July 18 2018 Meetup #3, Notes

We had a great turnout and good times at the 3rd SEA-CCC meet-up last night with seven total members in attendance.

Matt M. brought his exceptional A600 MiSTer, which really is a sight to behold. It has stability and power (if you want it), plus the graphics looked spot on. Very eye-opening to see that compact form factor kick so much butt. Definitely not a DIY project for everyone; it’s not exactly plug-and-play. But if you have the determination, passion and know-how – wow. It was really impressive. And at least according to Matt it’s way more “real” feeling than his rPi experiments.

Eric H. brought his breadbin C64 with WiFi WiModem, UII cart, Magic Voice synth cart and 1702. Eric gave a demo of the Magic Voice synth voice which no one in attendance had seen (or heard) before, which was cool. Shame so few consumer programs were ever made for it:

Recreational: Gorf and Wizard of Wor
Educational: Counting Bee, A Bee C’s, The Spelling Bee, and The Magic Garden Talking Book Series
Business: Magic Desk 1+

We played some Gorf with the voice turned on. Ha. Ha. Ha. 😉

Christian S. brought his mind-bending GBA1000 computer for all of us to drool over. Over “42 total hours” of work to get the machine flying, according to Christian. After looking at the insanely tiny surface mounted solders he performed by hand (and the zoom on his phone’s camera) I couldn’t believe it. I know it would have taken me more like 400 hours, and I still would have failed. Simply remarkable level of skill required. But wow – the machine was essentially an A3000 tucked inside the A1000’s beautiful frame. Simply gorgeous. Thanks for bringing that to the user group for us to see, Christian!

Finally, based on the generous 8-bit donation the club received recently, most folks went home with something to play with or turn into a future project.

It was a great time. Can’t wait for the next one! (Details for Meet-up #4 will be available soon.)

— Eric (aka intric8)

 

 

New Donation to the Club Received

A very large and generous donation was made to the SEA-CCC this week. Read more about it here.

We very much appreciate it, and will do our best to find homes for all of this wonderful hardware and software (half of it has already been claimed in less than a day!).

 

June 13 2018 Meetup #2 Notes

We had a great time at the Seattle Commodore Computer Club last night!

Attendees:

  • Eric Hill
  • Matt Martin
  • Rob Robland
  • David M.
  • Lucas Walter
  • Zade Alisdairi (honorary guest)

It was really a great showing and good times were had by all. We had three main systems set up:

  • Amiga 1000 Phoenix with 1084S monitor
  • Commodore 64 breadbin
  • Atari XEGS (mint!) with 1702 monitor

And there was also a gorgeous mint Atari Lynx with a brand new screen being handed around as well.

For games, we spend most of the night on the two 8-bit machines. An epic game of Archon between Zade and Eric got things going (Eric rocked, natch – dark side FTW) on the C64. Some of the games on the XEGS included River Raid, Robotron, Pitfall II and Joust, among others.

Lucas brought a stack of Amiga disks he’d kept for years and was pleased to find the majority of them still worked. Sadly a handful are going to soon become drink coasters, but nothing lasts forever. On the bright side, his original copy of Aaargh! worked flawlessly.

Thanks to everyone for coming out. It was a total blast.

The next meet-up date will be determined soon and posted on this blog. Stay tuned!

Some pics from the night’s festivities:

The legendary (and bizarre) 3D Amiga game MindWalker
Matt showing his stuff on the CBS Electronics classic “Mountain King”, a very interesting and slightly creepy game.
It was nice to learn that Lucas’ original disk of Aargh! worked perfectly.
One of the scenes from Aargh!
Lucas watching an animation of Fred Astaire dancing in a desert, found within the sample files of Deluxe Paint III.
I hadn’t played Archon in many years. I used to play with my brother (who always kicked my butt BITD). It was SO much fun. Such a great 2-player game.
From left to right: David, Lucas, Zade, Rob, Matt
My dog Jean Luc: a C64 image file stored on an Ultimate II cartridge plugged into a C64 breadbin (off-camera) and connected to the 1084S composite ports
From Top, clockwise: Zade, David, Rob, Matt. Eric and Lucas are off-camera.
Rob having just finished one of the games on the C64, which was borrowing the 1084S monitor with the Amiga 1000.

 

May 9 2018 SEA-CCC Kick-off Meeting Notes

We had a total blast!

Matt titled this, “Deep Thoughts, by MattSoft”

Machines in attendance from Matt Martin:

  • C64 with RPi3 brains
  • Amiga 500 with RPi3 brains
  • Playstation 3 HDMI monitor for C64 and Amiga 500
  • Absolutely mint Apple iigs (gorgeous screen!)

Machines from Eric Hill:

  • Amiga 1000 Phoenix
  • Amiga 1080 monitor
  • Amiga 1000 Rejuvenator Board
  • Amiga 1000 fan replacement contender

We fired up games, loaded demoes, dialed into ParticlesBBS off the A500/Pi3 and most important talked about everything. Pizza and local beer was close at hand, too, to keep the energy flowing.

Awesome time! Next meet is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, June 13, 2018. Same times, same location.

 

Inaugural Kick-off

The very first meeting for the Seattle Commodore Computer Club (sea-ccc) is set: we will meet on May 9, 2018!

Informal Agenda

  • Quick around the room where we introduce ourselves
  • Brief chat on whatever projects we’re each working on or hoping to start soon, if any 
  • Scene news (I’ll bring whatever I’ve heard, and everyone is encouraged to chime in with whatever they’ve heard, too)
  • Bring in any hardware you’d like to show-and-tell
  • Will fire up some games to compare across some systems.