ABUG Canada West July 6 2019 Meetup #12

[klintworth]

It was a cool, grey day and we had grand plans - things did not progress as anticipated! Ed kindly gave me a spare Retroclinic CD with all sorts of useful files on it. A recent project saw the installation of a Raspberry Pi Zero onto an internal Retroclinic Master Co-Pro board in my Master, so the CD will provide useful s/w to go with the h/w. Thanks Ed!

Paul had plans!

First up was working on the two A7000+ machines.I'd purchased an Icubes EtherLan 600 NIC on ebay, and this was duly installed. I wanted to check it's online ability, but for some reason the option to choose the card in the Internet configuration window was greyed out. Not sure why? Either I'm missing a software module or it's a duff NIC. My A7000+ runs RiscOS 4. Ed will relate his A7000+ saga. To be continued......

Slightly different labels - Castle model below

Setting up ... two A7000+ and a Master Compact

NIC option greyed out - not sure why?

I also showed Ed some additions to my Master Compact keyboard, principally the internal Gotek and the internal GBS video card. We were surprised that the 8200 did not need power as I forgot to connect the power, yet it still was getting power from the motherboard as the picture output is good.

Master Compact modding! Next up ..... volume control!

Finally we had to spend some time on the current HSC game Ghouls. Ed easily surpassed my meagre score! Unfortunately we didn't get as far as examining our BBC Master computers, so maybe next meeting?!

Ghouls on the Master Compact

Ozzie the dog wasn't so impressed with our Acorn capers

And we both neglected to take our end of day selfie! So here's a picture of a curious racoon in the back lane!!

Curious racoon

Now over to Ed .....

[KarateEd]

Hi Folks,

We had a brilliant time at our ABUG meeting, though not everything went brilliantly.

Our efforts were to focus on 32 bitters in the morning and switch to 8 bit in the afternoon.

Paul's efforts were towards getting his A7000+ online and he's explained how that went. Mine however was to just get the OS to boot correctly. It's been hanging after doing most of the boot-up process with the forever looping time glass...... When I opened the machine up, I realized the CDROM cable was unplugged and thought that might be the issue. it wasn't. We were able to somehow add a CDROM using the configure program but the CDROM was not readable. So that stumped us, no solution at that point......so......

I decided it was time to put a battery in the machine as the previous owner had removed it to ensure motherboard integrity.

Here are some pictures showing that process. It went very well indeed.

Soldering in difficult to reach places.

Soldering the wire to the positive pole on the battery.

Got it soldered up and also put glue from a glue gun on the connectors to ensure nothing can short out.

This is what things looked like before we made it messy on the table.

Here's all our machine nicely set up for play and work.....

Now the issues... but..... first a picture.....

Digging in and swapping cables, other parts to see if we can get some life.

What had happened was after replacing the battery and testing, before putting it all back together, was the OS wasn't booting up. We were getting the F12 prompt, typing DESKTOP produced a graphic error.

We tried different cabling, drives and nothing seemed to work. At times it appeared the drive didn't spin up or it tried to spin up but maybe failed at the boot sector. It's really hard to tell without some of the more modern tools one is used to.

We spent most of the rest of the day trying to sort that out, Paul had another drive with 3.1 on it and that should supposedly fire up. We'll certainly give that a try here but for now the jury is out.

Maybe me and RISC machines are not meant to be, it was a bit frustrating but, I'm retired so I can take time to troubleshoot, ask questions, etc.

Anyway, we finished with both of us having a crack at Ghouls. I had a most unfair advantage on this one as I used to play it for hours in Iceland. So having said that Paul had a go and the following pictures tell the story.

Doing fairly well so far.....

Man o man o man.......!!!!! :-(

I want to thank Paul for some very nice CDs of software related to RISC........

I also want to thing he and his wife for providing much needed coffee and a wonderful lunch that had a decidedly British flavour.

It's always good to see Paul and see what kind of things we can get resolved or not. Whatever we do, it's always a lot of fun. We may be a small club but we're a strong club.