Well, 2019 is about to come to a close and so it is with joy we close out our 2019 season with our final ABUG Canada West meeting of this year.
I'll say that it was a very good meeting where we didn't achieve everything we wanted to but we did have a lot of fun, shared gifts (that turned out to be decidedly non-Acorn in nature) and learned more about Acorn things as we usually do.
As usual, I'll give my perspective on the meeting and Paul will follow up with his goals/objectives and perspectives on how that went.
My first goal was to see if I could manufacture a battery connector for my PocketBook II. I bought it knowing the connector was rusted out. My aim was to use a dremel and the existing good one to create one out of a lid off my cat's food, a challenge to be sure.
Below are some pictures just showing the effort that went into this and the results.
Here I'm just starting to use the dremel to cut out the basic (not BASIC) outline of the part needed.
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Call the fire department, it looks like it's getting warm in here.....actually no real danger but it was an interesting effect. Good catch Paul!!!
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Bending the piece so it would fit properly in the PocketBook
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Trying to fit the piece into the PocketBook. This was surprisingly difficult. I eventually used long needlenose pliers to help achieve the task.
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This is what the piece looks like. I did polish it up so it's more tinny looking and also scraped where I needed to solder it so the solder would take.
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Well, it doesn't seem to work. I did test to ensure there was continuity so the device itself may have a problem. I found the piece I made to be a bit flimsy so I will take it and add solder to the parts that need to be more solid. Perhaps the connection is not 'solid' enough to pass a current. This is for a bit further down the road as it seems to busy right now at this time of year.
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Paul wanted to check his joystick to see if it worked on my A3010 and I had a joystick that came with a Commodore machine that I wanted to check so as Paul brought one of the few games that used 2 joysticks in it to play, we got set up.....
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This is the game that Paul found - Squash.......I thought that was a vegetable......
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Ok, this is early on and we were both learning the game. Paul's joystick worked fine on the A3010 and mine did too in spite of it not having a spring in the fire button.
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This was further on and we were really having fun. One thing we discovered is how our hands were somewhat bruised after using these archaic joysticks. I'd forgotten about all that.....ouch!
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The reason Paul wanted to check out his joystick on the A3010 was because it didn't work on his A3020. We realized of course it couldn't unless a proper joystick pod was installed on that computer. The serial one won't interpret the signals correctly. The reason i wanted to check mine out was I wasn't certain it would work on Acorn products.
So, the future may hold an A3020 upgrade that will allow Paul to play on it using a joystick. Seems a worthy project.
Great idea to use a battery adapter - off to the battery store today!! 