OK, I wasn't intending to attempt to write-up this one, as I knew it was going to be big ... very big.
However, there seemed to be a general feeling at the event that someone should give it a go and, well, a few ppl pointed out that that someone should probably be me - as I as the one who
wrote the most about the last event,
Retro Fusion. D'oh.
I think I managed to see even less this time round, so don't take this as a definitive round-up so much, but perhaps a commentary of one man's pinball tour of the event.
Also note, I was introduced to /so/ many people this weekend that by the end, all the new names pushed out the old ones, so I'm hoping the myriad of other attendees will chip in with comments, names, corrections, the many omissions and generally re-write everything!
Let's start by saying that this year's
Byte Back was an opportunity to learn from our experiences at last year's event. If one imagines DaveM as our general, it wouldn't be unfair to say that our army was fairly confident of storming the battlefield at
Retro Fusion simply with the sheer firepower we brought, packed into an exceptionally large hired van. Those with longer memories may recall that things didn't quite go according to plan and our commander was somewhat despondent half-way through the last get-together as we were simply unable to make use of the bulk of what had been brought. However, by the time that particular skirmish drew to a close, the fires of war had been re-stoked and the battle plans were started anew ...
Following
Fusion, our chief, DaveM, hooked up with Mat Corne - another attendee - and began throwing ideas around about how one could make such a weekend even better. Eventually deciding to take on the challenge, Mat and Dave began swapping contacts and chatting with Chris,
Fusion-organiser, and began laying out their plans ...
All glasses raised to the pair - they poured their energies into preparation, leaving no stone unturned nor spreadsheet unwritten, as can be seen from the links already peppered throughout this forum. Congrats to Mat for pulling off such a large event on his first shot, which covered a massive range of retro computing history - check out the
Byte Back website for far more info than I can list. Much kudos also to Dave who determinedly carved out pretty much the entirety of a large room for our own Acorn-related devices.
Skipping ahead to the weekend, everyone descended on a pair of halls in the depths of Longton, and a number of stalwart beebians turned up on the Friday evening to begin the unloading and setting up the stack of Acorn oddities everyone had offered to provide. I, through bad luck or laziness, depending on how you see it, was not one of them as I had to work on Friday, and had an unenviable 4 hour drive to reach the venue.
Saturday did not start well for me, as a temperamental alarm clock and a large degree of packing delayed me enough to ensure I didn't reach the venue until noon, where I had to explain to the box office staff what I'd realised two hours earlier - that my ticket was safely tucked away 200 miles away. Thankfully, my name was recognised (or it could've been the Chuckie Egg T-shirt) and I was admitted without having to pay out twice. I strode into the main hall and was immediately blown away. Gazing across the room, my first reaction was astonishment. It was huge - far bigger than even I was expecting, despite being kept in the loop over the upcoming weeks by DaveM. Seriously, anyone who was at
Fusion could not help but acknowledge that it was double the size. It was undeniable - the bar dominated the room, and was fully stocked with a weekend's worth of beer on tap! Awesome.
After taking this in, I then noticed the familiar hum of collectible classic machines, many of which should, by rights, be long-dead. I couldn't list all of them, even if I wanted to, but check out
David Glover's YouTube video to get an idea of the scale of things. A lot of the classics from
Fusion (VirtualBoy, Vetrex, Saturn) returned and were joined by many new treats including Oric-1, Atmos, Intellivision, Turbografx-16, 3DO, Sega Model 1 Hardware ... plus a whole host of new arcade cabs.
After touring the room, which took quite a while as I kept stopping at almost every table, I had utterly failed to find any Acorn machines at all, and not a familiar face in sight. Hmm ... a puzzler. Then I espied a familiar 4 player Simpson cab in the corner. I took a closer look and listened to the group in front fiddle with the game for a short time before the monitor unceremoniously powered off, much to the moans of the attendant crowd. That /had/ to be DaveM's cab, I was certain! No other arcade cab had proved itself to be so unreliable under show conditions.
I determinedly made another circuit of the room where I finally bumped into Greg (nee beardo, now
regregex). He revealed what I'd already suspected - the mythical second room did exist! Had I not read the layout plans? errr ...
I headed next door for some Acorn goodness. It didn't take long to feel at home. As soon as I walked in, I passed Anna and Steve purveying their retro wares and waved heartily. It didn't take long to find everyone, SteveO/sorvad was there, as were Tom, Dave and Gary, our erstwhile hosting provider. I pumped hands, slapped shoulders and generally heartily halloo-ed everyone. I'd just about had time to drink in the three dedicated Retro Software beebs, the MDFS Econet networked Master 128s, Joel Rowbottom's working Domesday setup (which reliably stayed up pretty much the whole weekend - was very popular!) and the prideful sight of Acorn's earliest home computer (an Atom, with a custom CF card interface that was also available to purchase) sitting side by side with their last, a RiscPC, when Dave quickly tasked me with my first challenge. The intention was to try and sell autographed copies of the new Retro Software title, Zap!, a fantastic beeb shooter by Qwak! author, Jamie Woodhouse - but, disaster strikes! The artwork had arrived too late for Dave to get the inlays printed. I spent the next hour in true Challenge Anneka fashion, using the web, a mobile, a sat nav and the helpful locals of Longton attempting to find a printers open on a Saturday, who could print our PDFs. Sadly, my mission was abandoned in failure, as every printer in the area appeared closed and the Tesco who promised could print out colour documents, turned out to have been sorely mistaken, when their photo booth wasn't quite as flexible as they claimed. Bah.
I returned to the event, tail between my legs, and acknowledged defeat. I thanked Christopher Dewhurst, who had kindly loaned us the use of his laptop for the search, and was on hand to demonstrate his Arcade Adventure Creation Kit, complete with comprehensive manual to match the flexible engine! I shook hands with more and more ppl - I met Joel, David Glover and also Ian Wolstenholme from the BBC Micro Mailing List, and got a chance to load up some of the games installed over the nine machine econet network. DaveF, of Mountain Panic fame, finally arrived and, then, to close the Acorn
Retro Fusion circle, JamesW arrived. I had hoped for a number of high fives and general back slapping between those of us who had survived last year's event, but I then realised we actually had to introduce James some of the other past-
Fusion attendees, as he'd only arrived on the Sunday - while many of our number had only been able to attend the day before.
I was wandering around the room in somewhat of a daze, stopping to look at more and more things - but it wasn't long before Dave beckoned me from across the other side of the room and provided me with a second challenge with which to redeem myself. Michael and Jonathan, Repton-meisters had arrived from Leeds by train and I got to shoot the breeze with them as I drove them over to their hotel to book in. If I didn't already know it, the journey proved that these boys are somewhat out of my Repton league.
We picked up JamesW, who had driven to another hotel to check-in and played a game of Tetris, trying to see if we could actually fit everyone into my hire car which was already packed with a huge box of random beeb gear. Of course, as soon as we arrived back at the venue, I immediately realised it would have made far more sense to drop off the box at the hotel. Oops.
Getting back, and I bumped into Dave Edwards for the first time, our Electron master. I was able to provide him with a handful of magazine disks for preservation purposes, which went down well. Myself and James also had chance to have a chat with Kenton who was on his way out the door. After identifying the avatar on my T-shirt, we had an exceptionally geeky chin-wag about Chuckie Egg and also had a look over some of his cracking bargain purchases. A good haul, by anyone's standards.
I got a chance to see Tom break out several of his work-in-progress disks. He had a crackin' beeb demo, akin to an Amiga scrolling demo, as well as his tunes ported direct from an Atari ST, which sounded awesome. His lightning progress on some of the RS stuff he's working on is phenomenal, as usual, and I was delighted to see the latest version of last year's WIP game was still coming along, and the beeb version is still potentially on the cards.
At some point, I stumbled across Ian W playing the simple, yellow Bat 'n' Ball BASIC game from the beeb Welcome cassette , on two machines. That's odd, I thought. On closer inspection, I discovered the genius of what he was attempting - to alter the code to allow two users to play against each other, over Econet. Essentially, an Econet-enabled Pong! Amazing, a networked-arcade game on the beeb! Such a thing has never been heard, surely?!
We were heading into Saturday evening now, and ppl's bellies began to rumble. DaveF co-ordinated again the now-annual beeb trip to a curry house, which consisted of the pair of us, plus SteveO and, new this year, JamesW. Given the fun we had with taxis last year, I offered to do the grunt work and the next hour was spent randomly driving around Stoke, in search of a suitable restaurant. The conversation spiraled around some geeky, fun and sometimes, downright bizzarre subjects as we waited for possibly the slowest service ever. We heard the latest on the first annual meet-up of the BBC Micro WAGs club (Steve and Dave's respective other halves, who'd shared their day off), and generally caught up. Some subjects cannot be printed to protect, well, DaveF, who might get in trouble over his use of Facebook if we did. On the safer side, we covered films - I repeated my Indy IV rant from last year for the benefit of James, whilst Dave hoped for good things from the new Watchmen film none of us had seen. Dave was somewhat taken aback my assertion that Stanley Kubrick was mostly overrated and only The Shining was much cop, with A Clockwork Orange and 2001 having a few interesting bits but being generally dull ... We both almost fell over in surprise, though, when Steve and James admitted to having completely missed The Shining in any form! Steve then compounded this by assuring us, there was no way he could pick up the Watchmen graphic novel Dave had recommended, because such things were under prohibition in his household!
We picked up the curry we'd promised to take back for Greg, and headed back. It was somewhat about this time that Dave started bemoaning the loss of his camera case - starting another annual tradition. Last year, it was the camera that went missing, this year it was the case. We got back to the now-quiet venue, where only the hardcore remained, looking after the kit (but no camera cases). I dropped off James to get a lift back to our hotel with DaveM and friends, whilst I offered to drop Michael and Jonathan, and Steve and DaveF back at their Holiday Inn. For no apparently good reason, we ignored Steve's comments on how the post code we were entering in my phone's SatNav app didn't sound familiar and that the journey time was a lot longer than he remembered. Of course, when we finally arrived at the Holiday Inn, it became readily apparent that Steve and Dave were booked into a completely different one, in the opposite direction from the venue than this one.
A few more miles and SatNav proddings later and I breathed a sigh of relief and got ready to rest my weary head. Just before I left the car, though, something told me to have a look over the back-seat ... sure enough, I found SteveO's box of Quality Street that he'd won in the raffle and right in the middle of the seat, a sparkling new iPhone which had a very Footitt look about it. Quelle surprise!
Sunday ...
Thankfully, I heard no fights kicking off in the car park at 3am, as Gary Forrest had experienced the previous night. I was, instead, awakened a little after 8am by the merry tinkle of an iPhone ... After assuring the owner it was safe, I headed downstairs to meet up with the others staying in The Weathervane. More chatting with DaveM and Christopher Dewhurst ensued, and I finally got a chance to have a good old chinwag with MartinB and his delightful partner, Jayne who were just two of the ppl I'd oh-so-briefly been introduced to, the day before. Dave and Greg convinced us to grab breakfast at the nearest McDonald's and, judging from James' review of the Hungry Horse breakfast, that was not a bad idea. Myself and Chris chatted with Martin and Jayne about beeb hardware diagnosis and how we can use the website to start documenting those efforts, as well as discussing the history of The Micro User and just generally gossiping. Great stuff!
Me and Chris drove over to
Byte Back in time for the 10:30 start, and things began again at a much slower pace, as the crowds had thinned out, which they tend to do on the second day. I reunited DaveF with his iPhone and humorously joked that if it wasn't stapled to him, he was unlikely to keep hold of the remains of his possessions, as this was fast becoming a habit. Given he had pretty much given up on his camera case after a few more look-rounds, it was hard to dispute. At this point, Michael and Jonathan rang to remind us they were stuck in their hotel, miles from the action, so I duly collected them so we could all get the most of the remaining time.
The morning and early afternoon allowed me to spend more time looking at some of the stuff that had been setup. Mark's
retro-clinic stand was a delight and myself and Martin had an interesting chat with him about the variants of Elite that were available on the beeb - we eventually came to the conclusion that were five, including two different variants of the 6502 second processor version. Mark also showed off a classic, and working!, Acorn laptop and his fabulous refurbished beebs with CFs and GoMMCs galore ...
At around this point, the Retro Software Zap! high score competition was well underway and James was convinced he could reach 1000 and beat the best known score of 800 odd, given a few attempts. Unfortunately for him, he was shortly bested by someone who's claimed score of 1000+ was increased to well over 2000 when he was asked to repeat it under observation. Oops. Still, that's a well-earned free copy of Qwak!
I was amazed to discover that the Retro Software stand had at some point become sited next to a newly-setup Guitar Hero installation but, unlike last year, I loved it! Someone had brought along a Sony PS Guitar Hero guitar and a device/software combo called
Shredz64 which had been developed to allow it to be used with a C64. The software on the C64 allowed you to strum along with classic SID tunes, from a Zelda theme to Ghostbusters. Best hardware hack I saw all day, definitely! And that's even including the fact that I proved to be spectacularly bad at it ...
I was delighted to find that Ian had been busy with the Econet whilst my back was turned and they'd successfully managed to get Cave working. It didn't stay up for long, as the Econet system in general remained stubbornly temperamental all weekend, but it looked great for as long as it was running!
This inspired me to start chatting first to Ian, then to Joel and finally to newcomer Rob from the BBC Micro Mailing List about the potential of running Cave using several instances of BeebEm emulators. The general consensus was that this should be possible, though noone had tried. One for the todo list - I'd love to see that going! Rob had brought along an A5000 which was running a Level 4 FileServer and a BBC B client which accessed the BBS on it. It was great to hear about Rob's plans to try and get BeebEm's Econet code to talk directly to an AUN device. Pure speculation at this point, but I'd love to be able to come next year and plug my laptop in to join the Econet network.
This vies with the potential for Econet arcade games as being coolest beeb project I was introduced to this weekend.
At this point, we watched the charity auction and witnessed a variety of common and rare bundles get sold off to the highest bidder. The refurbished and pimped out beeb donated by retro-clinic was one of the most expensive pieces sold and was generally agreed by the rest of us as being well worth the cash!
Things began winding down as we headed towards 3pm and ppl had to start considering some of their journeys ahead. I was delighted to be able to hang around and catch a working BBC Buggy towards the end of the afternoon though, which had been in pieces just that morning. It didn't have a working light sensor, but was able to avoid obstacles and generally looked as cool as they always do!
And here's where I had to leave it ... the long trip home meant I couldn't hang on much longer, so I had to shake the hands of those still there (including the friendly chaps over at the
Retro Computer Museum, who've invited us all over to them for an event in late May), and head back to the car with only one thought in my head:
... it's going to take bloody hours to write this up.
Sam.
Edit: I forgot to add, that DaveF's camera case turned up midway through Sunday afternoon - also in the back of my car. What is he like?
We sincerely hope to see you again. If not in "the flesh", as it were, then certainly on here!
Yeah...I was 40 on Sunday. Didn't really want to advertise it though... 
. Getting angrier than a wasp, I eventually noticed the red small-print message saying "Sorry, but 5....." Ho Hum