Stuffed into this vintage Ion Chamber radiation detector, a tiny Russian-built Civil Defense computer… running at 300MHz with 256MB of RAM and a 4GB flash drive. Flick the ON switch and the entire rig leaps into radioactive life, wildly ticking and buzzing about its own nuclear decay.
Technabob doesn’t think this rig would play the original Half-Life or Fallout, but I played both games on a rig about this powerful, back in the day. Lugging this around through the wasteland for a portable game of either is a dream application.
Geiger Counter PC Casemod Can’t Play Half-Life [Technabob]
A gentleman named Ryan Bocook built a Sound Lab Mini Synth (kit from http://www.musicfromouterspace.com) into a geiger counter case as well!
http://musicfromouterspace.com/analogsynth/photogallery/Ryan_Bocook_FrontCopy.jpg
http://musicfromouterspace.com/analogsynth/photogallery/Ryan_Bocook_inside.jpg
It’s projects like this that keep the rest of the Synth DIY community on their toes.
I think he might be right about that system not playing half-life. If you look closely, you can see what looks like National Semiconductor’s stylized “N” symbol printed on the CPU. If this is so, then the chip in question would be one of the later model geode processors(produced before AMD bought the product line).
The geode was a refinement of the Cyrix MediaGX, and inherited its absolutely ghastly performance(particularly for games). On top of a sucktastic core, these chips were hobbled by integration with, shall we say, “cost optimised” sound and video peripherals.
Ok, Ok. I give in. You could probably play a hobbled game of Half Life or Fallout if you could get the game onto a CF card. But I still like SCRAM better anyway.
…but you definitely couldn’t play HL2 or Fallout 3.
@Marky – That’s the first thing that I thought, too. If you follow some links, you can find it was put together by a Russian. But yeah, that’s a model CDV-715 radiological survey meter, most likely made by the Victoreen Instrument Co. in Cleveland, Ohio.
Is it legal in New York?
No no keep the gauge and hook it up to the disk drive. I’ve modded my computer to replace the flickering lights with an old style gauge – each flicker of the disk drive light translates into a flick of the needle. Neat effect.
This would be cooler if it used laptop guts with a small color LCD in place of the gauge. A luggable computer!
Um… That’s an American geiger counter. They were handed out by the thousands to civil defense people. Search “Victoreen” on Ebay.
Cool mod!
I would disagree that it wouldn’t be able to play the original Fallout or Half Life, 100MHz and 64MB of RAM would probably do it. Still, 300MHz isn’t a monster, so it might not offer the best performance with those two games. There’s also the issue of no CD-ROM drive, so you’d have to get the data on there some other way.
However, overclocking it may be in violation of international treaties.
I’d like to see this with a GPS inside. Great prank device. Program it to respond to proximity to a particular location. Convince your roommate that he slept with an alien and now his boxer shorts are radioactive.
But can you get on an aeroplane with it?
It’s not so vintage. Looks a lot nicer than the ones we use at my college.