Vintage Computer Fair West 2026

Vintage Computer Fair West 2026 | Bumbershoot Software

I went to VCFW again this year. Unlike last year there wasn’t a major overarching theme this time, but that meant more miscellaneous and serendipitous things to go alongside it.

The Motorola 6800

It wasn’t a theme exactly but there were a surprising number of Motorola 6800-based systems from multiple vendors:

My notes on these were incomplete, but I believe that these are recreations of Motorola’s original programming systems designed to let programmers test programs before creating devices with embedded processors. When chatting with the exhibitor here, he pointed me to the Heathkit ET3400 training system as a good place to start if interested in the CPU.

This, on the other hand, is a Sphere computer, which I first found references to when I was looking up material about the Exidy Sorcerer. The exhibitor here had produced a playable Flappy Bird clone.

This was one of two "DREAM 6800" machines, which was described in an electronics magazine so that enthusiasts could build them themselves.

Here was the second DREAM system.

I had hoped to create a 6800 version of the LZ4 decompressor when I did my big CPU comparison awhile back; if I can get a handle on the Heathkit system I should be able to add the 6800 to that list too.

Miscellany

The MOnSter 6502 made another appearance this year, albeit as a set decoration. It’s still a gloriously wacky system.

There was also an exhibition of type-in programs that had no need of the kind of "type-in rescue" projects I occasionally do. Shown below is "Escape from Epsilon", an extremely credible little puzzle-platformer for the Atari 800, and to its right, "Caves of Ice" for the VIC-20 which gets a workable first-person maze view out of PETSCII graphics.

Other Fun Stuff

A lot of the long-running exhibits also returned; I got to have good chats with the folks showing off new hardware for the Sharp X68000, the Sinclair and Acorn collectors, and a few other hardware homebrewers. I didn’t get a photo of it, but the Agon Light also made an appearance. The Agon neatly straddles two of the categories of retrocomputing I outlined in my survey a couple years ago—it’s both an "attempt to create a contemporary 8-bit computer, generally to recapture the sense of exploration and control that accompanied the old home computers" but also a fully modern "simple, inexpensive, all-in-one [machine] that end users could meaningfully develop for or use as part of their own projects." It’s not a niche aimed at me but it’s good that someone’s aiming at it.

The talks this year were also quite good, and I appreciated the opportunity to meet both David Crane and Garry Kitchen, early members of Activision whose work was quite influential for me when I was a youth. The arcade expo California Extreme was the weekend after VCFW, and it offered a panel with several of the early Atari developers, producing a nice counterpoint.

Vintage Computer Fair West 2026

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