Phoenix Project 03: Fire Damaged Retro Collection

This was the first time I was allowed back into my burnt-out house, masked and gloved up, to see in the cold light of day whether anything from the retro collection could be saved. When you have a fire you expect everything to be dry and toasted. It is not: after the firefighters went in, everything was soaking wet, and mould was already growing everywhere. This video was sponsored by Altium.

An Amiga 1200 behind a piece of wood

The first surprise was a box at the bottom of a pile that a piece of wood had partly shielded from the flames. Inside was an Amiga 1200, fused in place and with soot embedded in the case, and I wondered whether my old accelerator card had survived with it.

Fire damaged box containing an Amiga 1200 partly shielded by a piece of wood in the burnt house — The A1200 box that a piece of wood protected from the worst of the flames

What was lost

A lot of what I found was only identifiable by its back panel. A Sega Saturn (modded to play backups) is now just melted plastic, and there were what I am fairly sure were two Master System IIs fused together. The heat in that part of the room was tremendous. A Sinclair printer is badly warped, a stack of Spectrum +3 discs for the CPC 6128 is now a solid block of plastic, and the shelves upstairs where my best stuff lived, including the Dreamcast I made with RMC, are beyond any hope. That is where the fire started.

The first survivors

Quake 64 turned up, and I will take that as a win. Outside in the daylight I went through the rest. The Mega CD 2 belonging to The Retro Collective came out charbroiled, along with its Mega Drive 2, and I am not sure whether it is recoverable, but I will have a go. Things that were still in delivery packets were fine. Out of my whole CD32 collection, the only survivor appears to be The Labyrinth of Time.

Fire damaged Sega Mega CD 2 recovered from the burnt house and examined in daylight — The Retro Collective’s charbroiled Mega CD 2

An Amiga 600 hard drive model has a few cracks in the case, but the boards are inside, so I am not giving up on it. Another A600 underneath had a bag on top that seems to have protected the chips, and I think that one is totally recoverable, assuming it worked to begin with. My old A1200 was in pieces at the time of the fire, but the accelerator card looks surprisingly decent on the top side in daylight, although the coprocessor and its extra crystal are definitely done.

Soot covered Amiga 600 recovered from the burnt house that may be repairable — An A600 that may well be recoverable

Melted ColecoVision cartridges and a drying plan

The ColecoVision cartridges are very melted and sludgy, but the boards inside are quite robust, so some of them might come back if they can be cleaned and rehoused (possibly in a 3D printed case). Everything I salvaged is going into boxes to drain for a couple of days in the outside garage at the rental house, then I will clean things up one at a time. This could be a silver lining.

Melted and soot covered ColecoVision cartridges recovered from the house fire — Melted ColecoVision carts, but the boards inside may survive

A few cartridges came through with mouldy, crumbling boxes but intact carts, including Donkey Kong 64 and Double Dragon II, plus a PlayStation 2 network adapter. The insurance company will soon shovel everything into a skip, which is why I am doing this now.

What comes next

It is not a lot to recover from a lifetime of collecting, but there are projects here, and I would much rather try to save irreplaceable things than let them perish. Thank you to everyone who has supported me: I am back, and the Phoenix Project continues.

Later restorations of things saved from the fire include a soot damaged Intellivision. For more Amiga work, see the A600 chip RAM expansion build, and for the Mega CD, the smashed Mega CD Retro Resurrection.