It's
Not About The Winning!
Welcome to the homepage of sorts for this
years RetroChallenge.
What is the RetroChallenge?
Its a look at old hardware
by using it, it's a discovery of the kit you loved when you were younger, it's
a play for the sake of it, its stopping computers ending up in landfill sites
when they are still useful, its a bit of fun for those geeks out there that
want to play with old computers.
If you have to ask why, then I would think that this would not
be for you!
Rules
Erm.. There are none. Really!
You can enter with whatever
kit you like - It would be hoped that you would be sensible and use something,
old, obsolete or weird, but if you want to show all the great things that you
can do with a 3GHZ Intel machine, then go ahead. I promise however, that
everybody will laugh at you.
So what is retro? Well that is a hard question. Windows 95 and a Pentium
machine is not Retro. But depending on what OS you use on a Pentium machine,
then it could be considered retro and certainly fun. Depending of what you
actually did with Windows 95 - video work perhaps, then again it may have some
merit, but just swapping your current kit for Win95 and a Pentium during July?
Well that's simpler to answer. It's just too easy to do stuff on that sort of
setup. You can pretty much do everything you can now on a Pentium running
Win95, it's just slower.
It's not that this is about excluding hardware or OS from a certain time
period, just that common stuff 10 years old being used for day to day tasks, is
not that interesting. However fun stuff with a NeXT station could be
interesting. See how it works?
The point of this, if
indeed there is one, is to challenge you to do something new, to learn
something new or just play. It is sort of like a show-and-tell. Do something fun
or interesting and let the world know.
Write a program, paint a
picture, make some music, discover networking, monitor your local daisy or
beetle population and report it all in your C64, with pie charts of course. Why
not decide to forego all modern kit and suffer a bit using, erm... less bits!
Go 16bit, go 8bit! Go take
an Apple Newton to work, instead of your fancy Windows Mobile connected PDA.
Limit your internet use to telnet, ftp, and gopher. Get rid of GUI go commando,
sorry command line!
There is no particular point to whatever you do, apart from amusing yourself
and showing a bunch of other geeks your efforts.
That said, newbies need not think they can't do this. I
myself am very much still a newbie whent it comes to the Apple //c that I like
to play with, in a sense its all the more fun not knowing what your doing.
Workings
The RetroChallenge will run
from the 1st July to the 31st July. One full month. In that time, you do whatever it is you
are going to do. Ideally you will have some sort of blog running so people can
see what you are up to.
If you cant do this then you can email me weekly about your efforts and I will
update the RetroChallenge BlogPage with your story so far.
If you will have no email, then you can post on the RetroChallenge telnet BBS
and I will take some info off of it and post it for you, so folk know what you
are doing.
Heck you could even leave a txt file on an ftp server somewhere that I collect
each week. If however, you decide to be hardcore and have no internet
connection throughout the month, then you will need to do a write up at the end
on the month, arriving to my mailbox no later than the 7th August.
Winning
and Prizes
Ok then, anybody wanting to
actually win this event, again is likely not suited to this event! But there
will be a winner and even a prize.
There will be two 1st
places available, the first will go to the best creation, be it hardware,
software or artistic. the merits of your work, will not be based on whether its
actually any good as such, but the effort, fun, learning and so on that went
into it.
A computer musician, for
example may produce something better than the guy who has just bought his first
C64 to create a tune, but the C64 guy would be my winner when it came to the
vote. The computer musician, doing their first hardware project would be
something different however.
The second 1st place prize will
go to the best RetroBlog running in the month. This category is for the
folk who feel that they simply
don't have the skills or confidence to produce anything that they would want to
submit. But during the month, they may well produce some good stuff about their
experience playing with old kit, particularly if they are new to it.
At very least, the 1st
place winners will get something Retro through the post from me, I can't say it
will actually be any good (something from my Retro Cupboard of Treasure), but the 1st place winners will get
something. 2nd and 3rd place winners of both categories may get something,
depending on my 'behind the scenes work' trying to get prizes and sponsorship.
Depending on what I get (if anything) will depend on the prizes (if any)
I told you winning wasn't a
good focus. But that said, everyone who participates will get some
commemorative RetroChallenge 2007 desktop wallpaper sent to them at the start
of the event. That's sort of cool!
How is the winner chosen?
Everyone who enters will
get to vote for the entry they thought was the most interesting, fun or
whatever. How simple is that? You obviously don't get to vote for yourself, but
other than that, you as the folks taking part get to pick the winner using the
various RetroBlogs and postings that I will bring together so you can see what
everybody was doing for 31 days.
Simple.
Taking
Part
Download this text file fill in the info and send it back. Once I get
it, I will add your name to the RetroBlog page and thats you in. I will email
everyone at the start to wish you luck, and at the end to call time on the
event and to send out the voting sheets.
I don't need much in the
way of information from you - name or handle/ country / what goal you have, if
any / the machines you will be using.
And that's it. Email me if
you want more information. Names of those wanting to take part should get to me
as soon as possible and will be posted throughout June.
Check back every now and
then before the event for more info as I get it, and you never know, perhaps
even exciting things as prizes.