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 July 2016

Sorry for the delay in posting the photos from this month's Adelaide Retro Computing Group meeting, held on July 8th. I already posted the photos to our Facebook page, But here is my meeting report with photos now!

This meeting was a free for all retro system meeting, with a Star Wars game theme.

I decided to bring along my Amiga 600, which has been extensively upgraded, covered on this blog in detail every step of the way. Here is the internals which I had on display for a while during the evening:

For most of the night though it was running Stars Wars games:

I had both Return of The Jedi and Empire Strikes Back running on the Amiga 600 - it was actually my first time to play them in all these years of Amiga ownership!

We had a lot of different Retro systems on display during the night, thanks to the efforts of lots of attendees who brought in interesting systems to play with.

Here is an Atari Jaguar playing Empire Strikes Back as well:

Llamatron 2084 and Xenon 2 also got a run on the Atari Jaguar!

This is an IBM PC compatible machine from pre-2000:

Here is a rare treat - a working Dick Smith System 80 computer:

Here you can see the 5.25 drive internals exposed - love that it is titles as a "Mini disk drive":

I had a go playing Eliminator on this system - mastering the strange cursor key layout on the keyboard was a challenge - better to let the owner show how it's done!

We also had a for sale table running for this meeting (for the first time), and lots of interesting stuff to buy on the night - I certainly picked up a few items:

Here is a Dreamcast on display, with another Star Wars game:

This Dreamcast is rather special. It has no GDROM drive in it - Just a USB stick for loading Dreamcast GDROM images!

When the lid is opened, it still returns to the Dreamcast boot menu to choose another game - very neat!

Paul also brought in his Amstrad CPC464:

Here is Paul taking the Amstrad through it's paces with a game or two:

A wonderful thing to see was this rare Vectrex game console. I used to have one of these until about 10 years ago when it failed. Great system and a lot of fun to play:

Here is some of the overlay game sheets you put in front of the vector drawn black and white screen to colourise the games:

I couldn't resist another go at the Vectrex for the first time in years - here is me having a go!

Of course I was not the only way intrigued to try out the Vectrex:

Nintendo 64 was setup on the main projector showing off yet another Star Wars game - Shadows of the Empire!

The meeting was well attended again, which was great to see!

Interestingly we also had an Atari XE Game System video output into a Sega Game Gear using it's TV tuner attachment!

Here was another Dreamcast on display, this time with Pod Racer running on it.

An iBook G3 and Toshiba laptop were also on display, running Star Wars games too of course!

A curious item was this Epson portable computer with built in tape drive and printer that Theo brought in:

As we did at the last meeting, there was a two player retro system competition with a prize of a Raspberry Pi running Emulation Station (Retro Pi), which I donated.

The retro system chosen was the Dreamcast, and the game was 2 player Pod Racer - had to be Star Wars game of course for this meeting:

It was fierce competition with lots of people keen to have a go:

Of course there can be only one winner, and here is the winner getting his Raspberry Pi prize from me at the end of the evening:

It was another great meeting and I again want to thank everyone who brought in many different and varied Retro systems to our meeting.

I can't wait for the next one!