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Post by Blaine on Mar 4, 2023 20:18:41 GMT -7
March is upon us ! This month we have meeting room #3 booked at the Nose Hill Library.
1530 Northmount Drive NW, Calgary AB T2L 0G6, 7:00pm to 9:00pm
There were a lot of interesting and creative accessories made for vintage computers.
This month I was thinking, for some fun, let's look at some of those items.
I know I have a few items that are things you just don't see often for our little computers.
Bring your most odd, interesting or fun accessory and lets take a look, maybe see if we
can make it work !
See you Tuesday !
Cheers,
Blaine
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Post by Cube Inc. on Mar 5, 2023 9:21:16 GMT -7
I love gadgets and gizmos! I can't wait to see what you have to bring, Blaine!
One thing I have recently acquired is a 1541-Flash, also known as a XUM1541. These boards allow you to connect Commodore IEC and IEEE-488 disk drives up to a PC and both read and write to them. One of the main uses I've had for it is archiving my collection of floppy disks for the 64, turning a 1541 disks into a .d64 image in about 30 seconds. (Yes, you read that right - and that using a real 1541!) For copy-protected disks, you can also read the disks in GCR mode, producing a .g64 image of the disk - complete with all the intended 'corruption' designed to make the disks harder to duplicate.
As you may know, I have a passion for preserving Commodore hardware and software - especially the writings and creations of our local community which are not spread across the Internet. I have already found in my own collection a number of demos made by the late Greg Krisa, aka />amage Inc., which are particularly special to me, mainly because Greg passed away a few years ago and also because we had collaborated on a few of them when I was a teenager. My skills were nowhere near his, yet he took me under his wing and taught me much about coding on the 65xx series microprocessors during those formative years of my life when mentorship by like-minded peers several years my senior did wonders for the self-esteem of this balding scribbler.
I would throw this out there also - if you have a mind to bring to the meeting a box of your old floppy disks, I'd love to help you turn them into image files so their contents are not doomed to decay the slow death of 40+ year-old magnetic media. Years ago I sold the bulk of my own floppy disks to Tom (?) - "Medic One" out of Gliechen, AB and I'd pay hand over fist now to get that collection of disks back! Tom - if you ever happen to read this, I'd love to hear from you! I still have some of our Wild Rose Network BBS disks, for an Alberta-based BBS network we were trying to set up back then between his board, Jeff Crawford (Punisher)'s BBS "Terminal Insanity" and my own "Zap's Recharger". We dared to dream...
That's someone else I'd love to hear from - Jeff Crawford. I felt so cool hanging out in your room, listening to Synthesizer's Greatest Hits while you showed me this awesome new thing called JiffyDOS! I remember how you had even arranged the directory listings of the files for your BBS in such an order that they would load faster by putting programs the BBS software needed more often near the top of the directory. Somewhere I still have one of your "Terminal Insanity" business cards...
Anyway, enough rambling. I'll see you guys at the meeting!
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Post by Cube Inc. on Mar 5, 2023 9:33:30 GMT -7
Oh yeah, one other thing I wanted to mention - after the last meeting where we talked about word processors and the like for the '64, I decided to try to create a newsletter page using The Newsroom. Unfortunately it ran into far more snags than I had anticipated and by the time Cheryl needed submissions for the newsletter to be in, all I had to show was some screen shots of my work in progress, which is why it looked so haphazard.
When I was a kid, I used The Newsroom quite a bit, often drawing pixel by pixel with my joystick and creating graphics and charts and things for inclusion into school projects at a time when few others had the technology to do so and less had the software or the skill. Printing them out took forever on my 1525 because it seemed to only like to print two inches of each line at a time, re-home the head and then tackle the next two inches, etc.
This time, however, my greatest challenge was with the software itself. I'd sold off my original Newsroom disks to Tom back in the '90s, so this time around I pulled every version of it off I could find from csdb.dk and to my dismay, few of those would even load and then the one or two that did had a very strange bug: If I went into the photo room, imported a clipart image, took a picture of that clipart and then saved the photo to disk, all of that seemed to go normally. But, even in the same session if I were to clear the screen and try to load the photo I'd just saved, it would appear cut in half and each side swapped. Eventually, I made use of that glitch on the banner of my "article", placing the text in the middle of the space between the cut-in-half clipart - but it was not supposed to look like that and I have no idea why it did.
I thought it was the fact that I was running it inside an emulator, but when I tried to run it on a real '64 I encountered even more strange issues and had to go back to Vice.
Anyway, I wanted to write up more about repairing and restoring Commodore equipment but simply ran out of time for the March newsletter. Maybe I will have gotten things sorted out in time to produce a full page Newsroom article for April's edition. If anyone has the original Newsroom disks, I'd be happy to buy them off you. Bring them down to the meeting and let's haggle! : - )
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Post by Cube Inc. on Mar 11, 2023 11:11:11 GMT -7
The March meeting came and went, and I have to say I love this group of people. Several members brought out some unique examples of tech from decades gone by, and I think it safe to say that none of the presentations went quite according to plan! Each time something didn't quite work the way it should, people were quick to jump in, pull the covers off things and get to the bottom of things. In one case, after working normally for several minutes, one of the Commodore 64 keyboards started typing the letter 'Q' whenever the user pressed the letter 'O'. This made loading software on that particular machine practically impossible, and effectively brought the demonstration to a halt.
Fortunately, Blaine had not re-assembled his Commodore 64c from one of the previous meetings where we had modified it by installing a LumaFix IC to help get rid of the extra little lines between characters on the display, and so it was quickly pulled apart and a tiny bit of debris was removed from between two of the keyboard connector pins which was causing the wrong characters to be received by the CPU when typed on the keyboard. A few moments later, back in business.
I'm not sure what the policy is on posting people's names here, and I am not certain I even have the correct spelling of the particular individual, so I will just say that our resident VIC-20 programming guru was showing off some new cartridges for the C64, one of which allowed a very fast load of the Wheels operating system. This uses a mouse to interact with the OS in a graphical user interface similar to that other one, but the mouse movements were very jerky, moving in big blocks all over the screen. This, too, was obviously not according to plan, but it was quickly diagnosed as being the replacement SID chip in the 64c, which does not handle the analog-to-digital conversion the same way as the original SID chip does.
Many people might be surprised to learn that in addition to creating legendary SID music and sound effects, Commodore's infamous Sound Interface Device chip is instrumental (pun intended) for using a mouse with the C64. Regular joysticks used on the Commodore 64 have individual switches for up, down, left, right and the fire button. Often when moving one of these joysticks, you can hear or feel those switches clicking open and closed, and each one sends a binary signal (the switch is either on or off) to one of the CIA chips in the commodore to let the CPU know in which direction your space ship is supposed to move on the screen. The movements of a mouse are not easily represented by binary signals or simple ones and zeroes. The SID chip includes two Analog-To-Digital converters, one each for the X and Y axis of the mouse, which allow more precise measurement of the mouse's movements to be converted into data the CPU can use to mimic the user's hand movements in the cursor on the screen.
As it turned out, the replacement SID chip in Blaine's computer did not implement the Analog-To-Digital converters properly, and as a result the mouse cursor on the screen appeared to be very jumpy.
A second problem we encountered had to do with a number of the items on display outputting an RF Modulated video signal, which our LCD display had no idea what to do with. This was perhaps the most disappointing roadblock of the night, because I was really looking forward to seeing what might have come out of some of the devices on the table! When we hooked up the Pong game, it fired right up and began emitting familiar beeps and boops as the unseen ball glided across an imaginary screen. I think someone at the meeting suggested trying to play it that way while high, which I dare say would certainly add a level of challenge to the game!
Somewhere among my many bins of [stuff] I have just the thing we'd need to connect those devices up to any display. I am just hoping I did not throw them out thinking, what will I ever use this for again? I had over a dozen TV tuner boxes that had an F-connector input, and outputted Composite, S-Video and VGA formatted video signals with RCA left and right outputs for audio. It was a full 125 channel CATV tuner, and I believe they even came with remotes though those were long gone. If I can summon one of these boxes, we'd then be able to connect the output from any of those modulated devices into the box, tune it to channel 3 or 4 as the device required, and then output video and audio to a format that could easily be displayed on any LCD TV. It's on my watch list to hunt for these now.
Lastly and certainly not least - Blaine let me borrow his CMD RAMDrive to see if I can get it working again. We were able to open it up at the meeting and the four NiCad batteries had done their usual thing of leaking battery acid inside the case, but an initial inspection revealed that it does not appear they did any permanent (or irreparable) damage to the board or traces, and so I am going to try to get it up and running for our next meeting in April. I am super-excited about this project, because everything CMD made was the unobtainable golden standard for Commodore peripherals when I was a kid - the like of which I used to dream about owning but never had the financial means to obtain. And so it is with a mix of wonder and respect and sentimental awe that I now get to try to restore one of these rare pieces of Commodore legend.
I am going to try to set up some cameras and record the process, in case it turns out that I find something interesting along the way. Considering that I have never actually held a CMD RAMDrive in real life until this last meeting, I am sure there may be others out there who might be interested in peering over my shoulder as I work on it. Thank you again, Blaine, for giving me this opportunity to try my skills on your drive, and hopefully I'll be able to show off a working RAMDrive at our next meeting!
Thank you also to everyone who came out, brought coffee, tea and cookies, and shared in the camaraderie around the table. If, reading this, you haven't been to one of the meetings, I'd highly encourage you to try to attend one, and if you have come to a meeting in the past, why not come again? You never know what you will discover about our beloved Commodore computers, each other, or even yourself as we learn together in a casual, comfortable setting.
-- John --
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Post by Blaine on Mar 12, 2023 21:23:55 GMT -7
Thank You John !
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