Archive for May, 2014

A massive amount of donations!

So much going on in the museum, at the moment

As Phil has said, the museum has been very pleased to accept a major collection of all things Acorn from Chris Whytehead, this is crammed full of machines, prototypes, rare circuit boards, and of course a huge wealth of software, a wonderful library of Atom, BBC B, Master, Archimedes, and Risc PC, I have made some headway into the Atom and Electron titles, which have considerably boosted the museum’s holdings for those machines.

The donations from very kind members of the public have still been coming through the door, many more Amiga, BBC, Spectrum, C64, Amstrad, and even some for the more recent machines, Gamecube, PS3, Xbox 360, and our first Xbox One game.

As usual I am going to highlight some of the more colourful software recently added to the system.

    • Flight Path 747 – ZX Spectrum This game holds the unhappy distinction of scoring the lowest ever percentage in Crash magazine, who labelled it an unplayable game with poor controls, no instructions relevant to the machine, with the strong suspicion it was written in basic, they scored it just 4%
    • Zak McKracken And the Alien Mindbenders – Amiga Another humourous adventure game from the Lucasarts stable, with more obscure puzzle solving and the trademark cartoon graphics.
    • Planetoid – Electron This was one title in the Chris Whytehead collection that I personally wanted to see, this was the machine’s version of Defender, and was a conversion from the BBC B, the Electron valiantly gives a very similar performance to the original, and Chris has donated the German, as well as the UK version, we now have a whole couple of shelves of the distinctive Acornsoft Electron green chequered boxes.
    • The Acorn Atom Introductory PacK This was the pack for every new Acorn Atom owner, it contained a comprehensive manual, and four cassettes, these are full of some very useful programs like teaching aids, financial packages, and some simple games.

A special shout out to Gary who has upgraded my archiving machine, and made things a whole lot quicker, including the scanner which was massively slow before hand.

Many thanks Gary!