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Retro Computers and Consoles
A retro gaming event wouldn’t be a retro gaming event without a slew of retro consoles and computers, and the majority of these were in the main room, courtesy of The Centre for Computing History.
There’s more machines here than I can shake a stick at, so to fit in all the info and pictures, check out the slideshows below. First up is an Acorn BBC Master Compact, then an Apple Macintosh, a Commodore CBM 3032, and a Philips CD-I playing Burn Cycle – although, somehow, I couldn’t get off the main screen. I’d never used a CD-I much before, beyond trying one out in a shop when a salesman optimistically told me “Anyone looking to buy a CD player should seriously consider buying a CD-I machine”, even though I could see that the films available at the time, on Video CD, were of even worse quality than VHS at the time. They were released in 1992 in Europe, but it must’ve been around 1994 when they hit the UK shops properly. DVDs were just four years away, but we managed…
The other machines below are a Tatung Einstein 256 playing martial arts classic Yie Ar Kung Fu, Dreamcasts (possibly not in all cases) playing Time Crisis, Virtua Cop and House of the Dead; and finally, a ZX81 with an abundance of games. That one on view is Jetpack (just about to get going), although while it’s a little rudimentary compared to the ZX Spectrum, it’s amazing what can be achieved with a lot of extra memory.
(Note to self: for slideshows – make all pictures the same orientation)
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.