After the very successful Game Masters Forum at Te Papa at the start of March several of us were interviewed by José Barbosa of Media3. José tells me the segment should air in the next show on Wednesday 20th March at 11:15pm. Set your PVR to record it now!

Or you could stay up and watch it I suppose.

EDIT: This segment has been moved to Wednesday 27th March at the same time. Look out for it then, and on the Media3 web site afterwards.

EDIT: The show aired on Wed 27th, and is now available for on demand viewing. The piece starts at 21 min 15 sec, and I feature from 24 min 50 sec.

I had the great experience of participating on a panel discussing NZ game preservation at Game Masters - The Forum on Monday morning. This was a fantastic event which brought together people from many areas; game developers, collectors, archivists and researchers, all with an interest in maintaining our digital heritage. The panel was lead by Melanie Swalwell from Flinders University, Shane Farrow of the NZ Film Archive, Adrian Knightly from Te Papa and Alan Bell of NZGamer.com.

I thought the panel went very well, and a lot of good questions were asked.

Download the slides.
Download the audio. (There some annoying skips and some clipping but I've cleaned it up as best I can).

It has been a busy new year here in the 8 Bit household. I had my two sons with me up until this week, and I have my youngest with me permanently, so I don't have a lot of time for things Retro anymore. Step one in my plan has been to tidy the Vintage 8 Bit Office of Doom. Believe it or not I've already started - the area around (and on) the workbench is already much tidier than it was!

In the last pictyure, you can see the faulty Macintosh SE/30 I plan to perform a capacitor replacement upon.

Registrations have opened for the Retro Challenge 2013 Winter Warmup which, of course, happens right in the middle of the hottest part of summer.

Normally this January event is the Retro Challenge I can really get stuck into, being off work for a couple of weeks, but this year I find myself a recently single full-time Dad, so time will be much harder to come by. As a result I'm not planning to bite of more than a small chunk at a time.

Current plans include:

1. Tidy the Vintage 8 Bit Office of Doom,
2. Perform a capacitor replacement on a mac SE/30 experiencing Simasimac symptoms, (See previous notes)
3. Do something retro'ey with one of my Raspberry Pis, and possibly some leftover ZX Spectrum parts,
4. Or something else unexpected!

Good luck to all the other participants this year, may your retro stuff happen and your distracting stuff not!