Acorn & BBC User Group (ABug) NORTH 31 Jan HALIFAX

[oss003]

For those who are going to Halifax, have a nice weekend!!!!!
Please put some photo's online........

Greetings
Kees

[Prime]

Well I hope it gets better, I hadn't even got to the end of my road when my driver's side wing mirror fell off Luckily it was just the actual mirror, and Halfords had a spare.

I'm at Tibshelf services, so hopefully I'll be there for the curry.....

Cheers,

Phill.

[flynnjs]

Trains all running on time so far. Glorious sunny day on the East Coast main line with tiny dustings of snow in shady spots. Just passing through Wakefield.

[BeebMaster]

Is it really 1hr 15mins from Wakefield to Halifax??

Space permitting, I'm hoping to bring:

- Teapot, tea, etc
- Cake
- Dead FileStore E01S/E40S
- Station 114 & dual 5.25/3.5" floppy drive
- TV set
- Dave Moore's Midwich Winchester drive
- Econet FLAT box

[flynnjs]

By train via Leeds it is. That's why I was saying Wakefield is a better location for me as it's only 3 hours to get there instead of 4 and a quarter.

[danielj]

I've just pinged my number at a couple of people. I may train it across this evening which would mean I'd get there by 8ish.

d.

[sydney]

Setting off now. Satnav says 18:03 arrival.

[IanS]

Don't forget your name badge (if you still have it).

[roland]

Have fun @ Halifax!

[Prime]

Well I'm here, will go up to pub in a few minutes, but cashpoint first......

Cheers,

Phill.

[Dave Footitt]

Hopefully going to pop along - should be there about 8:30 in time for the curry!

[danielj]

Okay, car-ing it, wish me luck!

[flynnjs]

Dave might be on second sittings as there are growing numbers in the bar looking to move to Ziggys by 1930.

[BeebMaster]

Okay, car-ing it, wish me luck!

There's no snow! You'll be fine!

I'm here, along with IanS - just having a pot of tea then off to the bar.

I can't believe Harry Gration is still on Look North! Last saw him 20 years ago in Ull!!

[flynnjs]

Update. Curry venue is now Syhiba.

[Multiwizard]

Have lots of fun in Halifax...

[Dave Footitt]

What happened to curry at 9pm?

I only just got here

Edit:

Right I've waited 1.5 hours in the bar so I'm off. Pretty annoyed nobody could be bothered to wait for me. I won't bother next time

[BeebMaster]

I'm up early! (For me!)

And my milk has survived an overnight frost!

Off for brekkers now.

[hoglet]

How's it going guys?

What's everyone beavering away at?

Dave

[roland]

How's it going guys?
What's everyone beavering away at?
Dave

I guess they are very busy or there's a distortion with the internet connection. Not a single picture yet

[flynnjs]

We've been opening cans of worms on the coprocessor.
I'll post on the main thread.

[IanS]

The usual suspects that take pics and post them here were missing, so you'll have to make do with a few pics I took on my phone.

[Samwise]

A very familiar sight (and site).

Glad it all went down well. Not sure which I missed most - the event or the curry!

Sam.

[roland]

Must have been quite warm there when I look at the summer clothes ....

[flaxcottage]

Must have been quite warm there when I look at the summer clothes ....

It was not cold, that's for sure.

Thought I'd have to turn back when I set off on Saturday. It started to snow as I left the house and got worse the nearer to the motorway I got. Visibility fell to about 50 yards (45m to our European followers) and traffic was crawling at a snail's pace. And then - blue skies and sunshine all the way to Halifax.

It was a busy session (so busy I forgot to take photos )

The main focus seemed to be the matchbox co-pro which received a thorough testing. I was impressed with it running CP/M and GEM and of course Elite. BBC micros seemed to be very picky about running the co-pro. It would work if plugged in directly but not using an extension cable. The extension cable works fine on masters.

We did discover the co-pro did not like loading from Econet nor, apparently does it like saving to disc. I shall have to test it running my L3 Fileserver this next week.

Beebmaster brought his Filestore setup and a Midwich hard drive system. Like a MMC card system only bigger, noisier, slower of lower capacity but much more satisfying. It changes pitch slightly when accessing the hard drive.

Lots of projects going on and everyone helping everyone else. A great meet but sadly over all too soon.

[Prime]

Back home now, good to see you all again, even if I personally didn't do much hacking.

Cheers,

Phill.

[sydney]

Thanks to everyone for a great day.
I had a much more productive time than back in November when I spent most of the day chatting to people. I repaired a beeb keyboard by replacing a keyswitch but managed to remove the pad when I desoldered it. DaveH came to the rescue by twisting a small piece of wire round the lead of the keyswitch and soldering this to the track.
I then moved on to fitting a Watford 12 ROM board to the same beeb. 'A piece of cake' you may think. Not with my not so gentle touch! I managed to break a pin when trying to straighten it. I had another chat with DaveH to figure out the best way to fix it, Lee then suggested soldering a wire to the column and pushing it into the socket. I had some wire which is thicker than the pin so decided to give it a go. It seemed like the plan was going to work so I pushed the board onto the motherboard only to notice I'd not connected a flying lead to jumper s21 - which was now inaccessible under the ROM board! I removed the board, connected the lead and replaced the ROM board. Good to go! I replaced the motherboard in the case and unsurprisingly yet another mistake by me - the 5v and ground wires were not connected and they need to go under the ROM board! I quickly whipped the ROM board out again, connected the wires and carefully replace the ROM board again. Guess what. It only bloody works!
Jason updated my matchbox copro and took me,Lee and Jason through the reprogramming procedure so that we have a better understanding of how to do it ourselves once we have our own programmer. My matchbox works perfectly with my master but no longer likes my beeb after the ROM board upgrade. Thanks again to Jason for his work on this, I'm going to have to put some serious time into playing elite now!
Later when hiddenevil(james) arrived he convinced Daniel to replace the caps in the master PSU that released magic smoke at the November meeting. James and I then got on with getting his mmbeeb and floppy drives working. He then got out his been and I convinced himto replace the caps before tuning it on as the motherboard was looking quite grubby. Luckily I had some spare caps with me so we got to work. When we too the PSU apart it was clear that 2 of the caps had already blown. We fitted the new caps and the beeb was turned on and was working perfectly!
I had a good look at what other people were up to but didn't get a good look at Daniel's master 512. Maybe next time!
We had a bit of a discussion about the possibility of another meeting sometime in October or November so expect a post on that in the coming week or two.
As for the summer clothes - I'm from Newcastle so I'm not allowed to wear warm clothing or you southerners will think we are going soft!

[leenew]

Another nice day in Halifax
John (Flaxcottage) was in a software cracking mood, de-protecting some Sherston titles.

JGH was flitting all over the place putting his coding skills to good use.
He was over at the "co-pro station" with Jason Flynn sorting some co-pro code, then with John, checking some assembler used in loading the Sherston titles from disc. I also noticed him at most of the other tables throughout the day, casting his gaze across many a screenful of code.
Jason Flynn, apart from some more co-pro debugging, was also showing us how to upgrade the firmware on the device. This involved pressing a home-made header onto the pads of the co-pro, and then not breathing for 3 minutes!
One wrong move and the programming would fail - this was harder to do than Jason made it look. Simon (Sydney) had a bit of a fail when attempting it!

Jason (jbnbeeb) gave me a really good account of his progress on his new "dogfighting" game.
It was good to see the progress he has made, and he made sure I knew how much hard work it was!!
It was enlightening to see the cross assembling (writing the code on the laptop before assembling it for use on the beeb) and I particularly liked how neatly it was coded and commented. Good work Jason.

Danielj was hand-making some econet modules (for Ian beebmaster I believe).
Beebmaster had fetched along a Midwich Hard drive which I had never seen before. Massive! and probably cost a small fortune in the 80s.
Once again, he was sporting a fine example of knitwear, and his personal teapot and tea making facilites got quite a bit of use.
Simon (Sidney) and James (HiddenEvil) were working on their Masters.
James got a MMC working and Simon re-capped a power supply. I am sure they did other stuff too, but I was too busy to notice.
I installed a modern ROM/RAM board at the last Halifax meeting (Well IanS did it actually, as he has much better eyes than I have!).
The first thing I did with it was accidently wipe all the utility programs from it!
So, never having used it, I was determined to get it working this time, and set it up properly.
The manual for this thing is really off-putting (74 pages). If I were to re-write it, I could do it in about 5 pages!
It really is easy to use, but the important bits you need to know are hidden in the middle of the manual, in between loads of oscilloscope traces. WHY!
Anyway, I found the relevant bits and I now have it set with 8 ROM slots and 8 banks of Sideways RAM, and I know how to use it!!
I never managed to get the utilities back onto the device though so all the utils are run from disc. I will have to email the (very helpful) manufacturer about this...

Dave Hitchins was working on his multi-games cartridge and also made some co-pro extension cables for the Master. (danielj made some too).
IanS and Dave Footit seemed to be interested observers, helping out where necessary and just having a jolly nice time.
Phill (Prime) was on the laptop but I don't think he invented anything. He did seem to be enjoying himself though.

The end of day fish and chips looked terrible, and I think DaveH made a wise choice of a bacon and chicken wrap from McDonalds!

Good times.

Lee.

[oss003]

Thanks for the write-up guys. Sounds like it was a good productive weekend. Discussing problems/projects with a few people is working great and is very inspiring. Keep up the good work with your projects .....

Greetings
Kees

[danielj]

- good to see everyone and always good to see all the things that people are working on and playing with. Beebmaster is indeed now replete with an econet module installed on a podule card (Ian, thinking about it I'd use it on the A7000 and leave the "proper" econet module in the RiscPC - less likely to have any StrongArmArguments<tm>).

Big thank you to Simon for organising again!

d.