The Treasury — Collections

A treasury is not a pile of stuff. It is things kept properly — catalogued, maintained, played, watered — because somebody decided they were worth a life’s attention. These are mine.

The library

Thirty years of games, kept playable and kept honest. The library is curated the way a museum curates: every title classified — Sacred, Important, Curio, Archive — and the Sacred wing defended accordingly. Xenogears. Terranigma and the Quintet canon. EarthBound. The Metal Gear line, the first one completed seventeen times. Chrono Trigger finished to the last ending, then finished again through its romhacks and fangames — because preservation treats translation patches, mods, and fan works as part of a game’s living text, not as piracy’s poor cousins. The library stays playable on real hardware, FPGA, and emulator alike; the operating systems it all ran on are not dead either — they live in the Castle.

The iron

The 486DX is gone — its story lives in the Cathedral — and the electric typewriter of the grade-six years has wandered off; my sister might have it. But the Imperial 55 I first learned to type on as a small boy survives, and so does the iron that matters. Jenova One still stands — the case that housed my first build, the overclocked Duron 900, though the Duron itself has long moved out. It wears a dye-sublimated metal plate of Jenova’s head with the neural lace, and an engraved nameplate modelled on the one on her helmet — cut at my first job, as an engraver, converting vectors down to a format an MS-DOS program could drive in the little dungeon they kept me in. The second build was HAL9000, an Antec tower whose board — librebootable, carrying a Core 2 Quad — waits in the motherboard stacks for its next boot. Two Tandy TRS-80s hold the eight-bit wing, and FPGA recreations fill in where original silicon is unobtainable — cycle-accurate, not approximated. There is also a Berlin annex: my Olivetti — an eight-bit cousin of the TRS-80s — alongside a Dolch PAC64 luggable retrofitted with a third-gen i7 mini-ITX board, and my old workstation running the ATX variant of the same board. Both were flashed with coreboot from a Raspberry Pi 3B+ years ago, because the doctrine in the Armory applies retroactively.

The bench

Preservation here includes a soldering iron. A PAL Super Nintendo — already carrying a SuperCIC I flashed myself — and a PSP are in pieces on the bench right now, and a DualSense is being soldered back to life. The SNES is not my original — that one was sold out from under my childhood, and this one stands in its place. Things kept properly include things brought back.

The keyboards

Hand-built mechanical keyboards, typed on daily. The main station runs a Tipro industrial board — Cherry MX Black switches under Dolch PAC64 keycaps, custom Colemak layout. The crown oddity is a 256-key monstrosity I built with keys harvested from two German Cherry MX typewriters — a build that carries both pride and shame: the pride is the machine that exists, the shame is that the donor machines ended in the trash, and not even properly sorted. Beside the boards sit trackballs whose balls were swapped for polished Heilstein spheres — green fluorite, lepidolite, unakite — and the raw black tourmaline from the same order ended up hot-glued across the tops of the keyboards and some of the machines. That was a tradition here: CPUs that burnt out from overclocking got crystals glued to them — silicon carbide, mostly — set so they looked like they were growing out of the silicon, and the dead processors became ornaments. Some survive. One sits on my altar right now: a bismuth crystal growing out of one of my earliest CPUs. A keyboard you built yourself is the one piece of the interface no vendor can revise out from under you.

The garden

Rare cultivar cacti, grafted by hand. The oldest San Pedros in the collection were seven years old when they came to me in 2009, inherited from the man who opened my path when he passed. The garden is a lineage, not a hobby — the Temple explains why that sentence is not a metaphor.