Old Skool Blog

(I haven’t had any time recently to update this blog – we are heading into our busy period at work and I’ve barely had time to scratch myself…)

In the past couple of weeks I have made a few additions to the collection, courtesy of eBay. eBay has made collecting old systems remarkably easy, making it a snap to locate systems that I had only ever read about in imported magazines. Unfortunately eBay has also had a negative impact on this hobby, but that is a topic for another post.

The latest goodies that I have added to my collection include:

• An Oric-1 (though it has a dodgy power supply which I can easily replace)
• Some Mattel Aquarius cartridges – a couple of games and an implementation of LOGO which I am dying to try out!
• Another Intellivision console, complete with the Intellivoice module, Intellivision Computer Adapter and a bunch of games.
• A Dick Smith Wizzard (aka vTech Creativision – this is a very hard to find games console, so I am stoked to have won this auction
• A second Mattel Aquarius system, complete in its original box, with the expansion system and game controllers.
• and best of all, a working Vectrex system!

The Aquarius and Vectrex systems haven’t arrived here yet and I can’t wait to get my hands on them. The Aquarius turns out to be a really neat, if limited, system. There is something about the system that is intriguing – it is very under-powered, was over-priced when it came out, had a limited life, but it looks good and I find myself drawn to the system. Given the limited life of the Aquarius I am surprised at the number of unopened software which is readily available. Perhaps this shouldn’t be such a surprise though – the
Aquarius was killed very early on, so maybe stores and distributors were left with large stocks of unsaleable merchandise? Hmmm… Either way, it means there is a decent supply of collectible items for this system, which is a good thing IMHO.

The Vectrex has really got me excited though. I remember a friend of mine had a Vectrex in the early 1980s and it was a cool game system – the vector graphics, with an integrated monitor crapped all over my little Pong clone I had. The high price and poor reliability of the systems led to an early demise, which means that working Vectrex units are quite hard to come by and they attract a premium price. Still, I got this one for much less than I expected, so I am happy. Now I will have to start hunting for the games – it looks like there were 29 games released, which is more than I thought, and there are almost as many home-brew titles too.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 11th, 2006 at 7:18 pm and is filed under OldSkoolComputing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.