With Halloween around the corner, I thought I’d confess a couple of my retro hardware horror stories: how I broke my very first computer, and the truly awful fate of my Sega Dreamcast. I’m a reformed character now, honestly. This video was supported by PCBWay.
Silicon heaven
A Facebook memory reminded me that about six years ago I was at Guildford Comic Con, where Robert Llewellyn (Kryten from Red Dwarf) was asked whether he believed in silicon heaven. In Kryten’s voice, he explained that of course our gadgets go to heaven (where else would the calculators go?), except rubbish devices like the ZX Spectrum. Once the trauma of that eased, it made me wonder: where did all my childhood computers and consoles actually go?
How I broke my Acorn Electron
My first victim was my first computer, an Acorn Electron. I read in Electron User how to reset the machine while leaving the program in RAM, handy for cheats and pokes, using a bent paperclip across two contacts on the expansion connector. It worked well, until it didn’t, and my Electron became a useless beige paperweight.
I hid it for a long time rather than tell my parents it was “mysteriously” broken. It was partially repaired, but only ever worked in black and white after that. I could fix it today, but boyhood me took it apart and never put it back together. I also have a vague memory of butchering its keyboard to wire up a homemade gamepad, after I was given a Commodore 64 with games my stepdad got from a bloke down the pub.
That C64 is gone too, along with the copy of The Great Giana Sisters I bought with birthday money (worth serious money now), my original Game Boy, Super Nintendo, Mega Drive and many of the games. I simply didn’t care enough back then for it to leave a mark. Except once.
What happened to my Dreamcast
When the Dreamcast came out, I bought one, along with two light guns, House of the Dead and several other games. It was amazing. About a week later we decorated my flat, so before stripping the wallpaper I carefully put my precious new system in a black plastic bag to keep the dust off. The stripped wallpaper went into similar black plastic bags.
The next day I came home from work to find my girlfriend at the time had helpfully put all the bags in the outside bin, because it was bin day and the bin men were coming that morning.
I still dream about that Dreamcast.
Do you have any horror stories of your own? Tell me in the YouTube comments. And on a happier note: this month marked a year since the fire, and thanks to subscribers and patrons I’m about to release a rake of new content alongside regular streams.
Related
I’ve since done right by the Electron, with the Acorn Electron colour fix, and by the Dreamcast with a controller port fuse fix and a custom BIOS install.
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