When I was getting my feet wet back on the deviantART community, an artist by the name of Tonks_92 drew this picture from my Space Raptor stories. I liked it a whole lot, my cousin liked it a whole lot. In fact, he had it printed out and pasted to his computer hutch for a number of years. This is still a special piece for me because it kind of captures my ambition and ideal of the story for the time.
Here’s a quick shot of the “experimental” and original machine that’s supposed to span two eras in computing; the Millenium project.
A ghost of a husk of the old family computer, I was never able to get this computer to work for various reasons. First I got a hard drive in 2002 but I had no OS to make it work; then in 2006 I was given an official opinion that the motherboard was broken on it. It was a custom build, with no brand name or manufacturer that had a birth in 1999.
I have cannibalized and gotten a lot of parts, including buying a duplication Biostar motherboard to bring it to life again. It now thankfully powers on again, but I have to get it to work with the hard drive installed, which is hard since I have no OS.
But I have dry-tested startup on some additional parts; two CD-ROM drives (one being the fabled Creative 52X drive), a tape drive from a 386 that broke down, and dual 3.25″ floppy disk drives. I can’t get the digital display to work on the front, but everything seems to fire up right.
And while I don’t have a picture on the back, I have a SoundBlaster32 for internals (kicking out the ES1868 AudioDrive), an IDE expander and gotten connectors to have some additional serial and parallel ports on the back.
As for now, it’s a half-baked PC with no heart or brain, but a working body. Sitting in the corner like some neglected test aircraft down at Northdrop with a bunch of tarps draped over it. When I can get enough cash to get an OS for it, I’ll hopefully bring this system to the life it deserves. It’s a matter of when, as the frame has sentimental value to me.
This is a long blast from the past, when I was asking around on deviantART for people to draw my characters, this fellow did a pretty interesting take on my Jennifer OC and my main character out of the Space Raptors story.
Sadly the artist’s dA page is deactivated and I have no idea what happened to him, but if I recall his art style correctly, he did some pretty amazing stuff. I like to think he made it somewhere big doing illustrations.
If you’re curious, here’s a shot a relative grabbed of me about a week after my parents sold a piece of property. I was storing countless machines and computers there, and I had to pack up everything and bring them home. But as I was using the garage as a graveyard, there was computers galore. I was told that I needed to get rid of some of this stuff, which I told them I would, it wouldn’t be a problem. So I slowly started to hodge-podge computers together in the garage, trying to bring whatever didn’t work to life to at least sell or show that I had a system working to keep.
It was pretty late when this was taken, so I’m kind of “meh”. I believe the system I was working on was getting reformatted to scratch.
This is an amazing request that Kasailan did of my Jennifer character. I’m totally blown away with it. She looks so real and yet has that anime touch to it! Thanks a bunch.
I decided to give this a stab after doing my Starfighter Dragoon piece. This is a Xudos battleship, based on the SE3 shipset that my brother had made. Can use some tweaks but am mostly happy with it.
Sorry this isn’t much of a picture, but world, meet Kira. Kira, meet world. He’s my new betta, and sits on my bookshelf above my PC. He doesn’t have a bad setup, but I do have to change his water a lot more often because of no filtration system. Still, he has a pretty good life. Much easier than keeping a bit 30-gallon tank, I will admit.
This was my 3rd attempt at spaceship pixel art back when I was starting to feel comfortable doing digital art. I took a lot of inspiration from Starblade and Project Dragoon in its design, wanting something sleek and more airplane looking. Done in MS Paint and with a trackball mouse!
This was certainly an odd occurrence, and I was glad I was around to catch it. But just as I got home with the USS Novastar, I realized that the odometer was at 111,111. Very interesting. Despite having a crappy cell phone camera I snapped a picture for posterity. From then on I’d snap pictures if I could when they’d hit an interesting combination or a milestone.
Decided to try my pixel-art style to something else other than ships; such as weapons! My primary weapon of choice for stuff like Space Raptors and such; a Star and Saturn N80 Pulse Blaster Rifle.
Features include ammo counter, guaranteed vacuum performance and a built in flashlight/tactical laser.
Sorry it’s not in much of a bigger resolution; my MSPaint tends to conk out when the file gets to a certain size.