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There's always the Commodore Vegas Expo in July as well as several regional US and other world wide gatherings of Commodore and other classic computerists.

Closer to Canada would be the Emergency Chicagoland Commodore Convention (no listed 2012 date yet, There's one I think in Lousville KY in the spring, but cant find a link. And in the fall there's the AmiWest Expo in Sacramento for the Amigans out there.

(that's all I can recall off the top of my head.)

Agreed. I'm also aware of the ECCC, Emergency Chicagoland Commodore Convention, dating back to 2006. I'm not absolutely sure, but I'd bet that at least parts of it might qualify as a LAN party. At the very least, I saw a photo from 2007 of a game being demoed as the "first Internet game for the C64".

That would be Tiina

http://starbase.globalpc.net/~xmx/images/babe1.jpg

I should have been a little more specific, but I wanted to keep the summary fairly short. Take a look at this page:

My Projects Page

See the boards at the top named "PowerSID"? Notice how I had to divide it into two? I want to re-release it as a one-board design, and clearly there's no way to cram all of those parts into a 3x4 inch board.

Similarly, notice the "Front Panel" design. Routed with 10 mil traces because I don't expect I could hand-make anything smaller, and it still barely fits on a 4x2 board. I would like to add more features, which is clearly not going to happen on that size of a board (the max size I could fit into my project is about 5.5x2.1 inches, which is too big for Eagle).

Is the fab shop you are using so low tech...

Quite the contrary - it's the technology itself that I'm putting on the board that's low-tech. You can't buy 6581 SID chips in SMD form.

Also, how many nets are we talking about here that you would need an autorouter?

About 200 for the "PowerSID" project. I use the autorouter because it saves a great deal of time when I'm revising the layout of a board to reduce the size (and save me and whoever wants to build one of these projects a little money). Signal quality isn't nearly as great a concern with my projects as it would be with, for example, a cellphone or a modern multi-GHz computer.

Are you using any BGA packages?

Definitely not. BGA is impossible to solder by hand (unless you're lucky with the toaster oven method). I don't like to use components that can't be hand-soldered.

How many layers is the design?

Two.

Do you have any controlled impedance requirements? Differential pairs?

No. All TTL components (plus a little bit of analog, as in PowerSID).

To hand route a 3x4" shouldn't take long at all depending on density and layer count.

As many simple designs as I've done, nothing turned me off to hand-routing faster than this little ~2x2 inch thing I designed a few years ago. Manually moving traces around to cram another chip in (I realized a design flaw and had to correct it), and then trying to route new traces to that chip is a pain in the ass.

the whole open source movement... You sir, are a leech.

Don't be too quick to paint the rest of the open source world as being similar to this guy. Yes, that's a guy, and I'm pretty sure he's the same "Vannessa" Dannenberg who asked the question.

think of the children??? think of ME!!!

heres a photo from the starbase site... remind me of THAT the next time i feel enouraged to follow links!

its cruel, okay, its cruel... but yeah... wow...

Answer the damn question or go read maxim in the bathroom.

She's cool in my book.

http://starbase.globalpc.net/~vanessa/c128tower/in dex.html

OMG a nerd on slashdot who's female and not the likely winner of a hotornot contest with a legit question.

Does she deserve a bunch of sexist heckling and brush off answers? Nope.

my god, i know that /. geeks are supposed to be desperate but are we this desperate?

i felt strangely excited as i stumbled on my way to the bedroom and then the bathroom, in that order, after catching this.

mommy, make it stop. it hurts.

The "windows-like" interface they refer to is a project called Wheels, which is a descendant of the old GEOS package, currently called Wheels. I wasn't a big GEOS fan in the day though, and still don't use it... For the same reason that I only fire up X when I need Netscape. For folks that appreciate it, though, it's there.

So here are a few things the article didn't go into...

First, the "20 times" accelerator is a neat little device called the "SuperCPU" made by CMD (Yes, the same CMD that used to make the 64 SCSI hard drives). Imagine, a 20mhz C64 with 16 megs of ram... mmm...

Steve Judd, the guy in the lower picture, is the maintainer of The Fridge, a "code storage" facility. I got to meet the guy in person last year at an expo in Chicago area, and check out the projects he was working on at the time. Very cool stuff, not many folks write a 3d library in assembly ya know.

For more information on the C64 scene, check out Burning Horizon's links page. There really are alot of us left.

- Squash (previously TFS/FTA)