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Pictures from Seattle's Classic Gaming Weekend
Cyberroach has pictures from last week's Classic Gaming Weekend in Seattle. The pictures include an "Obsolete Media Festival" with a guy who makes music with an Atari 2600, Commodore C64, and a dot-matrix printer; old hardware from the NorthWest Classic Gaming Enthusiasts' Meeting; and the 6th Annual Atari Championship.
Here is the official webpage of the Classic Gaming Weekend.
This page seems to be working well, occasionally, even under the slashdotting.
Here is an attendee's web page with some details of the work he did.
And, of course, you should be aware of how many great people and groups there are out there keeping the memory alive with humor and aplomb, like these good friends.
The site's acting flakey so I mirrored the 3 thumbnail pages on my box:
http://snotwad.dyndns.org:8000/cyberroach_mirror/
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
LOAD "*",8,1
*sigh*
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
LOAD "$",8
LIST
To get a directory listing.
Formatting a disc was a pain though as the drives weren't dumb mechanisms connected to a controller in the computer, they were computers themselves. The 1541 was basically a file serving computer that sent filles over the serial bus. Problem was the software in the 1541 was really bad, very slow.
The fourth annual PhillyClassic kicks off on Friday, March 28 and lasts through Sunday evening, March 30.
~Philly
Minimalistic techno played with a C64 (so really not for everyones ears ;-). The guy also does live gigs.
Problem was the software in the 1541 was really bad, very slow.
I don't think the problem was the drive's firmware, as much as the design decisions that went into making the device in the first place. It was the fact that it was a 9600bps serial device that had substantial error-checking and so on going on all the time. It could be made several times faster using something like the Epyx FastLoad cartridge which bypassed most of the error checking and just loaded the damn file.
In other words, a decision was made to make the most reliable device possible rather than the fastest one. One could argue that point, of course, by pointing out the hard-stop at track 0 that the head would buzz against every time the drive was reset (several times, if the drive hit a bad block on the disk) that tended to knock the head out of alignment. But the idea was there.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
I remember seeing a C64 + 1541 drive with a FastDrive cartridge installed -- 5-10x speed increase (from something 100x too slow to begin with though ;)). I was amazed. And I still don't know how it worked -- some sort of caching or somthing? Anyone know the basic idea?
That was the Epyx FastLoad cartridge. They worked by replacing the drive's firmware and basically bypassing the extensive error-checking that was normally done, basically by telling the drive, "Just give me the damn file".
There were also some software-only implementations of this. Epyx Vorpal was the most common commercial one; it was integrated into a number of their later C64 games. Compute! magazine also published one, TurboDisk or something similar to that as I recall.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Assembly is a demo competition held in Helsinki, Finland each year.
They show demos by demogroups using new PC's with 3d accelerators to old school demos on the C64's or VIC20's. Yea, people still code for the VIC20.
It's not about Money, it's all about bragging rights. These guys can code some amazing stuff. Last year they even had a guy do a live music set with a C64.
Assembly is the name of the competition because all these guys used to code in Assembly. It's not so much so anymore; now they have all sorts of events.
I think it's awesome, and I'd love to go to Assembly '03. Last year they had 4500+ people. The level of talent that some of these guys show is outstanding.
You can download all the Assembly (and other party) demos, music, animations, and art at scene.org. Be sure to check out Project Kerosene, and 32 degrees in the shade.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -