ABUG Dev night #27, Thursday 7th October 2021, 7pm - 10pm (BST)

[BigEd]

Oh No! I can't host next week's ABUG Dev night, so can we have a volunteer please?

An early warning for your calendaring purposes: Thursday next week (if we have a host) there will be an ABUG Dev night, at 7, on zoom.

Come and discuss your Acorn-related dev projects, whether they be creating things, breaking things, or digging into things. Or even if your project is stuck... and if you haven't got a project, come along to hear about what's going on. Because somewhere, surely, someone has been doing something mighty interesting.

Hardware, software, tooling, emulators, games - all kinds of development, debugging, reverse engineering and investigation are on topic.

For a flavour of a typical meeting, see this previous thread.

For a bit of a heads-up nearer the time, subscribe to this thread using the spanner gadget below. I'll bump this thread the day before and on the day, if I remember.

Edit: Dave Arcadian adds:
N.B. By requesting a place at this event, you consent to receiving the Zoom logins in the form of a calendar invite sent via the ABug Google account to the email address you have associated with your Stardot account. If you have a different email address associated with your calendar (e.g. a Gmail account) then please update your registered Stardot forum email address with the correct address BEFORE requesting a place. Note we may issue the Zoom logins via PM instead, for example if we receive your request at short notice.

[BigEd]

Tomorrow's dev night looms closer... anyone up to volunteer as host? I think the main points, for my approach, are
- make sure everyone gets a chance to speak, and things don't go too far off-topic for too long
- that's it really

It really just means having one eye on the clock, taking a mental note of who's contributed so far, and being ready to ask people how their projects are going, and moving things on if twenty minutes have gone by with the one topic.

[dominicbeesley]

I could host later on if needed but I can't guarantee I'll be there before 8 and will need to pop out around 9 o'clock

[BigEd]

Thanks Dominic - that should help if, as has happened once before, no-one is saying anything (except where's Ed)...

[markdryan]

I can host until Dominic arrives, if there are no other offers. I'll probably be disconnecting at around 9pm as well though.

[BigEd]

That'd be great!

I don't think there's any problem with leaving things unattended later in the evening - indeed it might even improve matters - but I'm never there to see!

[tricky]

Thanks guys, looking forward to this after a week of moving and cleaning house. If I can start awake

[dominicbeesley]

I don't seem to have an invite for Thursdays any longer or does it get posted up here?

D

[BigEd]

We're all out of invitations and calendrification - re-use the details from the previous ABUG (of the same flavour) or PM me here for those.

Which is to say, we're all in charge of our own calendars from now on. Can we do it? (Yes we can!)

Nearby:

The weeknight virtual sessions are continuing throughout the spring/summer and Zoom events have been set up on these dates:

Dev Nights: 7pm-10pm (BST) on the following Thursdays ...
... 23/9, 7/10, 21/10

General Sessions: 7pm-10pm (BST) on the following Tuesdays ...
... 28/9, 12/10, 26/10

There is one Meeting ID/Password that can be used for all of the above Thursday Dev Nights, and a separate Meeting ID/Password that can be used for all of the above Tuesday General Sessions.

If you do not have the Zoom details please post in the thread for the event you wish to attend and one of the ABug admins should send you the Zoom logins via PM (if you are a new member, please ensure that you've also posted an introduction).

[dominicbeesley]

If you do not have the Zoom details please post in the thread for the event you wish to attend...

I've not been to a Thursday thing for some time and do not have login details. Will I not need a special login to be host?

[BigEd]

I've not been to a Thursday thing for some time and do not have login details. Will I not need a special login to be host?

PM sent for the login details. Dave Arcadian will (almost certainly) be there in spirit to promote you to host - same login as ever. But it's more the role than the status that's important I think - the actual Zoom host can do useful things like stopping screenshares or muting people (people with dogs or babies in the background), but that's just a bit of a help for smoothness. (There's also the bouncing bad people off the call, but I don't believe that's ever happened.)

(Oh, and keeping half an eye on the forum and the discord in case a late arrival needs to know the login details.)

[dominicbeesley]

Thanks Ed

I'll do my best to keep order! Good shout on Discord is forgotten that!

D

[dominicbeesley]

It look like I should be ok from 8 onwards if you can kick off Mark

D

[BigEd]

Thanks for hosting, chaps, hope it all went off well. Feel free to comment (here or privately) on any observations.

No reason of course why we couldn't have rotating hosts, but as it stands I'm happy to keep doing it.

[dominicbeesley]

I have to say thanks to Mark, he did all the heavy lifting!

[markdryan]

Thanks for hosting, chaps, hope it all went off well. Feel free to comment (here or privately) on any observations.

I think we had a total of 11 participants and a good 3 hours and 30 minutes of constant chat and demos. Lots of demos including

• autocad file rendering on an Atom in BASIC

• two impressive beeb blitter demos + a beeb playing tracker files with a Paula like sound chip

• A new launcher application for RiscOS with integrated search and package management support

• Lambda functions and function pointers in Subtilis

• A MAME demo of an emulated podule (don't remember the name) that was used to make BBC micro ROMs available in !65Host running on an emulated A540. The ROMs demoed were view, wordwise and kermit.

• Some great looking ZX spectrum inspired isometric art

Other topics discussed included new Archimedes podules, broken backplanes, battery damaged RiscPCs, RiscOS UI style guidelines, joypad support in Beebem, video NULA support via RGB2HDMI, turborascal and the Millipede Imago http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org ... Imago.html. Thanks to everyone for making it such an interesting night.