PDXCUG Meeting Highlights
Vol. 2, No. 3 - March 15, 2011 - Meeting Highlights
Tinker Time, Part II
This month's meeting was the continuation of PDXCUG's Tinker Time, centered around members' individual projects. Members got the chance to work on computer hardware, play with new things, and repair non-working equipment.
MSD SD-2 Disk Drive Repair
It is commonplace to see the MSD SD-1 and SD-2 drives start to fail over time. We've been working closely with local friend and the highly-respected Ray Carlsen on how to repair these. He says it is likely that all drives will eventually fail unless you can stop the leaky capacitors from damaging the circuit board beyond repair. It's not too late in many cases - we've started repairing several of these drives to like-new condition, according to Ray's MSD SD-2 information and GenCom64's excellent blog post MSD SD-1 and MSD SD-2 Super Disk Drive Repair. This sort of repair job is neither quick nor easy to do. It takes patience, perseverance and practice to get it just right.
PDXCUG Chat Operators Standing By
Our lovely Commodore gals are online, ready to chat with distant PDXCUG fans using CommodoreServer's chat rooms. You don't have to live in Portland, Oregon to join us - just use Agent Friday's Group Zork program, which is tied directly to the chat rooms. Our ladies and other members will chat with you about what is going on during the meeting.
Amiga Disk Transfers
Ernie and GenCom64 were working on transferring disk images from ADF on Linux to disks on an Amiga 500 and to the CF hard drive in the Amiga 600.
MIDI on the Commodore 64
Pinacolada attempting to bring us some music with his MIDI keyboard and GenCom64's Supertrack-ROM MIDI interface. The German manual made it difficult to figure out. Oh, well. We rocked out on 8BitWeapon's tunes instead.
C64List - BASIC Cross-platform Utility
Jeff's C64List is shaping up quite nicely, as seen in his latest demo. This utility allows you to write BASIC in your favorite syntax-hilighted text editor, without the need for line numbers. Additional features allow you to use labels for GOTOs and GOSUBs, adding a little more structure to your program. When you are ready, it will convert your program back into a standard PRG file, complete with clean line numbers and formatting. When Jeff completes the project, we'll have more information for you. Believe us, you don't want to miss this one!
1541 Ultimate II
Goog gave a demonstration of his 1541 Ultimate II. Sorry, not many pictures, but he showed all of the finer features and how to mount D64 disk images and access them just like a real 1541. To make it even more interesting, it was plugged into an SX-64 around the corner, shared with a breadbox C64 via the Vic-Switch. Cartridge networking! Oh, yeah!
Turbo Master CPU
Members got another chance to play around with Robert Bernardo's Turbo Master before he takes it away from us in April. Again, thank you to Robert for loaning us this wonderful Commodore 64 enhancement. It was fun!
Gaming Time
Local Mayor Katie, Sim City Expert
Katie spent some time building up a city on her Amiga 1000, using Sim City. We also took a look at the Commodore 64 version to compare. Needless to say, the Amiga version is superior.
Atari Jaguar
GenCom64 brought his mint Atari Jaguar to play some Doom and Alien vs. Predator.
Blood and Guts
An excellent game on the Commodore 64! We had a short amount of time left to play, but squeezed in a quick event of Cat throwing. That's right. But before you call the ASPCA, we want you to know that no real cats were injured during play - only pixelated cats were hurled across an open field like shotputs.
Member Snapshots
Here are some additional snapshots from the evening, provided by GenCom64. Thanks for the memories!
