VCF Europe 2026 in Munich
As I wanted to go public with my (retro) projects a bit more and meet people who care about the same machines, I was at the VCF Europe 2026 in Munich. It was my first VCF experience. I visited on May 1; the event is still running through May 3 if you want to catch the last day.
And what should I say: It was a really great experience. As I heard about VCF almost too late, I couldn’t prepare to present the devices I developed. However, I very much enjoyed the company there.
As I can’t list all and everything, let me just describe a bit of my experience. I got many new ideas, probably too many ;-)
Mega 65
Folks playing and showing a Mega 65 live in action: MEGA65 at Trenz Electronic (Oliver Graf) It’s an FPGA retro platform with a great keyboard, fine enclosure supporting quite a few retro computers and consoles. Of course - MiSTer FPGA is quite something as well, but especially the great keyboard makes the Mega 65 a great device.
Thanks Oliver for showcasing your device!
Retro Computer Stammtisch
While enjoying my Leberkas-Semmel I had a really nice chat with Klaus aka TinTin from the Retro Computer Stammtisch. With shiny eyes he told me the heart-warming story of how he got his formidable Atari Falcon 030. While being a bit envious about this nice device, I’m considering joining his next Stammtisch. Thanks Klaus!
Telephone exchange
Thanks to Oliver from the Vintage Computing Lab Munich (vclab.de) who did an entertaining presentation of a historical telephone exchange from the 1920s in Germany. For some unknown reason I agreed to trying to disassemble some code from a ZONAR device which was a late add-on to the telephone exchange. Maybe because that felt a bit more familiar to me than all of these relays and the mechanics. As there are so many moving parts, I better leave this topic to the specialists, but maybe I’ll do an explanation video soon about my rotary dial USB HID device.
PDP-8/e: Reconstruction of a PDP-8/e from original schematics
I have some idea what it takes to reconstruct a retro computer like the LC80 from schematics. Much of the Verilog/VHDL CPU work (for example for a Z80) can be reused, but Andreas went further and rebuilt a PDP-8/e, including the front panel and switches. Thanks, Andreas, for presenting your great project to me!
TECMUMAS
With big eyes I listened to Matthias from TECMUMAS aka Technikmuseum Matthias Schmitt in Bad König. What a great collection and what thrilling stories about how you got your interesting exhibits. Let’s stay in touch!
The Sorbus Computer
I’ve seldom experienced such an elegant computer design as the Sorbus Computer by Svobi(?) (Sven). Yes - just a 6502 CPU and an RP2040 running 6502 code on the original CPU. Ah wait - I forgot to list the 7 resistors. Or are those just for decoration purposes ;-). Was a pleasure to talk to you, Sven.
Robotron
Yes - there was a computer industry in the former GDR. The largest manufacturer in the GDR was Robotron. And yeah - Dirk proudly presented the U880 based computer resp. terminal K8915. U880 was the GDR-rebuilt version of the famous Z80 processor. I was deeply impressed by Dirk’s ability to on-the-fly disassemble Z80 byte code while reading the byte code. I am just able to decode 0xCD which is a call to a subroutine with absolute address. Great how you reverse engineered the K8915 and could even run demo programs on these so well maintained machines. I got a bit of experience with an LC80 teaching computer which also uses the U880.
Dirk pointed me to futoRETRO in Augsburg. Thanks!
I am now thinking if I’d present my Loreley board or my 68k/ SID MIDI synthesizer (stay curious, yet to come).
But anyway Dirk, looking forward to talking to you at futoRETRO in Augsburg!