Gday everyone, I am Womble, 32 years old, work as a network systems consultant, originally from Cambridge but made the mistake of coming to Australia for a holiday in 2001, and never really made it back to blighty. I now live in Melbourne in the sunny state of Victoria with Mrs Womble and a spare room that is an Aladins cave of retro goodness.
Am a huge retro fan, I love the old hardware (mainly coz it is just about simple enough that I can feign an understanding of how it works), but I especially love fixing old hardware, Spectrums, C64s, STs, Amigas etc etc but mainly the 8 bitters. Alas there isn't much of a retro scene in Oz, the speccy never made it down here, the C64 was king for a while but that's about it. I did live in NZ for a couple of years recently and ironically the Spectrum was very popular there, odd seeing as it is even further away from the UK.
Anyway - my retro collection currently stands at...
Spectrum 48K (2or 3)
Spectrum 128K
Spectrum +2
C64 and restored monitor
Oric 1
Oric Atmos
Atari 520 STM
Atari 520 STFM
Atari 1040 STFM
Atari 520 STE
Atari 4090 STE
Atari Falcon 14Mb (HDD was dead so now has a CF card fitted internally)
Acorn 3000
Acorn 3010
Acorn 3020
Yamaha C5XM "MSX Music Computer" with homebrew additional RAMpak (I made it from scrap arcade boards
)
--> Actually found the original music keyboard to go with this in my local Cash Converters for 4 quid, it must have been there for years)
Enterprise 64 (haven't actually every plugged this in yet, to my shame )
Additional stuff
Speccy Interface 1
Speccy Interface 2 (2 ROM games so far Jetpack and umm I forget)
Speccy Thompson RGB interface - crystal clear gfx through this puppy.
Speccy Microdrive
Atari STM124 monochrome monitor x2 (cant give these away nowadays)
Atari SC1224 colour monitor
Atari Megafile 30 HDD (actually boxed)
Umm thats about it.
To be honest my real love these days is repairing faulty arcade machine PCBs, ie the game boards that ran the old arcade boards, I have no interest in MAME machines - far too easy and there is no tasty hardware to play with.
Currently have 2 JAMMA arcade machines, one horizontal and one vertical screen.
Game circuit boards I actually own rather than faulty ones I have in my Q for other folk are
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Moonwalker
Golden Axe
Golden Axe II - The Revenge of DeathAdder
E-Swat
Bubble Bobble
1943
Armidar
Black Tiger
Galaxians
Galaga
Midnight Resistance
Ikari Warriors III - The Rescue
New Zealand Story
Psycho Soldier
Bombjack
Magic Sword
Tumblepop
Gauntlet
NeoGeo 1 Slot board - Puzzle Bobble Cart - Mrs Womble loves that.
I actually have a fair few articles I wrote for an old forum that Panther (another member on here) and I used to loiter in, it recently died tho. So my articles are effectively homeless, I did bung a few up on a blog I mostly ignore. Mainly coz the World of Spectrum folk emailed me asking where my "how to modify a spectrum to give composite video out in 10 minutes flat" article had gone. Am happy to re-home them here if there is interest.
