490: "I Only Found Out My Game Was in a Magazine Years Later" Rob Smith, Retro Inventor - The Retro Hour EP490

The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast)

The Retro Hour

Technology, Leisure, Video Games

4.9 • 558 Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2025

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week’s guest is Rob Smith: the mad‑scientist of the retro scene. Rob takes us on a tour of his wild inventions—from a disco‑themed floppy‑disk cleaning workstation that actually plays tunes, to a full‑scale whack‑a‑mole game controlled by an Amiga via Arduino and AMOS, and his glowing levitating Boing Ball built with magnets and LEDs. He also talks about the Retro Directory, disc backup stations, and his journey from VIC 20 BASIC to making modern retro PD titles.

Rob Smith's website: https://robsmithdev.co.uk/

Contents:

00:00 - The Week's Retro News Stories
47:48 - Dave Isherwood Interview

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Show notes

Atari Classics in Volkswagen Vehicles: https://tinyurl.com/wfner8j2
Paprium Flash Cart Release: https://tinyurl.com/2ucerftm
Metro’s Top 20 Amiga Games: https://tinyurl.com/ftz5y86h
Grant Sinclair Gamercard: https://tinyurl.com/nzc9uuem
Atari x Pac-Man Collection – Limited Edition 2600+: https://tinyurl.com/47ar835w
Atari 50 Namco DLC: https://tinyurl.com/bd8xczzs
Modern SNES Handheld in Development: https://tinyurl.com/45c8u3jn

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Coming up on this week's show, some big Atari and Namco news.
0:04.7	The Amiga turns 40 and we chat wacky inventions and floppy disks with Rob Smith.
0:17.2	And the Retro Hour podcast is brought to you each and every Friday with our sponsors, our friends,
0:22.5	at Bitmap Books. Now, have you seen their upcoming new book, 50 indie games that changed
0:28.4	the world? Celebrating the development and the legacy of some of those titles that made a huge
0:33.4	impact outside of the typical AAA studios, including some of the early ones in there, like
0:38.5	Super Meat Boy and Limbo, to classics like Shubble Night and Dead Cells, and lots more as well,
0:43.6	weighing in at more than 450 pages. You can pre-order that right now and find out more on their
0:48.5	website at bitmapbooks.com. And with our brand new sponsor, our friends at replay events, who next weekend are going to
0:55.7	be holding their first ever Sheffield Gaming Market.
0:59.8	Now, that's going to be happening on Sunday the 3rd of August.
1:02.7	Link in this week's show notes, and we'll tell you more about that very soon.
1:06.9	Hello, and welcome to the Retro Hour podcast, episode number 490, your weekly dose of retro gaming and technology news with me, Dan Wood.
1:15.1	Me Ravi Abbott and me Joe Fox.
1:17.6	And a very warm welcome to this week's show.
1:19.3	The podcast every Friday brings it up to speed on all the big happenings in the world of retro,
1:24.1	chatting about what's been going on in Retro news, which I know sounds a bit of a contradiction
1:28.7	in terms, but lots of been happening this week. And also welcomes on veterans of the industry and
1:34.2	just interesting people from the community for a chat on the podcast every week on an interview
1:39.2	in the second half of the show. And actually, I've been looking at this week. Turns out some
1:42.9	pretty big things happened on a this week in history in the world of tech and gaming. In 1999 in this week.
1:51.0	That noise haunted me when I was a kid. It's just like, oh, message. Got to go. Look.
	...

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