Commodore Computer Club UK 1st Meet
Party Report
Submitted by Shaun_B (Shaun_B aka C02) on July 27 2008
Written by Shaun_B
A brief summary of events
So, what really happened at the first ever Commodore Computer Club (UK) (CCC (UK)) meeting then? Despite several people unable to make it due to family committments and problems with transportation, with the railways being the least fun of all (as usual), we managed a grand total of 3 people there. Not bad considering the time it took to organise the event, and the UK "scene" in general.
Nigel aka NigelP2K was hosting, and myself and Conrad/Onslaught/Samar Productions in attendance. Fortunately, my train was running on time, and I got to Preston and waiting a few minutes for Nigel. Conrad had walked around five miles just to meet us, carrying his silver blue custom sprayed C64c. He was glad of the lift to Blackburn.
Conrad had asked me to do some text for a scrolly in a demo that he was going to release at the meeting earlier in the week, so I was therefore eager to see the final results, but we also needed to get the boring stuff out of the way first. And so after a few refreshments at Nigels place, we started quickly with the agenda for the meeting. Soon after, lager was offered, and it was time for some real Commodore stuff. Kool!
Conrad was keen to see Metal Dust in action, so I loaded it from my HD and also fixed (I hope) his 1541-Mk II with a decent head align program. Conrad commented on some of the effects found in Metal Dust, and then he finished linking the text into his one-filer demo. Nigel was reluctant to actually type anything into the scrolly, so we sort of spoke on his behalf with him agreeing to the vague statements. And it was finished and release.
There were several lager spillages in the day (!!!) but Nigel's Commodore room is rather cozy to say the least. In a way, it was a good job there were no more than three of us or people would have been lining up on Nigel's stairs to his room, with messages been passed down to explain what was going on, like a game of Chinese Whispers.
Nigel demonstrated the DC2N device for preservation purposes, and loaded Wizball, though we didn't enact the high score competition as, needless to say, I would have won it of course.
Various games were played on the VIC-20 mega-cart from Francois (Eslapion), and it was decided that Conrad was probably the best at playing Jelly Monstest (a PAC-Man game) and indeed he had the high score for the day.
Then it was down to Conrad to write some example source code for Nigel and myself to observe. He did a scroller split at the bottom of the screen demonstrating a basic interrupt, and commented and saved the source code for Nigel to have a play with. This was done using TAS on his MMC Replay device.
During the evening, we went to the local Fish and Chip shop, with Conrad having quite possibly the biggest portion of chips that I've ever seen. It was quite a feat to eat through them indeed! I had proper chips and gravy, which they don't do in Birmingham as far as I can tell. They filled my belly!
Interminently, we popped outside for fresh air as Nigel's room was getting too warm with all of the technology running.
As the night drew in, we went on to play some DTV games after not having the correct screw driver to open up the unit to see how easy it was to install an MMC2DTV. I looked for the hidden files on the DTV and found out that the PAL version didn't have them. Oh well, that's cost cutting for you. It must have saved all of about 128K in total.
All too soon, I was starting to tire and needed sleep. I at least saw the MMC Replay in action, which was good, and Conrad saw something of the SuperCPU too, albeit Metal Dust only. I couldn't remember what I had on my HD to show him, but I think it was just stuff like Slang.
The next morning, we were all up bright and early - well, it was definitely morning anyway. And how bright we were is questionable. It was naturally drawing to a close, but I am eager for the next meet up. Conrad again did some example coding, demonstrating flexible line distance on the C64, which allows you to bounce the screen around quite easily. He wrote some documented source code for us to learn from. I suggested that Nigel would have a full game or mega-demo written in a years time, which he laughed at.
The final action was Nigel tested big file copying between a C64 and a PC. He transferred a 5Mb file using a stock system and the IDE64 + PCLink. I was eager for this as I needed a way to move big PostScript files from my Commodore to the PC so that I could convert them to PDF for the newsletter, which is my next job.
All in all, despite being scant of attendees, there were a lot of positives from the weekend, and I'm looking forward to the next meet up. Members will be able to find the minutes of the meeting online in private member areas. For those of you interested in joining our usergroup, head over to www.CommodoreComputerClub.co.uk, or contact me at contact@CommodoreComputerClub.co.uk. We'll see you next time then.
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