Search the Community

A look at some of the more RARE and EXPENSIVE big box PC games. There are games in here you rarely see out in the wild anymore. Big shoutout to local Seattle collector Kevin Ng for letting me borrow a bunch of these for the video. Anybody here on AtariAge collect Big Box PC stuff (C64, Amiga, Atari St, MS-DOS)...and what are some of your more rare or valuable games?

I now have, in my possession, a system that is not supposed to still be in one piece: A GRiDCASE 1537, a variant of the GRiDCASE 15xx series that has a substantial amount of shielding designed explicitly to minimize radio frequency emissions that could be intercepted ostensibly by bad actors. It was a system that was not sold to the general public, and was only available through GRiD's government services shell company, GSCS, and only if you had permission to acquire a unit from the appropriate superior. I'd only seen vague mentions of this unit in GRiD sales literature, as case studies. Because these systems were designed for classified information processing, they were supposed to be destroyed upon decommission. A few of these wound up as surplus, and somehow survived. By all accounts, there are, maybe, 5 of these left in the world. Which is why I was _VERY_ surprised, when on a lark, I typed in GRiDCASE, hoping to find a 1520 or 1530 to be used as a development testing unit for my PLATOTERM development, and I find somebody selling a 1537 TEMPEST for $1100. My eyeballs popped out of my head. As it had happened, I had recently sold a bunch of excess hardware and software via eBay, so I had some extra cash, and after a lot of gnashing of my teeth, I decided to pull the trigger. Now, what one of these units was doing on eBay, is strange enough. The fact that this unit was in Pervouralsk; a remote part of Russia, is truly one of life's great mysteries. -------- A bit about the unit: The outside: The case of the unit is black painted magnesium, with a rough matte finish, which, while not scratch resistant, is _extremely fingerprint resistant, as well as fending off some liquid spills. It is NOT waterproof, however. The whole thing is black. black as black can get. It looks like the tycho monolith, very intimidating and imposing. This is what you would imagine a spy to have and use. It is a clamshell design, GRiD pioneered the entire clamshell computer design with the Compass, and they extended it here with a larger screen, adding an internal floppy and/or hard disk, as well as a battery in most configurations, to make it a self contained portable. This specific TEMPEST configuration does not have a battery though, due to various requirements for processing classified data. Instead, the battery compartment is filled with a 16 volt DC-DC transformer, which is bolted into the chassis. A fan is added to this DC-DC supply (unlike most GRiDCASE machines) -------- The inside: This laptop was produced for roughly two years, starting in 1991. This was a beast of a laptop by 1991 standards: * 80386SX 20mhz, which can be upgraded to an 80486SLC. (I did this on my original 1530 I once had) * 4 megabytes of RAM * 120 megabyte Conner mil-spec hard drive. (Only 5 specific hard drive models can go into this unit, period.) * Chips&Technologies chipset and VGA (C&T 455), which can do 640x480x16 * Electroluminescent Display panel (ELD), with a characteristic bright yellow self-illuminating glow, the EL display has a quirk in that it only displays 640x400 in VGA mode, the bottom 80 pixels are cut off * 77 key mechanical keyboard (yeah, it's a fully mechanical keyboard) * 3.5 inch 1.44mb floppy * built in SCSI adaptor All for a cool price of approximately $13,940 in this configuration, which for the US Govt is...a bargain. ------ A bit about the TEMPESTing: The laptop is TEMPEST certified, this means that there has been a substantial amount of EM shielding added to the unit. There is shielding around: * The power supply * The display and its driver circuitry * the motherboard, which has a few bits of sub-shielding around critical parts, such as the processor and memory. * There is shielding around the floppy drive * There is also shielding around the hard drive * There is shielding around the connectors on the back, as well as individual sub-shielding for certain connectors (the keyboard and VGA) * Every interconnect is surrounded by braid shielding * The display interconnect also has two long iron toroids surrounding the braid. * There is a sensor attached to the hard drive tray, which detects if a hard disk is in the cradle, and therefore if tempest integrity is maintained. If the bay is open, the computer displays a warning indicating the tempest integrity can not be maintained. My sensor is malfunctioning, so i always see this message, my system boots anyway. ------ Here are some pictures of the unit in action, in its new life: https://imgur.com/gallery/WCO1sIZ -Thom

I hung out with Al Lowe (Leisure Suit Larry, Freddy Pharkas, King's Quest, Police Quest, etc) the other day and it turns out he may have some of the only original copies of game source code for a lot of the those classic games. Now that he's in his 70s, he's selling a lot of his collection on Ebay and gave me a preview of what's to come. A starting bid of $100 for the original Leisure Suit Larry source?>! Hell yes!! LOL https://www.ebay.com/usr/al_lowe

I recently loaded these on to an old Packard Bell Legend computer and they worked flawlessly. Please see the pictures and ask with any and all questions. $10 plus Media Mail shipping from 80138. Thank you!

Sierra On-Line was a massively popular game publisher in the 80s & 90s, which great games like King's Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest, Gabriel Knight, and many more! I show some of the Big Box Sierra PC games in my collection. Anybody else collect Big Box PC games from the 80s & 90s?

Do you want to be a hero? The Quest for Glory series by Sierra was a classic adventure/role-playing series that fans world wide remember fondly. TheBigJB (Ex-Sierra employee) talks about all five games in the series and which ones are his favorite, and which are not. Anybody else remember this Sierra series fondly?

Games I've added to my collection over the last couple months. Many great old PC & Windows games as well as Xbox, PS2, Neo Geo Pocket Color, PSP, Amiga, C64 and much more! Anybody else collect big box PC games?