20 December 2020 meetup
It was a warm day on Sunday at Gary’s man-cave and it was good to see Brett, Andy (via video link from Canberra) and Jonathan (Brett’s brother) join Gary and I for another meetup. It was Jonathan’s first time joining us and he is into all sorts of retro computers and has a number of computers and we were very interested to hear what he had been up to with them.
Jonathan has done some tweaking to the 3D printed case for the ST2VGA adapters I made.
The new design improves on the original created by Brett and is slightly bigger but now has more robust clips for closing the two pieces together. Jonathan brought along a few of these new cases (in various colours) to share and so anyone interested, they will be available for collection at the next meetup at Gary’s place. I am impressed with the case and would like to pass on my thanks to Jonathan for the new and improved version. Jonathan said that the STL 3D files will be shared with everyone so those with the video adapters can print their own copy.
We all caught up on life and everything retro and Brett has a new program he is working on which shows the stars in the galaxy and runs on an ST as well as being developed on his Falcon. Brett had brought along a working copy of the program but we did not get to see this running and hopefully this can be shown running at the next meetup.
Gary updated his latest Atari STF computer acquisition with new 6 chip 1.04 TOS ROMs to replace the French TOS it came with and we tested that this then booted up which it did first time.
We fired up my H4 computer to test my new game, Athanor 2, but unfortunately my H4 crashed and then would not boot (it is booting now it is home again! so all good). So we fired up Gary’s H4 and loaded the Athanor 2 game using his PARCP-USB adapter and it ran fine under EmuTOS. The new game has some good music and graphics although we struggled to figure out how to interact with people and elements in the game as the interface was not that intuitive. We did eventually make some progress with picking up items and interacting with the wine salesman but we then decided to move onto other things.
Next up we powered up my latest version of my MIDI hat on the MT-32 pi emulator and we connected up Gary’s H4 to it via the MIDI port to review the music in Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 2 and Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis as Brett and Jonathan were interested to hear how this sounded on the ST platform to the MT-32. These games brought back memories from playing them on other platforms and much reminiscing was done.
Gary re-assembled his STF with the new TOS and screwed the case back together. We then tested some of my ST2USB PS2 mouse adapters after I finished soldering an SMD capacitor onto each of them.