. So I began to buy and export things here and there to fuel my collecting habits as I didn't speak/read/write enough Japanese to even land a job at McDonald's (why a fast food worker needs to know 1500 kanji is still beyond me...). Chances are if you bought a Super Famicom, PS1 Debugging Station, or some other piece of rare development hardware from a Japanese seller on eBay between 2013 - 2017, it came from me. The only way I knew how to sell things back then was to have the best price.
I sold the cheapest working Super Famicoms on all of eBay for a solid 2 or so years if I recall.While I was still buying, repairing, and selling vintage game consoles at that point, I was getting tired of collecting them and was beginning to move onto vintage computers and big box PC/Mac games almost exclusively. My first IBM PC compatible machine was a Toshiba J-3100 GT041 (which I still have), followed up by a Sega TeraDrive and a variety of IBM PS/55 and PS/V machines, which remain my favourites to repair and mess with due to their non-standard Japanese IBM-ness.
Since then, I've managed to own or at least work on pretty much everything I had ever dreamed of owning/working on. My collection has been downsized, upsized, and downsized more times than I can count, but I can definitively say that I'm done now. I'm in the process of pairing down everything I own to a handful of machines and games that I truly enjoy fiddling with and playing, with the goal of fitting it all onto a single shelf for when I finally move out in the next year or so. I'll continue to buy, restore, and repair things here and there because I still enjoy it and the secondary income is nice, but I won't be collecting much more than I already have. At the moment I'm keen on upgrading my IBM PS/55 Type 5551 to drag it as far into the future from 1988 as it will let me, then I'll probably do the same to my SE/30.
If you want to see some of my past conquests in between eating burgers, check out my Instagram.
When it comes to Macs, I was initially only interested in them because I had the goal of collecting physical copies of every Bungie game before they had made Halo, and I wanted to be able to run them on original hardware. It was pure luck that I ended up with a machine that could run all of those games (barring Oni), an in-box PowerMac 7200/90, because I knew close to nothing about Macs at the time. I thoroughly enjoyed playing Pathways Into Darkness and the Marathon Trilogy until the PSU blew up one day, and it sat on my shelf until I moved back to Australia and donated it to the Australian Computer Museum Society.
Is this an incredibly long-winded and wholely unnecessary bio? Probably! But people often ask me how I got into the hobby at my age, so now I can link them this thread instead of going through it again.
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