"Hrothgar's Cool Old Junk Page" is completely created and maintained using classic hardware.
I rarely update this site. People have sent me lots of information since I first put this site up in 1998. People have donated interesting machines that should be featured. I have received manuals for items that are featured on this site that answer questions I have asked. I rarely get around to incorporating this information into this site. I probably only respond to about a quarter of the e-mails I receive that concern this site.
My only excuse is that work and commuting now take almost 12 hours out of each weekday, and I don't spend nearly as much time with my collection as I used to. I'd now rather be a Druid and hang out with the trees, than be using computers throughout my spare time (I design and write software for a living).
This site features items from my collection that I find particularly interesting for some reason. The items that I find most interesting tend to be the ones that I know very little about, the ones that I know to be rare, and the ones that I think are particularly historically important. I especially try to cover items from my collection that I haven't been able to find elsewhere on the Web.
As important as systems like the VIC-20, Commodore 64, Atari 800, and Apple II are, I will probably never feature these systems because they are so common and so well covered elsewhere on the net that they aren't worth talking about here.
The dates stamped on the bottom of each page represent the last time I changed the actual content for that page. It may not match the datestamp of the file because I may bulk upload files from my local copy to the server, or I may have simply fixed a spelling error or typo.
All of the photographs on "Hrothgar's Cool Old Junk Page" were taken using a Sony Trinicon HVC-2200 video camera, connected to an Amiga 1200 or 3000 (depending on how lazy I was) with a VLab 1200 framegrabber from MacroSystemUS.
The video camera bears a manufacturing stamp of March 1981, so it is definitely an antique. It has suffered some burn-in on the tube, but otherwise works quite well. I have referred to it affectionately as "DinoCam" almost since the day I brought it home from a garage sale.
Usually the only lighting I use is two 60W incandescent light bulbs. However, sometimes I take pictures during the day, and get sunlight bouncing into the room at the same time. This mixed lighting is what causes the bizarre colours in some of the photos. I'm no lighting expert, but I try my best to get clear pictures. I often find that the strange colouration looks rather cool, though.
All of the sounds on this page were sampled with a Perfect Sound 3 Digital Sound Sampler, from Sunrize Industries. If you have a chance to get one of these - don't bother! The interface is non-standard and you can only use the supplied software with this sampler. The software has a few bugs, and some features simply don't work unless you're using an Amiga 2000 or Amiga 500. I had previously owned a Perfect Sound for the Amiga 1000, and I was much happier with that device as it used the standard parallel sampler interface, and the hardware incorporated a good smooth volume control knob for each channel.