Inspect a gadget 2012 – Live show!

Every year, thou­sands of nerds and gad­get fans descent on the real-life accom­pa­ni­ment to a pop­u­lar TV show: The Gadget Show Live. This year the UCHG sent a del­e­ga­tion in the form of Fen and Ross, and this is what they saw.

There were count­less stands, from all sorts of tech com­pa­nies — rang­ing from the tech­nol­ogy of tomor­row (like con­trol­ling stuff with your mind), to the more use­ful house­hold gad­getry — such as a flush­ing toi­let for your cat.

Of course, there are some things that catch your eye more than oth­ers: it was great to see some 3D print­ing going on, with real-life objects being cre­ated straight off a USB flash drive; a mini ver­sion of robot wars; and some super smart fly­ing drones, con­trol­lable from your mobile, full of gyro­scopes and accelerom­e­ters to keep them steady as a rock.

Custom built arcade machines made an appear­ance, though priced at £2-5k they were deemed a ripoff — and no where near as authen­tic at Fen’s own restored original.

There was a com­pany that deliv­ers retro gam­ing to par­ties, con­fer­ences, cor­po­rate events – though peer­ing behind their flashy LED screens revealed just a pile of wires and consoles!

And of course there was the live show, though most of what we can recall is a few chicks
danc­ing about in skimpy out­fits. Ross seemed to be too dis­tracted to take a picture.

The PC hard­ware area was quite a draw for us — as long time cus­tomers of the site
overclockers.co.uk it was great to see them have a pres­ence there. They showed off some of their rigs to us: cus­tom made water-cooled beasts, run­ning at nearly 5ghz with 4 meaty graph­ics cards. Rivalling this was Scan’s effort, a ridicu­lous machine called Swordfish: with three screens and some ter­ri­fy­ing specs! It wasn’t func­tion­ing when we arrived, but we couldn’t stand by and not mess around with stuff: we had it work­ing in no time.

We couldn’t leave with­out seek­ing out the retro com­put­ing area: as well as tech from through­out the years like an ancient morse code machine, PDAs the size of bricks, and the orig­i­nal com­puter that inspired Bill Gates (Altair 8800, pic­tured above) there was a host of gam­ing history.

We tried out a TurbograFX, Amiga CD32 (which was deemed to be shit, and took for­ever to load the game), Binatone pong machine, Commodore 16, Atari 600 XL and some early hand-helds includ­ing Astrowars and Munchman (which unlike the orig­i­nal Pacman only allowed you to eat the dots in one direction).

In sum­mary it was damn awe­some, so look at some retro consoles.