As much as I love retro gaming and computing, I love the community around it just as much. Never before have I seen one that not only deeply appreciates the hobby, but is actively trying to expand it in the modern day. The amount of amazing projects that people engineer and create to support these obsolete platforms is awe inspiring. They're not in it for the money, they're in it because they have the ideas and the knowledge to make them happen and just want to share them with like-minded people. It's the purest form of fandom if you ask me.
As the community has continued to grow, more shows and conventions popping up to support it. I had the chance to go to Vintage Computer Festival Midwest in Chicago in 2023 and had an incredible time. Midwest is the original and biggest of the VCF shows and has since moved into a larger venue and by all accounts, gotten even better. Being Canadian and valuing my safety and national pride means I am not setting foot in the US as long as Dimentia Don is in charge so sadly, plans to go back to VCF Midwest and several other shows besides in 2025 all got scrapped. It was in the comments of an LGR video of all places that I found out someone had taken up the mantle of launching the first VCF in Canada and that it would be in Montreal, only two hours from me! My friend and I paid this debut outing a visit and while it was definitely small, I have to say they're off to a good start.
We were both on the tail end of nasty colds, plus the area was in the midst of a polar vortex that made Montreal almost -40C with the wind that weekend. We planned to go both days, but ended up seeing everything on the Saturday and decided to come back that night because we were wiped out and didn't want to spend another night in the not amazing motel we booked. This also means that I wasn't entirely with it and didn't think to start taking pictures until halfway through the show and I missed a bunch stuff, though I did get some decent ones.
You ever seen the insides of an old VAX mainframe? Now you have!
While the show was called VCF Montreal, it was outside the city proper in a really nice town called Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, at the Royal Military College campus. Some people might consider this a bit out of the way, but it's not that much longer of a drive, plus the parking was free and the traffic barely existed, at least once you got through Montreal's nightmarish highways. The campus also has a restaurant which I heard was good but it kept weird hours. There are tons of other places to eat nearby though, many walkable in better weather. We met several fellow travellers from Ottawa, plus a pile of locals and none seemed to mind the slightly remote location. I think we all could have stood the show being a bit closer to Spring though, something I do hope they're able to do in the future.
The dude on this terminal was coding on this mainframe that was on the floor beside him.
As with any VCF, the highlight is the show floor, where various exhibitors show off their projects or have old hardware or modern add-ons for sale. This being the first show, the floor wasn't huge, but still had a solid variety of tables with cool things to see. A few scheduled vendors didn't end up making it, which was a bummer as ones like RetroDreams I was really looking forward to seeing, but such is life.
The floort was split up into two rooms, with one exclusively for vendors and the bigger hall for either exhibitions or those doing a mix of both. There was also the traditional VCF consignment and free areas, though both were pretty sparse this time. I did find this set of empty and collapsed Wing Commander II expansion pack boxes in the free section, which I hope to restore and eventually find the innards to complete.
I spent a rather ungodly amount of money at VCF Midwest 2023 (not that I regret a cent of it) and this show being smaller, my wallet thankfully took less of a broadside. My boy Eric from PC Games Vault had an enviable selection for sale and I grabbed several new big box additions for my collection, of top of another batch I'd ordered a couple months prior and was picking up. There was another vendor there as well with a more eclectic collection. I haven't had time to take photos of them all but I've now got these in my lineup:
- Star Trek: 25th Anniversary
- Master of Orion (I finally own all three!)
- Starflight
- The Last Express
- Quarantine (Wanted this one for a long time!)
- Star Trek Pinball
- Omikron: The Nomad Soul (the awesome trapezoid box release!)
- Descent I & II: The Definitive Collection
- 3-D Ultra Pinball Turbo Racing
- Heroes of Might & Magic II
- Summer Games II (Mint and sealed!)
- World Games (Also mint and sealed!)
- Adventure Construction Set
Collecting old software isn't for the faint of wallet these days, but I have to say that for what I got, I thought I paid very fair prices, which is often the case at shows as opposed to places like eBay.
Across from him was an older couple who were selling a very eclectic mix of random stuff in various conditions, mostly for best offer. I don't know if they were just shedding a personal collection or found a haul in someone's house, but it was quite the variety and the prices were surprisingly reasonable. Here's a few selections from their table, not including the mint condition Commodore 1702 monitor my buddy scored for only $200, with the box no less! I might have fought him for it if I didn't already have a 1084 of my own.
That green screen machine was an early touch screen if you can believe it. I also loved the nixie tube time keeper and now I really want to know what a Pied Piper computer is.
The highlight of the main floor for me was Leo Binkowski manning the booth for the incredible NABU RetroNet, an amazing project that made the obscure and incredible NABU decentralized home computing platform live again. I have a new old stock NABU in the box downstairs that I haven't had a chance to set up yet and the story of my experience with this incredible, Ottawa-developed platform is one for its own post that I'll write one day. Somehow, I didn't take any photos of the booth, but Leo's a great guy with an encyclopedia of stories in his head that I could listen to for hours and we had a great chat.
The rest of the floor was a great mix of things, as any good VCF is. Some really amazing projects were on display, some of which you could buy and there were several others just showing off their cool collections or stuff they made.
I picked up a copy of C64 OS, an insane full operating system made in Kingston, Ontario by hand in 6502 Assembler for memory expanded Commodore 64s. Among other things, it sports a full graphical interface, online support, a full on app store which has some commercial products in it and even a ChatGPT interface! I picked up a retail copy on an SD card along with their mouSTer adapter that lets you plug USB mice into a standard joystick port. Practical? No. Amazing? You bet!
Rather than detail out every other booth, here's some highlights in pictures.
1Bit Fever Dreams is a Canadian retro maker and YouTuber who partakes in a bunch of cool projects. In the second photo is the PC Gameport Party, a simple but great product that takes the normally single game port found on DOS-era PCs and splits it into two, while also providing MIDI passthrough. He was selling a handful of pre-made units for only $20 and I scored one! He was also showing off his Foenix/Wildbits k2 "New Retro Computer", a small batch system developed largely by a single Canadian named Stefany Allaire who I see as basically if you fused the knowledge John Carmack and Jeri Ellsworth into a single nexus of genius. It's not a mainstream product and is designed as a project system but it's stunning what people have done with such a tiny niche device. Foenix Labs is developing a new system now and as much as I'd love one, I wouldn't even know where to begin with it. And yeah, that is absolutely one of the rare Guitar Hero keytar controllers being used as a MIDI keyboard.
Over in the corner in a surprisingly unmanned booth was a selection of mint Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems and IBM specialized workstations. Back in the 90s, these were the kinds of high power, incredibly high priced systems that nerds like me would dream of, even though they were not designed for general use. Most of the CGI seen in movies and TV in the 90s was produced on Silicon Graphics stations and one of their chips even powered the Nintendo 64. As off the shelf computers got exponentially more powerful, the need for this kind of specialized machine fell away, as did the companies that made them. Sun was acquired by Oracle who did little with them, Silicon Graphics went bankrupt twice, eventually being sold to HP Enterprise and IBM pretty much got out of the desktop hardware game. A cheap smartphone can run circles around these now but back then, these were the best you could get.
This booth was showing off a selection of "portable" (often called luggable) computers from back in the day. They were chonky, heavy and generally pretty impractical, but those that could put up with all that (and the exorbitant price tags) loved them. The PC I got most of my initial DOS experience on was a Toshiba T3200 that sounded like a jet and also took about as much power as one. I remember playing Alleycat on an orange plasma screen that didn't look all too different from the orange CRT pictured. Some of these were for sale and none interested me, though I would have been tempted by a working T3200 if he had one.
This booth was manned by a gentleman who makes custom Amiga accelerator boards called the TerribleFire line. A niche within a niche, these boards are very expensive, in no small part because he has to source the long out of production high-end (for the time) Motorola CPUs to go on them. But if you're a hardcore Amiga fan, these are the holy grail of upgrades. I would have loved one for my Amiga 1200, but one of them cost just shy of a mortgage payment for me, so it wasn't happening. Truly amazing work this guy does though and I love to see crazy specialized projects like this.
Every VCF also has a number of talks and though the speakers list was smaller for this one, there were some cool ones on the docket. Unfortunately, my friend and I were just so out of energy by late afternoon on the first day that we just couldn't make any of them. I did really want to see Leo Binkowski's NABU talk on Sunday but talking to him at his booth, I think I ended up hearing most of the stories he would have told anyway. Next time, I hope to not be on the end of a cold and able to check some of them out.
Overall, I think the first Canadian VCF had a solid start and I really hope it was successful enough for them to keep it going. Some might say the venue was too remote, but I quite liked where it was. Unlike VCF Midwest which steadfastly refuses to charge admission, this one had to and for the size of the show, it's not cheap enough for families with a passing interest to go to on a whim. I get it, venues and such ain't free, but I hope they can maybe get a sponsor or two in future to be able to lower or remove the admission fee. It's definitely more geared towards enthusiasts, but there was a lot of cool stuff for old nerds packed in here and the admission plus the drive and hotel were well worth it for me. I might even consider volunteering for the show next year if I can get the time off.
My only request is that they try to move it forward into at least March as even without the brutal polar vortex that happened this time, the dead of winter is not a great time for this kind of show. Even if they can't though, it won't stop me from going.
It warms my aging nerd heart to see more and more shows like this starting up and largely thriving. As I said up top, the retro computing community has some of the most inventive, industrious people of nearly any fandom, who make crazy projects (most of the time at a loss) to fill the tiniest of niche needs just because they can and because they love it. There's very little ego in it and everyone is welcoming and eager to share knowledge, not gatekeep it. These shows embody that spirit and it's why I enjoy them so much. I hope to be able to go to VCF Midwest again some day, but I hope Montreal continues to grow and become a mecca for Canadian retro weirdos for a long time to come.
