I made a special trip to Dallas to check out VCF SW. I intentionally wanted to travel and visit as many VCF events in 2026 after many years of only attending my local VCF Midwest. VCF SW was the largest event that I've attended so far this year. The main show was split out into 2 rooms and a few more if you count some of the spin-off rooms for MiniDisc and Arcade repair rooms. In fact, I think they could easily grow square footage by 50% and not have any problem filling up. Some areas the booths were arranged with fairly narrow isles and there were multiple times where I intentionally avoided areas and just tried to come back a few times throughout the show waiting for less crowds.
The layout of the venue was well thought out. There was a sizable consignment area with not much of anything interesting for me. VCF SoCal had a larger consignment offering this year. There were side rooms for music and video games. The video game area was nice and reminded me of the concept of the console musuem at the Midwest Gaming Classic. The main room for talks was great as there was stadium style seating in a large room and the room next door was the overflow viewing area. The A/V quality at the overflow area was great and most of the talks I watched were from there where it was less crowded.
The quality of the talks were great. The one that stuck with me was the Lisa FPGA talk by Alex Anderson-Mcleod. It was interesting to hear how designing for an FPGA was not a 1 to 1 conversion of physical hardware.
The main show was split into two rooms. The smaller of the two was mostly vendors or folks primarily selling items. That room was very tight and during most of the show I could not get into some of the back isles. The isles themselves were only wide enough for a person to walk through. If someone was stopped at a booth it was hard to either get around or there may be someone looking at a booth on the other side of the isle. It just shows that this event may be at the point where they need a larger convention center.
The booths at the main room were very interesting. Off the top of my head, there were a few booths that focused on Japanese computers and games. One entire display around Soviet computers. And other themes like Sun Stations, NeXt computers, SGi, etc. Much like VCF MW, there was a phone company and a weather/cable network running. One interesting thing they did was give awards to booth operators covering a few categories. The awards themselves were cool PCB boards with LEDs that blinked. Nice touch!
The game show was an unexpected highlight for me. VCF SoCal and MW have had some fun trivia or late-night entertainment. VCF SW takes this to another level. Technical glitches not withstanding, they put on an elaborate recreation of a retro game show "$50,000 Pyramid" along with the sound effects and major game mechanics. What was interesting was that the topics were not all computer or tech related. The game show is something that would be entertaining for a general audience with no vintage computer knowledge required to enjoy.