Show off your skills at resurrecting the gaming and computing platforms of the past. We have one of the largest collections of original working hardware on which we will make our best efforts to show your work!

Competition Rules - Retro Specific

  1. A "retro" platform is, roughly speaking, anything not in current or recent production. As a rule of thumb, anything produced before the year 2000 falls into this category. Arguments for more recent platforms must be raised with the organizers in advance.
  2. To the maximum extent practical, an attempt will be made to play all entries on hardware if present in the large on-site collection
  3. If you are present and wish to do so, you may provide your own hardware on which to run the demo. Almost any analog video standard as well as DVI/HDMI digital video is supported. Audio must be line-level analog mono or stereo.
  4. Failing a hardware attempt, an attempt will be made to play the demo in a default installation of the most common emulator for that platform (if one exists). Please provide emulator settings that are known to work best with your demo, if possible.
  5. Authors are strongly encouraged to provide a fallback video capture of the submission in the event that hardware and emulation playback are unsuccessful.
  6. The following hardware platforms are available on-site (anything else will have to be emulated or shown as a video):
    1. Amiga 500 NTSC or PAL w/ 512k slow RAM expansion (provide floppy image)
    2. Amiga 1200 NTSC or PAL w/ Blizzard '060 accelerator 64MB RAM (provide floppy image or hard-disk runnable binary)
    3. Amstrad CPC464 64k PAL (provide tape image or audio file to play as a tape)
    4. Amstrad CPC6128 128k PAL with HxC SDcard floppy emulator (provide disk image[s] as standard DSK or HFE format)
    5. Apple IIgs NTSC or PAL w/ Transwarp GS (provide floppy image)
    6. Apple Lisa (provide Lisa Workshop or Lisa Office runnable binary or dc42 floppy image)
    7. Atari 2600 (VCS) NTSC (PAL basically works) with Harmony multicart (provide ROM image in any supported format)
    8. Atari 130XE PAL 1MB (provide floppy image)
    9. Atari 800XL NTSC (provide floppy image)
    10. MAYBE: Atari STF 1040 NTSC (provide floppy image)
    11. Commodore 64 NTSC or PAL (SID version not guaranteed) (provide floppy image)
    12. Commodore 128 NTSC (provide floppy image)
    13. MAYBE: Commodore Plus4 NTSC (provide floppy image)
    14. MAYBE: Commodore VIC-20 NTSC (provide floppy image)
    15. DOS PC 333MHz Pentium II GUS(with-RAM-expansion)/SB16/Covox 128MB RAM (provide DOS binary)
    16. Sinclair ZX spectrum 48k PAL (via Speccy2010) (provide TZX/TAP/TRD file)
    17. Sinclair ZX spectrum 128k+ and +2 PAL (provide TAP file)
    18. Sinclair ZX spectrum Pentagon 1MB clone PAL (via Speccy2010) (provide TZX/TAP/TRD file)
    19. Tangerine Oric Atmos 48k PAL (provide Oric-compatible TAP file or audio file to play as a tape)
    20. Timex-Sinclair 1000 (ZX81) NTSC 16KB RAM (provide ZXpand-compatible binary)
    21. TI-99/4A NTSC (provide floppy image)
    22. Vectrex (provide 32kb or 64kb [must adhere to normal bank-switching convention] ROM image)

Competition Rules - General

  1. All submissions must be original work that have not been previously released.
  2. Remote entries, those submitted by a group which has no representatives present at the event, are accepted and will be eligible for prizes. Prizes will be delivered by standard US or international mail if a valid mailing address has been provided.
  3. Submissions may be of any length, however only up to the first five minutes of the work will be screened during the event. For on-site hardware, video display will be generated by our best conversion hardware for that machine.
  4. Submissions should not require any input beyond an initial loading/configuration screen. At any time during the execution of the demo, pressing the escape key (or equivalent control) must cause the program to terminate.
  5. Any content contained in a submission that is not the original work of the submission author(s) must have prior approval by its copyright owner. Submission of work to this competition affirms that all such approvals have been obtained.
  6. All submissions will be made available for unlimited public distribution by the organizers. Submission to this competition constitutes an agreement to such distribution.
  7. All submissions must adhere to the format requirements of the submission system. Please note that the maximum uncompressed program size is 128MB for any platform (most machines obviously handle less than this). Authors are strongly encouraged to review the submission system in advance of the competition deadline.
  8. Submissions may not access any networking interfaces, modify system files, or in any way interfere with the playback of future demos.
  9. Organizers reserve the right to reject submissions which contain unusually profane, disturbing, or shocking content.
  10. Organizers reserve the right to cancel, combine or split any categories for any reason.
  11. Organizers reserve the right to modify these rules at any time prior to the submission deadline.
  12. Any concerns not addressed by these rules are subject to decision by the organizers. All such decisions are final.

Deadline for submissions is 2:30pm GMT-5 US Eastern Time on October 5, 2013.