And today, Gigatron #1000 has found a new owner! Thanks to everybody for making happen what we could not have dreamt of when we started! Unfortunately, it is just a few days too late for Marcel to also enjoy the moment.
We have decided to stop selling kits once our stock has been sold, which should be in a few months. For us, the Gigatron was always about inventing new things, understanding technology, designing, fine tuning, tinkering, and also about meeting like minded people (and having fun in the process). Making it into a kit had its own charmes, writing a manual, sourcing components, designing a PCB. Packaging and sending out kits, however, resembles a plain job too much, but was needed to create a community of people that would also want to design, understand and tinker.
That community now exists, and wonderful things have already come from it, both in hardware and software. So we (so used to using "we") will stop selling and providing support in a few months. Does that mean you can no longer get a Gigatron? No, you still can, because the PCB layout, the schematics and the software have all been open sourced. The only thing you probably cannot get is the wooden case that we had tailor made for the Gigatron. Somewhere in July or August, the assembly manual and more will open sourced as well. We hope the Gigatron will live on!
You will understand that with the passing of Marcel, the ROM development has come to a halt. We split all the work that went into Gigatron, and all the software development was done by Marcel (which was a wise choice
. But the both of us had decided earlier to stop. I want to pursue other challenges (starting with building a Tardis replica in my garden). And certainly now, if I were to go on with hardware development, that would not be the same without Marcel.
On the bottom you can see Marcel with the Gigatron, when we were at 34C3 in Berlin. They did not accept my talk about the Gigatron, but we had a good time and a lot of development was done on the spot, including the beginnings of the Racer game. Did you know the skyline in the game is to look like The Hague (where Marcel lived) and Eindhoven (where I live)?
