ABUG Canada West - June 1 2019 Meetup #11

[KarateEd]

Hi Folks,

Today was our 11th ABUG Canada West meeting, must be some kind of record for Acorn meet-ups in North America, waddaya think?

Paul and I had a great time today......we exchanged our usual gifts, mine was a 3 button PS/2 mouse for my OmniBus PC (really it's a server setup).

Our goals today were to see if we could get networking done on Paul's one machine, the other seemed to already work for the most part.

We weren't successful but we will be. On the Omnibus I think we have to get more basic files onto the beast to make it work properly. Anyway, a few pics with some explanations then:

Paul hadn't seen the beast opened up yet, or live at any point so this was his first look.

Yesterday I hooked up this battery to the machine. It had been removed to prevent the nasty MB killing goop. I used hot glue to hold down the battery and the wire. That keeps it from moving around at all. I have to say this piece of hardware is really, really solid, nothing moves around in it at all it's so well engineered.

Doing something on the OmniBus to help it work better, I think.

Believe it or not this was actually a lot of work between short periods or rest. It has to do with using floppys to copy many nested programs onto the floppy and transferring them and then doing it all again......tedious but necessary as I only had a floppy connected to the OmniBus.

Something we found out, due to a really good suggestion from Paul, was that if you have a formatted for DOS (in this case 1.44 MB) disk and copy a Zip file to it, or any Acorn file, it seems to rename the programs to the 7.3 format. We found we had to reformat the diskettes to 1.6 MB to make them work as they should from machine to machine. So, DOS to Acorn, not so good, Acorn to Acorn, we like it. Learn something new each day I always say.

These were 3 of the RISC OS machines we were working with today, one other, the A3010 was in another room, lonely, by itself, not really happy at all.

So, these are all the machines in one room except the A3010. Can you spot an imposter (non-RISC OS machine) in the midst of all this?

I'm so lonely, I just want to help. Hang on grasshopper, you'll help me lots now that Paul has taken his machines back.

and......to deviate from our 26/32 bit theme, we have here something 8-bit. Do you know what they are?.....besides r@re......

Well, it was a long, but very fun day here at ABUG Canada West and it would appear we are a little crazed and loopy by all the heavy duty screen work we did today.....it was really a ton of fun...thanks Paul.

I just want to thank Paul for the 3 button mouse (he actually got it to me well before the meeting) and his many suggestions that helped us move forward.

The time just zoomed past and before we knew it, we were done.....sigh......until next time........

and....... I'm sure Paul will chime in soon with his take on the day........

[klintworth]

A beautiful sunny drive up to Squamish was capped by a great RiscOS day spent with Ed playing on our 32 bit machines. I've got quite rusty on using RiscOS so it was a good recap. The first thing I noticed was how much heavier my boxes of 32 bit kit were compared to the 8 bit machines which seemed much lighter - but Ed took it in his stride carrying both the Iyonix as well as other kit!

Packed and ready for action at Ed's!

Was I ever surprised when Ed presented me with a personalised Acorn Pocketbook as my gift - wow! That's what I call a good buddy (he'd remembered that I mentioned it was on my Acorn wish list - I need to be careful what I say I'm after!!)

So happy to have a new piece of Acorn kit

The main order of business was copying files to the A7000+ Omnibus as well as getting both A7000+ machines online. The Iyonix went online just fine, but I'd forgotten just how slow the RiscOS browsers are! Unfortunately we weren't able to get the A7000+ machines online, not too sure why at this stage. Ed only had one mouse mat so we ended up with both mice (and both of us) using it at the same time!

Two mice, one mat!

All in all a great day which reminded me just how much I still want to achieve on my A7000+ (main things being to get online, set up ADFFS, and emulate the BBC using !65host successfully!) And I'm looking forward to playing with the Pocketbook!!