Ahhh..., if you don't mind a 'potentially incriminating' question...

[Eirulan]

Those are some impressive HDD collections

... and I thought I have a lot of digital data - too much - with my 10 TB internal HDD space + 3 TB NAS ^^

 

[bran479]

I used to be a TB guy.  But finally I realized I had a bunch of stuff that I would never play/watch.  Unless its rare or hard to find I keep 200GB only. 

[Porl Hendy]

 

This must look like @DOS76 room with all that HDD space

And this is my storage space

[Rincewind]

You know what I might back up my hard drive to floppy discs how many should I buy for a 2tb drive 

[DOS76]

Here is my actual data center but I appreciated the funny comparision. Its powered by a Pentium G3430 with 8GB of RAM which is the Max the OS Windows Home Server 2011 will support.

[Rincewind]

Love the fact you leave the side panel off the PC to keep it cooler

[DOS76Alt]

More laziness than anything if I want to change something or pull a drive I also have been known to stash small items behind some cables up above the drives.

[lino11]

In reality, a lot of content on a small corner shelf.... better than having all that stuff in real life sitting on your shelves, imo.

I admire the guys on YouTube showing off their mega rooms of wall-to-wall vg's, but one day, you'll feel that weigh on you. Gotta learn to let go sometimes. Sell it off. All of it. Go digital.

We've all spent real dough on the current gem systems at whatever time they were current, put in our share. If they didn't wanna give us a way to preserve the games and machines... and cry when we figure it out for ourselves...? That's ok, Rom City here I come. Permanent tenant. Me.

And now you have guys like Sony... who aren't interested in backwards compatibility anymore... thinking that it's a fair argument to sell a digital download of Final Fantasy 7 for the PS3... and when PS4 or PS5 or PS6 come out... tell the consumer, well, that was different architecture. You gotta pay for the emulation with the new machine. 

That makes no sense when like a damn Hauwei android gingerbread could run their game just the same, essentially a decade earlier.

[Lordmonkus]

I agree with you to a certain extent.

I agree that having the giant collection that fills an entire room is excessive but that's my opinion and not something I am interested in. But at the same time having an entirely digital collection isn't necessarily better. I prefer a hybrid of the 2, have an emulation collection while having a small collection of physical hardware and games that you actually like.

[lino11]

Oh, for sure, stay current. Contribute to the industry.

I've got dozens of PS3 and PS4 games on my shelf in front of me and dozens more I've downloaded from their stores. And I purchased all of the games I have roms for, too, back when they were brand new.

But there should be a line drawn about sharing data online so that the awful truth of it is always front and center...... no one was ever going to buy Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom for the NES. Not back in 1991 and 25 years later, any money paid for that game isn't going to the original developer.

These machines die and we bring them back to life. And maybe Tomato's next project you buy on your shiny handheld or whatever.

Look at what the GDEmu developer has done for reviving the Dreamcast scene... look at the prices on eBay for his Saturn kits, the RHEA and Phoebe are going for like $600 and up.... all just because gamers want to continue to enjoy these one-time expensive machines.... with their expensive software that is now readily available for all. Like a beloved painting on public display rather than some old dude's study.

And as we see these digital files, even when encased in cartridge or compact disc form, are just bits of data. They're like baseball cards. Completely worthless. And we can do it ourselves.... so acting like emulating a 3 megabyte retro classic for the new 8-core next-gen machine and charging $19.99 again after you bought it on the three previous systems.... is probably not a good business model to adopt.

[walter10h]

On 26/08/2016 at 6:09 AM, Rune Lockhart said:

i LOVE this quote! i feel the same way!  i also like to buy Indy games. because i know the money actually goes to the indy dev. not to some corp. Especially after watching that indy game movie  

You make Indy happy.

Spoiler

As for me. Given that my country's situation is pretty bad, and companies are not giving me the chance to purchase in my currency or through proper exchange, I simply "acquire" my games in any way I see fit. Some times, if I get some Paypal pocket money through an online job, I buy a bundle or something if I'm interested. However, as I do not have any options, I have to conclude that I'm not a target market, therefore my purchases are irrelevant.

Edited October 29, 2016 by walter10h

[MesonW]

I still own over 2000 physical console game originals, but they're all in storage and being enjoyed by nobody. I once dreamed of those wall-to-wall setups, but lack of space and the (welcome) additions to family meant it never came to anything.

Now I am sort of glad I never had it all set up like that. I've gone digital and have enjoyed browsing my LaunchBox library way more than I ever managed with my real library. For that I am very grateful to you guys Jason and Brad.

Now if I could only stop my new addiction of buying digital PC Games!

[massticles]

I purchase alot, and get alot by other means.

I have final fantasy 4 through both steam and Google Play, so yeah... I'm going to grab the SNES rom vs spending $70- $100+ on ebay.

Also, my server set up (which runs my win 10 VM)

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

[CadetStimpy]

On 11/8/2016 at 7:33 PM, MesonW said:

I still own over 2000 physical console game originals, but they're all in storage and being enjoyed by nobody. I once dreamed of those wall-to-wall setups, but lack of space and the (welcome) additions to family meant it never came to anything.

Now I am sort of glad I never had it all set up like that. I've gone digital and have enjoyed browsing my LaunchBox library way more than I ever managed with my real library. For that I am very grateful to you guys Jason and Brad.

Now if I could only stop my new addiction of buying digital PC Games!

Over 2K?  Wow!  What are you going to do with them?  Could be one of those crazy sales on eBay.    Some members of this Forum might be interested in a few of them. 

To me, one of the things about a 'collection', is having it on display, and to be admired, or even cherished to some extent, perhaps.  Therefore, I can certainly appreciate your dream of  the wall-to-wall setup.  But, you're in the Digital Age now, so your choice of LaunchBox was great, IMHO.

LaunchBox/BigBox is suprelative (whoa, I haven't used that word for a long time ) for a digital (aka, non-tactile) collection, in terms of being able to 'display' it, among many other attributes.

Good luck on the addiction.  I suspect many Forum members are similar addicts. 

 

[karlrobertuk]

I still backup most things to DvD and Blue Ray, just like to make sure i have a copy of everything somewere ...lol

 

[Kriven]

On 1/7/2017 at 6:22 AM, karlrobertuk said:

I still backup most things to DvD and Blue Ray, just like to make sure i have a copy of everything somewere ...lol

 

I do this as well... annually. I stash the old discs away with my original copies (assuming it wasn't bought from GoG or something). Make a bunch of little inserts and use printable discs so they still look cool as heck on the shelves. Anyways, they main thing is, if a disc or a drive fails, I have several other copies I can recover from. I'm sure you do something like this, too.

[Dyspare]

Wow, Very impressive. I thought I was getting up there with 7 HDD on my mains pc, like a total of 18TB or so. but wow guys.   I am planning on getting more though as I know i dont have to room to advance my Pokerom addiction too far into the CD sets.  And at the same time I have a decent Sega DC systems and games collection, as well as a Sega Genesis/32x/ and Sega CD with a ok collection of games. Have a PS1, 3, 4. An N64, WIi, Wii U, and soon a Switch. I agree that we should support the developers whenever we can. As for steam? im not overly familiar with it. I used to PC game alot, then I fell back into consoles when pS3 was big.  I think i have like 2 steam games.

[damageinc86]

i think video game enthusiasts are in a unique position to be the "underground archivists" so to speak, of this industry's offerings.  Since corporations rarely actually care about their products longer than 5 years after release, it is really up to us to somehow make sure these games are all preserved since they really won't do it, or make their content available for institutions (museums or archives) to obtain outside of actually hunting down every physical copy of something ever released.  Which sort of happens, but of course it's an amazing undertaking.  Here the underground comes in, and hobbyists have successfully kept very large pieces of history alive far past their initial lifespans.  I think that is really important, so in that respect I don't frown upon how this hobby obtains its cultural artifacts ;-)

[Mute64]

On 26/08/2015 at 7:17 AM, CadetStimpy said:

Do you folks with armies (aka thousands and thousands) of games, buy them all, or is it that many of them were a 'free-off-the-Internet' type of thing? My games only number in the 'low hundreds' (but I don't have any emulated games and only 15 Steam games).

Well..... were i can i like to pay/donate  for my games....... obviously all 150+ of my steam games are paid for and i also pay for services like Romulation,Emuparidise and i donate to bitGAMER.... if i could directly donate to the original creators i would... but unfortunately that is not always possible, but for example i  soon plan on emulating the new Zelda game but i am also going to purchase the game as well to support the dev team.

[Mute64]

Also for example i just purchased this 

 

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/sega-megadrive-and-genesis-classics-bundle