Well, yesterday was the ORSAM (Spectrum & clones) show, and since noone
else has posted about it yet I thought I would do a quick report:
I arrived at the centre with about two minutes to spare (having been
within a mile for about the last quarter of an hour, I think. It isn't
the easiest place to find.) Anyway, the city mayor (I think) was there
to open the show - a nice gesture, although I don't know if it was
really the photo opportunity she might have expected - at that point
there were probably only an audience of about twenty. On the other hand
there were a reasonable stream of people arriving through the day, and
it seemed pleasingly busy in the afternoon.
So we all went in, there were stands all around the outside of the
hall, with two "islands" of stands in the middle. All the Sam stands
were on one of the islands, so we had David Ledbury with his Sam In A
Can (mostly playing SID soundchip music), next to him Colin Piggot's
stand (running Soundbyte demos, and Stratosphere, that sort of thing,
with Quazar surround sound), and then my MNEMOtech table (fighting the
good fight for the Sam's internal SA1099 sound chip, by running demos,
eTunes, ProTracker2 etc) on a TV with with a particularly scratchy UHF
signal.
I didn't have a camera with me unfortunately (well, actually I did
bring a camcorder because Tarquin had asked for someone to video the
talks, but I lent the tape to someone who'll be editing it and sending
the files out to people) but there were a number of people with cameras
around, so I hope someone will point at a URL soon.
Anyway, once we'd set up and the initial flurry had settled down a bit,
we started to look at the problem of what was going on with my Sam. So
I plugged it in and asked Colin what he thought might be wrong, which
was met with lots of "oh dear"s and sucking through teeth. The RGB
signal comes straight from the ASIC with no components in the way, so
if that isn't working, then there's only really one candidate for what
went wrong...
But I've got Allan Skillman's Sam too, which has a perfectly good RGB
output but not a good composite output. And its floppy drive can't read
half of my disks (and when it spins up, it disrupts the picture -
probably a power drain but altogether not very healthy). So we hatched
a mad plan to put its drive into the bay 2 slot, and move the working
drive from my broken Sam into bay one, and construct a
Frankenstein-like happy Sam with two drives from the parts of the two
unhappy ones.
Well it mostly worked: onlookers were treated to a techie hardware
demonstration of two Sam's being taken apart ("No user-serviceable
parts inside"? I'll be the judge of that...), and had a look at just
what a hack the internals of the later Sams had turned out to be. It
wasn't that there were loose wires hanging around (at least they all
went from various parts of the disk drive, to various parts of the
board plugged into the disk drive interface; I had worried that
something might have been soldered onto the Sam's motherboard) but that
the disk drive interface actually used a different connector. I'd
plugged in the working drive into bay 1 without noticing. But plugging
the old drive into bay 2 didn't work. It didn't fit, it turns out the
plug was two pins too long! And the socket on the Sam motherboard had
been changed to match, on just the one side. Unbelievable. But the
extra pins aren't wired up, and the rest of the connections look the
same, so I plugged it in anyway. And it works, hurrah!
There were a few bonus extra scheduled events going on through the
afternoon, one was Colin demonstrating a brilliant new piece of
in-development hardware, and another was a fascinating talk by Simon N
Goodwin about a huge number of early-80s computers, in particular the
clones (licensed or otherwise) of the early Sinclair machines.
After the show a group of ten wandered around Norwich looking for
somewhere to eat. Seven of us ended up in a small but rather nice
restaurant, with a picture of an upside-down Amiga mouse on the wall.
Well, almost. All in all, a lot of fun. I want to see more Sam faces
there next year though!
Andrew
--
--- Andrew Collier ----
---- http://www.intensity.org.uk/ ---
--
Have you lost your Marbles? http://www.marillion.com/
