ABUG Canada West - January 26 2019 Meetup #7

[KarateEd]

Hi Folks,

Well, ABUG Canada is alive and well.

Today we had several successes, some of them after minor failures.

This was playing when Paul came in and when he left....

https://youtu.be/M1nwRxOU-HE

List of items looked at/fixed/stored for the future.....

Paul had a poorly master that had the dreaded long beep. When he adds to this post, I'll let him narratre the story.
He also wanted to do an external control for an internal Gotek and it seems the prototype might be in place. I'll let Paul tell that story too.
I have a GBS-8200 that needs work to make it useable. It's new but the thing here is that Paul printed me a case for it to be housed, thanks very much Paul!!! .......
I still have an issue with my Gotek screen. I added a new 2nd one.....it died too. Today I added 2 that died, the 3rd and last one so far is working.
I had a broken Z key on my RetroClinic Master. Mark mailed me some key switches and I've repaired that. Thanks very much Mark, great, as usual, service of your grateful customers.
We played Arcadians trying to best our scores and neither of us came close....very frustrating but fun.

Paul and his 'Kamikaze move......

https://youtu.be/mIQMMaeoNNM

Hard to get a good game going one-handed.......with Dennis the Menace playing in the background. I love my M500 running 5000 software.

https://youtu.be/r5aIYdeveDc

So, here are the pictures of our meetup that I have so far. Paul will send the other pictures as he gets them uploaded.

Thanks Paul for the GBS-8200 enclosure. it will get good use and is much appreciated.

Paul printed this for me to enclose the GBS-8200 card so now I will have to build that, another project, yes? Thanks Paul.....

There's work to do it would seem.

The two main things that I wanted to get done we to fix my Gotek screen (glad I bought several of them) and in the end, I did. it was my first port of call today. There is the broken screened Gotek and the screen in the static bag waiting for me to do the work. Beside these are some key switches for my Master. I was playing Mushrooms and I felt the Z key give way. It worked for a few more games so I thought it had just 'caught' but it failed to work at all after awhile. I let Mark know this, wasn't expecting him to send anything really but he offered to send me not just a replacement switch but 3 of them, now THAT'S SERVICE.....It's very much appreciated Mark.

Sweet, working again.

The story behind this Gotek is that it kills screens. I doubt if it's the Gotek's fault, I think the screens may have had a bad run, maybe no quality control. All I know is the screen died not too long after I had it so I ordered some and put a new one in.....success!!!.....then epic fail. Another broken screen. Today my task was to put another new screen in. I had 3 spare so not to worry.....until......another one broke, then another one. Now I was down to 1 screen left. I put that one in and voila, it worked. It's still working but my 2nd screen took a few days to crash and burn so we'll reserve judgement, but for now I have a completely working Gotek.....yay...!!!

A bit of fun for Paul

Paul had a bit of fun play Arcadians and here's a shot of his focusing in on the game......

One last thing.... I was trying to run A5000 emulation on a Windows 7 laptop. It seems to have some weird issues such as when bringing up the desktop, I have to do it from the line editor. The first time I type in *DESKTOP, it gives an error at the top of the screen, then I have to scroll down to get a space to type it in again. The desktop then comes up but very bland......until I click the HD. At that point it comes up as it probably should have in the beginning.

Doesn't go to desktop properly

Not enough memory?

Have to arrow down here and retype *DESKTOP

This is 'ok' but not really complete

This is how I believe it should start up from the beginning

The other thing that's annoying is it doesn't show the pictures in the documents for A5000 guide, etc. The text is there but not the pictures. I'm not sure why, anybody have some ideas?

I will post this in this thread further down as I can only post 10 pics in one comment space.
.
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Sad to go but what a fun day!!!

Well, it was time to leave and sadly, another ABUG meeting, though on foreign soil, has come to and end. This meeting was really satisfying for both Paul and myself.

So we did different things on many different machines.
- we played music on a Music 500 with M5000 software on a BBC Model B Micro
- we worked on 2 Masters
- we worked on a Master Compact
- we worked on Goteks
- we reviewed the RISC O/S problem on an A5000 emulation system on a Windows 7 laptop

It was a pretty complete ABUG Canada West day.

I'll let Paul tell his stories in this thread, it's interesting that everything today was golden.

.....except some of these pics. I don't know how to correct the sideways ones so I hope nobody gets a crick in their necks....Fixed with a little extra labour......

Great day today Paul!!!!! Thanks.

[richardtoohey]

I'm being dense ... what is a Gotek screen?

It's not like a monitor/TV? Do you mean the little LCD display on the Gotek devices?

Not looked at Gotek stuff hence my ignorance.

[klintworth]

Hi Richard, Yes - it's the little LCD screen on the Gotek. The Gotek works really well with the Beeb, I love mine!

[klintworth]

Today was brilliant, thanks Ed! As I arrived I was greeted with music playing on Ed's Music 5000. How do I top that at the next meeting?!!

Music from The Beano Concertino - this was Dennis the Menace!

I brought along my dead BBC Master (continuous beep syndrome) to test the keyboard on Ed's Master. This worked well as Ed had to replace a keyswitch on his Master so he had to remove his keyboard. We got the continuous beep on mine, so put my keyboard into Ed's. Boot up was just fine, then we tested the keys. The S key was a bit sticky, but worked after a good pounding! What was strange was that the numeric keyboard was non responsive, so Ed suggested maybe a broken keyboard track. Then we switched the keyboardback into my system and got a good boot after a brief delay! My dead Master no longer had the continuous beep, it was alive!! And the numeric keyboard worked! Ed then entered the CMOS settings, we connected the battery and after a few test start ups all seems well. So happy I decided to bring my Master!!

Ed works his magic and my Master lives again!

My other project for today was testing out my Compact with an internal Gotek and a prototype breakout box with the Gotek display and rotary encoder. I still haven't finally decided on placement of the board inside, so I tried affixing it to the underside of the top case. This didn't work that well, so I think I'll put it roughly where Tricky put his, but I'll need to enlarge the Compact hole where the USB will be inserted. The break out box seemed to work well, but will need anchoring, probably with double sided foam tape.

Compact with Gotek breakout box

Gotek breakout box

Power lines for Gotek on the Compact Motherboard (soldered, then anchored with hot glue)

BBC Compact - "Look, I'm Italian!!

So what a great day, and so happy that my Master is working - Ed is my lucky charm to get my broken kit working!! We have lots of projects on the go, and I'm looking forward to setting up my Retroclinic Co-Pro board with my Raspberry Pi Zero. Ed is going to invaluable help here, too!

A happy ABUG Canada West Team with resurrected Master in the background!

[BigEd]

Sounds like a great meetup - thanks for writing it up!

Is that big-M title screen for the Master from some well-known piece of software? Maybe a demo? I'd be interested to have that.

[KarateEd]

Sounds like a great meetup - thanks for writing it up!

Is that big-M title screen for the Master from some well-known piece of software? Maybe a demo? I'd be interested to have that.

That's the Welcome program for the Master Compact, the Italian version.......

[BigEd]

Thanks!

[KarateEd]

Here are the last two pictures describing the way the document fails to load correctly.

Because of the errors you have to repeatedly press space or the mouse button to fully load the document. Also the partial rectangle you see is the 'blank' or non-loading picture for this document. The whole document is like that. There seems to be no path to the document's picture, perhaps that's the problem?

This loads incorrectly a couple of ways

This is really the same issue. A reload isn't any better. Usually a reload of something will take resident information and quickly refresh, not this time.

Notice that the load bar bottom right only advances on a space bar or mouse button click.

[tricky]

I had to "trim" my GOTEK a little including the end pair of pins from the 34way to make it fit, but I didn't want to touch the beeb in case I changed my mind.
Have you tied my GOTEK menu, if you do, I would suggest a second USB stick as the FF file sets indexed mode where the files have to have a specific name.

[klintworth]

Hi Tricky, yes - definitely planning to try out your Gotek menu when I have some time! It's on my project list for sure
Unfortunately my BBC Compact case is pretty banged up so I don't mind any extra holes in it!

[klintworth]

Update #1
Forgot to say Thank You to Ed for giving me 5 mini LCD screens. Now we need to figure out how to use them. Thanks, Ed for giving me more project work, ha ha!!

[klintworth]

Update #2
Still not getting a consistent boot up with the Master. After power off for a while it's hard to get restarted without the continuous beep. There are also DFS and ADFS errors, so not sure what's going on with it.

[tricky]

Do you have an MMC you could try for a while?

[klintworth]

I have a Retroclinic MicroSPI so I can try that this evening

[KarateEd]

I have a Retroclinic MicroSPI so I can try that this evening

Good call.....