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.
![[Photo: Ian Smith and Felice]](images/ccc01.jpg)
![[Photo: Steve Sweet upgrading a PC's BIOS]](images/ccc02.jpg)
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.
![[Photo: Mark's Falcon NVRAM configuration]](images/ccc03.jpg)
![[Photo: Derryck Croker, Peter West and Mark Branson]](images/ccc04.jpg)
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.
![[Photo: Club members all busy]](images/ccc05.jpg)
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!
![[Photo: Falcon at 99.9 MHz]](images/ccc06.jpg)
![[Photo: Sausage rolls]](images/ccc07.jpg)
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
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