ABUG Canada West Meet Up #24 September 12 2022

[klintworth]

After a lovely drive up to Squamish I was greeted by Ed's Hybrid Music System playing an old Genesis song - magic! Once again Ed supplied coffee and goodies, most welcome. Then we set to with our projects. First up for me was seeing if I could use a CD-ROM drive on my A7000+, on which the onboard IDE had died. Using a RiscPC 2 slot podule backplane I had successfully installed both Ian S's IDE DOM as well as an old IDEa podule. My understanding is that ZIDEFS did not play nicely with CDFS, so I tried using a different ROM on my APDL ARCIN 5 IDEa podule. Ed had kindly burnt a ROM that included the CDFS software.

Ed kindly burnt some ROMs for me, as well as gave me some parts containers and dog supplement for my puppy!

I then spent the next hour re-configuring the CMOS settings (!) as they reset (not sure why) and I'd left my ZIDEFS instructions at home! I did take a photo so that I have it for reference next time this happens.

The key one was taking out the onboard ADFS drive at the bottom!

Once it was all set up there was a success - the ROM worked! - and failure - the CD-ROM was not detected! Ah well, at least I can use my Virtual Acorn system to run CD-ROMs if needed. Bottom line is how well Ian S's IDE podule works with ZIDEFS. It's taken a long time to get there, but I have all my s/w running on a 8gb DOM, and it's very smooth.

CD-ROM not found

Ed cooked a wonderful chilli for lunch, seasoned to perfection! It was very tasty, so we even had seconds!! Once fortified I moved on to my second project. I've just got to grips with the wonderful ADFFS from the JASPP site. I wanted to see how to run an ADF file with ADFFS, so I tried an old educational title Through the Dragon's Eye. Once I'd used the correct sequence up it came and it worked very well. BITD I'd only used the Beeb version, so it was interesting to see the RiscOS version.

ADF file

Working well!

My final project was back to 8 Bit computing to get a high score on the current High Score Challenge game, Smash 'n Grab. I haven't had much spare time to spend on this in the last week, so Ed gave me some tips and I achieved a modest gain! It's a very typical platform game of the time, though somewhat luck based. It's also quite tough until you work out the gameplay!!

Smash 'n Grab, the current HSC game, playing via my Master Compact

All too soon, it was time to depart back to Vancouver. We had a great time talking Acorn and other things, and always good to reconnect. Can't wait until the next ABUG Canada West! Over to Ed for his thoughts on the day ......

[Bobbi]

Greetings from a fellow Canuck Beeb fan Toronto is a bit of schlep to Squamish though ...

Bobbi

[klintworth]

Greetings from a fellow Canuck Beeb fan Toronto is a bit of schlep to Squamish though ...
Bobbi

Hi Bobbi,

There are a couple of other Acorn people in Toronto! WalterMixx is one, for sure. We could always do a remote Canuck ABUG, allowing for time difference!

Best wishes, Take care, Paul

[KarateEd]

So, as Paul has said, we had a great meet up yesterday with working on a few things.

To put it mildly, I played Smash n Grab more than I did any work but Paul and I consulted on his A7000+ quite a lot. He spent a great deal of time removing and re-installing parts.

I spent some time getting one Turtle wheel smooth after trying to glue an o-ring and removing that as a failure, left some 'spikes' in the wheel causing problems.

The operation was successful. The turtle works just fine thank you without the rubber, never-the-less I will try to use a glue gun to create a rubber wheel on the base wheel. I just feel it will be possible and give better traction.

What I'm not going to do is remove the wheel again, I don't think the structure would take it and really, it's too complicated to do a proper job that way.

The next thing I ventured into wasn't Beeb oriented at all but Paul gave me an Oric computer. I'd not only never owned one but really had only seen ads on them. Thanks very much Paul, it will get used and I have a cassette deck that will work fine with it.
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Finally, we both played a little Smash n Grab, sharing some insights into how to play the game to advantage of it's weaknesses.

Paul on arrival on a glorious sunny day, really good to see you again Paul.

Well, now you've done it. It's apart and I'll bet you're trying to achieve something with it.

Ah, more bits and pieces. It's quite a chore to get the old machine apart and together to work on them.

An overall view of the chaos going on with the A7000+ but Paul is enjoying the journey (he might disagree with me though).

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https://youtu.be/oK338H_Z2-M
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This shows the computer working properly but with the exception of the use of the CDROM. Paul will be continuing his research on how to make this work together with the cards that he has. It should be mentioned that the chip I burned for him worked fine, there are just a couple of things to get around.

One of these Paul described to me in a chat session.....as such......

"I guess the ROM you burnt for me is looking in .choices.boot tasks.CDreinit, so that may be something to check in the boot start up files. But that would mean taking it all apart again ……… sigh!!!!!"

Good luck with it Paul.....
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This guy was the supervisor. He kept close watch on us and wouldn't let us vary from our established routine.

Labour before success I always say. This wheel needed a bit of refined filing, thank goodness I had some fingernail files about.

After testing the turtle, I could find no 'rough' spots on it's locomotion. All is good in turtle land.

[Bobbi]

Nice turtle! How does the cat like it?

The main thing I remember about the Oric is the BASIC commands for sound effects `ZAP` etc.

[KarateEd]

So to finish up the report on the ABUG meeting yesterday......

This part is going to be mostly about the Oric just because.

What we did here was just test out a music program, some of the inbuilt sounds and one that I use frequently just to test that BASIC is working as it should. It's not a difficult program, it's very BASIC (see what I did there?) and shows a computer works properly with the generic BASIC commands.

Of course we also finish with the required selfie which is often outside but inside my Acorn haven this time, courtesy of Paul.

I think I was beginning to put the music program in. I made a syntactical error, putting a . where a , should have been. I didn't understand the editor and how it worked so I just retyped the line. I've typed in hundreds if not thousands of lines in my lifetime so one line is not at all onerous.

I'm shocked by how small the footprint is and how nice the keyboard feels, now we'll check out the BASIC and see how that is. You can see a bit of my Turtle to the left of the Oric, giving you an idea of how small the keyboard is, yet it feels normal when typing on it.

This is my generic BASIC program that works on any BASIC that I've ever seen.

Ok, it wasn't Mozart but......it worked and was mildly impressive.....now where is that hookup to a stereo system?

Well, all too soon it was time to say goodbye from another ABUG Canada West meeting. It was great seeing you again Paul and hope it will be soon we can get together again.

[KarateEd]

Nice turtle! How does the cat like it?

The main thing I remember about the Oric is the BASIC commands for sound effects `ZAP` etc.

That boy didn't get a chance to play with it but.....he's timid with electronic toys. For a big guy (20+ pounds) he really is a big chicken.

For the Oric there are also a couple of other sound commands that I don't remember off hand but they worked as tested yesterday.