On the 1st January 1986, my cousin and I founded the „Blue Danube Atari Club“ („BDAC“), that is 30 years today. Well time flies …

Our club was probably one of the very first user computer clubs in Austria. It featured the 8-bit home computers as well as the 2600, 5200 and 7800 game systems, and soon also the ST computers. It was a small club with around 50 members at its peak. Great times!

The picture shows the cover of the very first club magazine. The cover „art“ was hand drawn by me, the content was written on a mechanical typewriter. The magazine was then photocopied for the members. Later (I had no printer in the beginning) it was made on my 130 XE and printed out. Imagine printing out dozens of copies, each with 16 or 20 pages, on a Seikosha GP-100AT seven-pin matrix dot printer. Eventually it was converted into a disk magazine, I wrote the software for the 8-bit and 16-bit computers by myself, both versions featuring 80 columns on the screen.

In the early 1990s the PCs took over and computers were no longer a hobby, but business, which I absolutely didn’t like. To compensate that, I renamed the club to „Play Atari Club“ („PAC“), featuring only games for all the above mentioned systems, plus Lynx and Jaguar. When I got my first internet access in spring 1997, the club was closed and continued as a free website, named „Classic Consoles Center“ („CCC“) …

Well I was relaxing at my parents‘ house today and suddenly had the idea of making a video of my games collection. That’s an easy job with today’s smart phones and soon I had uploaded the video to YouTube.

I had always stored my collection in banana boxes in the cellar of our appartment since I started collecting in the early 1990s. To enjoy my collection I had to go down in the cellar, open the boxes and put the games out. Non-satisfying. Three years ago my grandma, who lives only a few minutes away, told me that she had a room which she doesn’t use anymore. That was a great opportunity to use it as a video games room. Finally I could put my games in shelves. Very satisfying!

Now this is the very first video of (a big part of) my collection in twenty years of collecting!

As from today, there will be a link on my old website to this new website. So to speak this is finally the relaunch of the CCC website. However, the old site will stay online for another month or so, because the transfer of all articles and pictures from the old site to the new one is not completed yet, some stuff is still missing on the new site. The transfer should be finished until November.

Why did I relaunch the site already then? Because there are some news: I will add information of my new Videopac Release Martian Threat and pictures of Eurocon in Karlsruhe today – and want to do that already on the new website :)

So again welcome, I hope you will like the new CCC website!

Welcome to the new Classic Consoles Center website!

After 11 years online I am working on the second relaunch of my site – and it even got its own domain! The Classic Consoles Center was always planned as a site that invites its readers to actively participate. Web 2.0 now makes this easier than ever, so I really hope that you fellow readers don’t stay just readers in the future, but evolve into active members. Use the comment function in the News section, use the forums – and start immediately, because at the moment we are in the construction phase of the new site and I want to know what you like or don’t like, what you think about the design and so on – this is not my site, it should be our site.

Regarding the static content: Please have some patience until the static pages have been moved from the old to the new site. I hope to have completed the transfer until the end of September.