This is a cool thread, and while I'm a bit late to the party, I came prepared. Well actually I came some sticky white stuff, but we don't need to talk about that
So here's the setup before I owned the house:
The person before me was a record collector, the whole down stairs area was wall to wall records. This picture was October 18th, 2013, so this is right before we moved in.
Here it is on the 3rd, 2014. Yes, it's one hell of a mess. For those who don't know me, I got my Duo with my own money from working as a kid, and I've been "collecting" since 14ish. Or just buying a shit ton of old games, depending on what you call it; I was too messy to be considered a collector for a long time. Anyways, shit happened, and my games were stored in boxes at my parents house. At some point, someone moved said collection into the barn, and they didn't even use the same boxes. They just dumped them into larger boxes, and put in the barn where bats could poop on it, and rats could eat them. And the cords, I think they used them as jump ropes to tangle them all up. Took me FOREVER to untangle.
In this picture I'm messing around some with system placement ideas a shelf area in the center of the room where he used to keep his records. That's a crap-tastic 33" CRT with way too much over scan.
Note the perforated peg board in the middle. It didn't last too long.
Here it is in June, 2014 with a new coat of primer, the center part ripped out, and my $5 goodwill speakers (Still using them). You can see my kick ass Extron video switch in the center, I'll show pics of what it can do later
And a bit later on in the month, I started painting it. While it looks like I didn't finish, I painted all I needed too; I was going to make a "face" for in front of the shelves, and paint it black. Then put hooks in it to hold the controllers for each system. Ran into a shit ton of design issues though, think I got them all figured out now though. Note the baby CRT, think it's a 19", it's now off to the left somewhere. I keep it around, due in part cause of the power of my Extron switch.
Lookie what I got for $60 at goodwill. It's a LCD projection TV, so has most of the benefits of CRT and LCD combined (But requires bulbs every so often; I get them for $20 each)
And here's me trying it out some. This isn't actually a console, that's an emulator running in that pic. I dislike modding hardware, this way I can keep it all stock, and still get many of the picture benefits + play games I don't own. A best of both worlds setup.
And how here it is today (Nov. 17th, 2015)
Almost nothing's hooked up, I still need a lot of wires to show up; the Extron uses BNC and I just now got the adapters, but I'm still waiting on some spools of instrument cable and RCA ends to start making all my interconnects. And power, that won't be for ages; I'm getting my first switched power block tomorrow to test out.
Anyways, first thing's first, there's no place to sit yet. One reason it goes slow down there. And yes, that is a C64 on the coffee table. The Denon receiver ($8 goodwill again) runs it's speakers into a switcher, so I can run the speakers on the game stand itself, plus enable the surrounds or turn them off if I don't want to bother the wife.
I mentioned the Extron, it's a big boy video switch. It's a 6U case if you know what that means, and it's a 16 input, 8 output matrix switcher:
If you're going to go big on a setup, you really should look into a matrix switcher. It let's me take any input, and send it to any output. I could play nes on the CRT for some duck hunt goodness, then switch it over to the LCD and run snes on the CRT. Or I could run the Duo on both, just because I feel like it. The coffee table has a LCD on it, one new part I'm waiting on is a composite -> HDMI converter, meaning yes, I have 3 monitors I can run systems too, all right there. One of the outputs of the switch runs to the Denon, meaning I can have nes on the CRT, using the CRT's speakers, and snes on the LCD, playing through the sound system, only to flip it and have nes on the sound system. Or, I can play a CD in the DUO, and not even have it on the TV.
If you know me, or if you looked at the f*cking wall of text I just wrote, you know I don't half ass stuff. When I do something, I f*cking over do it. 4 of the outputs from the switch run into a CCTV processor, for security cameras. If you don't know about these amazing devices, they're in a sense a picture-in-picture device with all sorts of options. With a matrix switcher, this gives you amazing abilities,
For example, I decided to send my xbox to all 4 inputs on the CCTV, then sent the CCTV back to both TVs. The result is 8 XBOXs. And now I decide to send Turrican (TG-16 version of course) to the CRT, and port #1 of the CCTV:
But I changed my mind, and now want him on the LCD, I just send the CCTV to the CRT, and the Duo to the LCD (And it's still also going to the CCTV):
I'm sure a bunch of you think this is dumb as f*cking hell. Well besides the ability to have more systems going, it's great for a few other tricks. Playstation had some games that used the link cable, now I can use those on the two TVs, or send them both to the LCD. I'm planning on getting 3 more gamecubes, and the GBA players. 4 of the gamecubes will be setup will pretend to be GBA's, but rather than play say, 4 swords on tiny GBA screens, I can now route the 4 sub-cubes to the LCD, and the main gamecube runs on the CRT for some kick-ass 5 player action.
