SUX 6400 - first look

(photo by the Goog)

At http://www.portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=commvex:presentations_guests , mention is made of the mysterious Sound Ultimate Xpander 6400 hardware and its Digimaster software. They are to be released at the July 23-24 Commodore Vegas Expo v7 2011. Here is a first, tantalizing look at prototype #2 of the SUX 6400. This year's CommVEx is shaping up!

Truly,

Robert Bernardo

Fresno Commodore User Group

http://videocam.net.au/fcug

July 23-24 Commodore Vegas Expo v7 2011 - http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex

Notacon 8/PixelJam Demoparty pics to be posted soon

I just dug out my photos of the Notacon 8/PixelJam Demoparty 2011 which was held this year on April 16-18 in Cleveland, Ohio. I had almost forgotten about them! I'll send them to the webmaster of the Fresno Commodore User Group website so that he can make a page for them. Expect to see them on-line soon!

Truly,

Robert Bernardo

Fresno Commodore User Group

http://videocam.net.au/fcug

July 23-24 Commodore Vegas Expo v7 2011 - http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex

Kiki Stockhammer at the Hollywood Charity Horseshow

(photo by Donna M.)

When I attended the Hollywood Charity Horseshow banquet on April 30 this year during the William Shatner Weekend, I sat down at our Shatner & Friends, Int'l. table. At the next table I saw a familiar woman sit down. I looked and looked, doing double-takes in my mind. Finally, I decided she was who I thought she was. She saw me looking and immediately greeted me, coming over to my table. It was Kiki Stockhammer of Newtek Video Toaster and Warp 11 rock-and-roll fame!

We gabbed excitedly, and I asked her why she was there and why wasn't her Warp 11 band doing the music for the banquet. :) To the former question, she said that she was part of the Newtek crowd providing video equipment for the live webcast . To the latter, she laughed.

After the banquet, we talked some more (especially about the new Viva Amiga film being produced), and I tried to get some video of her meeting William Shatner, but I was not very successful in getting a good camera angle in the fast-moving crowd.

Truly,

Robert Bernardo

Fresno Commodore User Group

http://videocam.net.au/fcug

July 23-24 Commodore Vegas Expo v7 2011 - http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex

PET 8296-D waiting for me in England

(The above from Steve Gray's website)

When I arrive in England on June 8, I'm picking up a Commodore PET 8296-D. A former PET user did not want it and had delivered it to my base of operations in Haywards Heath. It's been waiting there several weeks. From his description, the PET does not display anything on the screen but comes with boxes of disks. When I met PET guru Mike Naberezny a few weeks ago, he figured that one or both PLAs have burned out in the 8296-D, a relatively easy fix in that the chips can be replaced with eproms with the appropriate code.

My problem is to transport the 8296-D back to the United States. If I have to, I guess I could carry it back on the plane as oversized luggage. A better idea would be to separate monitor away from the lower casing. Mike told me that it would be possible by taking the back off the monitor which would expose four bolts that hold the monitor casing to the lower casing. Remove the four bolts, and the 8296-D separates. I hope that a divided 8296-D is easier to transport than an undivided one.

Truly,

Robert Bernardo

Fresno Commodore User Group

http://videocam.net.au/fcug

July 23-24 Commodore Vegas Expo v7 2011 - http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex

EasyFlash received/mini-reviewed

(photo by Mike Betz)

Last Thursday I received an EasyFlash cartridge from Mike Betz of Antelope, California. He's building these carts and selling them on eBay for $35 plus $5+ in shipping plus sales tax for those who live in California. Arriving a few days after placing my order, the cart came is a small, padded mailing bag with just about $1.34 in postage, not even close to the $5+ charged for shipping. No other materials (like instructions) came with the cartridge.

The cartridge casing is solid to the touch, blue in color, has a nice label, and has an LED, a slideswitch that selects normal or flash mode, and a reset pushbutton. The casing is embossed with the name of its German manufacturer. The holes in the casing for the switches and the LED look to be hand-drilled or cut open with an Exacto knife. After removal of the center screw, the casing comes apart fairly easily, exposing its board with all the components taking up nearly all of the board space. The components all seemed to be well-soldered onto the board.

At last Sunday's FCUG meeting, I brought the EasyFlash and as many instructions as I could print from the inventors' website at

http://skoe.de/easyflash/

We plugged it into the club's flat C128. Upon power-up, there is an EasyFlash title screen with a little bit of animation. A nice touch! Then it presents you with a menu of what there is on the cartridge. To go up and down the menu, you can use the cursor keys, a joystick, or the F keys. To our surprise, there were a number of game titles already on the cart -- no need to immediately learn how to flash a new cartridge image into it. We tried a few games. Several of them presented just a blue screen, no cursor, no other activity. I attributed that to the games being PAL versions, and we were using a NTSC C128. Some games ran just fine, like Frogger.

I have not yet tried to flash a game into the cartridge. To flash a game with the use of a C64, you download the program, EasyProg, from the above website, and then run the program. The site advises that you should have a large device, like the FD-2000 disk drive or a uIEC card drive, in order to hold large cartridge images. When I followed the site's links to where the images were, I was presented Google pages from which to grab the images; the problem was that Google had hundreds of hits, and you'd have to look through every one so that you could get the image you wanted.

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug
July 23-24 Commodore Vegas Expo 2011 - http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex

Pepsi Throwback

Back in the "Good old days," soft drinks were sweetened with cane sugar.  In the 1980's, soft drink companies switched to high-fructose corn syrup, because it was cheaper.  Recognizing the value of selling a genuine retro product in 2011, Pepsi has gone back to their original sugar-based formula and are using their original logos in their new Pepsi Throwback series of soft drinks.  Apparently, this was test marketed in 2009 and in 2010, and was met with strong sales.  Good move; it matches my original Commodore 64 system perfectly, and tastes the way it should.

Welcome

Retro-link.com started as a small community of like-minded individuals with a keen interest in retro computing.  We created a message forum that encompassed not only retro computers, but also retro cars, retro television, retro everything.  Recognizing that we each had some great stories to tell, we decided that a blog would better suit our needs.  This blogspot blog, retro-link.blogspot.com, represents the blog offshoot of the original project.  If successful, it will replace the original retro-link message forum, and the domain name will point here.  Meanwhile, stay tuned for some great stories!