ABUG SOUTH 1 to 3 June 2018 (Hampshire) BOOKING THREAD

[JudgeBeeb]

Robert, can you pm me your FaceTime contact data? We’re ready to connect.

PM sent

[JudgeBeeb]

Roland,

Have you managed to connect to me using my email address?

If you have problems, PM me again and I will send you my phone number.

[1024MAK]

Some event photos...

Mark

[flaxcottage]

Looks like a great meet, guys. Stuff everywhere and people having a jolly good natter.

Me, I'm marking purple sacks full of exam papers.

Looking forward to the next meet when I hope to be there.

[helpful]

Hoping to come along tomorrow with Louie & Dave. Not bringing any kit.

Great news, see you tomorrow! Can you bring the video of your LED cube that you showed at ROUGOL last month? I'd like to upload it to the website.

Thanks,
Bryan.

[thomass]

Great meet everyone today, I had a great time. It was nice to have a jolly good natter

Thomas

[sbadger]

Thanks for the pictures.
@SarahW What have you got going on your screen?!. Looks like a Master running a Lucasarts adventure!! (Second pic from bottom)

[BigEd]

A grand day out - thanks to everyone for the interesting chats, and of course also to Robert for organising. And the interesting Teensy adventure.

[Elminster]

Yep just got back myself from a great Saturday ABUG. Picked up new skills, soldering smd’s; and also picked up a 500g reel of solder then will probably last me 20 years.

Shame I can’t do Sunday as well, I will try harder next year.

Well organised, a great venue, and most importantly the interesting people.

[SarahWalker]

Thanks for the pictures.
@SarahW What have you got going on your screen?!. Looks like a Master running a Lucasarts adventure!! (Second pic from bottom)

I was a bit disappointed how few people recognised the game, or indeed the genre itself

A work in progress

[lcww1]

Maniac Mansion!
How utterly fabulous

PS might your work on MM open the way to porting the other SCUMM based games?

[Arcadian]

Traditional group piccie, taken Sat afternoon...

[SarahWalker]

Maniac Mansion!
How utterly fabulous

PS might your work on MM open the way to porting the other SCUMM based games?

Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken will work, the rest won't fit in a Master!

[sbadger]

Thanks for the pictures.
@SarahW What have you got going on your screen?!. Looks like a Master running a Lucasarts adventure!! (Second pic from bottom)

I was a bit disappointed how few people recognised the game, or indeed the genre itself
maniac.png
maniac2.png
A work in progress

Amazing! Yeah I spotted that a mile off, even on that little pic. Amx support pretty please?!

How have you managed to deal with the c64 character type display?

[1024MAK]

Sunday's 'photos...

A Gigatron being tested just after construction

Mark

[VectorEyes]

I never thought I'd see a SCUMM game on an Acorn machine!

I wish I could have come down for the day -- especially as I have a BBC Master with display output problems and a Risc PC that I want to get fully working again -- but sadly family commitments meant I just couldn't get the time away. Hopefully next year!

[chrisn]

Thanks everyone for a great day, sorry I had to leave early... So nice to meet everyone and share projects and ideas and advice See you next time!

[kieranhj]

Thanks for the photos everyone - looks like a great weekend!

Sorry I wasn’t able to make it in the end - my short business trip to Egypt earlier in the week has left me somewhat incapacitated, I’ll just leave it at that.

Amazing to see SCUMM running on a Master but I’m still intrigued as to what cmorley’s secret demo was?!

[1024MAK]

I have put copies of the 'photos that I took onto my Flickr account. This includes the original full resolution 'photos and the lower resolution 'photos that I posted earlier. To visit, click this link

If anyone would like any captions or notes adding, send these by PM to me please.

Mark

[jbnbeeb]

Hi,
I came along on the Saturday for the day along with my other half. Was great to meet everyone - both familiar faces and new. As usual I didn't get much done on my still-work-in-progress game . But I got to chat with just about everyone and learned something new along the way, including tricky techniques from Tricky for smooth software scrolling and efficient sending of data over the Tube with hoglet's amazing implementation of Conway's Game of Life on superfast 6502 on Pi-Tube. DaveH and I also discussed code updates for the next version of the Mega Games Cartridge and I'm looking forward to working on that later this year.

All in all a great day! Big thanks to Robert for arranging the inaugural Hampshire ABUG!

[hoglet]

Back in sunny Bristol now. I had a great weekend and it was nice that things were able to start slightly earlier on the Friday. The venue was excellent, very spacious, great food, great beer and great company. A big thank you again to Robert for organising this, and to the venue for being so accommodating and genuinely interested in what was going on.

Here's what I remember doing...
- chatting with DaveH about the new version of MGC
- helping Peter (flibble) get his PiTubeDirect running DOSPlus off a BeebSCSI
- talking with Mark (markdryan) about Electrons and Basic Compilers
- watching Phill (Prime) resurrect an Apple IIE
- talking with Robert about his next project, which will be Teensy 3.6 based
- getting a demo of Scramble from Tricky
- finally seeing a working Gigatron after Mark had been busy soldering
- meeting chrism for the first time, and talking about lots of stuff
- helping chrism and DaveH fix a dead Electron - I think the 6502 bus analyzer helped here, even if it was just to confirm there was no 6502 bus activity to analyze!
- watching a secret demo from chrism which was pretty amazing. Am I allowed to say 50fps Mode 0 video?

In terms of my own projects, I managed to get three things done:
- demoed the FPGA based real time Mandelbrot renderer to anyone that was interested
- finally discovered the reason that DOSPlus 1.2 doesn't work in PiTubeDIrect - it apparently need the available RAM to be a multiple of 128KB, and on PiTubeDirect there is 960KB. Reducing this to 896KB fixes the problem
- started work on extending the 6502 protocol analyzer to also trace the tube protocol - I'll post more about this later in the appropriate thread

Anyway, sad to be back home and very much looking forward to the next one.

Dave

[cmorley]

I’m still intrigued as to what cmorley’s secret demo was?!

After Leicester when we were talking about injecting code into the Tube memory window I did a proof of concept and got Bad Apple running at 640x512 (yep not 256) 50 fps in mode 0 with 2x2 ordered dithering and the Japanese version digital audio playing back at 22kHz via the Tube port... on an otherwise stock model B.

I can post some details of how I did it if people would find it interesting.

[cmorley]

What a great meetup. Many thanks to Robert for organising this.

Splendid to talk to those I've met before and to put some faces to screen names. Thanks to Dave H and hoglet I now have a working Acorn Electron (albeit with unidentified yellow goo on the return key). Stuck my 2p worth in some conversations - invited or not! Hopefully helped a few people out over the weekend too. And once again great to see the diversity of projects people are working on!

[JudgeBeeb]

Even though I say so myself, that all went rather well. Thanks to everyone for being such great fun. It really was a pleasure organising this event. Thanks, in particular, to everyone who gave me help and suggestions regarding my Teensy project.

I am hoping to organise another event at the same location next year, maybe, subject to everyone's thoughts, in February.

In the meantime, next stop (hopefully), Cambridge and then Leicester.

Finally, I am officially renaming this thread, the Master Games Cartridge Order Thread and putting my name at the top of the list.

[kieranhj]

After Leicester when we were talking about injecting code into the Tube memory window I did a proof of concept and got Bad Apple running at 640x512 (yep not 256) 50 fps in mode 0 with 2x2 ordered dithering and the Japanese version digital audio playing back at 22kHz via the Tube port... on an otherwise stock model B.

I can post some details of how I did it if people would find it interesting.

That sounds crazy and unbelievable! Yes, please start a thread in the projects forum to explain what you’ve done and hopefully show some videos!?

Can’t believe I’ve missed that as well. Seems like this ABUG was a good one.

[tricky]

Thanks to everyone, especially Robert for a great ABUG. Carol (she was the one knitting in the beer garden) liked it so much that she said that she would go to all of them if they were like that!
I also enjoyed the uninvited visitors who were in the beer garden when the father exclaimed "beebs" and came in for a chat and told us about the vehicles that they used to kit out with sensors, a beeb, monitor and printer for safety testing. He remembered Chucky egg and then asked about a game where you changed from a cat to a monkey. When I said Imogen, he went off to get his daughter. He did spoil it a bit by telling us that he had binned his beebs a couple of years ago, but made up for it by saying that he would send some photos of the vehicle testing of he could find them. Nice people.

[Elminster]

He did spoil it a bit by telling us that he had binned his beebs a couple of years ago, but made up for it by saying that he would send some photos of the vehicle testing of he could find them. Nice people.

If we banned everyone on stardot for the stupid mistake of getting rid of their Acorn kit, there would probably be only 20 people left Guessing he came in Sunday as dont remember that bit.

I am trying to tell my wife that other peoples partners spent the whole weekend their and seemed to have fun, so why doenst she come along to the Cambridge one. But that isnt going so well at the moment.

[oss003]

Hi guys,

looked like a good meeting, nice to see so many interesting things.
Would be great to see a list of ongoing projects ......

Greetings
Kees

[z0m8ied0g]

Thanks for a great meetup. Nice to see so many cool projects and stuff way above my comprehension level
The venue was great, thank Robert for setting this up.

Cheers

Stephen

[z0m8ied0g]

I also enjoyed the uninvited visitors who were in the beer garden when the father exclaimed "beebs" and came in for a chat

These are always the best, its amazing how even the most unexpected people remember games from their childhood.