bmoc's Ongoing Gameroom Project

[bmoc]

Back in December 2015, my family and I moved from an 1100 square foot house to a 4000 square foot house (if you count the garage). Thanks to the much needed upgrade in space, I am now able to have a dedicated gameroom.

Currently the gameroom resides in an unfinished basement. Here is what it looked like when I got everything moved in.



The horrendous green cabinets were always intended to be temporary because the were free and I didn't have anything better to use at the time. Unfortunately I could only hook up six consoles at time with this setup. All my games are stored in the drawers at this point. I also moved my PC speakers over to the console area and did without on my PC for a while.

Recently, I came into possession of some cheap shelving so I have rearranged things a bit. The Ikea shelf and the periodical shelf cost me a grand total of $5.





Before I got the shelving, the amp/subwoofer on my Klipsch Promedia speakers died. Luckily I had been saving an old 5.1 channel receiver from work and I am now using that to drive the Klipsch speakers. I purchased the cheapo 8" Monoprice subwoofer to go with it. It is decent enough for the price.

I really like the periodical shelf but unfortunately my wife despises it. Apparently she had assumed that the gameroom would be "family" space and that she got input on what goes there. I had to manage expectations a bit and remind her that we have a gigantic living room for that purpose. The kids have their own rooms to do as they please. She has the rest of the house + a craft room of her own to do what she wants. I didn't think that I was asking too much for a roughly 12'x12' area to call my own.

So the end result of our conversation is that I will be getting a wall as soon as possible where the periodical shelves currently sit. So I can put whatever I want in there and she doesn't have to look at it. The catch is that putting a wall there doesn't leave enough space in the room for the periodical shelf + all the other stuff I want. I played around with http://planner.roomsketcher.com/ but I just couldn't make it work.

So when the wall goes up, I am going to remove the folding parts from the shelf and move it in the garage for general storage needs. I will have to budget thinner shelves for the gameroom as part of the renovation.

One of the first things I plan to change is the entertainment center. I am going to build something that can handle two 29" PVMs and a 40" HDTV plus all my consoles. It will look something like this but without all the LEDs and glass.

More to come as the saga continues!

[fastbilly1]

Digging it. But whats the story on the light green dresser?

I wish I knew about roomsketcher when we bought our house. That is too awesome to be free.

[noiseredux]

I wish I knew about roomsketcher when we bought our house. That is too awesome to be free.

for real.

[bmoc]

Digging it. But whats the story on the light green dresser?

My wife's grandfather passed away last year and left us a bunch of furniture. All the furniture you see in the first pic was his except the computer desk. My wife and I both agree that the green dressers aren't so fabulous. We will probably repaint them at some point.

I had to go get all that furniture from TN shortly after recovering from my splenectomy. I was cleared to move heavy things but I was very much out of shape. The 92 degree weather that day about destroyed me. That and the sofa bed. RIP my back.

[bmoc]

My plans for the gameroom are changing a bit. I've decided to ditch the PVMs because it has proven darn near impossible to get them serviced. Replacement PVMs are also much harder to come by than they used to be. As such, I have decided to future proof my retro gaming setup as much as I can by switching to modern displays and consumer CRTs.

I'm going to do most of my gaming on my HDTV from here on out. However, with the use of some matrix A/V switches, I have reconfigured things so that I can output most every console to either my HDTV or a consumer CRT with component inputs. That way I will still be able to have lightgun support and a second TV for gaming with guests and my kids.

One of the first things that I did with the new setup was determine exactly how much display lag my HDTV has. Since I can do a side by side lag test using the 240p test suite, I was able to get a pretty close estimate. It seems to be about 3.5 frames. Not the best but not awful either.



I also properly calibrated the colors on my HDTV using the SMPTE color bars and blue filter THX glasses.





I attempted to adjust the brightness using the 3 vertical black/gray bars in the bottom right. Unfortunately, it looks like the black levels of my TV are crap so the bottom right looks like one giant black bar no matter what brightness level I use. For now I am just going by what "feels right" on my N64 which seems to have the darkest output of all my consoles.

I'm waiting on a replacement remote control to arrive so that I can calibrate the CRT that I recently got for free. It isn't anything that special but it does have a 2005 manufacturing date so it probably doesn't have a ton of hours on it. It is a 24" Philips - model number 24PT6341/37.

If all goes well, I am hoping to have the money to finish the basement before the end of the year. So maybe by this time next year, I will have a fully completed gameroom.

[bmoc]

After many delays, I am happy to report that we should be finishing the basement (not just the gameroom) this year. Possibly very soon. We are selling our old house and using some of the profits to finish the basement in our current house.

We have a buyer for the house but they want to get a USDA loan. With the USDA being part of the federal government that is shutdown, that has put a stopper on things. If the shutdown drags on another month or so, our old house will go back on the market and I'm confident we will find another buyer relatively quickly.

So look forward to some new progress pictures in the near future!

[bmoc]

I worked on the basement some last week. We got everything framed up and the electrical is 90% done. I'll probably get the electrical finished up this week along with some minor HVAC tweaks.

I did discover something that is going to hold me up a bit. The radon levels are a bit high in the basement so I am going to have to get someone to come out and fix that. Apparently it is well known that this area has high radon levels. I'm a bit miffed that my builder did not recommend putting in a radon mitigation system.

[dsheinem]

Stock up on Rad-X and RadAway. That should do the trick.

[bmoc]

Stock up on Rad-X and RadAway. That should do the trick.

Hey now, I'm not exactly made out of bottlecaps you know.

[bmoc]

Guess what guys? It turns out that the builder did put in a passive radon pipe. It was in the part of the attic that doesn't get hardly any light so we never noticed it.



So if all goes well, we will just have to attach a fan to this section of pipe in the attic so it pulls the radon out more effectively. This is potentially going to save us several hundred dollars.

In other news, I decided on installing a 5.1 surround system. I got the speaker wire roughed in this past weekend.



The speakers arrived yesterday and were mistakenly delivered to my neighbor by FedEx. Luckily he is awesome and brought it over soon after I got home and before I went into full panic mode due to the seemingly missing package. The front & rear left/right speakers are going to be in-wall while the center channel will be a standard speaker. They are all Monoprice speakers which have decent enough reviews.



So the next item on my to-do list is to attach some banana plugs to the roughed in speaker wire. I am also going to have to partially remove two studs to get the in-wall speakers where I want them. The walls aren't load bearing so it shouldn't be a problem. Once the radon fan is installed next week and assuming that it does the job, we''ll be ready to start drywall installation.