On Friday December 8th, 2017, we held the final Adelaide Retro Computing Group meeting in it's current form, with all three organisers (including myself) no longer running the events after this.

We had an amazing turnout for the final event, it was full of people! The atmosphere was incredible as always and I had a wonderful time.

I talked so much about Amiga on the night that my voice went and I can barely talk today as I write this blog entry!

So, to the meeting itself, we had a lot of interesting systems and naturally a lot of Amigas! I brought along my AmigaOne X1000 for the evening, and had the case open for people to see it:

I was busy showing off the latest AmigaOS 4.1 OpenGL Nova  drivers included in the latest Enhancer bundle from A-Eon Technology, showing the live Workbench mapped onto 3 cube, playback of 720p movies and plenty of games and emulation stuff too.

Of course we had plenty of other Amigas at the event, with two Amiga 600's running Vampire 600 accelerators on display:
 

 This Amiga 600 used a PCMCIA wireless card to provide internet access, and of course the Vampire 600 installed inside, along with A604n expansion and real time clock expansion module:

 
The other Amiga 600, also with a Vampire 600 installed, also had a SDNET module installed to provide internet access, with plenty of games and movies played to show off the impressive power of the Vampire 600:

An Amiga 2000HD with Gotek was also there:

 
Completing the Amiga presence, we also had an Amiga 1200 (with 060 installed), Amiga 1000 running Captain Blood and Powerbook G4 running MorphOS on display at the event:

 But of course, the Adelaide Retro Computing Group isn't just about Amiga systems!

We had plenty of other systems on display on the night too - a lot of Apple Mac's especially! First up is this Apple Mac Cube G4, complete with SSD hd upgrade:

 
 Some new visitors to the group brought in a Apple Powerbook G4 and Apple Mac Classic, which were busy gaming during the evening!

 An iMac G3 (green) and Apple Mac SE/30 were on display too:

We even had a snowy!

 A beautifully restored IBM PC 8088 System was also brought in - looks amazing inside and out:

Amstrad 386SX luggable (I am not sure I would call it a laptop!) was also on display:

Consoles were also well repesented, with Playstation 1, Atari 7800, SNES Mini here:

Closer look at the 7800 - I used to have one of these but sold it a long time ago - it was good to see it again:

 
The rare Victor V-Saturn (rebadged Sega Saturn in Japan only) was also here with plenty of games to enjoy:

Also a rare Test Playstation 2 unit was here:

  A Sega Megadrive 2 modded with everdrive clone and used to compose music was busy on the night doing it's thing also:

We even had a Microsoft XBox running arcade and retro system emulations during the night:
 

Plenty of games and consoles were for sale on the second hand tables:

 FM Towns Fresh also made an appearance, which was great to see in action again!
 

The place was buzzing with people, excited to talk about all things Retro computing:

We even had a Psion EPOC on display!
 

I didn't get a great shot but we had a Vectrex running on the night too, in the far right corner of this photo:
 

It was a great meeting!

At the meeting we discussed the future of the group, and a number of people expressed interest in running the group in 2018 and keeping the meetings going. That was wonderful to hear and we will shortly hand over the group, website and facebook presence to these new people so they can get to work on the next events in 2018 and hopefully beyond too. I wish them the best of luck with it.

It has been a real pleasure to run these meetings for the past three years. I am so glad to meet so many people in Adelaide who love retro computing and are so passionate about it.

If you ever attended one of our meetings, I am very glad you could make it and I hope you had a great time.

I expect to still attend the meetings in 2018 under the new group management, in whatever form that ultimately takes, as long as it doesn't stray too far from what George, myself and Theo worked so hard to create, a retro computing enthusiasts group for local Adelaide people to meet, share ideas and play with some amazing systems!