Our group of vintage adventurers reconvened at Coedo for another day of fun, 8 bits at a time. As is typical, Sean arrived first, this time bringing his PC-8801MC… and not much else! Like, no keyboard to use the PC-8801MC with, some games, but half of them couldn’t even do their intros without the keyboard. What a dummy! He also brought in his non-powering NEC PC-6601 for inspection. Andy and Justin poked and prodded at it and threw out theories. Edoardo eventually took it home with him.

Fortunately, Michelle would join a few hours later and brought in her own PC-8801 keyboard, so the PC-8801MC could get some actual use! Not only that, she brought in a compatible CD-ROM drive so we could catch a glimpse of the in-ROM CD player functionality. Cool!

Sven brought in a perfectly working computer board, at last! Full VGA output and keyboard interface and all. Great project! Look at that fractal! Legend has it, it died a few days later.

Andy took his Apple IIc along for some maintenance and games. It’s such a conveniently portable model compared to the previous II series machines. And there were some classics played for sure.

Curt took great effort in pointlessly bringing along his Basic Master Level 3. It’s a beast of a machine that didn’t even fit in his own luggage; he had to borrow something from Sven, and then it didn’t even get plugged in once!

Saburo brought in a variety of goodies, including tapes for Curt’s Basic Master Level 3, which obviously also did not get used. His NEC PC-2001, however, did get some use, including a whack-a-mole game for the tiny, tiny screen. He also spent some time completing one of the totally whack games that Tom brought in.

In addition to some games, Tom also had with him his Panasonic MSX Turbo R A1-ST WP, how’s that for a model name?

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One thought on “Meetup #29 – 2022-06-25”
  1. Yeah, the issue with the Hitachi was that I ended up spending pretty much the entire session off in the corner with Justin working on the tools to get set up for CPLD and FPGA programming. (I picked up a couple of 5V-compatible CPLD boards that I hope to use to do the kind of things that the Commodore 64 PLA did: address decoding and suchlike.) That’s definitely a session Justin and I should have done separately on another day. Still, got a lot done, even if it was invisible to the rest of the meeting.
    Anyway, I’ll be bringing the Hitachi along to the next meetup tomorrow where this time we can give it a proper workout. And I’m really looking forward to seeing Saburo’s software for it! The only thing I’ve seen on it so far is a BASIC prompt. (Well, and a couple of small BASIC programs I wrote myself.)

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