ABUG Canada West Meetup #4 Sept 22 2018

[klintworth]

Ed & I had another great meetup in Vancouver. Unfortunately Peter (MrEe) was unable to join us - hopefully next time! Most of our time was spent with Beebs - the RiscOS side was a bit neglected today! Ed brought his Master with DataCentre so I was about to make disc images of a couple of Ed Tech items that I recently found: Whispy Wood and Christmas Tales. I'll upload those to Stardot soon.

Ed working his DataCentre magic (and chatting to Mark Haysman for advice!)

The other project I worked on was flashing my Gotek, which had previously defeated me for reasons unknown. Ed suggested resoldering a couple of pins on the Gotek and provided his soldering iron for the purpose. Once I had set the jumpers I followed the USB A-A cable route using my work PC, and then after a couple of tries - success!!

Flash Floppy success!

I also showed Ed my Electron setup complete with my newly acquired Mega Games Cartridge - love that piece of kit!

I also spent a short while investigating !65Host on Iyonix (no joy) A7000+ (no joy) and Virtual Acorn (floppy drive wasn't reading discs!) As I've got 6502Em working I think I'll go that route to use old educational s/w on the Iyonix and A7000+

I'll leave Ed to continue with his thoughts on the day .....

[richardtoohey]

Thanks the write-up and photos - great to see what other people are up to.

[KarateEd]

Well, Paul and I had a great day again. A few of Paul's hardware issues got resolved but me, not so much. Nevertheless we had fun and probably learned a few things. We used the Master just for the creation of the SSDs that Paul's already mentioned. We did that first because I wanted to see what I could find out on my motherboards that weren't working.

Well, what I found out is that I really need to learn to use my oscilloscope because checking things with a multimeter isn't accurate or quick enough. I will ajlso have to get my skills back to properly read schematics, it's been a long time and with the way my life has been going it's been difficult getting that going. I figure I'll get as much learned in the next month to properly pursue and demonstrate what can be done with the scope.

Anyway, I did learn that the most common culprit, the 6522s were just fine thank you as I have new ones from Mark to swap and test with.

I also checked certain chips that were suggested in a troubleshooting guide and as far as I can tell the 0V and 5V pins are fine. i'll have to delve into more data sheets to discover what can be wrong elsewhere as there is literally no screen showing up from the RGB port..... that could be several things and why I think the scope is the best route to go.

Overall look at the Issue 3 board

Close up of the link where IC86 should be

The above pictures show a link in the place of IC86. Does anyone know why that would be? I couldn't fathom it.

Mega Cartridge in Action

Paul showing off his Mega Cartridge, nice bit of kit.

One of the games on the Mega Cartridge

Paul having a go at Chuckie Egg from the Mega Cartridge

Paul was determined to get a new high score in the current HSC game being played....well, fell a bit short.

Keep going Paul, i know you can do it......

We're a happy group just meeting up and having fun with our projects.

Sorry if our mugs bring down *. but we gotta have the shot, don't we?

Our mascot when at Paul's place......

Ozzy kept us company the whole time through and nodded his approval with what we were doing.

All in all, some things got done, some things got realized and most of all we had a great time which is what it's really all about, isn't it?

We will meet up probably in about a month and hopefully have a third member in attendance.

Ed......

[sydney]

Looks like fun. At first glance at the first of Paul's pics I thought 'What the hell is Dave Hitchins doing at a Canadian ABug?"

[davidb]

Looks like fun. At first glance at the first of Paul's pics I thought 'What the hell is Dave Hitchins doing at a Canadian ABug?"

Having a good time, of course!

[tricky]

Glad to hear you had another good day.

[BeebMaster]

The above pictures show a link in the place of IC86. Does anyone know why that would be? I couldn't fathom it.

The wire link is part of the 1770 disc upgrade, but that Beeb looks to be half-way between an 8271 to 1770 upgrade as some of the 8271 interface components are still there. If the Beeb isn't working, I would say to remove the disc interface completely by following the steps to add both an 8271 and 1770 interface in reverse (e.g in the service manual) to convert it back to tape only, and start again from there.

[KarateEd]

The above pictures show a link in the place of IC86. Does anyone know why that would be? I couldn't fathom it.

The wire link is part of the 1770 disc upgrade, but that Beeb looks to be half-way between an 8271 to 1770 upgrade as some of the 8271 interface components are still there. If the Beeb isn't working, I would say to remove the disc interface completely by following the steps to add both an 8271 and 1770 interface in reverse (e.g in the service manual) to convert it back to tape only, and start again from there.

Doh! I probably did that myself. Well, thank you sir I will bring it back to 'stock' before I try to troubleshoot it again.

Ed......

[KarateEd]

Looks like fun. At first glance at the first of Paul's pics I thought 'What the hell is Dave Hitchins doing at a Canadian ABug?"

Amazing what a little face decoration can do. Dave knows way more on the hardware side of these beasts than I do. I'm just the great pretender there. and......you see what they mean by 'having a double somewhere else in the world' now, don't you?

[lurkio]

I was about to make disc images of a couple of Ed Tech items that I recently found: Whispy Wood and Christmas Tales.

Did you ever get around to doing this, btw?

[klintworth]

Yes, just did Christmas Tales before Christmas (!) so I'll post them soon, also send them to FlaxCottage.
Apologies for the delay! Paul