Making a retro poster out of Internet pictures

I am in the process of redecorating my office, and I wanted to have some cool-looking 80’s motif poster hanging on some of my walls. O searched eBay, Amazon and some other sites for it, but couldn’t find anything I really liked – or in the size (an price range) I wanted.

So, I thought about doing it myself. I imagined it shouldn’t be that hard. The Internet is full of pictures and all I needed to do was finding one that was aligned with my taste, use Photoshop to make it right in terms of size and resolution and send it to the print shop.

To test it, I went with a classic 80’s MSX game, called “Penguin Adventure”. I love that game and it really brings me a lot of good memories. So, I googled for it to see what pictures I could find on it. Bingo, found the one below, which is a photograph of the game box.

As it can be seen, the resolution wasn’t that great, and the size wasn’t exactly right either. I wanted an A2 size poster, so that would require some changes on the selected picture. A2 size is depicted below.

So, I edited the picture on Photoshop to the A2 measure (in mm) and a resolution of 150 dpi (normally, enough for picture printing). Of course when you increase the picture size, quality is going to get decreased – and that’s why it is so important to get the original picture in the highest resolution you can. I also took the opportunity to crop out the parts in the picture I didn’t want. I also added a 30 mm bleeding frame to it, so it would have some white spacing between the hard frame and the picture, after framed. The end result (here, in lower res) was like below:

Now, to print it, I opted for a print shop with online service. That is so much more convenient. I chose https://www.instantprint.co.uk/, created an account, picked the print size (A2) uploaded the jpeg and they generated the digital proof, all in real time. You then need to approove the proof and pay for it (it cost me 8 pounds). Two days later, it arrived. Meanwhile, I bought the frame at Amazon, for about 12 pounds, which arrived 24hs later.

The final result can be seen in the below picture.Total cost: 20 pounds (I guess it could be cheaper if you can get it printed for less and make your own frame…!).

The result was so great that I am working on an A1 size poster, now. This one would use the Atari patent picture I found on the Net (below). Hopefully, it will turn out as nice as the Penguin one! I will tell you all about it later, when it is ready.

Powerbook 3400c tear down and clean up

This video shows a full disassembly of a Powerbook 3400c, thorough cleaning and test. This Powerbook was bought at eBay for 40 quid, in an operational state. But the PRAM (CMOS) battery needed to be removed to avoid leakage, so I took the opportunity to fully disassemble it and clean it.

The vĂ­deo is fairly long (1h 30min).