Here are the Winners!

Firstly, congratulations to all who took part – both myself and Dale have really struggled making time for Retrochallenge this time round, so if you didn’t get the time you deserved for retro-computing you have our sympathies! We always hate choosing winners to be honest, although we do acknowledge that it is great to have your hard work appreciated.

So here are the winners. I will complete a more comprehensive summary when I get enough time – Dale will tweet from @retrochallenge when the summary is up on the website. We have been generously offered several prizes from a few kind members of our community – I suggest that pragmatically only the smaller items could be shipped overseas so if you would like a prize please let me know and we’ll arrange getting you something as best we can. I will attempt to put together a list of what is available and from where.

We are planning a change to the competition given the continued distractions both myself and Dale experience in both January and July, the traditional Retrochallenge months. The proposal is to shift the challenge to a Spring/Autumn format with the challenges lasting for the months of April and October. I would welcome feedback on how our current and previous competitors would feel about this change? Given the proximity of April the next full challenge would be October although I have a few ideas for an alternative, mini-competition for April which I’ll try and firm up over the next month or so.

Our winners, in no particular order, are:

We found Norbert’s blog captured the essence of a great retrochallenge project in the making early on. He didn’t disappoint and continued to deliver high quality, educational posts with just the right level of detail and humour to keep the reader engaged and looking forward to the next installment. As well as the game development part what really captivated us was the level of technical detail infused in the blog posts which really rounds out this entry and is appreciated for the time and effort this takes. Congratulations on a job well done!

Tom has done a great job in both creating his Retro-C IDE, blogging about it and keeping us all well informed of updates on Twitter. We love this challenge because it has resulted in a novel, new application which could easily become the foundation of subsequent retrocomputing projects. A truly professional job, well done Tom!

This really has to win the award for the most unique entry this competition – a blend of old and not-so-old technologies for a multiplayer game on a platform that quite frankly you don’t think would be up to it. The project gets you thinking on how far the technique of communicating via an IRC server can be taken? Clearly some solid coding skills have gone into the game itself – all we need now is a download link for the source and binary 🙂