The meeting started with a few of us working out how to hang and get power to my LED Neon Nintendo and SEGA signs. We stole power from Robert and Angela’s table where they were setting up an old DOS laptop running old DOS games, a SEGA Saturn with a dual stick controller playing VirtuaOn and the original Atari Flashback along with a Donkey Kong Game & Watch, a Game Gear and a Wonderswan.
Also available to play at the meeting were a variety of competitive puzzle games, come racing/karting games on a PS2 Slim and a Raspberry Pi 2 put into an Atari 2600 Jnr case running the Retro Pi distro with thousands of games from many platforms all with cover art and game description. The portable arcade machine got a work out with Bomberman projected.
During the announcements I spoke about the Famicom Mini and the At@Games Genesis being sold – and sold out – by Kogan and Catch of the Day respectively. The NES Mini has been hacked and loaded with as many as 600 games, MultiBowl – the ultimate retro gaming challenge – is coming to ACMI as part of Melbourne’s White Night Festival. The RetroBlox is a new retro game console which accepts CDs and has interchangeable modules to accept game carts and controllers from emulated retro systems. I also mentioned the passing of Masaya Nakamura the founder of Namco.
During the show and tell segment Aleks brought out his Viewmaster Interactive Vision – an early educational VHS based game system. The system used the VHS tape for backgrounds but generated it’s own graphics over top. Software includes childhood favorites staring Mickey Mouse, Seseme street, etc.
Lastly we decided on a them for the March 2017 meeting – and XBOX LAN Party. Aleks has many copies of XBOX multiplayer games that we’ll be playing on XBOX360s networked together. We can expect multiple racing and FPS games. Hope to see you there.