Issue 38: Dec 2003
Features
- | Foreword
- | Tip of the day
- | Euro JagFest
- | JagFest Micro
- | Atari USA Meets Atari Netherlands
- | Atari Goes VST!
- | Adrian Mole's "Secret Diary" Is Dead Good
- | Wonderful CCChristmas Time
- | Visit The Christmas Market
- | Best Electronics Is Awesome!
M@ilbox
| Wonderful CCChristmas Time Shiuming Lai goes to catch the seasonal antics of Cheshunt's finest computer club Help! Someone spiked my drink with satellite navigation pills. That's right, this article is going to be much shorter than usual, because I managed to drive solo to Cheshunt Computer Club without a map and without taking a single wrong turn. Amazing. Now what? Without a customary tale of getting lost, we head straight for the action - or at least after a big jam right on the A406 in the middle of rush hour as I travelled right after finishing work. 17 December was the club's Christmas nosh-up, and we had club member Fred to thank for the scrumptious party food. Apart from that, I recently received the Rev. 6 CPU for Mad Butscher's CT60 which I was supposed to be testing and updating for him. Since seeing the progress of Mark Branson's CT60 tower project at JagFest Micro (see the separate report this issue), I wanted to take the chance to update the CT60 firmware on a known working CT60 platform. I don't have a stock Falcon on which to try it myself. Despite arriving late myself, there were still more to come. Peter West was already there with Ian Smith, the two of them having started their journey well before 17:00. Peter looked busy as usual, and Ian was looking every bit the cool gangsta, sitting in the corner smokin' a fag and playing a Bomberman clone his new Apple PowerBook G4. I think he was put off the idea of a Stacy when I told him how much replacement screens cost. Felice was there chatting to Ian and once again without fail, twisted my arm about going to the next Alternative Party in Finland! Does a sinister surprise await me there? Perhaps one day I'll find out! Ian will be attending, as he has Finnish ancestry and will be visiting an uncle as well as getting an overdose of Atari fun. Hopefully he can be MyAtari's eyes and ears for this event. When Steve Sweet and Mark Branson finally turned up, everyone jumped on Steve to do one hardware project or another, and he was madly hopping from table to table, literally (due to a broken leg!). Here he can be seen keeping his hands off a delicious sausage roll long enough to sabotage a PC by flashing it with an incompatible BIOS image file. More PC shenanigans were going on near the entrance to the room, where some guys were struggling to make a USB Bluetooth adapter work on Windows Me (yuk). I was always under the impression that Bluetooth didn't work anyway so denied all knowledge of this. Dealing with stupid PC problems all day at work is quite enough! I had with me the latest issue of ABBUC's club magazine to show everyone, featuring a German version of MyAtari's Unconventional 2003 report, painstakingly translated by Uncle Harry. There was also an Atari-themed DVD in the package, but nobody had a DVD player to hand. CCC used to have a similar newsletter of its own, Derryck Croker told me. Mark was experiencing a few hassles with his CT60 so I had to wait before testing my 100 MHz sample. He'd previously attempted the motherboard bus acceleration but it plainly refused to work, so had to be reverted. During the meeting, it had another hiccup with its NVRAM chip, by now fitted in a socket. His Falcon would not boot at all. Steve's solution: unplug the NVRAM, boot the Falcon, set NVRAM parameters and hot-plug the chip back in! It worked, but it may not work for everyone so beware. As you'll notice from our JagFest Micro report, Papyrus X has landed. Document processing is about to get very interesting for the TOS platform, as Tempus Word is also currently in the spotlight, and being translated by Peter and the DDP crew. Intense work-in-progress could be seen on Peter's Falcon and if you walked near it, you'd be lectured on its greatness. The moment of truth for Mad Butscher's CT60 came near closing time, and it was something of an anti-climax. We popped it in, and it just worked - not that I'd expect less of a Czuba-Tech design - but notice it seems to be missing that last 0.1 MHz?! Last thing to do is update the CT60 firmware, I left it with Steve, trusting Mark not to swap his own CPU for the Rev. 6! Overall attendance was better than expected, perhaps next time it could be advertised more widely. There was still plenty of food left over. If enough people come, we could crash the ballroom dancing party in the room next door and liven it up some... shiuming@myatari.net
Useful link
Cheshunt Computer Club http://www.cix.co.uk/~derryck/
[ Top of page ] | MyAtari magazine - Feature #8, December 2003
Copyright 2003 MyAtari magazine