Straight away - an apology for my absence of late. I've been working day and night on my latest projects, and knew it was time to stop in for an update.
For those curious how the wedding project was going - All of the rings have been crafted and each turned out better than I could have hoped for.
The coin ring craftsman I commissioned did an outstanding job with the mint proof. The image wasn't even warped in the slightest. And the silversmith I found to accept the challenge of resizing the piece from a 14 all the way down to a 7 did an expert job and for a delightfully low price.
Here is the coin ring before sizing:
And after:
But on to the next project!
This past weekend, my girlfriend and I developed a terrible nostalgia streak for the kids shows we watched in the 80s and 90s, as well as some more-recent favorites from the first years of Adult Swim.
We tossed our televisions back in 99 and have seen very little since so those two decades really have a strong connection to our childhoods. That's what inspired this new project.
We've got an old but working CRT in storage, and I'm going to build the MAME cabinet equivalent of 80s and 90s television. 106 complete program archives with a dedicated media center interface for easy navigation. When the project is complete, we plan to make it a Saturday morning routine, complete with marshmallow cereal.
We pooled a master program list via the Wikipedia and channel listing archives and narrowed it down to just over 100 of our favorite series.
Monday and Tuesday's archiving yielded the first 600 GB of content. The playlist thus far comprises 1,137 hours of retro-television - 44 different series from our master list and over 3,800 commercial-free episodes.
I learned quickly that the majority of these complete series archives are fan-compiled - that is, no official DVD collections exist for most of these programs, so you couldn't go out and buy them even if you wanted to.
As such, some series are top-notch while others are a mixed bag of video quality. But honestly, the occasional VHS scan lines add a touch of realism to the project and give it some life. They remind the viewer that the community brought together hundreds or even thousands of fans' VHS tapes and built these archives from the ground up. Joel Hodgson was right -
The RetroBox Project will be a lot of fun... though I anticipate I'll be stocking up on hard drives in the near future.