New England RetroFest Recap

Paul Lefebvre

Oct 29, 2026

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The New England RetroFest was on Saturday, October 24 at the Faraday Function Center in Concord, NH. It was a resounding success!

I don’t have official numbers, but I bet at least 200 visitors showed up to check out exhibits and sellers. From my perspective things were constantly busy from about 9:30am to 1pm.

I actually drove up the night before, since it was about a two hour drive for me, arriving in Concord about 6:30p on Friday. I plugged my car in at the hotel and set its timer to turn the climate on every couple hours to keep my precious gear from getting too cold (it dropped to about 29F overnight).

My Polestar 2 filled with Atari gear

I got up bright and early, grabbed some hotel breakfast and headed over to the Faraday Center, which was a short 6-minute drive and was the first one to arrive there. I waited in the parking lot until 7am and then went in to check in, but since I was so early instead ended up helping set up tables.

The show officially opened at 8:30am. Here’s a view of the main entrance.

The show was held in the large open area with exhibitors around the perimeter and sales in the center. Here are some photos of the show floor shortly after it opened and before it got too busy. There were attendees from all over New England. I personally talked to people from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. Alas, I don’t know if any Rhode Islanders were there.

My Atari exhibit was on the wall opposite the entrance. I had an Atari 800XL set up running some games, using cartridges and my SDrive Max. Donkey Kong was popular.

The Goto 10 Atari exhibit

All set up!

I also had a 1040ST set up running some games from floppy, such as Time Bandit and Bubble Bobble.

In addition to those demos, I also gave a way a bunch of free stuff. I brought a giant plastic bin of my magazine doubles and gave away all of them. There were issues of Antic, ANALOG, START, ST-Log, Current Notes, Compute!, and Creative Computing that I encouraged people to take home with them. I also gave away Atari 2600 cartridges and some ST software.

My table was busy for most of the show. I barely had time to run to the bathroom! Lots of people love Atari and were thrilled that there was some representation.

There was also another table across the room from me that had an 800XL set up with a FujiNet.

Me, chatting with a visitor (photo by Mark Leaman)

People loved talking about Atari and I even met several Goto 10 readers, which was a pleasant surprise. Most everyone had an Atari story or two to share and a popular topic of discussion was the newly announced THE 800XL from Atari.

I had a great conversation with Andres P. about his ST Books that he’s been working on restoring. You can read about his ST Book story on the Exxos forum. His engineering skills certainly are impressive! He even volunteered to take a look at my non-functional 1200XL! To make me even more envious, Andres also has a Falcon030!

I also talked with Federico L. who has been restoring some STacy machines. Those have been giving him some troubles. It sounds like he’s making progress but has run into trouble with hard drives and drivers.

The creator of crustyBASIC stopped to talk shop and I really need to check that out. It compiles BASIC code in a variety of dialects to machine code for many different old-school systems, including Atari 8-bit and ST.

It was great to meet Mark Leaman, who has started the Maine Vintage Computer Society. I look forward to hearing about some upcoming meetings.

Unlike the many others that were there, I didn’t actually buy anything. It turns out I have more than enough vintage and retro gear and don’t really need to be acquiring more. In fact, I even sold my 1040ST at the show! I didn’t expect to be selling anything at the show, and was surprised when a visitor asked if they could buy it. I wasn’t sure at first, but since I didn’t use that ST and it would be just going back to storage in the basement, I felt it would be better off in the hands of someone that would actually put it to use.

The show wrapped up about 2pm and I was back home by 4pm, having been away from home for just about 24 hours. It was a whirlwind and I loved every minute of it!

I want to thank Derek Lemay for putting this all together and I really hope we’ll all be doing this again next year! I met so many wonderful people, sadly most whose names I’ve forgotten, but the people there were my tribe, as they say.

We are all nerds with a passion for older, simpler, unique and weird computers. That entire vibe is what I try to do here at Goto 10 and if I can achieve just 1/100th of the excitement I got from the show, I’ll be happy!

I do apologize for anyone I forgot to mention here. I should have been taking notes!

If you want to stay in touch with people from the show and New England area, join the New England Vintage Computers Discord. You can also join the Facebook group.

I didn’t get photos of all the tables at the show, but here are a few closing pics of things I found neat.

The amazing Amiga 1000. I actually got to play around with this for a moment before the show opened, the first time I’ve ever used an Amiga.

My exhibiting neighbor was showing off the various Timex Sinclair computers. I didn’t know there were that many different ones.

I do like the Apple IIGS.