Six Years Ago... The Original DF Office Set (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Rich here. If you own an Android phone, you'll know that Google Photos pops up occasionally to remind you of images you captured in days gone - and today, I was surprised in a 'Roger Moore eyebrow raise' kind of way to see the construction of the original DF set - which includes the revelation that the desk was nothing more than a white board resting on some Ikea trestle tables. But let's take a look a look at what the mighty Ikea Billy bookcase had on it, eh? Everything is numbered here, starting top-left, then moving down one row at a time.

1: Looks like my old AM3 Gigabyte motherboard with an FX-8350 when I foolishly thought it could replace a Core i7 3930K. Also, a Nintendo 3DS.

2: Some old GPUs along with peripherals we were looking to test but never did. It took the arrival of Will to give us any kind of decent reviewing prowess for keyboards, mice and the like.

3: Now we're getting interesting - that'll be a 3DS debugging station there, along with some PS Move controllers and the disappointing PS3 Super Slim.

4: Looks like some more AMD motherboards and a separate chip?

5: The boxes of our Canon camera (great camera, not good for video as it turns out), a debug PS3, a debug Wii U, a retail Wii U, a hardware-modded Vita with video output and that mini-tower there is a debug PSP!

6: A bunch of retail and debug Xbox 360s and an Nvidia GPU

7: The DVD is a compilation of DVD projects Digital Foundry did before we concentrated on game analysis. The laptop was a prototype mobile capture station I developed and the board there is an Accustream 170 - a 2004-era capture card that could handle 1080p! I built many stations around that card, and it cost $3000 per unit. Yes, $3000 for a capture card. This was used in military grade and medical imaging scenarios and I adapted it for game capture, starting in 2005 when Xbox 360 arrived.

8: Retail PS3, debug PS4, various cameras including Kinect, PS3 and PS4 cameras, motherboard and GPUs.

9. A Haswell era Mini-ITX board, what may be a small ATX board for first-gen Core and a Raspberry Pi.

10. The classic Ben Heck latency controller monitor board, as used in the development of Modern Warfare 2 and many other games.

11. Another debug PS3, a Doctor Who Blu-ray we used for BD testing, some graphics cards, hard drive and a specific LG BD drive that could read PS3 Blu-ray games. Also a USB 3.0 Micomsoft capture device with DF stickers to make identifying it harder when nosey journos looked at our kit on press trips.

12. Wii U Pro controller, external DVD drive and an actual portable DF capture kit from the mid-2000s period. We built these into Shuttle PCs so they could be easily moved about, shipped etc.

The bottom two layers can't be seen clearly but we didn't put much of interest there because it was out of view. But you can see another Shuttle-based DF capture station there, and the hint of the red controller there would be a PlayStation version of the Ben Heck controller monitor board - which struggled to work well, to be honest. A couple of hard drive boxes there. I think those were 4GB desktop drives that I stripped out to make a RAID-0 array in my PC.

I am tempted to make a new set now! Or maybe just a green screen for a UE5 background set as pioneered by John - but yes, an interesting trip down memory lane! Oh, and yes, I will see if I can dig out that DVD. It basically compiled a bunch of DF DVD projects onto one dual layer disc we used to market digital video services.

We actually did an office 'tour' just before we shut down the office. You'll hear me make a strange aside about 'next year' because at that point (2018), the PlayStation 5 was apparently going to come out in 2019, which is another story altogether. Here's that #content: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/2018-04-07-digital-foundry-office-tour-core-i9-vs-threadripper-df-workstation-face-off