Post a Comment On: The Dreamcast Junkyard

When I got me that lovely blue cabinet to hold all my Dreamcast games, one thing sprung to mind: what if I could give it a little more Dreamcast identity? being stuffed full of games and featuring zombies and crazy taxis on top simply wasn't enough, I wanted the logo slapped along the side of it. Having not long broken up from Uni, I now have time to do all sorts of time wasting things, like make my own multi game discs (I'll come back to you lot on this), make loads of custom covers for Bleem games, and go back to some games I still haven't completed. Last week I decided to have a go at painting the Dreamcast logo on the side of my blue cabinet. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of he steps I took, so you'll just be seeing the final thing.

Now I may be a slightly arty type, but I'm no expert at painting things, so I only had a rough idea how to do this. printed off the logo nice and big, then cut it out into a stencil. Then I taped this onto the side, and with acrylic paint tried to paint into the stencil. The stencil, for a start, was on tracing paper, so it flopped all over the place so the final result was a complete mess, so I had to clean that off.

Clearly that idea didn't work, so this time I went about getting me some spray paint to do it, and stronger paper while I was at it. I waited for a sunny day, dragged the cabinet into the garden and spayed a bunch of layers into the stencil. After about 4 or 5 layers it looked white enough. The stencil was still only paper, though (I really should have used cardboard or something) so quite a bit of spray creeped through and I ended up with what looked like a ghost of the logo, all glowy. This would of been fine if it wasn't for the blobs of blue left behind by the blue tack I used to keep parts of the stencil down! I let it dry, though, and decided to tinker with it the next day.

To finish the job off, and make the logo look almost as if it came off of the side of the box art, I got some white spirit, dripped some cotton buds into it and rubbed around the letters and swirly thing until it looked a lot nicer. here is the final result of about two days work. It's not perfect but it looks fine enough for me, especially from a distance. It's the first thing you see as you walk in the room, too.

[Image][Image]In other not very exciting news, I found some bits and bobs in the loft I forgot all about. Usually all the console boxes are kept on one side of the loft, but while sorting out boxes for video players we're going to sell, a black sack full of Dreamcast boxes was found that I didn't realize was even up here! These included one for a controller, a arcade stick, a VMU and and a keyboard...with the keyboard still in it. These were boxes for the first pieces of Dreamcast kit I brought along with my system way back in 1999. The keyboard was my original one and had been stuffed up here for some reason and is in nasty shape from so much use back before I had a PC and used the consoles internet connection to write on my old website Segagaga, which was essentially a blog (before the term 'blog' existed) about my Dreamcast purchases only without any kind of layout (literally, it was just text). I would go onto the Chu Chu Rocket chat rooms, set the web address and a shortcut key, and just plaster the link everywhere. People naturally ignored it. Memories~

[Image]I'm taking photos of boxes! I must be bored!But Dreamcast boxes weren't all I found. Also stuffed up there long forgotten about were some HUGE Sonic promo cut outs from the good old days when Sonic was hugely popular with real people, not furrie FREAKS who want to have sex with him. These probably date date back around 1992/93. I plonked a Dreamcast and Sonic figure next to them to show you the sheer scale of them. They are now sitting in my room, where I can wake up to them staring at me everyday. Just like my childhood. No, I never wanna grow up.
[Image]36 inches of AWESOME.

[Image]The good old days. Sega ruled the world in 1993.
The Sonic 2 board still has it's flap at the back, so you could sneak this into a shop, kick that Playstation 3 sign out of the way and make the public believe shops have started to stock good games again. The other board had it's feet ripped off, so I crudely taped them back on. I remember when a Sega bus visited my scouts club, and gave us Sonic toddles for our ties. That was the scale of how massive Sega were back then, they made Sonic TODDLES.
[Image]More coming soon from the Gagaman: New Bleem footage, the wonders of VGA and custom multi-game disc making.