ABUG Cambridge Sept 7th-9th 2018 BOOKING THREAD

[BeebMaster]

If we see cartloads of Beebs and Elks being carried around in bright green baskets we'll know who was behind this:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-c ... e-45433997

I'm still hoping to put in an appearance tomorrow, it will depend on the state of my legs and voice when I get released from Hyde Park tonight.

[jregel]

If some who are attending could take and share some pictures for those of us who can’t make it, that would be very appreciated!

[lurkio]

Good luck to everyone at ABUG!

I know you'll all be very busy with various projects, but if you happen to have a spare minute, please consider helping John to preserve some of the following items of rare Beeb software from the Centre's archives -- in some cases you might be helping to save the last known copy in the world!:

• viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13020&p=213760#p213760

(We managed to recover quite a few items last year. We have Jason's kind permission to try again this year.)

[VectorEyes]

Rather late to ask I know, but one thing I've been after for a while is a ROM cartridge for the Master that lets you put a few ( say, 4 or 8 ) ROM images onto it and then select which two you want active. ctorwy31 (makes the IFEL branded hardware) made some a while back but doesn't have any left. If anyone has something like that sitting around they never use and would be willing to sell, please bring it along!

I now have a ‘writable’ ROM cartridge - if that would do?
Just search for ARA III

Dave H

That sounds good to me!

I think I'd better work out who you are in the room and come and say hello!

[tom_seddon]

ETA for me is around 2:30pm.

--Tom

[1024MAK]

If some who are attending could take and share some pictures for those of us who can’t make it, that would be very appreciated!

Funnily that you say that, I've just taken some...

Cambridge ABUG

Cambridge ABUG

Cambridge ABUG

Cambridge ABUG

Later, I will give a link to larger, higher quality versions

Mark

[Elminster]

If anyone wants random free stuff I am over in the corner by the window with a couple of boxes of stuff to get rid of.

Modern SATA disks, tapes, master psu, and other random stuff.

[Coeus]

Funnily that you say that, I've just taken some...
IMG_7749.JPG

Just wanted to say it was nice to meet, in person, some of the people I have enjoyed chatting with on here and it a pity I was not able to stay for the whole weekend and see what everyone was doing. For those who I didn't speak to, if you're interested, I am the leftmost person standing in the first of Mark's pictures, with the long hair, behind flaxcottage (seated).

[Elminster]

Funnily that you say that, I've just taken some...
IMG_7749.JPG

Just wanted to say it was nice to meet, in person, some of the people I have enjoyed chatting with on here and it a pity I was not able to stay for the whole weekend and see what everyone was doing. For those who I didn't speak to, if you're interested, I am the leftmost person standing in the first of Mark's pictures, with the long hair, behind flaxcottage (seated).

Always good to put a face to a name of our many debates, and more going of topic of course, but only when Mark/Daniel not looking.

[flaxcottage]

I don't think I've ever seen a 7 amp fuse.

I'm almost certain I've got some in my collection of plug (BS1362) fuses; I think I've got 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10 and 13 amp.

You collect fuses? Wow! That's great. Ha ha.

[pau1ie]

I have a couple of surplus books if anyone wants them:

21 games for the bbc micro (Mike James et al)
Exploring Music with the BBC Micro and Electron. (Kevin Jones)

On my table.

[BeebMaster]

I am on the way, just departing King's Cross now.

Should be there in just over an hour or so.

[JudgeBeeb]

Another excellent ABUG. It was great to see some unfamiliar faces along with the regulars. Nice to see the Music 500/5000 receiving some love. Great selection of interesting projects and some rarities.

Didn't expect I would ever some a custom modded Electron designed to book tables in a Flemish snooker bar. Also, the Acorn Communicator. Wished I could have seen it booted up.

Also, very encouraging to see such a good turn out for the Acorn World show with visitors of all ages.

Thank you so much to Jason N for organising it so well. And thanks to Jason Fi for letting us use the centre once again.

Also thanks to Dave H and Jason Fl for helping me get my head round how the MGC works and for all the helpful suggestions with my board.

Can't wait for November and the Midlands meet up.

Also, I am planning to arrange another ABUG South in the New Year (late January, early February) subject to availability of the venue. If anyone feels there are any dates I should avoid. Please let me know.

Code: Select all

10 DIM JASON(3)
20 FOR N = 1 TO 3
30 JASON(N) = THANKS%
40 NEXT N

[BeebMaster]

Glad I could make it today, I had a great time seeing all the projects that are being are worked on. I think I enjoyed it so much because I didn't have my own stall so I could spend time catching up with other people. And one of the added benefits of a get-together in Cambridge is that you tend to get ex-Acorn employees coming along to look at what we're up to!

[Elminster]

Yes I second that, thanks to all, especially Jason for organising. I am also up for another ABUG south, currently nothing else booked in Jan/Feb

I do have scope envy after looking at Flynnjs’ microscope and huge oscilloscope. I know what to put on my Christmas list now.

[mattyj]

Thanks to Jason for organising this meetup, you are a star! Brilliant event as always!
Looking forward to the next one.

[Kazzie]

It looks like you all had fun. On this occasion, while you were playing with BBC-Bs and EPROMs I was at a BBC PROM (in the park), but I'll surely come along to a future meetup that's a little closer to home base (for a day vist at the least).

I'd not seen any mention of the November Midlands meet in the core event thread. If there's nothing planned for the North West of England for 2019, I might aim to come along there instead. Are there any further details?

[pau1ie]

I had a good time. Thanks to Jason for organizing, and the museum for being excellent hosts as always.
Thanks to 1024MAK for repairing the cable for my Music 500
Thanks to chrisn for testing it on his set up, and helping me get it set up on my master
Thanks to Jason F at the museum for letting me have a floppy
Thanks to chrisn again for lending me his speakers to get the music 500 fired up on my master

And thanks to everyone I spoke to for telling me about their projects. It is great to see what everyone is doing. I am motivated to get into some of my projects again!

[tom_seddon]

I enjoyed it - nice to meet people and put some faces to the names :) Looking forward to the next one!

--Tom

[chrisn]

The ABUG meetup this weekend was excellent. Thanks to jbnbeeb for organising everything so well, and to Jason and all at the Cambridge Centre for Computing History for hosting us.

I brought along my Beeb with Music 5000, plus keyboard and MIDI interface - which hadn't been used in decades. It was a real team effort getting it working again... thank you to flaxcottage and elminster, flynnjs, JudgeBeeb, pau1ie, Coeus, and 1024MAK for your help!

It was great to see so many awesome projects: JudgeBeeb's ROM board, tricky's latest Scramble version, tom_seddon's b2 emulator, jbnbeeb's latest in-development game, among many others. One of the highlights was meeting Chris Jordan in person and talking all things Hybrid Music.

[lurkio]

will it be okay if some able and willing volunteers come and raid access your archives again, to try to preserve some more rare and ageing Beeb software?

As long as people ask politely I'm pretty sure the museum will be ok with retrieving items. If there's quite a few items though, I think it might be good if these were collated in a list alongside a catalogue reference..and that they be retrieved first thing or after 4pm when the museum isn't busy. I might've seen a thread where this has been done.

Yes, the list, with reference numbers, is here:

• viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13020&p=213760#p213760

Hi, Jason. Looks like none of the items on the list were rescued, in the end.

John/flaxcottage tells me that the list was "given to the museum" but that "none of the titles appeared".

What went wrong? Was there some misunderstanding or miscommunication somewhere?

[VectorEyes]

I had a great time. Barely got through a third of the stuff I wanted to do, so next time I'll try to make the whole weekend. Really good to meet people and chat about all the wonderful Acorn software and hardware that was on show.

Special thanks to Dave Hitchins for showing me how to take a Beeb keyboard apart, and looking into issues I had loading ROM images into the ABR cartridge, to sbadger for fixing a stubborn broken 'I' key, to ZombieDog for taking a look at my broken 5.25" drives (TL;DR: "Fixable but a lot of work. Buy a new cheap one!"), and to everyone in general for being so friendly. Also apologies to Tom Seddon for not having time to properly help with the Master PSU recap because I was packing up to leave!

Looking forward to another meet-up soon.

[philb]

Hi, Jason. Looks like none of the items on the list were rescued, in the end.

Oh, that's a bit sad. I'm happy to stop by the museum some other time and archive them.

[lurkio]

As long as people ask politely I'm pretty sure the museum will be ok with retrieving items.

Hi, Jason. Looks like none of the items on the list were rescued, in the end.

Oh, that's a bit sad. I'm happy to stop by the museum some other time and archive them.

Thanks, Phil! Yes, it's a bit sad that none of the games on my list were saved for posterity!

I had already PM'd Jason/jbnbeeb before I saw your post to see if some of us could arrange a date to do some archiving. But if you're local to the area and able to get there more easily and you have the skills to rescue the software, that would be a better option.

Would you be able to bring your own kit or would you be relying on the museum's own Beebs/drives/tape recorders, etc.? Would they be okay with that?

I guess Jason is best placed to answer those questions. Dunno if he's monitoring this thread currently, or reading his PMs. I'll try emailing the museum if I don't get a response soonish. Or do you know a better way to get in touch with the museum?

Does anyone else know, or have any advice re any aspect of this matter?

Anyway, thanks for offering to help, Phil. I can't help feeling that time's running out to try to save these rare Beeb titles (even if they might possibly be a bit rubbish!). I hope we can make some progress.



EDITED to make it clear which Jason I meant!

[hoglet]

I had already PM'd Jason/jbnbeeb before I saw your post to see if some of us could arrange a date to do some archiving.

Lurkio, you do realize that Jason (forum member jbnbeeb and super-star ABUG organizer) is not Jason Fitzpatrick, the curator at CCH?

Just checking, as some of you posts seemed to imply you thought they were one and the same!

Sorry if I've completely got the wrong end of the stick here.....

[philb]

I had already PM'd Jason/jbnbeeb before I saw your post to see if some of us could arrange a date to do some archiving. But if you're local to the area and able to get there more easily and you have the skills to rescue the software, that would be a better option.

Yeah, my office is only about 15 minutes away from the museum. I'm fairly sure I have enough gear to archive them, I'll just have to figure out what the most efficient way of doing it is. Presumably for the cassettes the recommended approach is just to play the tape into a sound card, digitize it and then demodulate the bits in software, so I can do that with a tape deck plus my laptop. For the disks I guess the easiest thing to do is take my A5000 and image them directly.

I guess Jason is best placed to answer those questions. Dunno if he's monitoring this thread currently, or reading his PMs. I'll try emailing the museum if I don't get a response soonish. Or do you know a better way to get in touch with the museum?

Which Jason do you mean? I wasn't aware that Jason Fitzpatrick (of the museum) was on this forum at all. But maybe he is and I just didn't realise. He's always been quite responsive to emails in the past so I'd just try that to begin with.

[Elminster]

Lots of people seemed to be doing lots of archiving at the weekend, so not sure what they were archiving. I did over hear from Museum staff/volunters a box of stuff had got misplaced and was located on Sunday evening, whether that was the cause of the issue I dont know.

[lurkio]

I had already PM'd Jason/jbnbeeb before I saw your post to see if some of us could arrange a date to do some archiving.

Lurkio, you do realize that Jason (forum member jbnbeeb and super-star ABUG organizer) is not Jason Fitzpatrick, the curator at CCH?

Yes, I know that. I haven't personally communicated with Jason Fitzpatrick, so I'm addressing my comments to Jason=jbnbeeb of this forum for now simply because he's actually on this thread and has responded here in the recent past. Sorry for not being clearer about that.

But yes, I'll probably soon have to contact Jason Fitzpatrick too.

I'm fairly sure I have enough gear to archive them, I'll just have to figure out what the most efficient way of doing it is. Presumably for the cassettes the recommended approach is just to play the tape into a sound card, digitize it and then demodulate the bits in software, so I can do that with a tape deck plus my laptop.

That can sometimes be surprisingly tricky! See this thread for past attempts to do so at CCH and the mixed (but admittedly largely positive) results:

• viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13020#p168616

See later in the above-linked thread for more results.

You might want to try just playing the tape into an actual Beeb and doing a basic tape-to-disc/DataCentre/MMFS transfer, if you can. More details in the above thread.

For the disks I guess the easiest thing to do is take my A5000 and image them directly.

Most of the discs will be 5.25-inch floppies. Does your A5000 have a 5.25-inch drive? I'm not familiar with Archies generally.

Which Jason do you mean? I wasn't aware that Jason Fitzpatrick (of the museum) was on this forum at all.

He's not! I meant Jason a.k.a. jbnbeeb:

... I had already PM'd Jason/jbnbeeb ...

[philb]

You might want to try just playing the tape into an actual Beeb and doing a basic tape-to-disc/DataCentre/MMFS transfer, if you can. More details in the above thread.

Ah right, fair enough. If that yields better or more reliable results then I'm happy to do that.

Most of the discs will be 5.25-inch floppies. Does your A5000 have a 5.25-inch drive? I'm not familiar with Archies generally.

Yeah, I have an adapter for the A5000 to attach an external 5.25" drive.

Which Jason do you mean? I wasn't aware that Jason Fitzpatrick (of the museum) was on this forum at all.

He's not! I meant Jason a.k.a. jbnbeeb:

Right, got it. Sorry I misunderstood.

[jgharston]

Which Jason do you mean? I wasn't aware that Jason Fitzpatrick (of the museum) was on this forum at all.

He's not! I meant Jason a.k.a. jbnbeeb:

Right, got it. Sorry I misunderstood.

I think we may have hit the One Steve Jason Limit.