ABUG Canada West - April 27 2019 Meetup #10

[klintworth]

On a sunny windy Spring Day Ed was greeted by 8 bit computer demo music - not quite as inspiring as the Ample music that Ed sets up in Squamish!

We have a traditional gift exchange, so Ed kindly gave me a North American plug and cable to go with the new Meanwell PSU, and I gave him 3 Acorn CDs.

First up was sorting out my disc drives that seemed to be not working. After much swapping machines and testing the 'defective' drives they were both working fine - the culprit turned out to be the DFS chip that just needed pushing down. Thanks Ed for spotting that one!

The DFS 2.10 chip that needed reseating

In the course of disc testing we ended up with the DART Turtle Graphics program on the Beeb. We had a bit of a digression drawing a nine pointed star - it took us a while to get the correct angle to make it work!

The Nine Pointed Star

We then spent a while trouble shooting my Master which seems to have trouble accessing DFS / ADFS. We've come down to either the 6522 chips of the Master MOS chip. I'll start with replacing the MOS chip, then the 6522s if needed.

Before lunch we both spent time on the current HSC game Savage Pond (which was one of my picks). Not the easiest game as the collision detection seems quite variable, but we both ended up with personal best high scores - yay!!

Tadpole Ed in the Savage Pond!

The final task was breaking out the soldering irons to replace the chopping transistor in a Beeb PSU - we each had one to fix, and after a fair amount of effort we were able to successfully able to replace the transistor on the heat sink (following Mark Haysman's clear instructions in the BBC repair manual!)

PSU Transistor replacement

Finally here is the Team with Savage Pond in the background.

[tricky]

You two always achieve much more in your meerups than I do in two days at a UK one

[Kazzie]

I kind of feel that you should have tried a long-distance video link up with the Wakefield RISC OS show, like the BBC do every Last Night of the Proms.

Maybe next time.

[KarateEd]

We had another fun and productive day at our monthly ABUG meeting held at Paul's home. First order of business??? - play a little Savage Pond. Now realize, my score for this game so far was abysmal. Paul showed me (usually I show him) how to proceed well in this game and I achieved my personal best score by triple my previous one. Thanks Paul......

The atmosphere was so good at Paul's I got triple my previous best score in Savage Pond - Paul taught me how to do this one instead of the other way round.

Paul didn't know I took this pic of him on his way to a new personal best for him. In fact, I didn't know he'd be getting a new high score either at the time.

Paul on his way to his new personal best score.

After a few harrowing moments of narrow escapes from becoming pond food, Paul achieved a new personal best score for the game. I'm sure we'll see it posted on *. HSC.

A very happy outcome!!!

Our monthly gifting was.......Today, our gifts included the number 3 for all you Sesame Street fans - in this case a 3 wire power cable to Paul for our power supply projects, which we've been enjoying working on.

A gift for Paul

Paul gave me 3 CDs full of RISC goodness which I'm very happy to have, thanks very much Paul

3 very happy to have from Paul

Trying to find a way into the R/W head to clean it. Had to remove a cover just to see it. In the end, we didn't have to clean it. The problem turned out to be either a DFS chip problem or 6522 issue, we don't know which yet.... but the good news is that both of Paul's diskette drives work.

Trying to find the disk R/W head

Removing the heat sink from the Beeb PSU isn't an easy task. Great care must be taken to remove as much solder as possible using a very hot iron and solder sucker/braid combination, not an easy task at all though rewarding once accomplished.

Now, how do I get the rest of this solder out?

The solder was quite old and wasn't flowing all that well, even under high heat. However, using solder paste helped it flow better for removal. Wire braid also seemed to help.

The heat sink was moving around like it was doing the watusi but it still wouldn't come out.

At this point it was very close to being removed from the board, just a bit more 'persuasion' was needed.

Success

Finally, after much cajoling, it came undone. After this it was a very easy task to fit the new transistor. They can only go in one way so there is very little room for error on that. We didn't have a switch handy so testing will have to happen at each of our prospective homes. We'll let you know if our faces get blackened by something blowing up.

One final thing. I created another project for myself when I broke a pin off my 4 in 1 OS board. I was removing it so we could test Paul's chip from his machine when my hand slipped and the board came out sideways, one pin almost folded back on itself. I knew when I saw it that the news was bad. I was very careful but it was too much for the pin to overcome so I will repair that, it's a fairly easy fix.

And if you're curious, it seems Paul's chips for the DFS on his Master is faulty, it didn't work any better in my machine, flaky at best.

All in all, we had a great time playing Savage Pond, making sure through proper testing that the diskette drives worked, renewing one of the PSU components on 2 PSUs and generally just having good old Beeb fun goodness as usual every month.

Also, Paul provided me with a very nice lunch of 3 types of salads and chicken samosa and gallons of coffee and apple strudels. Well funned and well fed!!!!

Thanks again Paul, great day it was indeed.

[KarateEd]

You two always achieve much more in your meerups than I do in two days at a UK one

We do tend to get some stuff done, not bad for a one dayer, usually not even a very long day or as John would say.......4:00? There's still another 6 hours left........

We usually go from about 10:30 AM to 4:00 PM so 5-1/2 hours minus about 45 minutes for lunch.

[KarateEd]

I kind of feel that you should have tried a long-distance video link up with the Wakefield RISC OS show, like the BBC do every Last Night of the Proms.

Maybe next time.

So Kazzie,

How was connectivity done for that 'international' flavour to happen at other meetings such as Wakefield?

[Kazzie]

I kind of feel that you should have tried a long-distance video link up with the Wakefield RISC OS show, like the BBC do every Last Night of the Proms.

Maybe next time.

So Kazzie,

How was connectivity done for that 'international' flavour to happen at other meetings such as Wakefield?

Er, I'm not quite catching your drift, sorry.

Perhaps I've not explained myself too clearly either. When I saw that two distant Acorn-related meets had happened at the same time I thought it could have been cool to have done a link-up of some kind.
The first idea that came to mind was the Proms-style video link, though a serial/SLIP/dial-up session with an actual Acorn machine for a real-time text chat might be a better choice. Either option would clearly have needed planning by both sides to do, though.

I wasn't at Wakefield, though if I were, I'd be happily waving my (eastern) Canada flag for you!

[KarateEd]

I kind of feel that you should have tried a long-distance video link up with the Wakefield RISC OS show, like the BBC do every Last Night of the Proms.

Maybe next time.

So Kazzie,

How was connectivity done for that 'international' flavour to happen at other meetings such as Wakefield?

Er, I'm not quite catching your drift, sorry.

Perhaps I've not explained myself too clearly either. When I saw that two distant Acorn-related meets had happened at the same time I thought it could have been cool to have done a link-up of some kind.
The first idea that came to mind was the Proms-style video link, though a serial/SLIP/dial-up session with an actual Acorn machine for a real-time text chat might be a better choice. Either option would clearly have needed planning by both sides to do, though.

I wasn't at Wakefield, though if I were, I'd be happily waving my (eastern) Canada flag for you!

ok, this makes a bit more sense to me.....other than I'm not familiar with the technology. However, as I've been in the industry both with PCs and networking, I'm sure I could figure it out if I knew what the actual specs that were needed to achieve this. Might be a really cool idea to try at some kind of UK meetup.

I think you're right, it would take 'across the pond' planning. I was think something more modern than a chat session, I was thinking video which of course couldn't be on an Acorn machine, at least not an 8-bit. I don't know if there would be anything available or useable on the Acorn 32 bits.

[Rfairman]

Hi

I see you were using the program Dart. I am trying to get an archive copy of Dart 2.3 or 2.4 to drive my Valiant Turtle.
Flaxcottage only has version 2.00 and the manual for 2.4

TIA

[klintworth]

Hi Richard,
It's buried in a box! Let me check and get back to you. I wasn't aware there were different versions.
Talk soon, Paul

[klintworth]

Ok, been through boxes and I don't seem to have a copy of Dart. I found a tape version of MicroPower Draw, but that is a LOGO subset and doesn't include external Turtle support. Pretty sure that the DART I was using was a downloaded disc image, but not sure which. I'll let you know if it is the later version.