If you’ve never listened to this podcast before then I envy you, because you now get to start back at episode one and listen through to their 300th episode which is being recorded on Sunday 31st October.
Each week this podcast has the latest in Retro gaming news and then an interview with a guest from the industry. There are so many great stories to be heard so head over there now and start listening!
Wishing Dan, Ravi and Joe a very happy 300th Episode 🥳
I have been looking at these machines for a while now and monitoring what prices they go for. Then just before the weekend, I saw this one come up on eBay for a reasonable price. I then noticed that it was actually located in Bristol which is only a day trip away from me. With a bit more digging around I found he had also listed it on Facebook marketplace without the price to cover eBay fees. A few messages later and a deal was done.
The next bonus to my newly planned day trip was the fact that the guy runs the Retro Arcade in Bristol that I posted about earlier. All of that combined with a trip to Za Za Bazaar for lunch, made this look like a promising day out!
The day was a great success but what I brought home with me was this gorgeous piece of history. The Vectrex has its own display built into the console but instead of displaying pixels, this console drew its graphics using vectors and is the only console ever released of its kind.
The display itself is monochrome but colour was added to the games by sliding a coloured film in front of the display. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the original games yet (apart from the built in game) but I do have some modern Neon UV filters on their way which look really great when combined with a UV light source. I will do a post about this once I have it all set up.
For now though here is the console in all its glory, along with an acrylic light that I made to sit alongside it to add to the whole vector effect.
I’m not really a game collector as such, mainly due to lack of space. But I do like to have a selection of original games for each of the consoles. And if you are only to have a few then why not have some rare beauties 🙂
Now I would never go out and this much on a game these days just to sit on a shelf. Most of my rare games are ones I have owned since I was young.
But with this game, I was actually lucky enough to win it in a raffle. So there are no complaints from me here and this now sits proudly alongside my GameCube console.
I guess one day I should play this game to see what it’s all about. It has pretty good reviews from what I can see 😊
So today I braved the big wide world and left Devon for a trip up to Bristol to pick up a new console for my collection (details coming soon). But this port is about the location I had to collect it from. It was from a guy named Mark who has set up a retro video game arcade in the Galleries Mall in Bristol (A perfect place for a retro arcade!).
He has created a retro paradise up there with some nice displays, consoles set up to play on and a great selection of arcade cabinets and pinball machines. More information can be found at https://www.historyofvideogames.co.uk/
So the next time your other half drags you to the city to do some clothes shopping, do yourself a favour, hand her the credit card and then head over to the history of video games for a day of retro gaming for just £12. Once in all the machines are free to play.
We really need locations like this to thrive in the UK as the traditional arcades are just a shadow of their former selves. Living in a small coastal town myself, growing up we had several arcades down the seafront which had a wide range of games, pool tables, bowling alleys etc. Now, we have one arcade left and it’s just crammed full of teddy bear machines, fruit machines and a Mario Kart game.
So if you are around the Bristol area do make sure you go and check it out. You won’t regret it!
I have wanted one of these in my collection for ages but at around £200-250 for an unboxed one, I had decided to wait to see if a better offer came along. Typically two then came at once so I had to buy both of them!
The first of which arrived today. This one was the first purchase and I took a bit of a chance on this one. It was from an online shop that deals with retro computers/consoles. They advertised it as not working and said it may require a new ULA. I actually have a poor condition grey +2 sat in a cupboard somewhere so a new ULA wasn’t going to be an issue. So for £120 including next day delivery, I went for it as I thought it would be fun troubleshooting the issue and hopefully bringing it back to life.
Not only is it in great condition. But I plugged it in and it works perfectly! No issues that I can see whatsoever. I have no idea how they came to the conclusion that it was broken. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the RF output doesn’t work? I will have to test this as I am currently (and always will) using an RGB Cable.
So I think I ended up with a pretty good deal on this one. Hopefully, the second unit should be here in a couple of days and that one was fully working but needed a new keyboard membrane.
I have replaced the membrane in this one also as it is almost certainly going to die in the near future, they all do!
So if you have not heard of the MiSTer project (where have you been?) it is an open-source project that runs on top of the DE10 Nano FPGA board.
OK, so that probably doesn’t help you understand much about it. An FPGA is a Field Programmable Gate Array. What this means is it is basically a chip that you can re-program how it behaves. So imagine you have a Sega Megadrive, inside there are a bunch of chips and a processor that make the console work. With an FPGA and a lot of time, you can re-construct all of that hardware within the FPGA so it will now behave in the exact same way as the original hardware.
The main benefit of all this, is in theory, any core running on the MiSTer should be more accurate than software emulation.
For me however, the reason for buying one was that it looked fun to mess around with. Normally you need to buy the DE10 Nano and then buy a couple of additional parts such as extra memory, an I/O board and an analogue output board (if you want to connect it to a CRT for example).
Recently though, RMC Retro have announced their Mister Multisystem board. This board contains all the additional parts you need and combines them all into a console form factor. They have even designed a case for the unit that can be 3D printed https://rmcretro.store/all-products/
I have already pre-ordered my board which should arrive next month, so I will update you all once that arrives. Until that day though, I have been messing around with some of the basic cores on the MiSTer and also 3D printing the case ready for the new board.
Since the case design obviously took some inspiration from the PC Engine, I decided to stick to the same theme and went with a white colour case with a PC Engine style logo I designed and cut out using my vinyl sign-cutter.
I also have some white Playstation DualShock 3 controllers on their way along with some wireless USB adapters to link it all together. To finish it off I have a white wireless USB Keyboard with built-in trackpad. With that setup I should be able to play all of the MiSTer cores, both consoles and retro computer systems.
This is going to be a fun one 🙂
I know this is far from retro, but if I add it to my collection now, it saves my having to do it in 20 years when it will cost 3 times the price!
Anyway, considering I have the original XBOX and an XBOX 360, it only seemed right to add an XBOX One to the collection. And at least I can play some of the XBOX exclusive games that I missed out on being a Playstation fan.
This is a fully boxed and as new, XBOX One S with 1TB Hard Drive. Hopefully one day a decent exploit will come out for this and we can fill that drive full of the best titles 🙂
Well since I had a PC Engine in my collection now, along with a flashcard, I figured it would be rude not to get the PC Engine handheld console also since they can share the same game cartridge.
Looking on eBay I found one for a reasonable price and made an offer which was auto declined so I left it at that. A few days later the seller out a generic offer to people watching the listing, this gave me the option to send another counter offer which I was expecting to be auto declined again, but this time it was sent to the seller for consideration which he accepted.
So here it is! The PC Engine GT 🙂
I had done a bit of reading up on these before purchasing, and one thing that was clear was that it would need to have the capacitors replaced if it was going to survive. So I purchased a capacitor kit for the unit from console5.com
I could have sourced them all myself but knowing this pre-made set would have every value I needed, just made life a little easier.
My next step was to open it up and get to work. This is actually the first console I have tried recapping, and although I have all the required tools it was still going to be a bit of a learning curve. It all went well but I did run into one issue where it seems at some point in the past this console has had a “repair” done to it previously. The audio capacitors had all been replaced with standard through-hole capacitors rather than the surface mount ones. My original plan was to swap these out with the new SMD ones from the kit, but this is when I realised, whoever had done this repair had ripped all the solder pads off the board! I expect this is why they then went with through-hole capacitors so they could fix their mistake.
After carefully working around this bodge job and replacing the remaining capacitors, everything was cleaned and re-assembled. I now have a nice condition, working PC Engine GT which will hopefully last for a few more years to come.
What a great handheld this is! I can’t imagine how amazed I would have been if I had seen one of these back in the day. Even the display on it is pretty good and clear compared to the absolute garbage that was the Sega GameGear.
