My Visit to Leicester Retro Computing Museum (patron only)
Added 2019-08-05 00:22:48 +0000 UTC
Photos (and video stills) myself and Nostalgia Nerd took when we went to look at the Virtuality machines at Leicester Retro Computer Museum!
There was a lot of gubbins in a very small space. The owner of the Virtuality machines, Simon, kindly chatted to us after closing time and showed us the machines in action, it was quite a treat to have a go on them. They are just as non-realistic as you'd expect a virtual reality machine from the early 90s to be, but it was pretty awesome to learn about them and see them running. We played Dactyl Nightmare two-player, which was hilarious, and a flight game.
Dactyl Nightmare, by the way, is a bizarre FPS where you have a single arrow to shoot at a time, and you need to shoot the other player with it in a weird polygon world. Meanwhile, a pteradactyl occasionally appears to mess either one of you up. I'm going to make a video about it.
There was a number of consoles and nice computers to see, and a room with Quake set up on LAN. But it's not really a museum in the conventional sense - it felt way more like someone's front room, which to be fair is the vibe they are going for. But this meant a lot of highly valuable stuff was just knocking about in full view, with no form of security.
We found a Sega CDX just sat on a shelf, I picked it up not knowing what it was. That was pretty shocking. Later, we were told a lot of their operation relies on trust - trust on patrons not to bag stuff like that and clear off. Even the "archive" was open to anyone who wanted to wander in, and the games that were hidden in there would make your mouth water. I touched as many as I could.
While we were talking to Simon, who is an absolute doll and clearly very passionate about this stuff, I mentioned the Jaguar VR (also developed by Virtuality) and he responded "I've got one in my car". I nearly lost my sh*t. He brought it in for us to have a look at and of course wear. It's a clunky, clumsy piece of kit that makes you look like an alien beetle. Sadly, he has no receiver bar so we couldn't play it, but just touching it was thrilling to be honest.
The photos that don't look like they were taken with a badly-exposure-balanced potato were by Peter, by the way.
