I Swear I Need These – Part 1

I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

For months I have been attempting to get my ass in gear to set up my retro gaming systems. Well, that time finally came and I am happy to share with you some of the fruits of my labor and some of the classic gaming finds I have picked up in the last couple of months. I also assure you that now that the fruits of my labor are within reach, this column will become a bit more regular.

About nine months ago, a friend of mine at my job offered to give me a 36” Toshiba CRT TV when he was moving out of his house. I gladly accepted it because I had been on the hunt for a CRT for quite a while and the price I wanted to pay was around $0 and I was pretty firm on that. So, on a Saturday Eric and I went and picked up this monstrosity of a television and moved it to my house. Since that time, the TV has been positioned very awkwardly on a table that is nearly broken and was picked up out of the trash in the alley behind my house. Well, the time came for that TV to go somewhere else. I purchased a new refrigerator and the giant tube television sitting on a precariously positioned table in my kitchen was going to prove difficult. The TV had to be moved. Fast forward a few hours and I had selected a small table in my bedroom as a destination for this beast. So, I moved this CRT to the bedroom and possibly sealed my fate as a man who will have back problems for the rest of his life.
Once the TV was in the bedroom, I decided that I needed to hook something up to it to ensure the TV actually worked. Wait… I haven’t tested this TV, not even before we moved it. Success! The TV does work and I haven’t broken it! Next I pulled out my Super Nintendo and began the process of modifying it to play Super Famicom games. After that was completed, I played about an hour of the Japanese Super Mario World. That game is still not my favorite. But, it proved to me what I needed to know. That TV works and my modification job on the SNES worked and I now have a functional, region-free SNES.

The weeks since that time have been a blur. I have been digging through boxes every night after work and pulling out cables and game systems and old games, some of which I had no idea I owned. At the time of this writing my bedroom has turned into some kind of weird retro game shrine that I am sure is going to be very appealing to the women that I bring home from the bar to… Play chess. The CRT TV is now connected to a spare 5.1 surround system that I had in a closet. There are also several game systems hooked up including, a NES, SNES, Gamecube, PS2, Genesis, and Saturn.

Here is a picture of what my madness hath wrought:

As you can see, I am in a full lather for retro games right now and it shows in some of the purchases I have made recently. Here is a list of some of the stuff I have picked up lately:

Continue to Part 2 >>