I got as far as the train-station, where I was told that because I hadn't booked my ticket 5 days previously (should've been £32), it would cost me nearer 60 quid to get to Norwich! I really wanted to go, but not at those ticket prices!
David -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Collier Sent: 07 November 2004 14:13 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: ORSAM show report 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/
