A long long time ago I used to own up to 38 (!) homecomputers as part of my collection. Including several Amiga’s (A500, A600HD, A1200, CDTV), Philips MSX, Apple Macintosh, Philips P2000’s and last but not least, Tandy. It started when I found a Philips P2000-C in a secondhand shop and I was intrigued by the system itself. The green-screen, the unknown. It took me a few weeks before I finally got it to boot into CP/M thanks to the HCC. I’m talking about 1995-ish..
Moved several times and needed the room for my growing drum kit(s) I basically sold everything or gave it away to museums, which I mostly regret nowadays. But I moved on and up to 4 years ago, I only had newer computers in my home (well, only a 80386 which I forgot).
2 Years ago I came across a friend who collected old game consoles and my love for old homecomputers and especially for the Amiga’s came back to life. After a small message on Twitter I managed to get a huge collection of Amiga’s. I loved it. My love for Amiga was returned completely. I cleaned the systems, played with it a lot but had to sell the latter because of financial reasons, keeping one because I wouldn’t allow myself to be without homecomputers again.
Very short after I regretted I sold again, so I got myself a next-gen Amiga and rebuilt it to a fully working, next-gen Amiga which is pretty rare nowadays. Still, my feeling of actually owning a A1200 (which I used to have) wouldn’t go away. I had to have one and when Petro was getting brand new Amiga’s I just knew I had to get one. Which I did.
Again, financial issues made me sell my beloved new A1200 because I still had my A500 and NextGen Amiga. I didn’t have much use for the A1200 anyway.. I thought..
Then I came across a complete CDTV which I just couldn’t refuse. I picked it up and did my cleaning, fixing thing with it. Got a CDTV FDD thanks to my friends at Amibay and connected it to my 42″ Plasma. What a joy when everything was working.. All in all, happy again with my 3 Amiga’s.
When cleaning my garage, I suddenly found a very very old 80386SX16 and I couldn’t resist. I tried to boot it up which didn’t work in the first place, but after some extensive cleaning and replacing a few parts, it booted! Oh the joy I felt when this machine was resurrected from the death.
Exactly 2 weeks later I found an advert on the Internet stating somebody was selling his collection of homecomputers. Despite I had my doubts if I should do it, I just bid on it and won the collection for a really low price. It almost felt like, too good to be true. Here’s a picture of what I eventually got:
Yes, that’s:
– 3x Amiga 1200
– 2x Commodore 64
– Commodore 1541-II drive
– Toshiba MSX
– Toshiba T-1100
– Philips CDi 210
– Atari Mega ST-4
– 6 boxed Amiga games
– Hundreds of 5,25″ disks for Commodore 64
– 3 boxes full of 3,5″ disks (including several original titles) for Amiga
– AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 original on CD
Can you imagine how I felt? This is christmas/sinterklaas for me! Most of the systems are working, but really really yellow. The Cdi-player has a problem with it’s tray, but fixable. One of the A1200s has a broken FDD and one of the A1200 didn’t have any screws in it to hold it together (though it has a harddisk, accelerator card and the latest kickrom).
This was just … wow..
Last weekend I gave away the Toshiba MSX for I has no use for it. I did get myself a boxed Amiga 600 making my Amiga-collection hoarder-size ;-).
My next project will be to clean and retr0bright everything so all systems look like brand new. I’ll keep this updated on this website for your reading pleasure.
My current collection:
Commodore 64 ‘brown’
Commodore 64 ‘white’
Commodore CD-TV incl FDD, keyboard and mouse
Commodore Amiga 500.
Commodore Amiga 600.
2x Commodore Amiga 1200 (standard)
Commodore Amiga 1200 (with 68030 CPU, Harddisk and Kickrom 3.1)
micro AmigaOne (A1-C) (with 800Mhz G3 CPU, 512MB RAM running AmigaOS 4.1)
Toshiba T-1100 Personal Computer
Philips CDi-210 (incl 10 CDi) (not working at the moment)
Atari Mega ST-4 incl screen
Intel 80386SX16, 3MB memory, 512Kb Trident videocard and Seagate 44Mb HDD
Also, check out my Youtube-channel where I’ll put videos of my projects!