Jason Oakley – Aussie Geek

When I was about 12 years old my parents bought me a Dick Smith VZ-200 computer. This is a rebranded Video Technology Laser 210 sold in Australia.
I had been looking for something in my dad’s wardrobe and lifted up a jumper or towel and it was hidden underneath. I was so excited! But I wasn’t supposed to know so only told my sister haha. I spent many years playing that computer.
A friend of mine (Guy Thomason) was kind enough to give me his Dick Smith VZ-300 computer recently.

I had lots of fun playing Hoppy and VZ-Invaders (written by Dubois & McNamara — You can find an interview I did about them recently on my other site). I moved onto a VZ-300 and bought a RAM expansion pack, dual floppy drives, a printer, joysticks and many, many games. I lauched VZ DiskMag — a magazine on floppy disk which I sold locally. I only managed 4 editions as I had very few contributions and had to create them myself. You can download them from BlueBilby.com
In 2000 I developed ArkaBall — an Arkanoid clone for VZ computers. The Z88DK devkit was limited then in that you could only have integer variables so the game was quite limited, but it was nicely playable.

I had only played it on the VZEmu emulator written by Guy Thomason.
A guy called Ben Grimmett is a member of our VZ200 fans Facebook group and he recently created a hardware project which maxed out a real VZ computer’s memory, added memory banks to switch to and an SD Card reader to allow you to store .vz files on a FAT32 system and play it on a real VZ computer! You can buy them from his online store.

I can put every VZ game and application on this and still have a ton of room! The smallest SD Card I could find in my town was 16Gb!
This let me play Arkaball for the first time on a real VZ computer: