We had a great time at the club this month and had several C= models to geek out over as well as a few fascinating platforms to experience.
Members in attendance this time around included:
- Eric
- Matt
- Dan
- Christian
- Zade
- Ron (all the way from Port Orchard via ferry!)
- Lucas
Machines on display and in use included:
- Brand new C64 Reloaded MK2 with Ultimate II cart, 1702 monitor and new 64C case. Several of us played a few rounds of BC’s Quest for Tires. Took me back!
- C128 with 1541 and 1571 drives (we copied disks – it was a Pirate Party!) and 1902 monitor.
- Mac LC3 – a very cool looking (and clean) and robust machine with an internal SCSI2SD drive.
- Altair 8800 Computer (brand new, replica) with a laptop connected as a terminal.
- Amiga 2000 ‘B’. This was a machine I never even knew existed. It is essentially an Amiga 1000 motherboard with an Amiga 2000 case. So it has the skinny Agnus (like the 1000) and is limited to .5MB chip, but it also has all of the Zorro expansion ports as well as kickstart ROM! Very cool, historical machine to see in person.
- Dreamcast (made in 1998 – it’s 20 years old so it qualifies) with several CD games.
And then Ron also had several A2000 motherboards that needed minor repairs, which Christian did indeed fix! So great to bring that hardware back to life.
Here is a link with more details on the German A2000A model which was the original A2000. http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=66965
Ron’s A2000B motherboard (rev3.9, serial number 24) is one of the prototype boards for the later US designed A2000B which is the far more common A2000 variant.
Ron is the man
Hi, I was an avid amiga user and fan from around 1986 to the early 90s. I still have two amiga 3000s and an amiga 500 with a gvp side attached hard drive. I would like to get these up and running again as well as connect with people with an interest in amiga computers, but i am open to hearing about people’s experiences with other platforms. Please put me on your emailing list if you have one.
I am 70 years old and a retired king county sr. deputy prosecuting attorney (among other thing I specialized in computer related criminal prosecutions from 1982 -2012. I prosecuted my first computer crime in 1984 and authored Washington’s computer trespass and malicious mischief statute (as it related to damage to computers, operating systems etc.).
I had my first computer experience in graduate school at U Texas Austin from 1970-1973 (I was a govt major but developed an interest in computers and ended up taking about 20 hours of CS classes – the last of which involved writing a Fortran compiler – that class did me in – 100+ hours a week was not long enough and i had to drop the class) I worked with CDC 6400-6600 HUGE machines and punch cards. I wrote my dissertation entitled “a computer simulation of plea bargaining” in 1973-74 (one of my committee members liked it as is, another suggested some revisions in one chapter, the third said “Pick a new topic and start over.” I started law school (JD Harvard 1977) a week later. Needless to say revisions on that dissertation are still pending.
I mostly played games with my kids (born 1986 and 1989) on the Amigas but did put my experience to some legitimate use in the early 1990s. I was on a soccer team, playing in a game in which one of our players was hit from behind by someone on the opposing team. My teammate fell, his body twisting to the side and then his head slamming into the rock hard Cintrex surface, an all weather surface which almost all Seattle soccer fields were composed of at the time. My friend went unconscious when he hit and never came back. Life support was disconnected a week later. His widow sued the Parks department (who has since converted all fields to artificial grass turf fields which are much more yielding and safer to play on. ) I was playing goalie and was in a unique position to see the play which happened just outside the box, about 20 yards from me. I had just started using Martin Hash’s Animation Apprentice, a fascinating 3d animation program and used the program to recreate the play from my perspective. The animation was able to successfully demonstrate what my testimony would have been, i.e. that the “offending forward” had pushed the ball toward our goal and my fullback and he were converging on the ball with my fullback slightly ahead. The other player lunged from behind and hit my player with his left shoulder into my player’s upper right back area. The force of this caused my player to start a rolling fall twisting slightly from right to left. Alone this would have meant a nasty spill and lots of cuts from the brutal cintrex surface. Unfortunately the lunge by the forward put the forward off balance and he fell to his left which most unfortunately had him landing on my fullback’s legs which were twisting with his body. This fall trapped the lower portion my fullback’s body which had the effect of then slamming the side of my fullbacks head into the ground with terrific force. i can still hear the “crack” as his head hit. The attorney his wife hired told her this animation was crucial evidence that persuaded the city to settle (and ultimately convert all the fields to the more yielding surface)