The weeks before the Eurocon event had been very hecktic for me. I was releasing a new vectrexgame at the event,
so i spent a lot of time finishing and polishing the game based on the latest betatest results, as well as gathering
all the materials needed for a release (box, carts, manuals, labels, etc.). This of course took up most of my time
and social life. I also wanted to be able to properly demonstrate the "Vexos" operating system, so basically any free
minute of time left went into implementing new features into the OS, so it could be demonstrated properly at the show.
Luckily, most of the packaging stuff came together about 3-4 days before the show, allowing me to start assembling the
packaging.
The only thing left was to wait for John to arrive on friday with the final eproms.
Friday - Traffic jamming
John arrived on friday with his girlfriend, and since i live relatively close to zutphen (where the event is held), john
and his girlfriend would be crashing at my place during the event. We did some final preperations for the new 3dscape carts
that were going on sale at eurocon, and after that we went on our way to Eurocon.
However, we just happened to get stuck in the largest traffic jam that i've seen in years. There were 2 traffic accidents and a large
concert nearby that caused the traffic jam. This delayed our trip to Eurocon for about 5 hours!!!
When we arrived we were welcomed by Mr & Mrs. Atari who organised the event and we quickly met with the others (Alex/Vectorzoa, Mat Allen, Simon Quernhorst (a atari2600 programmer) and many others were already there. In the evening we all went to Mr. and Mrs. Atari's house which was great fun. They had many machines to play with and a lot of interesting items to look at. After a long evening of chatting with everyone we went back to my home for a quick sleep.
Saturday - The retro fair and Product demonstration
The Saturday was reserved for the retro fair. This ment i had to get up early and do some more packing (so not a lot of sleep for me).
The retro fair started at 10.00 and was open to public from about 11.00 onwards. I met some familiar faces, and a lot of new people and i've gotten
some nice feedback on the different vectrex products i had on display. Alex was displaying his new game in progress "solar war" of which he was selling a small number of preview copies (8 total).
Luckily, I managed to get my hands on copy for my collection.
The trading fair
Alex and Pepijn playing Solar Wars
After the fair we went for a quick dinner before returning to the main event of the evening, the "Show and Tell". Simon brought some interesting prototype games, including a game by Manfred Menz (of Turrican fame) on the Super Nintendo.
Mat showed off some newly aquired items from his vectrex collection (a few prototype cartridges and his vectrex pen & badge). Then it was up to me...
Demonstrations
I started my presentation with a quick demo of the different demo's that can be found on the 3dscape cart and telling people how i got started with vectrex programming.
Then i showed off my new game: "Vectoblox", which is a sokoban type of game for the Vectrex. I played some levels and i got a good response from the crowd.After a quick demo of my Radium techdemo (a realtime raycasting engine on the vectrex), i continued with the demonstration of my largest project so far: The Vexos operating system
The demonstration showed a notebook on the one side where i showed the different content i was adding to the OS, and the vectrex running the Vexos OS on the other side displaying the content.
I showed a bunch of photo's, the textfile reader, the vecvox text-to-speech reader and a digitised sound player that could either play small samples, or complete digital songs!
I demonstrated 2 songs which both took between 16kb and 24kb of size each.
The last, and imho the most important, OS feature that i showed was the BASIC compiler. I showed the BASIC sourcecode of a small Pong game i wrote and then showed the result on the Vectrex.
The last thing i showed was a small demo of the Stip! game that is currently in development. The game has 4 different overlays that can be changed on each different world.
Furthermore it had some basic elements in place like a scrolling background, some enemy characters and a main character that you could walk around with.
I think the demonstration of the Vectrex OS was the highlight of my presentation, as everyone in the room was very much interested in seeing what this small vectrex machine could do.
After the demonstration we went to go disco bowling. I wasn't very good at bowling and i nearly missed out on every shot as i was constantly chatting with different people instead of paying attention to the bowling lane :P After the bowling i went home for a few more hours of sleep to prepare for the last day.
Auction day
Day 3 was auction day...
The day started off with a few game competitions and around 13.00 everyone gathered around for the main event of the day: "the auction".
There were many interesting items on the table, including a bunch of vectrex items like:
"Cubequest","Debris exclusive","2 kousokusen games","Vectrex Tshirt","3dscape cart (first run)","a unboxed kousokusen system", a copy of the "Solar Wars preview cart" and last but not least the only existing copy of Joust Evolution.
The auction started with some smaller items and we had some good laughs with the guy presenting the auction.
Alex had won the Kousokusen system along with a copy of Harmagedon, and i won the Solar wars preview cart!
When the auction was nearing its end there was only one item left: The Joust Evolution set.
This set was offered for charity auction and contained 2 Joust evolution carts (one with label for display and one which was a bit less fragile for using), 5 different overlays that were used during development and all the rights to the game.
The set started at 50 euros, but the price quickly went up. I pitched in a few bids but i was quickly outbid as the price went quickly upwards to 250. It was then that frenzy collector Mat Allen started to wake up and caused the price to go up to around 500. At this point everybody was sure that Mat was going to grab this cart, as he did with the special Spike's Circus edition last year.
But then, out of the blue, long-time Vectrex scener Pepijn shocked the room with his bid of 700 euros. The bidding-war between Pepijn and Mat had started!
Bids went upwards in small amounts and heavy discussions started, were they able to split up the cartridges or not, but they couldn't come to an arrangement. The Pepijn threw in his final bid of a stunning 1000 euros!!!
The Joust evolution set that was up for auction
Mat quickly topped his bid with a 1025 euros! Pepijn realising that Mat wasn't going to let this one go, he sadly had to have mat win this one. Everybody was a bit in shock of what happened but we were all very excited to see the charity been funded well!
After the auction everybody said goodbye to eachother and the new location for next year was announced.
In conclusion
It has been an awesome weekend. It was a great to meet alex and john again, as well as getting to meet people like Mat Allen, Jon Legg and many others. The demonstration and auction were absolute highlights and i can't thank Sijmen and Sandra (Mr. and Mrs. Atari) enough for organising the event.
