Home to around 400,000 people and located pretty much smack bang in the middle of England,
the city of Leicester is perhaps best known for Pukka Pies, Walkers Crisps, the National
Space Centre, and bizarrely, King Richard III, who someone randomly found buried under
a car park in 2012 after looking for him for 500 years.
As you do.
It’s also my hometown, and while Leicester is famous for all of the above and so much
more, in this video I'm interested in the Retro Computer Museum, which I had a chance
to visit over the weekend.
See - that’s me playing with their Oric Atmos, wandering around their huge software
library, and having a crack at a very impressive VR machine from 1991.
Oh, and there’s also this huge warehouse full of treasures to explore!
Located on a business park in Thurmaston, just 4 miles north of the city centre, the
museum is a registered charity and was founded by vintage computer enthusiast Andy Spencer
in 2008 when his own collection started to grow out of hand.
So the museum started because I'd got a little collection, and it was mainly in my garage
- and so I just thought one day “I wonder if anybody else would be interested in this?”
and it turns out yeah - quite a few people were!
So we did a little event in our little village hall near to where we live in Swannington
and I expected probably 10-15 people to turn up - and almost 70 people turned up to our
first event.
I'm thinking “oh this is pretty good”, and then people started donating stuff to
us, and then the garage was getting filled up quite quickly.
So we got a little unit over in a place called Earl Shilton and it was a tiny room below
a recording studio - and the recording studio belonged to…
Kasabian.
It was a pretty old factory and it was an old shoe factory.
It had been converted and then we sort of outgrew our first room which was probably
12’ square, and you can imagine that people are still giving us stuff, we're doing small
events, so you know getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then we moved to a place called
Heather again in Leicestershire.
We took over almost an entire building there, and then it was quite bizarre really because
we said “if we clear this room a bit we might be out open to the public” and all
of a sudden it was like “oh this is getting a little bit bigger” and we actually managed
to do that.
We had quite a few events there and then the landlord unfortunately decided he wanted to
put the rent up a little bit - and it was more than I was willing to pay for that particular
unit.
In some ways I'm so glad we did because - I don't know if you can actually see the bowing
on these - see, they got damp.
These are some of the original Billy bookcases we had and they started- I mean there is a
lot of weight on there granted because these are four deep in places - but some of the
Billy bookcases were actually getting damp.
So we moved away from there and moved here but to a different building on this estate,
and we filled that in 18 months.
Then since we've moved here we've had two different storage units now - we’re on our
second storage unit.
So, of course, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to check out their huge warehouse full of
old computers and associated bits and bobs, and museum volunteer Dean - who incidentally
took on the role of director for this video and did a fantastic job of it too - very kindly
agreed to show me around - and, wow, there’s so much cool stuff here!
So this is where you take your life into your own hands - please don't judge us!
So all of this stuff that you can see at the front is fairly recent donations, and the
idea is that we want to put it through our asset system.
…and interestingly, this is the nicest box I've ever seen for a Commodore 64.
It was quite a recent donation again - and I don't think I've ever seen a better condition
box for a Commodore 64 than that one.
Initially when we started putting all the equipment in here we tried to do it alphabetically.
So I'll show you how far we got.
So this is our Acorn section - or the start of our Acorn section - and what we've tried
to do is put all the BBC Micros down here, and then we've got some RISC-based systems
as well.
We've got quite a few of these, some of them have had their power supplies recapped but
most of them haven't so we've got a big job of changing the RIFA capacitors on the power
supplies at some point.
We've got quite a few Electrons, quite a few Acorn Atoms as well, and they all work as
far as we know so we're quite proud of that section.
…and then we’ve also got a load of Amstrad equipment down there as well.
…and this is where we keep all our Macs.
So there's quite a lot of classic Macs down here and a real mixture of iMacs and classic
Macintosh SEs and so on.
This section here is where we've got all our Ataris!
Come this way, come this way!
…and you can see we've got our Ataris - nicely boxed ones up here and rows and rows of - well
- a mixture of 520s, 1040s, I think we've got some 4MB STs here and STEs as well.
Classic Atari 2600s and Jaguars down here.
Some Apricot and Camputers stuff in that section over there…
…and then this is where we start our Amiga section as well so quite a lot of 500s and
1200s that you can see and 600s and then some very nice boxes up here as well.
So it's quite nice to have them boxed, yeah, and these all go through to the 1200s up there.
We've got some quite rare SX-64s - they all work as well so it's quite nice to have those
in our collection.
Continuing with the Commodore theme we've got the 8-bit systems now, so Commodore 16s
and the +4s, and then we've got the VIC-20s over here, and many, many Commodore 64s.
You can see them all lined up - the breadbin and then the 64Cs here - and again we've got
quite a few of them boxed up here - we’ve even got some of the- when they did the nice
games packs like the Night Moves pack for example up there.
It's nice to have some of the classic boxes.
A couple of Commodore 128s!
We've got quite a nice selection of Commodore PETs - and I know that Commodore PETs are
not everybody's thing but I think they're quite desirable these days and they go for
quite a lot of money on ebay, and we've got pretty much every different model as far as
we know.
They probably need a little bit of TLC but it's just still nice to have them in our collection.
…and then we're on to the D's.
So here's all the Dragons - we've got a mixture of Dragon32s and Dragon64s and we've also
got a Dragon 2000 in our collection which is over at our main museum.
Yeah, so a real mixture in this aisle - we've got some Phillips Videopac G7000s over there,
we've got some Tandy TRS-80s here, and some RM Nimbus - and our collection of Dreamcasts.
I think most of them have got laser issues but - you know - I think about half of them
work.
Sega Mega Drives and Sega Master Systems on this side.
We've actually got some NextStations here as well which are reasonably rare.
We've got the cube version - which I think is very rare - and there is one system that's
got all the peripherals connected to it like the sound- the audio interface and all that
sort of stuff.
MSXes as well, various different ones.
A whole bank of Xboxes - funnily enough we get quite a lot of donations of the early
generation Xboxes.
I'm not a massive fan of them myself just because it's not really my generation but
lots of people do have lots of love for them and it's one of our most used systems at the
museum.
Then we've got the Tatung Einstein - both the T01 I think it is - the first model - and
the 256, we've got a number of those as well.
Oh!
We've got some Sord M5s which is quite- yeah they're quite nice little systems as well.
Some really nice boxed examples up here of the 16K and the 48K original rubber key Spectrum,
which is where I started.
That's really where my love for all this stuff came from.
We think we've got over 100 Spectrums, and the fact that they've got some dedicated chips
inside, we're quite keen that we make sure we preserve as many of those as we can.
But yeah, the full range - so the Spectrum Plus and the 128, the +2s and +3s, we've got
quite a lot of those as well.
A number of QLs down the bottom there - and again quite a collection of ZX81s.
Not so many ZX80s - we do have a couple but for some reason they're much rarer.
We've got quite a lot of the original PlayStation, the PlayStation 2's, all of them still work
so they're pretty good, and we've even got the dinky ones as well.
The Texas Instruments TI-99 - we've got quite a few of those as well which you can mod and
have a VGA output on these, and it gives a really, really nice clear picture if you happen
to do so.
What we've tried to do with this side is put all the peripherals in here - so this is all
things like all the various different controllers for the various consoles and so on, with joysticks
and all that sort of stuff.
Follow me this way…
Banks and banks of hundreds and hundreds of different joysticks - the Atari joysticks,
QuickShot, everything.
We've got a lot of boxed ones as well and things like steering wheels and unusual controllers
for different machines.
You name it we've got it in here!
Even messier is this area that we're trying to get through - this is basically all the
donations that we've had over the years and we're just trying to get through sorting it
all out.
We're very short on space - so again a bit messy in here but we have managed to sort
out things like cables and hard drives and various keyboards and other bits and pieces,
and eventually we'll get around to assetting them and then getting rid of the rubbish and
putting things away properly.
But the idea is that we'll try and get all this stuff working and then we'll use it for
something - it's just time.
While there’s a huge amount to play with including the vintage computers, consoles,
arcade machines and even a very cool mini pinball table - which is a personal favourite
of mine - one of the most impressive things the museum has to offer is its hands-on software
and games library, boasting over 40,000 items that you can not only peruse, but also maybe
load up on its associated system for that authentic nostalgic experience.
Since we moved here we've gone from having probably 10- maybe 12- 13,000 games to over
40,000 - not games but pieces of software, and since we became a charity it's just…
I think people trust us with their possessions.
I think a lot of people give us their stuff because:
a) they don't have the room and
b) they wouldn't use it anyway
They bring it here and - as you can see - it's accessible.
I don't mind if somebody said “oh, can I load that from tape”, or “can I load Finders
Keepers in from tape?”
Well yeah, of course we can, no problem at all.
It’s one thing to have all of this software, but the volunteers at the Retro Computer Museum
are also very keen to document and preserve any rare finds that come into their possession,
including the one-of-a-kind software for their Virtuality VR machines.
A lot of this has been backed up digitally.
We've been given loads of Microdrive cartridges - lots and lots and lots and lots and lots
- and obviously they're all failing a little bit so we've got to replace the felt on them.
So what we're going to try and do is back those up, because there might be some stuff
on there that's not backed up anywhere.
We've also got some - our VR machines - we've got some software for those that we're backing
up as well using KryoFlux, or we're using the various ways we can do that now, so that's
all going to be backed up as well.
We do buy stuff occasionally but we don't have the money to buy stuff - literally we
get no funding from anywhere - so we rely on people visiting, we rely on people donating.
So about those amazing early VR machines.
There’s even a local connection here - the technology behind Virtuality was developed
at Leicester Polytechnic - later renamed to De Montfort University which, incidentally,
is where I went to university.
One of these would have set you back around £50,000 in 1991, which is getting on for
£100k in today’s money, and it’s widely acknowledged that the modern VR devices of
today have their roots in these machines, and that groundbreaking research at Leicester
Poly.
Based on an Amiga 3000 beefed up with some custom graphics hardware, Virtuality claimed
a latency of less than 50ms using a Magnetic transmitter in the ring part, and a receiver
in the headset, and to be honest this is one of the best VR experiences I've ever had - it
really is silky smooth and very responsive.
The museum has 2 of these stand up 1000CS machines and 2 of the sit down 1000DS machines
on display, although the sit down machines are currently undergoing maintenance.
On that note, Simon, one of the volunteers at the museum, has grown to become the world’s
leading expert on these, and has amassed a big collection of spares and original documentation
to hopefully keep them running for years to come, and he’s also working on some improvements
and future-proofing like new screens for the headsets and a menu system to make switching
games easier.
Incidentally this isn’t the first time I've played one of these - last time was around
30 years ago in the local shopping centre, and I didn’t do very well at all and I may
have even cried, so it was great to finally redeem myself and actually win a game of Dactyl
Nightmare after all these years.
But as you’ve seen that’s only a small part of what the Retro Computer Museum has
to offer - and one thing that really surprised me were the families with young children who
were in today, enjoying those 8 and 16-bit systems.
We're quite a fun museum rather than being quite stuffy.
When we first started this it was mainly - sorry if I offend anybody - but it was geeks and
nerds!
You know I class myself in that category - probably half of both really.
I think we're more family orientated than we've probably ever been and I love that fact
because then you get like- we've literally had a three-year-old playing sonic.
It doesn't get any better than that.
But then when that same child would literally move a little bit and go and play on a Spectrum
playing Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy or something daft - or Chuckie Egg - and they get the controls
and they get the joystick straight away that's wonderful.
I mean part of our core outside of normal opening is school visits and and Scout visits
and corporate visits and things like that - and you know - some of the the the children
we've had have been so intrigued by it you can see that they come back a bit later and
they've bought an old system, and they’re messing with it.
But there's one of our really nice visitors - he came from the age of probably 9 up until
about 18, and he's got a lovely collection of kit himself now - and, you know, if we've
inspired anybody to do that that's got to be a great thing really.
Yeah, we do take pride in that.
So I hope you’ve enjoyed joining me on this trip to my local computer museum, it wasn’t
my first visit and it certainly won’t be my last, and I also got talking to them about
volunteering some of my time and helping them out with some repairs and maintenance on some
of this interesting old hardware, so I'm sure this won’t be the last you’ll be seeing
of them on this channel.
I also asked the founder, Andy some questions from my supporters - whose names you can see
on screen as I speak - and I've put that video over on my second channel if you’re interested
in some more in-depth behind the scenes questions about running costs, maintenance and that
kind of thing, and that video is linked up above and down in the description as always.
So thanks for watching, and I'll hopefully see you again next time.