Happy new year! And thanks to all members, old and new, for another fun meet-up. Our event ran from 10am to 6pm and the retro computing conversation and after-party continued until 10pm at the nearby yakitori shop. We continued the trend of growing slowly, with twelve people in attendance this time.
This session began with spreading out the early-arrivers’ devices and Curt, Justin, and (new member) Tadashi running through some troubleshooting with and Curt’s newly-constructed Apple I clone kit. The mini NES in the box was already there and nobody seems to know whose it was.
We played with Christian’s The C64. It’s a hardware based Commodore 64 and VIC-20 emulator with some modern conveniences, such as HDMI output, and it’s all wrapped neatly in a very convincing-looking Commodore 64-like cover.
Next at bat was new member Ohgami’s PasoconMini, a modern-day device using a Raspberry Pi that emulates an NEC PC-8001. It’s super tiny and has a case designed to look like the real machine. It was his first experience with this machine, and he learned that old video games are really hard!
While this was all going on, Sven was working on his new Amiga 500 all the way from Switzerland. He was trying to get a GoTek to work with the system. That keyboard is nice and clean! But his PSU is 230V. What to do? Sean’s after-market PSU with back-side power switch to the rescue! We got some Turrican time in.
What can possibly be better than an Amiga? How about TWO Amigas! New member Katsuyuki brought in his rather pimped-out Amiga 500. He carried two large bags of stuff with him, one for the system, two different accelerators, and a portable monitor, the other for software. It was quite a sight to see. Dueling Amigas!
Once the The C64 and PasoconMini were put away, Sean set up his VIC-20 with Penultimate+ Cartridge, showing off its capabilities, such as switching between different memory configurations, loading different versions of BASIC, and, of course, launching games. We played some Pac-Ma^H^H^H^H^H^H Jelly Monsters, Dig-Dug, and Doom.
We spent the rest of the cold afternoon chatting and playing. Other devices included Popo-san’s NEC PC-6001 mkII and Gameboy Color complete with camera. Curt graciously fixed Sean’s secondary FM Towns PSU.
Leave a Reply