I will be attending this year as well.
My first name is Joe.
That's too bad that there seems there won't be a nes homebrew presence like there was for the prior 2 years in the basement. However there appears to be a NintendoAge annex room opposite the gaming museum... down the same hallway where the food is. maybe some NES related stuff can happen there?
As for memories, it was fascinating to see tepples's stuff on private display in 2011... wish I was more personable at the time, but the burning plastic of the modders in the stuffiness of that tiny basement room was making me gag/reddening my eyes. Also yes I suck at Tetris even on a good day. I hope other geniuses like tepples would show up and just show stuff off... it's hard work to prepare, but much appreciated.
Last year I remember the NES compilation cartridge. But I was blown away by the N64 dev cart... I love how modestly that inventor answered my question about who discovered how to defeat the N64 security... it was him of course... Plus he answered, accurately, my very pointed questions about how the N64 worked internally. It's rare to be able to speak in person to people like that.
I hope to encounter these kinds of fun surprises and people this year as well. What should be generating a buzz is the RetroN 4. Unfortunately they won't say until the unveiling if the audio output is broken like the other clones. What I'm trying to say, is that somehow if a unit like that catches on, the price and availability is right, and is an accurate hardware clone, then homebrew development interest would spike up again.
Personally I'm very good at electrical hardware and can read timing diagrams and chip datasheets and draw up schematics, but am pretty terrible at writing low-level language software (even though I understand the individual CPU instructions I can't seem to put them in a useful order without experiencing fatigue).
