This was our biggest meetup in quite some time, with twelve people in attendance for the first time since the pandemic began. Sean was a bit late, but arrived first with his NEC PC-6601. As it was going on the auction block the next day, it was the only day to bring it in for show and tell. It’s not a very compact system but comes with an integrated floppy drive, fairly novel for that class of system.
He also brought in his Commodore C16 for Curt’s keyboard analysis project. It’s a bit of a strange beast, with the keyboard sharing a similar layout and, save for color, a nearly identical appearance to the Commodore 64 keyboard, but they’re wired totally differently. Well, I guess that’s why we reverse engineer things!
Michelle brought in her PC Engine Duo for capacitor removal, and Edoardo brought in his heat gun to get the job done, but before the destruction began, Michelle brought out her controller tap and introduced Justin to Bomber Man. Despite being Justin’s first time playing it, he still managed to outlast Sean in both rounds.
Greg lugged in his ultra-portable Commodore 64-SX and his bulky and cumbersome Amiga A500 Mini… wait. Maybe that’s backward. The Commodore 64-SX was decked out with a 1541-Ultimate II+, chock-full of demos and games, old and new. The Amiga A500 Mini is a cute little replica of the original with a lot of attention to convenience and detail.
Sven came back with his Z-80 computer board project and a bar of chips, looking more populated and like a completed project than before.
Tom brought in a joystick for repair, or at least to get a general idea of what it would take to repair. It turned out that one button was bad and repairing may prove more trouble than it’s worth, but that doesn’t always stop this crowd.
Saburo came with his KryoFlux for more disk imaging and disk image writing, achieving success on an SMC-777 game and Sean’s PC-6601 disks. He was also finally successful in getting his TRS-80 to load software over the CMT port, a goal that eluded him last month!
Leave a Reply