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The middle of the year is always a bad time for me entering the Retro Challenge. Between work, tax end-of-year, school holidays and (this year) an overseas conference, little time is left for Retro hacking.  As a result, it has taken me almost two weeks before actually getting anything done. Heck, I hadn't even selected my challenge.

A few weeks ago I bought a bunch of second hand retro gadgets from Trade Me, our local alternative to eBay. These turned up in a big box a week or so ago.

I went though the box, testing each of the units with a fresh set of batteries:

All but the Scrabble Sensor failed to power up at all, or exhibited faults.

There is a cupboard in my living room that has seemed invitingly handy for storing my vintage games consoles. Today I finally got around to putting in the "shelving" (actually a budget bookcase with extra shelves) and populated it with a few consoles.

At the top I have a Playstation and Nintendo 64, followed by a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). The NES is not present in this picture for reasons that I will explain later.

Sega Saturn and Atari 7800, and a Commodore CD32. The CD32 has a faulty CD-ROM drive - there is some damage to the laser lens that looks like a lens fungus inside the lens assembly - but thankfully I had a spare complete CD32 drive assembly lying around (who doesn't?) so I quickly swapped it over.

I also have a few non-vintage game machines such as (from left) Jeri Ellsworth's Commodore 64 DTV, Jakks/Namco Arcade Classics, Jakks/Namco Ms. Pac-Man, Sega Megadrive Plug 'n Play, and Atari TV games. These are all-in-one device that plug straight into the TV and play a bunch of classic games.

The case of the missing NES

The Challenge begins once again! Being in the middle of our Southern winter, and a busy time of year at work it is entirely likely I will fail to get anything of note done over the next month (July). I will nevertheless try to do something every day however trivial or silly it may seem.

Some ideas so far:

• Finish scanning in the Hot Copter/Laser Hawk documentation and hopefully get a floppy drive ready to image the floppies.
• Write some kind of program on my recently exanded Briel Altair 8800micro.
• Or something else.

What will it be? Nobody knows! Tune in later, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel.