Other retro tech, then……

I bought one of these whilst on business in Wisconsin, 1993. I didn’t get around to buying the TV tuner “cartridge.”

“BarcodeBattler”, that sounds like a pretty extreme version of supermarket wars.

Gamegear, was that about the equivalent of a mastersystem?

Game Gear! Think I might still have one somewhere

Shinobi on the game gear consumed me. I’m sure I’ve still got one somewhere, TV tuner too.

got one of these lurking in the loft, got it for £5 of a clerk of works,
its reasonably accurate for quick 90deg setouts not as quick as the ‘wimpey clap’ Simple bit of kit that works well

Akai S1000

Them bad boys was the sampler to have around ’93 when jungle arrived. Many a happy hour messing around with mine. Utterly utterly trounced by the simplicity and speed of Reason 1 in 2000.

Donkey Kong 2 handheld.

I had it. I was about 10. It was awesome.

I present Big Trak.
as a child of the 80s – this was a technological marvel.
friend had one and used to bring it into school on the last day of term. soooo jealous.

I bet a ‘homebrew’ big trak could be built with a rasberry pi computer, some meccano and powered by laptop batteries with a smartphone as controller…

Love these threads 😀

I was a MiniDisc person – full deck, portable recorder, and portable player.

😀

Ed, BigTrak is back….Clicky linky! [/url]

The trailer on the original was utterly gash, though! 🙂

I’d love to have a Yamaha DX7 but they’re effing expensive now!

I have a Windows XP computer, does that count yet?! 😉

I had one of these as an upgrade from the Nintendo single game (donkey Kong etc) thingies above. It was cutting edge at the time, but I lost interest in playing computer games.

Our storesman was showing me a mint BigTrak, with trailer both still boxed that he bought off e-bay the other day. I so wanted one of those when I was young. Can still remember lusting after them in Boots.

I had a Palm PDA, with the Handspring phone plug in. That was ACE! (official)

Well, I thought it was hi-tech at the time…

Oh, I remember that. It was all mechanical, wasn’t it?

That’s just jogged an old memory actually. Anyone remember, there used to be a series of little hand-held clockwork games, red plastic case and a clear front, maybe about the size a modern smartphone but 1cm or so thick? You’d wind them up, then frob a basic control on the front to move a plastic racecar or some such as the screen asthmatically rasped past. No idea what they were called now, ring any bells with anyone?

Pocketeers!

http://www.masters.me.uk/pocketeers/pocketeers1.htm

Clockwork and celluloid, but I thought it was witchcraft at the time.
😳

Cougar, I vaguely remember that. I think you mean the pocket raceway. My mate had one, it was a bit… pants

Edit: bugger, too slow

Pocketeers!

I had completely forgotten about those! I had Time Up and friends had the driving ones.

A bit more up to date:

I loved the Grandstand games. I’ve still got Astro Wars upstairs (next to my Big Trak), along with Scramble and Firefox.

I don’t think my AW is working, though; as a kid, I discovered that if you upped the voltage on the “universal power supply” then it made the display really bright, with fairly inevitable longer-term results.

Man, Firefox. I had that.

I can remember the sound of those poketeers too.

We played “game of Dracula” the board game at the weekend. My 3 & 5 year olds love it. Nearly 40 yrs old now I think.

I loved the Grandstand games. I’ve still got Astro Wars upstairs (next to my Big Trak), along with Scramble and Firefox.

I got AW one Christmas and Scramble the next. Scramble was a lot easier. One brother had the Pacman.

After that I got a Spectrum. Something that only played one game seemed odd.

Was that “Munchman”?

I still have one of these (though not used any more) – still think it was an awesome idea. PCMCIA calendar and address book. No good for inputting, but synchonised with Outlook 15 years ago. Also got a box full of Palm Pilots (V, Vx, Tungsten). I had some really early TomTom software on the Tungsten, with an eTrex connected by a cable. Could only hold part of a country at any one time though.

Was that “Munchman”?

Yes

Couldn’t remember the name. Just googled the image.

We also had this:

Some amazing stuff posted here … a lot of which I remember.

Shinobi on the game gear consumed me.

Me too.

I also lost a lot of time to:

27 floppy discs it took to install !

Then once installed, I could use this:

to get onto bulletin boards … oh the days 🙂

As for minidisc, I still have a mini-disc player/recorder in a drawer somewhere. Mine had an optical input so I could rip straight from a CD player onto the disc with minimal loss of quality. Its a pity they never really hit it big time, I really liked the format.

Donkey Kong 2 handheld.

I had it. I was about 10. It was awesome.

Same here I think, not sure about the age but I remember the game. I remember getting my first original Gameboy as well 🙂

johnny astro (hardly qualifies as tech though)

Is OS2 retro then? I was still using it in Bank of Scotland up until I think 2005… (when they rolled out XP to replace it, they cunningly did it by giving is 2 PCs each and a switch box, because half the actual banking software didn’t run on windows)

to get onto bulletin boards … oh the days

Can still do that. http://Www.mono.org

I had totally forgotten about most of this stuff, but I’m pretty amazed how many of the exact items in the photos I had in the games, toys, and music veins.

yo, mefty

The Casio was running the original batteries the last time I used it about a year ago, they’ve died now though – about 38 years life I should complain and get my money back!

Link to photo doesn’t work, sorry – pic of Sinclair Cambridge and Casio fx-81 calculators!

I bet a ‘homebrew’ big trak could be built with a rasberry pi computer, some meccano and powered by laptop batteries with a smartphone as controller…

When I was a kid, I built one out of a Commodore 64 and a remote control jeep – the C64 was great for bodging stuff.

Galaxy Invader 1000 was awesome.

On the box it says 2K Bytes L.S.I. – is that Large Scale Integration?

How twee.

My mate got this for xmas and I was bottle green with envy. The downhill skiing game was awesome.

The Sinclair calculator still looks stylish. I LOVED their logo. I used to recreate it with a pen on my exercise books at school.

Astrowars! 🙂 brilliant!

Whie everyone had ZX Speccy’s and Vic20s/C64s, we had this (couldn’t afford BBC Micro)

I wrote lots of games for that, but my heart was lost to sensible soccer on the Vic20. What a fantastic game that was. Whenever I see FIFA-14 or something, I think ‘derivative tosh’ 🙂

You can still get them but silly money: eBay

And non one has mentioned this yet:

First game: Basketball. About 9 pixels used in the entire game. In no way did this reduce its awesomeness to a small boy!

Oh and that Modem reminded me of my first ‘computing’ experience at school in about 1980 where the ‘computer club’ were allowed to use the Uni Mainframe for 15 mins a day. The interface was a teletype terminal and

300 baud if I remember rightly. What a club that was, we got all the girls. No, really.