A look back at what I had in February earlier this year. A lot has changed since then with my collection, so stay tuned for a 2020 collection overview! We see some of the old favourites in there and some slightly newer ones that hadn’t been mentioned before.

Things have changed quite a bit since those earlier collection videos. By February 2019 I’d moved house more than once, and each move seemed to leave me with a little less room for all my old computers and consoles.

Once upon a time I had plenty of shelves to spread everything out. Now I’ve got one bookcase, and that’s just about all the space I’m prepared to devote to the collection. A rather dramatic reduction, but perhaps not such a bad thing.

I’ve been trying to keep the machines that mean something to me rather than having shelves full of duplicates. There’s still plenty of Sega, Nintendo and Sony hardware, but I’ve become a bit more selective about what deserves to stay.

The arrangement is roughly chronological, starting with the Mega Drive, Super Nintendo and Game Boy. Then we’ve got the Saturn, original PlayStation and Nintendo 64, followed by the Dreamcast and GameCube. There are a few gaps, of course, but I’m quite pleased with how everything fits together.

The Xbox is a bit of a nuisance because it doesn’t fit particularly well on the shelves. Typical Microsoft! It looks as though some machines simply weren’t designed with my carefully arranged bookcase in mind.

There are also several of the newer miniature consoles sitting around. I keep buying them because the idea of having a whole collection of classic games in tiny little boxes is rather appealing. Perhaps one day I’ll have enough of them to replace the full-sized systems on the shelves.

Then again, that’s probably how I end up with even more hardware than I started with!

The upper shelves are home to games, cartridges and other odds and ends that haven’t found a better place to live. I’ve got Mega Drive cartridges, a few bits of Game Boy equipment and plenty of things that really ought to be photographed and sold.

There’s far less development hardware than there used to be. Most of that equipment was simply too large to keep once space became such a problem. It was wonderful having all those machines together, but I can’t realistically dedicate an entire room to them anymore.

And that’s the collection as it stood in February 2019. Smaller, certainly, but still full of some rather wonderful machines. I’m quite happy keeping a selection of favourites instead of every last console that happens to pass through my hands.

Of course, things have changed again since this recording. I’ll have to give you another proper update when I get the chance!