The CRT TV stand on the left is new. I got tired of my Jerry-rigged TV stand that I was using before (it was just an old-fashioned ice cooler-style wood chest), so I went looking for a real stand and found this cool thing online. Now the CRT TV is up higher, the DVD recorder is no longer sitting on top of the TV, and I don't have visible cables going everywhere.
The DVD cabinet is the same, but there are some new Wii U games and movies. I moved the Wii Remotes inside the cabinet since that's better than dealing with the constant dust.
There aren't many retail games coming out this year that I want (it's basically just Project Cars and the Wii U Zelda), but there are several downloadable games that I'll be picking up later on.
The HDTV stand is the same (I love this thing and won't be replacing it). The Wii U and satellite box are on the top shelf. The Wii U is now permanently hooked up to the TV via HDMI. I don't have to swap out the component cable with the Wii anymore, which is much nicer.
The lower shelves have been slightly reorganized. I no longer have the VCR hooked up since I never use it, and I replaced the DVD player with a Panasonic Blu Ray player. This allowed me to move the middle shelf down a notch, creating more room above and making it easier to swap games in and out of the GameCube. The GameCube and Wii are separately hooked up with their official component cables, and the GameCube has a Game Boy Player attached.
My HDTV is a 32LG70. It's a 1080p, 60 Hz model with 3 HDMI inputs, two component inputs, multiple composite inputs, VGA, S-video... they just don't make TVs like this anymore. Nowadays you're lucky to get component or composite support at all. It has a game mode to reduce input lag and it can pass through a Dolby Digital 5.1 signal to the receiver (it seems all LG TVs do this).
The sound system is still the Panasonic HTB-15 sound bar. But hanging to the right side in the background there is my new Elgato HD60 capture card. This is why I no longer have to swap the component cables with the Wii. Every system aside from the Wii U is recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR.
The sound bar supports a variety of 5.1 surround signals (Dolby, DTS, LPCM), and it accepts HDMI inputs directly, so when I want surround sound out of my Wii U, I can just connect the HDMI cable directly to the receiver. However, since the Elgato doesn't accept LPCM 5.1 (nor does Youtube support it), I just use stereo when recording footage.
The CRT TV is a 25" Philips Magnavox from 2001. I'm the original owner. It makes a bit of an annoying humming noise when it's on, but it's great for retro gaming. I've discovered is that pre-GameCube systems don't work well on HDTVs for two reasons. The first problem is input lag. Old games often require fast reflexes, and HDTVs introduce display lag because of how much they process the incoming video signal (deinterlacing, scaling, etc.). The second problem is frame rate loss. I've noticed that old 60 fps games get their frame rate cut in half on HDTVs because the TV deinterlaces the 240p signal as if it were 480i, destroying the smooth image. So I do most of my NES, SNES and N64 gaming on the old TV.
One nice thing about the new CRT TV stand is that the cabinet below is large enough to fit one of my console organizers, as well as the distribution amplifier. So whenever I hook up a retro system now, I can keep it off the carpet and avoid a lot of dust. Now that's nice!
I'll be needing to update my pictures of my boxed game collection soon. There have been all sorts of additions (which I've noted on this blog), but I haven't taken complete pictures of each entire collection for about 3 years now. One of these days I'll need to upload some videos of the collection as well.
This was awesome. Maybe you should do videos of the collection.
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