RISC OS eXperience may 2019 ( The Netherlands)

[TimoHartong]

The anual Big Ben Club day in the Netherlands will be held on 11 May 2019 in:

Wijkgebouw de Vuister
Molenwerf 44
1541 WR Koog aan de Zaan
From 10:30 to 16:30

The admission is free

I will bring the following things to annual day:
- An Archimedes A410 /I fitted with Gotek and SCSI2SD
- An A5000 with fitted a gotek and normal floppy drive
- An A5000 fitted with gotek and a SCSI2SD
Most likely there will be a :
- An econet network demonstration
- A robot controlled under RISCOS
And many more things

Update 10 May 2019
- One of the A5000 will be fitted with an IDE to SATA and SDD hard drive. This is different setup from a CF Card. In this A5000 also a WIZO EPROM is fitted

More information:
https://www.bigbenclub.nl/
Or the informal Big Ben Club facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/bigbenclub/

[markdryan]

Koog aan de Zaan doesn't seem to be too far away from where I live so I'll pop in and say hello. Are any other stardotters planning to attend?

[roland]

I won't attend. My Atom does not run Risc OS. Maybe another year when I updated my FPGA But it will take a lot of time before I reach that level of excellence.

[TimoHartong]

Atom owners are more then welcome as well. Please bring it with you.

[roland]

I am sorry but even with an Atom I cannot attend. I have another ( for me important) event this day.

[TimoHartong]

Perhaps next year.

[markdryan]

I'll be travelling by public transport so won't be able to bring any of my RISC OS machines, which are all a little large. I do have a rather nice electron that I could bring. However, I won't be able to bring a display, so this would only be worthwhile if there was a monitor available.

[TimoHartong]

I presume it is composite video I can bring a nice Philips Mono chrome CRT with me.

[markdryan]

I presume it is composite video I can bring a nice Philips Mono chrome CRT with me.

Fantastic. I have an RGB to scart cable for the electron. However, I also have small upscaler I can bring that can be used to connect the electron to a HDMI display. So something with HDMI or scart input should be fine. The electron has a turbo board fitted, a Plus 1, an MCG (Mega Games Cart), an ABR, an AP5, a Beebscsi mini and a RPI second processor. So lots to demo.

[TimoHartong]

I presume it is composite video I can bring a nice Philips Mono chrome CRT with me.

Fantastic. I have an RGB to scart cable for the electron. However, I also have small upscaler I can bring that can be used to connect the electron to a HDMI display. So something with HDMI or scart input should be fine. The electron has a turbo board fitted, a Plus 1, an MCG (Mega Games Cart), an ABR, an AP5, a Beebscsi mini and a RPI second processor. So lots to demo.

I will see if I also can bring a CRT colour television with SCART. So it will be really retro look

[TimoHartong]

I presume it is composite video I can bring a nice Philips Mono chrome CRT with me.

Fantastic. I have an RGB to scart cable for the electron. However, I also have small upscaler I can bring that can be used to connect the electron to a HDMI display. So something with HDMI or scart input should be fine. The electron has a turbo board fitted, a Plus 1, an MCG (Mega Games Cart), an ABR, an AP5, a Beebscsi mini and a RPI second processor. So lots to demo.

I have prepared a nice Sony CRT for you

[markdryan]

I have prepared a nice Sony CRT for you

Brilliant. I've prepared a few nice demos (mandelbrot and mexican hat), which I can show running on the standard electron, in turbo mode, on a 3Mhz 6502 second processor and on a 250Mhz 6502 second processor. I'd also like to get them running on the ARM native processor but am currently struggling to get BASIC working on this. Hopefully, I'll be able to fix this tonight. There's also a whole pile of games on the MGC to show off. All this should give people an idea of some of the great stuff you can do with the Electron these days, thanks to the amazing efforts of the people on this forum.

Perhaps, we can have an Electron vs A5000 Mandelbrot rendering competition. BTW, do you have an FPA in either of your A5000s? There's something I'd really like to try on a real FPA.

[roland]

If you want to bring your Electron to the TechSat I can also arrange a monitor or TV with scart for you. You have some nice goodies to show (besides the MGC that I already have).

[markdryan]

If you want to bring your Electron to the TechSat I can also arrange a monitor or TV with scart for you. You have some nice goodies to show (besides the MGC that I already have).

Good idea. I'll bring it along.

[TimoHartong]

I have prepared a nice Sony CRT for you

Perhaps, we can have an Electron vs A5000 Mandelbrot rendering competition. BTW, do you have an FPA in either of your A5000s? There's something I'd really like to try on a real FPA.

The FPA unfortenately not even 2nd hand they are expensive and extreamly rare

[markdryan]

I'd also like to get them running on the ARM native processor but am currently struggling to get BASIC working on this. Hopefully, I'll be able to fix this tonight.

And it's fixed. I just needed to update my version of PiTubeDirect. Oddly enough the ARM native mode doesn't seem much faster than the 269Mhz 6502 processor when running BASIC programs. Maybe this is because the programs I tried were doing a lot of floating point calculations. In anycase I managed to get it to plot the mandelbrot in two and a half minutes, which is 264 times faster than a spectrum (and I think on the spectrum I only used 64 iterations as opposed to 100 and possibly a lower resolution).

[markdryan]

Oddly enough the ARM native mode doesn't seem much faster than the 269Mhz 6502 processor when running BASIC programs. Maybe this is because the programs I tried were doing a lot of floating point calculations.

The bottleneck seems to have been the large amounts of graphics commands, GCOL and PLOT 69, the program was sending over the tube. I modified the program to draw lines instead of points and now it runs in 50 seconds on the native copro. It runs in 50 seconds if the electron is in turbo mode, that is. If I disable turbo mode it takes just over 2 minutes to run.

[TimoHartong]

So nice to have you on the day. And it was a great addition to all the machines there ( BBC, Master, Archimedes and A5000 ). Hope to see you next year.

[markdryan]

So nice to have you on the day. And it was a great addition to all the machines there ( BBC, Master, Archimedes and A5000 ). Hope to see you next year.

Thanks so much for the invite and the lend of the monitor. It was great to meet everyone and to see so many Archimedes in one place. I also had lots of fun playing with PiTube direct on the Electron. Although I've had my AP5 for almost a year, it was the first time I'd really sat down and played with it. There's so much potential here. Wish I had a bit more free time to exploit it!. Anyway, thanks again and seeya next year.