AJW, not sure I'm up to really doing the weekend justice in a full report, but I'll write down a string of consciousness, if you want.
The others can disagree violently on any points where I go wrong.
We'll start with the first toast to DaveM who came up with the great idea of a beeb meet at Retro Fusion, and managed to co-ordinate our merry group's attendance with just a month's notice, even though when we tried to organise a meet without him a while back, it all fell apart rather swiftly.
The hat is duly tipped.
From my humble view, the weekend started at an ungodly hour on Saturday morning. I'd been up late the night before, working on cranking out the text adventure
z-machine dev. environment over on Retro Software. I somehow managed to get myself on the road long before the rush hour traffic, though. Armed with the determination of getting there in time to be of some of use, at least on the lugging boxes around front (as I had very little in the way of hardware to contribute) I got through the roadworks and ended up at the venue in Leamington without too much hassle, at about half eight.
After introducing myself to Chris, the event organiser, it was rather shameful that he had to introduce me to
Greg (and his Dad, who was on driving duty), even though he was clearly in the middle of setting up a prominent GoMMC Beeb setup.
Greg soon had has Beeb expertly tuned, with some under-the-case fiddling (impressively clean insides
) and we had the complete STH archive on an MMC card at our fingertips.
TomW arrived soon after, and brought with him a beeb, a Risc PC and an Archimedes. Unfortunately, the latter didn't get a chance to shine as despite us trying a large combination of cables and monitors, we couldn't get the setup working. The beeb was swiftly in use running Chuckie Egg, which we found it hard to pry show attendees off as the day wore on ...
On his other working machine, Tom fired up a recent version of his latest 32-bit Retro Software WIP which we were all suitably awed by - tho later on
SteveO's glee turned to frustration pretty quickly as he remembered just how bad at playing games he truly is.
Only joking - none of us were much better, and Tom revealed that the version running wasn't the latest code and it wasn't actually possible to complete a level.
DaveM arrived shortly after, where I had the sad duty of pointing out that we may have over-estimated how much space we had to play with. Dave's hired van was absolutely stuffed with retro treasures many attendees would fight each other for, so it was disappointing we weren't really able to get the majority of stuff out - including most of the mightily impressive banners and posters, which would have served us well at an Olympus show.
DaveM got Greg to work on transferring all our Retro Software WIPs over to beeb disks, as well as his pièce de résistance - the ultra-rare copy of Repton: The Lost Realms which he's been tracking down since he first heard about, back in 2002, and had just managed to get hold of, the day before the show! With blessings from Superior Interactive (née Software), we were allowed to demo it to the world, exclusively, for the first time ever. Every member of our little group was looking out for this one, especially! (This will get released at some point, but there's plenty of discussions to be had regarding rights and legal stuff. As soon as we know more, you'll hear it here first!).
DaveF arrived with little fanfare and produced a small snapshot of a little something he had been working on. Wow. Check out the screenshots of
Mountain Panic, an arcade adventure based on a short story from H.P. Lovecraft. It's a work of magnificence!
We also got the first chance to look at the playable version of
The Krystal Connection by StephenS, a traditional platformer which I thought was very reminiscent of the early Acornsoft titles, like Monster.
SteveO had been forced into work in the morning, but when he arrived in the afternoon we were all eager to see a build of his latest work. The graphics looked great, though the gameplay hasn't been implemented yet - the main attraction was the stunning scrolling which, we began to realise, owed no small part to the advice and contributions of one
Rich Talbot-Watkins, who's scrolling routine is now becoming the stuff of legend!
The rest of the show itself was pretty deafening - we had a couple of circular tables which were right next to an XBox 360 Rock Band setup, playing through a projector and very loud speakers, which made chatting hard enough and listening to Tom's music work would have been impossible, which disappointed the rest of us. The hall was mostly made up of people's retro kit spanning the decades. From talking to our guys over the weekend, some of the stand-outs included the VirtualBoy playing Super Mario Tennis (mine) and the Vetrex running Pole Position (Dave F). There were plenty of MAME computers and JAMMA cabs to play with, as well as original consoles.
We also got the chance to meet a lot of interested peeps. Martin Hollis, of Rare/GoldenEye fame was particularly hooked - as an ex-beeb programmer. He talked to Dave for ages first, and then after I was introduced spent an equally long time chatting. Similarly, Ste Pickford of Dizzy fame had his interest piqued, and stayed around for a while until he was forcibly dragged into the spotlight for his interview, amidst a crowd (well, 1) of autograph hunters. A pair of regular visitors to our stand were Andy and Gary (IIRC) of the
Retro Computer and Console Museum (currently looking for premises). Great guys. We met plenty of other ppl, far too many to list.
We finally packed up about seven-ish, shortly after Tom had to head home so that those of us staying in the hotel could go for a curry. DaveM decided to head home and unload a lot of the stuff he hadn't been able to make use of and as a lot of our guys only had single day passes so wouldn't be around on Sunday, wasn't sure when he'd make it back.
Anyway, the rest of us trooped off into Kennilworth and had a grand old time. Well, until we settled in the pub and tried to call for a cab. DaveF spent well over an hour and a half calling firms - we got the yellow pages from the bar and I gave him every firm in Kennilworth, none of whom could send us one. We finally lucked out and had a relieved laugh about it on the way back ... back to the hotel for a midnight look at work in progress stuff on Greg had in his collection, and where I was able to break out my GP2x to show off a mobile Beeb ...
Morning broke, and tired spirits were renewed. DaveF and SteveO had to return from whence they came, but Greg, his father and I set off blindly following the SatNav to hook up with DaveM again to see what was going on.
And well it was that we did! After a spell where we all pitched in to help Dave straighten out his van (turns out when you remove a load of stuff, the rest of it has a tendency to move in transit. A lot.
), we wandered back to the stand and found a youthful looking man who, with some assistance from Greg, was soon engrossed in Rocket Raid. I duly chatted blithely away to what I thought was a member of the unwashed masses until DaveM wandered up. We talked about Rocket Raid for a while, until DaveM asked me if I'd ever seen our very own
JamesW's unfinished Rocket Raid tribute. Why, no. No, I haven't, I said.
Quote:
err ... I'm James Watson.
piped up our games-playing wizard. Oops.
James hadn't been able to make it the day before, but we quickly got him up to speed on most of the stuff we'd been showing off. In return, James showed off a number of projects in various states of completion, including some of the PC projects he had been working on for college recently, including a crackin' chess game and an extract from his first 3D animated movie.
At the same time, DaveM discovered a vast, untapped market for his posters (including James!) which were by now, much easier to get to. And there were plenty of ppl asking what else he had in his van ... The large board of Bob Wakelin art that we'd put up all weekend began to pay off.
By the time I was forced to leave him, I was surrounded by trays of classic games and kit, as well as racks of retro posters. He was smiling ...
And that, ladies and gents, is where I'll leave it (the 3 hour trip back home wasn't that interesting ...
)
Guys, it was great to meet you all - I had a ball!
*phew* ...
Sam.
All errors and omissions are solely mine.
Hopefully, the others will correct them all when they're discovered.
lol
