Adelaide Retro Computing Group meeting Dec 2017

On Friday December 8th, 2017, we held the final Adelaide Retro Computing Group meeting in it's current form, with all three organisers (including myself) no longer running the events after this.

We had an amazing turnout for the final event, it was full of people! The atmosphere was incredible as always and I had a wonderful time.

I talked so much about Amiga on the night that my voice went and I can barely talk today as I write this blog entry!

So, to the meeting itself, we had a lot of interesting systems and naturally a lot of Amigas! I brought along my AmigaOne X1000 for the evening, and had the case open for people to see it:

I was busy showing off the latest AmigaOS 4.1 OpenGL Nova  drivers included in the latest Enhancer bundle from A-Eon Technology, showing the live Workbench mapped onto 3 cube, playback of 720p movies and plenty of games and emulation stuff too.

Of course we had plenty of other Amigas at the event, with two Amiga 600's running Vampire 600 accelerators on display:
 

 This Amiga 600 used a PCMCIA wireless card to provide internet access, and of course the Vampire 600 installed inside, along with A604n expansion and real time clock expansion module:

 
The other Amiga 600, also with a Vampire 600 installed, also had a SDNET module installed to provide internet access, with plenty of games and movies played to show off the impressive power of the Vampire 600:

 

An Amiga 2000HD with Gotek was also there:

 
Completing the Amiga presence, we also had an Amiga 1200 (with 060 installed), Amiga 1000 running Captain Blood and Powerbook G4 running MorphOS on display at the event:

 But of course, the Adelaide Retro Computing Group isn't just about Amiga systems!

We had plenty of other systems on display on the night too - a lot of Apple Mac's especially! First up is this Apple Mac Cube G4, complete with SSD hd upgrade:

 

 
 Some new visitors to the group brought in a Apple Powerbook G4 and Apple Mac Classic, which were busy gaming during the evening!

 An iMac G3 (green) and Apple Mac SE/30 were on display too:

We even had a snowy!

 A beautifully restored IBM PC 8088 System was also brought in - looks amazing inside and out:

Amstrad 386SX luggable (I am not sure I would call it a laptop!) was also on display:

Consoles were also well repesented, with Playstation 1, Atari 7800, SNES Mini here:

Closer look at the 7800 - I used to have one of these but sold it a long time ago - it was good to see it again:

 
The rare Victor V-Saturn (rebadged Sega Saturn in Japan only) was also here with plenty of games to enjoy:

Also a rare Test Playstation 2 unit was here:

  A Sega Megadrive 2 modded with everdrive clone and used to compose music was busy on the night doing it's thing also:

We even had a Microsoft XBox running arcade and retro system emulations during the night:
 

Plenty of games and consoles were for sale on the second hand tables:

 

 FM Towns Fresh also made an appearance, which was great to see in action again!
 

The place was buzzing with people, excited to talk about all things Retro computing:

 

We even had a Psion EPOC on display!
 

 

I didn't get a great shot but we had a Vectrex running on the night too, in the far right corner of this photo:
 

It was a great meeting!

At the meeting we discussed the future of the group, and a number of people expressed interest in running the group in 2018 and keeping the meetings going. That was wonderful to hear and we will shortly hand over the group, website and facebook presence to these new people so they can get to work on the next events in 2018 and hopefully beyond too. I wish them the best of luck with it.

It has been a real pleasure to run these meetings for the past three years. I am so glad to meet so many people in Adelaide who love retro computing and are so passionate about it.

If you ever attended one of our meetings, I am very glad you could make it and I hope you had a great time.

I expect to still attend the meetings in 2018 under the new group management, in whatever form that ultimately takes, as long as it doesn't stray too far from what George, myself and Theo worked so hard to create, a retro computing enthusiasts group for local Adelaide people to meet, share ideas and play with some amazing systems!

Adelaide Retro Computing Group August 2016 Event

The August 2016 meeting of the Adelaide Retro Computing Group had a theme of "Bring your favourite Retro System" and our biggest attendance so far turned up to show off their favourites!

We had lots of interesting systems on display at the meeting. To start off with take this 1978 Ohio Superboard system and Apple II si.

Amiga systems were well represented at the meeting, here are two Amiga 500 systems, kitted out with A590 hard disks (upgraded) and one with a CDROM drive.

A rare system indeed - a Sharp TV with built in Super Famicom (SNES) called the SF1:

A couple of MSX systems were also on display at the meeting:

Here is the internals of the Canon MSX system - this system had a mod done to output standard video out:

Here is the Toshiba version of the MSX.

Here is an Apple IIe:

No shortage of software to try on the Apple IIe on the night!

Here is the internals of the Apple IIe, showing (hard to see) the internal joystick mod:

A Commodore Vic 20 was also on display, showing a game that was recently ported by the owner to the Vic 20 from another system!

In my case I brought along my Amiga 4000T and a Neo Geo X for the 2 player game competition:

I showed off AmiKit Real running on the Amiga 4000T plus running a lot of AGA demos.

I also put some games on for people to play - here was Disposable Hero AGA:

The attendees looking over the systems on display:

We also saw the final release version of Rebooteroids for Atari Jaguar, showed off by the programmer of the game!

Theo brought along his Mac Colour Classic system:

More Amigas at the meeting - this time an Amiga 600 and Amiga 1200 side by side:

A serial cable was connected up between them and a two player serial hookup game of Lotus 2 was soon underway!

Next door to this was a MSDOS Compaq IBM PC clone, also running plenty of games during the evening:

The tables were all full and lots of people!

Here you can see a Commodore 128D, which the owner has had since new.

We also saw the extremely rare Pippin console on display at the meeting - this system was designed by Apple and built in Japan by Bandai and marketed as an Atmark system. It was seriously expensive when released and few titles released for it. Steve Jobs canned the Pippin project when he returned to run Apple in the late 1990's.

Here it is in action:

I was very glad indeed to have a play on this very rare system.While in Japan I won an interesting Famicom in a joystick system (with 200 games built in) from a UFO Catcher game, and decided to bring it back as a prize for this month's meeting retro game competition!

We then had a presentation all about capacitors, a common problem that needs fixing for all retro system owners.

It was a very interesting presentation, and we all learnt a lot about the different types of capacitors and common failure points.

George also did a quick presentation on Thimbleweed Park, a new upcoming point and click adventure game in a similar style to the original Maniac Mansion game from Lucasarts back in the 1980's.

As you can see the meeting room was almost full:

As we did last month we had the middle tables set up for people wanting to sell old retro system bits and pieces - there was plenty of interest:

The room was buzzing and it was a great turnout - many thanks to everyone who brought in their systems! There is also a Microbits (from South Australia) PC system in this shot that I missed during my rounds!

Aron was certainly busy at his soldering station, helping many people with their soldering needs:

George brought in a Radio Shack TRS80 luggable (portable?) system:

The two player Retro game competition then got underway, playing a fighting game on the Neo Geo X system I brought in - Luke brought in a second controller so we could have 2 players on it:

In the end a young man became a very happy recipient of the prize! Here I am on the right giving the prize to the lucky winner:

He then quickly started playing it on the main screen:

George also brought in an System 24 arcade board by Sega - very dusty but nice to see an arcade board on the night:

Paul from Retrospekt also brought in his French Amstrad CPC6128 Plus:

It was a fantastic evening and I really enjoyed the meeting. It was great to see so many interesting systems and our biggest attendance so far. Can't wait for the next meeting!

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