This years Sherwood Pines Rally appears to be running a little later in the year than the the usual October. Hopefully thanks to the resent spell of rain rain rain, the stages will be that extra bit muddy this year.
I’ll be there this weekend with my camera in tow hoping to snap lots shots of side sliding 70′s/80′s rally cars
http://www.premier-rally.co.uk/index.asp
Yesterday saw the second RCM open day of the year (excluding the members only retro-fest in July) and on entrance my immediate attention was drawn to sounds of arcade machines lined up & a Williams Congo pinball table.
Those would have to wait until later as I wanted to have a good look round and chew that fat with a few RCM members. This second event looked even bigger than last May with some huge range of old/new consoles and computers.
As always, plenty of Retro game goodies on offer compared to eBay’s often inflated prices. I manged to pick up a few Retro Gamer Magazines to fill the holes in my collection. A couple of Vectrex Carts caught my eye too.
Time for some gaming, Tempest 2000 (Atari Jaguar), Panzer Dragoon (Sega Saturn), Kikstart (CBM C16), Dropzone (Atari 800) to name but a few.
Like most retro computer events, I’m always interested to take a look at the ecliptic range of home brew storage devices. Take this, it’s a SD card based floppy drive emulator. Simply put, store game files on SD card and load them direct. No more hunting for floppy disks/disk swapping.
Here’s a couple more interesting devices
Atari 2600 rom scanner
Amstrad PC/Sega Megadrive
..and one mother of a controller.
After lunch, the Bomberman competition began. I’m not particularly good and lost out on round one but it was fun all the same – Will practise more for next time. Big Steve won the compo.
I was there all day and stayed behind to help pack up the systems. Heaving those huge arcade machines into the van was thirsty work but the reward was worth it – I got to take a peak at the owners private collection. There must have been over 50 odd arcade machines in there….. I was in heaven.
Got back home around 9pm grinning ear to ear. Got a few goodies still in my car boot so will having a look later.
I’ve also uploaded a large collection of photo’s from yesterdays events to my Flickr account so feel free to take a look
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26527444@N06/
RCM Nov ’09 – Best retro event this year.
Take a look at this concept laptop design….don’t forget to wipe away the drool!
They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn:
At the going down of the sun and in the morning:
we will remember them.
My Vectrex 72-1 Multicart arrived yesterday and despite not having a lot of free time to use try it out, my initial thought is that this is a must have add-on for any Vectrex owner.
The 72-1 Multicart is basically a cartridge designed for the Vectrex that contains a custom rom chip containing not only the entire catalogue of Vectrex games but also includes prototype games that were never released, games created by fans well over 20 years since the Vectrex’s demise and also homebrew demo’s created by talented coders to show off this stunning vector based machine.
Here you can see the actual board and imitation Vectrex game label designed to stick on to a cartridge case once installed. A fully cased version is available to purchase however I chose this uncased version (about half the price) and will fit my own case at a later date.
The board is designed to fit an original Vectrex game cartridge and includes the same three mounting holes. Here’s another shot of the circuit board next to an original Vectrex game cart.
It looks simple enough, but considering that this is a home made board produced by hand, the quality is of very high standard.
After inserting the board in the Vectrex cartridge slot & switching on (no puff of smoke!) a simple menu system offers access to Original games, Unreleased games, Homebrew games, Modified original games and Homebrew GFX demos. Navigation is done via the joystick and fire buttons to launch the selected title.
..and here’s me trying to get pole position on..well Pole Position!
One of the many homebrew games – This ones appears to be a Frogger clone.
..another homebrew title which looks to be a clone of Discs of Tron. Two player version of this should be fun especially being a huge fan of the arcade original.
When i get chance i’ll post a few more pictures and maybe a few reviews on the homebrew games. Here’s a complete list of whats on the cartridge.
Games List
| ORIGINAL GAMES ARMOR ATTACK BEDLAM BERZERK BLITZ. CLEAN SWEEP COSMIC CHASM FORTRESS OF NARZOD HEADS UP ACTION SOCCER HYPERCHASE POLAR RESCUE POLE POSITION RIPOFF SCRAMBLE SOLAR QUEST SPACE WARS SPIKE SPINBALL STAR CASTLE STAR HAWK STAR TREK WEB WARS PROTOTYPES HACKED ORIGINAL GAMES 3D GAMES |
LIGHT PEN GAMES ART MASTER * MELODY MASTER * HOMEBREW GAMES HOMEBREW GAME DEMOS MISC DEMOS * REQUIRES LIGHT PEN ± BY JOHN DONDZILLA |
