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FCUG Meeting Reports Page 2 |
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These are the informal reports on meetings of the Fresno Commodore User Group. Not really minutes, and not exactly news, we started this just to have a record of decisions made, attendance, etc. Notes are co-written by President Robert Bernardo and Treasurer Dick Estel, unless an individual byline appears. The latest report will always be at the top of the newest page (currently page 3). After that they appear in order with the oldest years at the top. Don't know what year or month you want? Start with the newest and read a few recent reports; then go back to the oldest and see what was different. Some months are missing and will be added if and when they become available. |
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Latest Meeting Report Older Meeting Reports Commodore Links 2010 - 2016 are on Page 1 2023 and later reports are on Page 3 |
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Older Meeting Reports Below this point, reports are in chronological order, oldest first |
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2017 |
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January 2017 We had our biggest attendance for many months in January, thanks to a new member and the appearance of one we haven't seen for four years. Brad Strait not only made a long overdue appearance, but he paid his dues and said he would probably be able to attend more often. Meanwhile Bruce Nieman, who attended his first FCUG meeting in December, joined the club. Welcome! Others in attendance were Greg Dodd, Louis and Vincent Mazzei, Roger Van Pelt, Robert Bernardo, and Dick Estel. Dick presented the annual financial report. The treasury was down slightly from last year, but we have had very few expenses, so there will be enough for any costs that are likely to come up during the year. There was a lengthy discussion of CommVEx. With the Plaza Hotel unable to guarantee a room until April, Robert booked the nearby California Hotel. There were certain limitations, including no Friday set-up and the need to remove all equipment at the end of the day on Saturday. This did not go over well with a number of people who have attended in the past, and a "rebel force," including members of our now former co-sponsor club in Las Vegas, are apparently planning a competing event for the same weekend. CommVEx will proceed as planned, and time will tell how things work out. Robert discussed several possibilities for demos at CommVEx, including some that would be on video if the demonstrator is not able to attend. Louis and Greg reported that they are discussing the formation of a new user group, one that will support all the many orphan computer platforms, such as Radio Shack, Texas Instruments, Atari and others. The tentative name is Classic Platforms United (CPU), and details will be revealed as they are developed. Robert showed a section of a new Brian Bagnall book, "Commodore - the Amiga Years." The .PDF file was only available to Kickstarter backers, Robert being one of them. Also we saw the first 12 minutes of the new film, "Viva Amiga, the Story of a Beautiful Machine" which had Amiga engineers and historians talk about the history and current state of the Amiga computer. It is available on Hulu and on iTunes, disc formats coming later this year. Members watched as Bruce booted up his Amiga 2000 for a quick look. This demo was very short since he had to leave early, but we were able to discover that it had a 68040 processor and a graphics card. Bruce said he will be it back for the next meeting. Roger displayed a collection of updated Commodore games on a flash drive. They have been configured to be as much like the arcade versions as possible. We saw Frogger, Donkey Kong and Jr. PacMan, while Greg demonstrated his proficiency, rarely getting "killed." |
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February 2017 Driving from Stockton, president Robert arrived to the meeting 20 minutes early. He started setting up the equipment. V.P. Roger arrived later, and both of them set up their various computer hardware bits. Roger helped Robert set up the two Dell 2001FP monitors Robert had recently bought from the East Bay Area. The Dell’s had VGA, DVI, s-video, composite inputs, and a stereo headphone jack/stereo speakers. The Dell’s were not your ordinary flat screen LCD monitors, because they could scan down to 15 KHz and thus were usable with classic Amigas with the appropriate RGB-to-VGA adapter. Also under s-video and composite modes, they were NTSC and PAL-compatible. Eventually, members Brad, Louis, Vincent, and Greg came in, and everybody started ordering their food. While everybody waited for their food, Robert informed the group that Maker Faire was coming to San Mateo in May, and once again, an application was put in to have a classic computers’ exhibit. He also said he would be traveling to the Pacific Northwest in April so that he could check up with the Living Computer Museum, the venue for the June Pacific Commodore Expo NW. As for July Commodore Vegas Expo, he reconfirmed with Louis about the presentation on modding the Plus/4. Just as the guys finished lunch and started seeing part 2 of the video, “Viva Amiga: the Story of a Beautiful Machine,” member Bruce dropped in, and Roger and he went out to bring in Bruce’s Amiga 2000 system. As they were setting up, Robert showed the new Ray Carlsen power supply for the VIC-20 (early model) and the Canadian 3D-printed, VIC-20 cartridge case for the Final Expansion 3, Rev. 11. Back to the A2000, Louis and Robert verified that it was running OS 2.0. Then Louis opened up the machine so that everybody could see what was in it – an A2320 scandoubler board for VGA output, a Progressive Peripheral & Software 68040 28 MHz. board with 16 megs of Fast RAM, a Supra board with 4 megs of RAM, a MegaChip for 2 megs of Chip RAM, and a Trumpcard SCSI board with a 120 meg. hard drive. It was a very capable machine. However, on closer examination, Louis discovered corrosion “fuzz” on the legs of the old Ni-Cad clock battery. Both Robert and Louis urged Bruce to have the battery replaced as soon as possible so that no more damage could be caused. Louis even offered to replace the battery at the next club meeting, a task that would not be easy to do because the various boards and the internal power supply in the Amiga would have to be removed. Then Robert and Roger concentrated on Commodore 8-bit business. Without JiffyDOS in the Vincent’s VIC-20, Robert couldn’t figure out the long commands to open the .D64 files on the Compactflash card in Robert’s uIEC-CF. Oh, well, the VIC-20 programs of $B, Maxi-Edit, and Cask Jumper would have to wait for another meeting. For the final part of the meeting, Robert and Roger tried to make sense of the C64 educational program, “Bear Jam”, for the Chalkboard Powerpad. In past meetings Robert had brought what he thought were all Chalkboard Powerpad programs – Leo’s Links, MicroMaestro, and Leo’s Lectric Paintbrush. However, he recently discovered that Bear Jam was available for download, but he didn’t discover where the instructions were. Thus, Robert and Roger were poking at the Powerpad, trying to make Bear Jam do something for some purpose. They found some pressure points on the Powerpad which activated some graphics on the screen, but what did they mean? After many minutes of trying to discover the meaning and the manner of the program, they both gave up and promised to make a concerted effort to find the instructions on-line. |
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March 2017 By Robert Bernardo Robert
and Roger had their usual two-item combination lunches, while Brad
ordered the easy-to-eat and fun cheese quesadillas for himself and
the kids. As lunch neared the end, Robert started with club old and
new business. He talked about the upcoming shows – the May Maker
Faire, the June Pacific Commodore Expo NW, and the July Commodore
Vegas Expo. Just as he finished his summary of the shows, a visitor
came in – Alex Lewandowski. We
tried to view part 3 of the newly-released film, "Viva Amiga:
The Story of a Beautiful Machine, " but Robert couldn't find
the external speakers for the laptop which was to play the movie,
and so, the movie was delayed until the next meeting. In
hardware, Robert showed the Final Expansion 3, Rev. 11, for the
VIC-20 – this time with the board and 3D-printed case all
assembled. However, he was without his usual VIC-20, because it was
under repair by Ray Carlsen. In a few days, he was to go to the Brad
borrowed Robert's Kim Uno (KIM-1 replica), and he actually knew how
to use it, except for discovering how to use its built-in Chessmate. At the
February meeting, Robert and Roger flailed around with the Bear
Essentials and the Chalkboard Powerpad for the C64; they had no
instructions nor the Powerpad overlay for the Bear Essentials, and
so, they were just poking at the Powerpad without knowing what they
were doing. This month Robert brought back the Bear Essentials and
Powerpad, but this time he had the instructions and a color printout
of what the overlay was supposed to show. Roger had more success in
finding the particular pressure points on the Powerpad and had the
Bear Essentials respond a bit more. However, without the
exact-fitting overlay, Roger was still estimating where the points
were and was not able to find all of them. All in all, getting to
use the program was partially successful. Robert had the idea that
the color printout of the overlay would have to be enlarged and
proportioned to the size of the overlay and be printed on something
like acetate. Robert
had brought in the A2000 which will be at the May Maker Faire and at
the July CommVEx. Refurbished by Duncan MacDougall, this one was
loaded with a Blizzard 2060 50 MHz. board, 128 megs of Fast RAM, 2
megs of Chip RAM due to MegaChip, SCSI controller board with 8 megs
of RAM, NewTek Video Toaster, Digital Processing Systems Personal
TBC, A2065 Ethernet card, Digital Processing Systems Personal
Animation Recorder (PAR), OS 3.1, SCSI CD-ROM drive, 4 gig SCSI main
hard drive, 500 meg SCSI hard drive for the PAR. Robert brought up a
few windows to show what was in the computer, but mainly he had
brought it to show how |
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April 2017 We started small but finished big as far as attendance was
concerned. Robert, Roger and Dick were present for the opening of
the meeting. Robert noted that a free condo room is available in Robert also reported on his trip to the There was preliminary discussion of the future of CommVEx.
This year's show will go on as planned, on July 29 and 30 at the
Plaza Hotel in As he has done for several years, Robert will be attending Maker Faire on May 19-21. He will be displaying a collection of vintage Commodore machines. Due to the conflict with our meeting date, the May FCUG meeting will be May 7. We started watching the next segment of the film "Viva Amiga: The Story of a Beautiful Machine." During this time we had an infusion of guests, in the form of Roger's parents, Mary and David Van Pelt, and his brother Aaron. During the early years, David made use of computers in his work, and he was interested to see the new hardware that has been developed for Commodore. For the second time, Robert brought the new Final Expansion 3, Rev. 11, the cartridge for the VIC-20, with custom-made 3D-printed case. With the help of its manual, he and Roger figured out its RAM options and DOS wedge. Then they tried to run a new program, the "CGA emulator" which needs 35K RAM, the maximum attainable on the Final Expansion. They did see a high-resolution, 320x200 screen, but the graphic was corrupted, probably due to the fact that the picture was for PAL video and not for NTSC. Then they tried to run Doom for the VIC, a program which also needed 35K RAM. The opening title screen ran, but then when the next part of the program was called, it crashed, probably due to the fact that the SD card in the FE was not a real disk drive and the program expected to load from a real disk. Robert and Roger decided that next time a real disk with Doom would have to be used. Five programs from OS4Depot.com were installed in the AmigaOne G4,
but the two games - Tux Football and Fighter - would not run. The successful programs that did run were the demos,
Ballfield and Etch-a-Sketch, and the emulator, ViCE (Virtual
Commodore Emulator). |
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May 2017 The May meeting took place on a day with fluctuating weather. It had been 99 degrees the Thursday before our May 7 gathering, 69 two days later. Sunday started out with a cold rainstorm and ended with temperatures heading back up. |
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June,
2017 |
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July 2017 by Robert Bernardo For the July meeting, members Robert, Roger, Brad, and David were present. They talked about the upcoming July 29-30 Commodore Vegas Expo v13. Brad was not prepared to film any presentation for the expo, but Roger was ready. After the meeting, Roger and Robert would go to Bernardo Studios, a.k.a. the University Inn Hotel, and Robert would film Roger's two C64 software presentations. As the meeting progressed into old and new business, Robert showed the website that had an auction listing for Admiral Kirk's Commodore PET 2001 from the movie, "Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan!". For the movie, the computer had been beautified with a chrome and gloss black finish. It sold for over $5,000 and with the auctioneer's profit margin, taxes, and shipping, the computer came out to be about $8,000. |
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August 2017 Although we lost some long-time members this year, we have added at least as many new ones, and several of them joined the other “old-timers” for the August gathering at Bobby Salazar’s Mexican restaurant. Brad
Also on hand were Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt, Dick Estel, fairly new member Dave Smith, and Mike Fard, who joined the club before the meeting ended. Robert gave a report on Commodore Vegas Expo, held in Las Vegas at the end of July. Although attendance was down, those who were there had a great time, and the show will continue next year. We didn’t quite cover expenses, and the room rates have increased, so we will return to one of the smaller rooms for 2018. We may also consider moving to a different city in the future. Michael Battilana from The September meeting date was moved to the tenth, since Robert will
be leaving for Entering the wonderful world of hardware and software, Robert had on display a Commodore PC20-III, a MS-DOS computer. The computer came from the Sacramento Amiga Computer Club, and Robert was warned not to power it up until it had its internal power supply thoroughly cleaned of dust. Mike opened up the machine and discovered that it came from 1987. Robert loaded up a C64 Forever 2017 CD on his Windows XP laptop, and we explored its Commodore emulation capabilities. The same process was followed with Amiga Forever 2017 DVDs. Meanwhile at the club C128, Katelyn took on all comers in Ringside Boxing, the two-player, two-joystick Compute!'s Gazette C64 game that was used in competition at CommVEx. |
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September 2017 Because
Robert was traveling to |
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October 2017 by Robert Bernardo Every
October the club has its annual “picnic” lunch, in lieu of a
regular meeting. This year the members went to the new Dave and
Buster's Restaurant in north They
were one of the first ones to show up when the doors opened that
Sunday morning. Those who attended were David S., Mike F. and
Sherry, and Robert B.. The first table that they were shown was near
the arcade games, but because there was a great deal of noise, they
moved to another table as far away from the arcade as possible. They
ordered off the well-stocked menu, but they did not go overboard in
ordering food. After
lunch, they wandered through the vast arcade. They were most
interested in the giant Space Invaders arcade game which stood 12
feet tall! Though
picnic lunches had not been known for being C= related, afterwards
everybody wandered off to Robert's car to pick up some C= gear that
he had brought in. |
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November 2017
Robert
announced that the room in Robert
told us of a C64 sighting – a scene set in a missile silo control
room in the TV show CSI: During
his recent trip to Moving
to our demonstrations, Robert had brought a pile of new Commodore
games from Robert
set up his newest toy, an A.L.I.C.E. laptop, with dual boot system
– Windows 10 or Linux with Amiga emulation. During
the last part of the meeting, Roger, Dave, and Robert ran various
VIC-20 programs, including some new British games also from |
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December 2017 By Robert Bernardo & Dick Estel It
was time for elections, with one vacant position to be filled, the
board members slot previously held by Louis Mazzei. Dave Smith was
elected to the position, and all other officers were re-elected. Before
we got down to business, Robert told us about his latest mishap,
getting rear-ended near At
the December meeting, Robert distributed the Computer Savers to the
members, and he spread out a large pile of free programs that came
from a member of The Other Group
of Amigoids (Amiga club) in Continuing
the Christmas giveaway, Dave had brought in a package of reusable
plastic water bottles, available to whoever wanted one. In
keeping with a long-standing club tradition, we voted to make a $50
donation to St. Jude’s
Children’s Hospital in Robert
loaded up a series of games for As
the meeting came to a close, Robert and Dave tried out more of the
new, commercial game disks from BinaryZone.org. |
2018 |
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January 2018 Although
we lost some long-time members in 2017, we had even more new ones
joining us, most of whom were present at the January meeting. Those
present included Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt, Dave Smith, The
centerpiece of the pre-meeting random discussion was the latest
episode of the TV comedy, “Young
Sheldon”, which shows "The Big Bang Theory’s"
Sheldon Cooper as a nine-year old. In the January 18 episode Sheldon
got his first computer, a Tandy 1000, and demonstrated some of its
uses to his family. In
official business, Dick asked the members to begin thinking about
backup plans in case someone in a key position is no longer able to
carry out his duties. No decisions were asked for at this time, just
that members give it some thought. Dick
presented the annual financial report, which will appear in the
newsletter, and noted that our total assets increased by a small
amount in 2017. Robert
was preparing once again to bring Commodores for the Classic
Computers' exhibit at Maker
Faire, May 18 – 20 at the Other
future events included Vintage Festival Seattle in February and Pacific
Commodore Expo in June, both in Seattle. None of the club
members had an interest in traveling to Robert
fired up his laptop and showed segments of the new documentary, “The
Commodore Story”, which will have it first public showing at
the Though
Christmas had come and gone, C= "gifts" were still
arriving -- more software from John Yaccarine of The Other Group of
Amigoids (San Jose) and computer chips from Rolf Miller of the
former CIVIC 64/128 club (Ventura). The club members grabbed many of
these free items. Once
again we loaded up some of the BinaryZone.org games Robert had
brought back from |
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February 2018 Good
attendance is now the rule for the Fresno Commodore User Group.
Members in attendance at the February meeting were Robert Bernardo,
Dick Estel, Dave Smith, Roger Van Pelt, The
official meeting and the pre-meeting discussion covered a wide range
of subjects, mostly computer-related. The group wished Robert a
Happy Birthday, only one day late. The
star of the show was a set of VR64 virtual reality goggles which
Robert had purchased from Jim Happel for $80. He loaded up Jim's
game, “Street Defender,” although it took some swapping of
equipment to find a Commodore that worked properly. The club C128
would not work, and Mike Fard diagnosed the failure being due to a
blown internal fuse in the power supply. They then tried to use
Mike's C64 which he had picked up from the free equipment of Raymond
Ciula. It powered up, but the keyboard did not respond very well, if
at all. Finally, they had to run the game on The
game showed the dual image on the computer monitor, with a
reasonably good 3D image in the goggles. With the goggles preventing
actual view of the keyboard, the big challenge was firing weapons
against the attacker by use of the F keys and turning the view
within the goggles by use of the Left Arrow and number 1 key. The
club's summarized opinion of the gameplay was that it was clunky,
because there was no use of a joystick. Duncan
then ran a very smooth shoot 'em up from his 1541 Ultimate drive,
entitled “Enforcer.” It was very advanced with smooth,
sideways-scrolling and lots of on-screen objects. He said that it
was the best one out there and that it had been developed in 1992.
On the 1541 Ultimate directory, Robert saw a game with the name of
“Clystron,” and he thought that with such a name, it must be
good. He was wrong! It had screen after screen of documentation
before it even came up to the game. Forget it! Then they tried a new
game called “My Life.” Though it had just one screen – a view
of a bedroom – |
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March 2018 By
Robert Bernardo |
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April 2018 By
Robert Bernardo For April's meeting Robert, Roger, Dave, and Brad were in
attendance. Brad's kids were not in attendance this month and were
missed. Dick Estel was not at the meeting, and he was missed.
Nonetheless, the members carried on. Robert reported on the April 14 Livermore Innovation Fair (LIF),
which was a new venue in which to exhibit classic computers. He
noted that the booth area was small, and unlike the giant Maker
Faire Bay Area which had 100,000 attendees, LIF had hundreds, and
consequently, the number of visitors to the booth was much less.
Robert had brought a SX-64 and an Amiga 1200 along with an Atari
800XL while the others in the booth had brought an Apple II clone, a
MSX system, and more. The booth was outside in the courtyard of the
venue, and though covered by shade, the sunlight was still bright
enough to overwhelm the picture of the Dell LCD monitors that Robert
used. The visitors could only use the SX-64 comfortably because of
its bright, built-in CRT monitor. The lesson learned – bring CRT
monitors when using computers outside. After lunch, Dave showed a video of the new C64 Mini (which was due
for eventual release in In the last meeting, Robert had brought the skiboard, skateboard,
and short surfboard for the Amiga CD32 game, Surf Systems' Biff
Boardin'/Urban Surfin'/Biff Select V2.03. This month Robert brought
a boxed, Amiga CD32 console, complete with the new, heavy-duty, Ray
Carlsen power supply, instead of its wimpy, black, brick power
supply. However even with a new, heavy-duty power supply, Robert
couldn't get the CD32 game console to boot. Sometimes the CD32
opening screen would show, but the Surf Systems' disc wouldn't run.
Robert theorized that because the CD32 was European PAL and not
North American NTSC, the disc did not recognize the machine (Surf
Systems was Brad and Robert brought in the latest Wi-Fi modems for 8-bit
Commodores, a pair of StrikeLink modems (two versions) and the
WiFi64 modem (from SharewarePlus of England). The StrikeLinks came
caseless, and the WiFi64 had a neat, little case. Brad's StrikeLink
was an early version, and Robert's StrikeLink was a later model. In
a side-to-side board comparison, the only obvious difference between
the two was a rearrangement of the components. The WiFi module used
in both was exactly the same. After Robert opened up the case of the
WiFi64, they compared its board with that of the StrikeLinks. Its
board looked exactly like the board and Wi-Fi module of the later
StrikeLink. Roger liked how the WiFi64 came with printed instructions and a deck
of “playing cards.” Called Top Cards: BBS Edition, the cards
described every current Bulletin Board System for the Commodore,
including the Borderline and Cottonwood BBS's of FCUG member Andrew
Wiskow. Brad attached his StrikeLink to the club's C128, and Roger ran the
C64 terminal program, CCGMS. Brad's goal was to connect to the
restaurant's Wi-Fi and then cruise to various Internet sites. He was
able to get the modem to respond, but he was unable to connect.
Robert realized that the CCGMS they were using was version 5 and
that version 6 was the latest one. Perhaps the problem was the v5
software; perhaps v6 would have better results. Because Robert had
no Wi-Fi at his house, he lent his StrikeLink and his WiFi64 for
Roger to try out at his place. (Note: At his apartment, Roger was
able to connect successfully with both modems and CCGMS v6.) The meeting ended with Robert, Roger, and David going through the
various C64 and C128 programs on the April, 1988 disk of Compute!'s
Gazette magazine. It was a time-travel trip to what was popular 20
years ago! For a simpler time, the disk had simpler games and
utilities. The question was would such programs hold the interest of
a Commodore user today. Maybe yes, maybe no. |
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May 2018 By
Robert Bernardo & Dick Estel The holiday and various obligations contributed to an unusually low
attendance at the May meeting – just Robert, Roger, and Dick.
However, we had good conversation, ate a great lunch, and got
to see an unusual Commodore peripheral. After setting up the computer equipment, we ordered lunch.
Dick mentioned that the club library did not get much use,
which was fine with Dick, since he did not have to do any work as
librarian. He said that he
would bring a few of the educational game disks to the next meeting
to see if our junior associate members, William and Charlotte, might
enjoy them. Having finished lunch and business, we moved into the
hardware/software part of the meeting.
Somehow, time had put the “hard” into “hardware,” as
three disk drives, including two recently donated by Rolf Miller of Robert started talking about Maker
Faire Bay Area which was held the previous weekend.
As usual, Robert had spent hours manning his computers at the
Vintage Computer Festivalers' exhibit.
As usual, hundreds and hundreds of fairgoers had gone through
the exhibit, exclaiming how they used to have the Commodores, how
they used to program the computers, and how they began their careers
with them. As usual,
there were the equipment breakdowns, like fellow exhibitors having
their Apple II not powering up and their C64 burning out its SID
chip. Robert said that Maker Faire was good training for the June 9-10
Pacific Commodore Expo NW to be held at the Living Computers: Museum
+ Labs in Robert gave us the latest on CommVEx in Although we could not view it, Robert showed us the official Blu-ray
release version of The Commodore Story, which has been in the works
for some time. He was
able to pass around the book that came with the Blu-ray. Unlike other meetings, this time Robert stuck to the presentation
agenda exactly. First,
because it was the 20th anniversary of Wheels 64/128, the compatible
OS for GEOS, we watched an on-line video of it in operation. Then,
he showed off the relatively-inexpensive ($42 US) SD2IEC drive from
Jason Micari of We were able to see something old but new to us.
Advertised as a "music synthesizer and multi-track
recording system," the Lastly on the C64 front, we looked at a disk from the library of the
defunct Diablo Valley Commodore User Group of Robert tried to run the Plus/4 disk magazine, Lone News 21, in C64
mode on the club's C128. Unfortunately,
the disk magazine wouldn't run, meaning that it required a Plus/4
computer so that users could view it. Switching over to C128 40-column mode on the club's C128, we tried
out newer Manic Miner 128 and compared it with older Manic Miner 64;
the older version had music and animation, and so, the 128 version
was not an exact duplicate of 64 version. The C128 system was set aside, and the VIC-20 was connected.
Downloaded from links at the Denial VIC-20 Internet forum, we
ran the new game, Pyrotech, and the new demo/game, Dr. Ultra +
Snake. The graphic of
Dr. Ultra was particularly well-drawn. Finally, we checked out the Amiga 2000 computer which Duncan
MacDougall of The Other Group of Amigoids had upgraded.
He repaired its 28 MHz. 68040 processor board, installed a
DKB MegAChip for 2 meg Chip RAM, added 40 megs Fast RAM, attached a
Video Toaster board (but didn't install its software), and upgraded
the machine to the latest WHDLoad with more games.
Robert and Roger played a few of those games which were on
the A2000's hard drive. |
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June 2018 Having
our meeting on Father’s Day presented some challenges. At least
one member who is the father of three was absent, and we assume he
was having fun with the young ones. In attendance were two fathers,
Dave and Dick, who had celebrated with their daughters earlier in
the day/week; and two non-fathers, Robert and Roger. The restaurant was very busy by the time we arrived, and the staff
expected big crowds. We use a small banquet room at the back of the
restaurant, with about ten tables available for eating and our large
amounts of equipment. They asked us to limit the space we used to
just two tables in order to provide for large groups expected later
in the day. We were able to do this, although we were interested to note that at
Over the last few years we have talked about creating a new “New
Member Disk,” since the old one dates back to the 1990s and
definitely needs an upgrade. Robert had volunteered to take on this
job and reported that he is going to try to get it ready for CommVEx
in August. At the show, he will hand out copies as part of the
traditional gift bags presented to each person attending. Back in the day (way back) all the library disks were brought to
each meeting. There has been little call for them lately, but Dick
reminded the members that all they have to do is ask, and he will
bring the desired disks (limited to one box) to any meeting. Robert reported on the Pacific
Commodore Expo (PaCommEx) in On Saturday at the show, Eric Hill spoke about making a new run of
the classic Rejuvenator board for the Amiga 1000 and about A1000
Kickstart mods which combined the Kickstart and Workbench into one
bootable disk. A considerable number of people came to the museum because of the
show, plus the “regular” museum visitors were surprised by some
of the exhibits and amazed to learn that hardware and software is
still being developed for Commodore. The museum events' director was delighted with the success of the
show and offered financial assistance for next year’s event. Before the show Robert dropped off a large number of items to be
repaired by Ray
Carlsen, who estimated the work would take 30 days. Robert
stopped on his way home and was happy to find that Ray had completed
all the repairs. Some time ago Robert learned of a mini Maker
Faire in Next it was time for hardware and software demonstrations. Robert
received a 1541 Diagnostic Cartridge from Chris Zimmerman, who had
attended CommVEx previously. It was made by World
of Jani and turned out to include disk diagnostic features. It
loaded up and worked fine on our 1571 drive. Then Robert showed off Toni Westbrook's Shredz64, a C64 music game
which is used with Westbrook's PSX-to-C64 adapter and a Guitar Hero
guitar. Robert had last shown this in 2008 at a club meeting and had
brought it back, because he had shown it at PaCommEx and was also
going to show it at this year's CommVEx. From Ryan Sherwood of the Puget Sound Commodore User Group came 3
disks with the name of “Scibax Demo”. As Ryan had explained to
Robert, with the 3 disks a user could learn how to create C64 demos
with graphics and music. It was not as simple as it sounded. The 3
disks were full of instructions, examples, and music and graphics
creation programs. However, the user would still have to learn some
programming in order to connect all the pieces and complete a demo.
As member Dave said, it would take a lot of study. The meeting finished with Robert and Roger going through several of
the programs on the SD card that came with Roger's SD2IEC card
drive. One such program was Pinball Spectacular, a C64 game that did
well in imitating the board physics of a pinball game. |
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July 2018 The July meeting drew a good crowd – Robert, Roger, Dave, Dick, Brad, and his daughter Katelyn. Dick had brought part of the club’s disk library, including the educational section, and we immediately put Katelyn to work testing some of these programs. |
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August 2018 by Robert Bernardo The end of summer meant that less members were at the August meeting, the absent members probably enjoying the last days of their vacations. Only Robert and Roger were in attendance. However, the low attendance did not stop the two of them from carrying on with the meeting as usual. After setting up the club's Commodore 128 system and Robert's Amiga 2000 system, they ordered food, and soon they were deep into discussion. Robert spoke at length about the August 11-12 Commodore Vegas Expo – the pre-show happenings which included meeting/speaking to Las Vegas C= enthusiasts, setting up all the equipment, running the show on Saturday and then Sunday, finding support from the Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network members who attended, relating his impressions of the raffles and the gaming, and talking to the hotel about a 2019 show. Robert passed out a leftover CommVEx gift bag to Roger, and Roger was surprised at the variety of Commodore and Amiga items in it. Unrelated to CommVEx, Robert also gave a reminder of the upcoming October Amiwest Show in Sacramento. For a few minutes, Robert and Roger looked at one of the videos presented at CommVEx – the video of Roger describing the use of certain C64 software with a C= wi-fi modem. Of course, Roger didn't want to see too much of it (because he had already presented the technique in front of the camera), but Robert wanted to prove that with good editing, the many mistakes during the actual filming could be erased. Also, though the video looked dark when seen through the camera viewfinder, it came out perfectly exposed when shown on a TV screen. For the software part of the meeting, Robert had brought the SuperCPU 128 so that he could easily run the 3D Construction Kit game, A Chance in Hell. Unfortunately, the club C128 did not boot with the SCPU, only showing a black screen in 40-column C64 mode. Switching the SCPU from 20 MHz to 1 MHz did not solve the problem. Robert retrieved his C64C out of his car and set it up. Then he tried the SCPU with it. Again a black screen. Roger sprayed some DeOxit on the connecting edge of the SCPU, hoping that the chemical would clean the contacts. Some black oxide was wiped off, but that didn't cure the SCPU problem. Without the SCPU working, Robert didn't want to show the game running at the normal C64 speed of 1 MHz; it would have been unbearably slow. Roger had brought the German C64 CAD program, GigaCAD, again, and though the SCPU would have helped make the program run more smoothly, Roger felt that even at 1 MHz he could show off what he had learned in the one month since he had been using the program. Then he went into an intense explanation of how the program worked, how to design objects, and how to render them in 3-D. Robert was very impressed, so much so that the rest of the meeting was devoted to GigaCAD, and the Amiga 2000 was ignored. |
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September 2018 Cooler pre-fall weather brought out a good crowd, including a couple of members who have not attended in quite a while. On hand for September were Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt, Dave Smith, Randy Stoller, Mike Fard, and Dick Estel. |
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October 2018 Back
in the day, the Fresno Commodore User Group had an outdoor picnic at
the home of one of our members. As our membership declined, we came
in from the outdoors and turned this annual event into a restaurant
lunch.However, it's NOT a regular meeting, because: |
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November 2018 By Robert Bernardo Robert arrived to the meeting first, followed by Dave, Roger, and Mike, in that order. Roger set up the club C128 system, and Robert set up his Amiga CD32 system. Mike was very interested in Robert's Sony GVM-1311Q monitor, having never seen such a NTSC/PAL CRT monitor like that one (it appeared at CommVEx, but Mike didn't go to the show). Dave showed off his new 64 Mini which he had ordered from Amazon.com, but Dave was not prepared to demonstrate it, saying that he would save that for a future meeting. The waitress was fairly quick this time with the orders being taken
efficiently; while the members waited for the food, the big topic of
discussion was the Camp Fire in Paradise, California; the Woolsey
Fire in the Malibu area, and the unhealthy/hazardous smoke covering
the valley all the way through Fresno down to Bakersfield. Robert
knew of a Commodore vendor who was in As the FCUG members chowed down on their food, Robert talked about how SCCAN was going to have an exhibit table or two at the December 1 Downtown Los Angeles Maker Faire and two to three tables at the January 5-6 Retro City Festival in Pomona. Robert spoke about how FCUG has voted on donating money to a charity during the December meeting. For the last several years, it had been to the St. Jude Children's Hospital, but Robert thought that this year with the disastrous fires in California, the club should donate to aide the victims. The other members agreed with the idea. After the meal, Robert started up the CD32, and the others concentrated on the various game discs for that machine while Robert tried to run the newly-revised 3D Kit Game on the C128. He tried but failed, because his SD2IEC card drive would not fit in the computer with the SuperCPU attached. He'd have to wait until a C64 or a differently-designed SD2IEC was brought to the meeting. However, he was able to carry on with the rest of the demonstrations without hardware difficulties. Among the various CD32 discs, the members especially liked the cartoony and smooth-running Zool. Over on the C64 mode of the C128, they tried out the new games – Shadow Switcher (a platformer), Great Giana Sisters 30th Anniversary Preview (another platformer), Knightlore (isometric graphic adventure), Tower of Rubble 64 (a type of Bomberman), Hibernated 1-This Place Is Death (text adventure), and their favorite, the atmospheric and gory Limbo Preview (run-and-jump). Then they went into C128 mode with the 80-column text adventure, Innuh's Pyramid. Finally, they closed out the meeting by setting up the VIC-20 and running Chinese Patience (a card game) and Morse, a program which lets the user practice Morse code by pushing the firebutton on a controller and listening to the dot and dash sounds while seeing the results on-screen. The 8K RAM-expanded version of the program ran better than the unexpanded version, but there was still some lag due to the firebutton insensitivity of the particular controller used. |
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December 2018 By Robert Bernardo and Dick Estel Robert had a Christmas present for the members and hopefully for many Commodore fans – there WILL be another CommVEx show! Commodore Vegas Expo v15 will take place August 10 and 11 (tentative on signing the contract) at the Plaza Hotel in downtown Vegas. Although this will be the final CommVEx, all agreed that the show has had an amazing run. Receiving this news from Robert were Brad, Dick, and Dave. We said that this news was like having dessert before our lunch! Robert also noted that the third annual Pacific Commodore Expo (PaCommEx) will be held in June in Seattle. And Robert is trying to coordinate a new show in May – the Commodore L.A. Super Show (CLASS) at the Santa Monica Public Library. We’ll have more information about all these shows in the future. Dave once again passed around his C64 Mini, a game machine designed to look like a quarter-size C64. which Brad and Dick had not seen before. A demo will be scheduled some time in 2019. Dick passed around a thank-you card from St. Jude hospital, which has received our annual charitable donation for the last few years. Because of recent devastating fires in northern and southern California, the club voted to make a donation to the Red Cross disaster relief fund this year. It was also time for elections, with the existing slate of officers
being re-elected by acclamation. They are: Robert Bernardo,
president; Roger Van Pelt, vice president; Dick Estel,
secretary-treasurer; and Brad
Robert reported on his participation in Mini
Maker Faire in On January 5-6 Robert will attend the 2nd annual Retro City Festival in Pomona, which focuses on arcade and pinball games. SCCAN will have three exhibit tables there. Turning to hardware and software demonstrations, Robert set up his Amiga CD32 and we tried several programs. Some would not load, and some did not work past the menu, but Bump & Burn and Bubba 'n Stix both functioned and were well-received by the members present. More CD32 game discs were tried, and the quick-loading ones were favored. Robert remarked that there is a new board that can be installed in a CD32 console which gives a SD card solution, i.e., the programs would load more efficiently off a SD card instead of the 2X speed of the CD32 disc drive. He was not ready to buy that board yet. |
2019 |
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January 2019 The
first order of business at our meetings is to carry in the equipment
This can be just a few items or a few tables full. Sometimes we have
as many as five computer systems set up, with no duplicates. More
about that later. Next
the various systems are set up and plugged in, with all the
peripherals needed for the day’s events. Only
when we have completed these tasks do we sit down, place our orders,
and attack the chips and salsa. The official meeting does not begin
until we’ve nearly finished eating, but there is always discussion
during lunch, mostly tech-related but sometimes straying far and
wide. To kick off 2019 on January 20, Robert, Roger, Dave, Brad and Dick held forth on how various companies failed to capitalize on their main product and either faded away (Commodore) or rose from the dead with something entirely new (Apple). There was mild debate on whether the iPhone will be the end of Apple; Mac almost was the end of Apple, and the Amiga definitely was the end of Commodore. Brad pointed out that Apple has billions in cash, providing a pretty good cushion against future problems. The other unanswered question was whether Tesla can survive without Elon Musk, with Brad noting that it has barely survived with him. Robert passed around the new book, “Commodore: the Inside
Story,” written by former Commodore In
official business, Robert reported on the 2nd annual Retro
City Festival in We
also discussed the three shows that Robert and FCUG will present
this year, the first being the Commodore
Los Angeles Super Show (CLASS) on April 27-28. Plans to hold it
at the Santa Monica Public Library did not work out, and the venue
instead will be Toolbox LA, a
co-working space in Chatsworth. Robert will make the final payment
for the room early in February. The
final Commodore Vegas Expo (CommVEx) in August is still in the
“very probable stage,” with the contract yet to be signed. The
final word should be out by late February/early March. At
the insistence of club members, Robert also told us about his trip
to Moving
to demonstrations, we finally got a look at Dave’s 64
Mini in action. This is a replica C64, about the size of a VHS
cassette, containing a modern game machine that emulates new and old
Commodore games under Linux. Dave connected a keyboard, a joystick
and a gamepad controller via 3-way splitter into the device’s USB
port. The display was fed into a Samsung HDMI monitor. Dave treated
us to several games, including Boulder Dash and Choplifter. Some
programming of the machine can be done using BASIC. There’s an
on-screen virtual keyboard which Dave said was very tedious to use,
but any USB keyboard can be plugged in. As
Dave ran the very intriguing game, Digiloi, on the 64 Mini, Robert
loaded up the same game on the club C128 so that he could compare
the game's SID music between each machine. Digiloi was programmed in
assembly language using Commodore keyboard graphics. Considering the
limitations of the tools at hand, the game looked very good and
played smoothly. Though
Robert had a packed agenda with various stuff for us to try out, the
rest of the meeting was devoted to testing the new Ultimate
64, a modern motherboard replacement for the C64. No legacy
chips were used in the U64 (Robert joking that it was a World War II
German submarine sunk in 1940). Robert had put the U64 in an
ordinary brown C64 case; however, if you looked around the back and
right side of the computer, you would see that it was not ordinary,
what with its dual USB ports, Ethernet port, HDMI port, missing RF
jack and channel switch, and spacing gaps where there should be
plates covering the holes. After
connecting the U64 to Dave's HDMI monitor, Robert powered it on and
had to switch the monitor to 4:3 aspect ratio instead of its
standard 16:9 ratio. Then he showed the computer's configuration
menus which were accessed with the machine's multi-function switch
and the F2 key. With the computer configured (or so Robert had
thought), he ran the Digiloi game. There was no sound from the game!
Robert went back to the U64 configuration menus and verified they
were OK. Still no sound. Robert connected a regular A/V cable to the
back of the computer and hooked it into the monitor (which also had
composite and audio ports). Sound came from the game via A/V cable!
Finally, after going into the computer menus again and after much
thought, it was determined that the U64 was connected to the wrong
HDMI port of the monitor; one port allowed sound and the other
didn't. When the HDMI cable was connected in the correct port, there
was no problem with the sound. Robert
ran several games from the SD card USB adapter connected into the
U64. He discovered that if you “Mount a D64” and then ran it,
the Epyx Fastload (a cartridge emulated in the U64) would work.
However, if you directly “Run a D64”, the fast loader would
disabled. Then
it was time to test the U64's disk drive capabilities. He tried to
load and run several disks by using the club 1571, the club 1581,
and his own 1541. All failed to load and run. He could not even pull
up a directory. It was back to the configuration menus. IEC drive
and printer enabled... yes. Disk drive selection... change from
1541-II to 1541. Virtual drive disabled... yes. Still no correct
response from real disk drives Finally, on advice from Roger, Robert
reset all the menus back to original with the exception of the
enabling of the IEC drive. The real drives now worked correctly. The
virtual drive option had to be enabled (though that seemed contrary
to what Roger and Robert understood). With
real drives working correctly, Robert loaded and ran 1581 Toolkit,
the FCUG membership disk, and even a German GEOS disk. However, the
GEOS disk only reached the desktop without any icons. Without a
mouse, further GEOS testing would be difficult. Robert had wanted to
test the U64's SID emulation (UltiSID)... would it recognize a
mouse? Finally,
in order to test the UltiSID, Robert plugged in a Koalapainter
cartridge and a Koalapad into the computer. The U64 ran the
cartridge but did not respond correctly to the Koalapad. No matter
which way Robert moved the Koala stylus, he could not move the
screen pointer lower than halfway down the screen. Even
enabling/disabling the Paddle Control in the configuration menus
made no difference. The U64 had failed. If the UltiSID was inferior
to real SID chips, then the real ones would have to be installed in
the U64's sockets (the U64 had sockets for two actual SID chips).
Robert was now suspicious of U64's handling of paddles and a mouse;
further testing would have to be done with applications that used
paddles and a mouse. |
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February 2019 By Robert Bernardo and Dick Estel Nearly everyone who attended the February 17 meeting drove in the rain as they left their homes, with the temperature around 40. By the time we reached Bobby Salazar’s Restaurant in central Fresno, the storm had moved east, and there was blue sky above us. Even so, this cold storm brought snow to very low levels, down around the 1,500 feet level. Inside the restaurant it was warm and cozy, and there was a good turnout: Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt, Dave Smith, Brad Strait and son William, Dick Estel, and Randy Stoller. The main topic of the business meeting was the various exhibitions in which the club is involved. First up was the Commodore Los Angeles Super Show (CLASS) on April 27-28 at Toolbox LA in Chatsworth. Robert reported that Mark Ripkin, who worked at Commodore late in its run, will be at this show. Robert also reported that the Livermore Innovation Fair was coming on May 4 and that the application for the May 17-19 Bay Area Maker Faire had been submitted. He showed the updated websites for the June 8-9 Pacific Commodore Expo NW and the August 10-11 Commodore Vegas Expo v15. The Pacific Commodore Expo was being held at the Seattle's Living Computers: Museum + Labs, and Robert remarked that Matisse Fletcher, the events' coordinator who was in charge for the last two PaCommExes had moved to the Burke Natural History Museum in Seattle. Though she had moved, PaCommEx 2019 was still a go. We have now committed to holding CommVEx 2019 at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, the 15th year for this now-iconic event. Robert was working on a video commercial for CLASS, and the script called for young students. After we finished eating, we went outside, and 9-year old William Strait made his TV debut in a small but significant role for the commercial. Robert also photographed a brown C64 sitting on Randy’s new Tesla, perhaps a contrast between old and new technology. Since some us had never seen such a vehicle, we were intrigued by the presence of front and back luggage compartments, and the lack of traditional dashboard items which were replaced by a large video display. Returning to the meeting room, Robert presented a salute to Valentine’s Day by loading up Wordwriter by One Step Software and showing samples from a disk of “Love Letters 1: A Selection of Famous Love Letters.” The definition of “famous” is highly subjective, because most of us found these missives severely wanting. The new Ultimate 64 (https://ultimate64.com) returned for further testing. After running a few games from the SD card adapter attached to the USB port of the machine, the U64 began giving trouble, i.e., the screen was not being displayed. Even after a reset and after a power-down, the screen reliably did not come back on the U64. Robert and Roger spent the rest of the meeting trying to get the U64 running again. When they did get the screen back, they would go through the U64 menus, trying to track down some kind of setting that stopped the display. By the end of the meeting, they had given up on trying to solve the problem. Robert did say he would bring the machine to the next meeting of the Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network and have the members check it out, especially the one member who had the U64, too. |
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March 2019 by Robert Bernardo As usual, we met at Bobby Salazar's Mexican Restaurant. Robert arrived first and started taking down the chairs and setting up the tables in the back room. David came in later, followed by Roger. During lunch, Bruce came in but only stayed a few minutes. For this meeting, talk centered around the first-ever Commodore Los Angeles Super Show. It will be held on April 27-28 at Toolbox LA in Chatsworth. Robert had already scouted the area for nearby restaurants to the venue. After the discussion on CLASS, Roger talked about data transfer via television video! Various classic computers, including Commodore 64, could have received such data transfer when users in Europe watched certain TV shows. There would be a flashing pixel(s) in the corner of the TV screen, and that would be the data coming through to specialized receivers that the users would have. Then that data could be converted to a program on disk/tape! Roger showed a YouTube video that demonstrated how this was done. Robert brought his Ultimate 64 again, but this time with new firmware revision 1.10, a newly-painted case, and a new carrying case. He explained that the breadbin case was found in storage. It had already been painted black by a south San Francisco Commodore dealer who had converted an old C64 motherboard into what he called a “C64GS.” (Not really because a true C64GS had a reduced-cost/reduced-component board and came from Germany.) Robert threw out the old board and installed the U64 board in its place. For added board support, he installed the 3D-printed brackets from CoreI64. The black paint needed touching up, and Robert went to a hobby shop, bought Tamiya Color Paint for Plastics, semi-gloss black; and re-sprayed the case. He bought new chrome badges for where it said Commodore and Power on the case. He used the original dark brown keyboard to complete the look. The carrying case came from Harbor Freight Tools. It had the aluminum frame/black plastic suitcase-look and came with a carrying strap. The interior was lined with pluck foam which was removed in spots to contain the U64 breadbin, the SD card-to-USB adapter for the U64, and the U64's power supply. Laid over this was a presentation folder that had color photocopies of the U64 website which briefly introduces the machine and its operation. With the club C128 at the ready, Robert showed off the new 128 40-column games, Knight Lore v1.10, Two Days to the Race, and the Space Invaders demo. For the C64 side of the computer and with the use of the SD2IEC, we ran the new 64 games, Bruce Lee – Return to Fury, Boulderdash Junior II, and Street Defender v1.6 for VR64. We connected a VIC-20 and with the SD2IEC and ran the new programs, Go-moku (which needed 24K expansion), Two Days to the Race (which needed 32K expansion and played exactly like the C128 version), Snake, Spaceship, and Realms of Quest V Beta Track. The last program was not a game but a compilation of “music” to be used in the future game, Realms of Quest V. However, the term, “music,” must be used very lightly. The members agreed that each musical number sounded more like noise or special sound effects or highly out-of-tune compositions. (Ah, the look on their faces!) The meeting ran long, and Robert was the last to leave. He stopped by the front counter to reserve the room for April. However, the counter person said that under a new restaurant policy, the room would have to be reserved with an $80 deposit which would be returned after the meeting. He paused for a second and went to the back room. Another counter person came out and said that from now on, the room would cost $100 a month (no return of money) and could only be used a maximum of 3 hours. He said that our group was taking up space that another group had wanted that day, even though we had reserved that room weeks in advance. Shocked, Robert replied that he'd have to discuss this with the club. Thinking fast, Robert thought of where the club could meet for free. The idea came immediately. Do what the Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network did for its meetings -- meet at Panera Bread Restaurant. Robert scouted the local Panera's that afternoon. The Clovis Panera was too crowded, and the north Fresno Panera was too busy and not conducive to setting up computer equipment. The last Panera on West Shaw Avenue proved to be a wonder. It was far less busy than the other two Panera's, had a restaurant area in the back with multiple electrical outlets, and even had a covered patio with electrical outlets. This was the spot for FCUG meetings from now on! |
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April 2019 By Robert Bernardo After 6 1/2 years at our previous venue, the Fresno Commodore User Group met at a new venue, Panera Bread Restaurant at 3590 W. Shaw Ave. in Fresno. At that meeting were Robert, Roger, David, Brad, Randy, and Mike. With Robert leading the way, the group aimed toward the back of the restaurant, which was where most of the electrical outlets were. Taking over a few tables, Robert set down boxes of items to present and also set up a Commodore SX-64. Unlike the previous venue where a waitress came to the table to take orders, the group went to the front counter and ordered food from there. It took a bit longer to place the orders, because most members were not that familiar with the Panera menu, but the food was ready far more quickly than at the older venue. After eating lunch, talk concentrated on Commodore. The day before the meeting, Robert opened up “Bernardo Studios” at University Square Inn. At the studio, he and Roger spent hours filming a video, tentatively titled, “The C64, SuperCPU, and Giga-CAD.” With his knowledge of Computer Aided Design programs, Roger made a presentation on the German program, Giga-CAD, arguably the most sophisticated C64 CAD program. The video will be edited and shown at future C= shows. Robert spoke about the Commodore Los Angeles Super Show which was to be on April 27-28 at Toolbox LA in Chatsworth, California. He was hopeful that it would be successful, though he acknowledged that he didn't know what attendance would be, i.e., would it draw outside people rather than those associated with the sponsoring club, the Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network? Another topic of discussion was the
Brixty
Four. Composed of Lego bricks, the Brixty Four comes in different versions – just the case, the case and the keyboard, or the case plus keyboard plus motherboard. A user could source his own parts (bricks) in order to build the Brixty Four, he could buy the parts from website, or he could buy the pre-built units from the site. On a side note, Robert told how a member of the Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network bought a MechBoard (fully mechanical, modern keyboard) for his C64C. That MechBoard cost $300! Then Robert started opening boxes. First, it was a box full of new books, the book being “The Vintage Commodore 128 Handbook” by Margaret Morabito. The book, which originally was supposed to be published in 1985, had been held from publication, the author updating it and finally releasing it this year. The book will be sold at a discounted price at the Commodore Los Angeles Super Show and at the Commodore Vegas Expo. In the other boxes were items from Tim Harris of SharewarePlus.blogspot.com. He had sent over these items to be sold at the above shows, with the monies going to pay down the costs of those events. The goodies were the C64/128 FM Radio Module, the Final Cartridge III+, LumaFix 128, the C64 Multicart+, Trackdisplay for the 1541-II, a Pi1541 (Raspberry Pi not included), the 1541 Diagnostic cartridge, cynthCART 64, and SD2IEC for the C64/128/VIC-20/SX-64 user port. Robert was able to demonstrate some of those items on the SX-64. The Final Cartridge III+ was noteworthy in that it was a modded implementation of the classic FC3; the new version had more utilities available in its drop-down menus. The C64 Multicart+ came in a nice case and had 63 games built into it. The 1541 Diagnostic cartridge needed more instructions for interpretation of its results on the SX-64's built-in disk drive. The cynthCART 64 played its music well with the SX. However, because the SD2IEC was programmed as drive 8, it could not be used with the SX, due to that machine's disk drive already being drive 8 (the SD2IEC would have to be reprogrammed on a C64 that did not already have an attached disk drive). David bought the Final Cartridge III+, and Randy bought the pi1541. Robert thanked them for supporting CLASS and CommVEx. Because of the quick speed of Panera's service, the meeting was able to end earlier than it had in years past. After the meeting, Robert met with two of the Panera people who manned the counter. They reaffirmed that the club was causing no problem and that we were most welcome to have meetings in their restaurant. |
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May 2019 By Robert Bernardo We met for the second time at our new location, Panera Bread Restaurant on West Shaw Ave. in Fresno. Robert had come from Stockton, and though he had left early from that city, he had to pick up Roger who had no ride. Even so, they were able to arrive a bit early and set up the club equipment. Because the weather was cool and there was a nice breeze, this time we met in the covered patio, and we were free to spread out our equipment over several tables. In attendance were Robert, Roger, David, and Brad. Robert gave a report on the April Commodore Los Angeles Super Show. The show was a success with about 40 attendees, good presentations and exhibits, and a lot of enthusiasm for the venue, Toolbox LA in Chatsworth. Most importantly, the show made back its cost with a little bit of money left over. The next event would be the May 17-19 Bay Area Maker Faire in San Mateo, and Robert intends to exhibit only two systems – an Amiga CD32 and the Ultimate 64 -- to that show. For backup, he will bring an Amiga 600 system. He will leave the rest of the Commodore hardware and software in his station wagon for the June 8-9 Pacific Commodore Expo NW in Seattle. The big topic of software discussion was Super Mario 64, which had only been released a few days before our meeting. The programmer had worked on it 7 years, porting it from the Super Nintendo version. He then uploaded it to various websites so that people could download it for free. When Nintendo found out about the program, the company started sending cease-and-desist orders to those websites that carried the game. The game was erased off those sites; however, with some digging, a user can still find the game on-line! Roger and David knew nothing of the furor. However, Brad had brought a disk copy of Super Mario 64, and that was run on the club C128. Robert also had his copy of SM 64, and that was run on his Ultimate 64 which had been upgraded to firmware v1.10. There it was, the game being run on 2 screens at the same time! Roger got behind one of the computers. With the game in his expert gaming hands, he noted that it was extremely accurate to the arcade version, even down to the hidden world. Naturally, all this gaming brought out the interest of others sitting in the patio, especially from one little girl (Destiny?). She was very bright and inquisitive. She played with SM 64 for quite awhile, and afterwards, she kept asking for more and different games to play. Because the U64 was set up with a lot of games on its SD card, Robert had her play from that computer. Meantime, the two women that had brought her were content to continue talking with each other. All the time was taken up with the games, and there was none left over for VIC-20 or Amiga software. Those computers would have to wait for another meeting. |
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June 2019 By Robert Bernardo and Dick Estel For the most part, the usual suspects showed up for the June meeting. Dick made what is becoming a rare appearance, his first since February and his first at the new location of Panera Bread Restaurant. Also present were Robert, Roger, Dave, and Randy. Dick observed that the new venue has a lot going for it, and he enjoyed the healthier food available at Panera Bread. It's the season of shows, and Robert hasn't missed very many. He was at a William Shatner Weekend recently, and as usual got "Bill" to autograph a couple pieces of Commodore equipment - a VIC-1525 printer and an Amiga 600. In early June Robert and his big station wagon battled the steep mountains of Oregon, en route to the third annual Pacific Commodore Expo NW at the Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle. Robert wisely took three days each way for this 2,000 mile round trip journey, and he and the vehicle both arrived safely, with stops in both directions to drop off and pick up equipment at Ray Carlsen's repair depot in southern Washington. Attendance was down slightly at this expo, attributed to the fact that the weather was nice and people were taking advantage of the rare opportunity to be outside. Still there were nearly 100 people going through the museum on Saturday and maybe 60 on Sunday. Now Robert is getting ready for a trip to Las Vegas, first for the Creation Star Trek Convention and then for the final edition of CommVEx at the Plaza Hotel and Casino, August 10 and 11. Robert attended the recent Maker Faire in the Bay Area, where he saw and captured on film quick shots of a few Commodore luminaries - Leonard Tramiel, son of Commodore founder Jack Tramiel; Bill Seiler, Commodore engineer; and Jeri Ellsworth, who is developing augmented reality (AR) goggles for gaming. This turned out to be the final "big" Maker Faire, but a one-day event will continue in downtown Los Angeles. As many of our readers know, Robert has a lot of Commodore equipment - in every room in his house, in a house that his mother owns in Stockton, and of course, in his vehicles. The house in Stockton has to be cleared out so it can be rented, which has led Robert to order a big 10 x 16 storage shed for his yard. While awaiting assembly, he has been forced to rent a storage unit in Stockton, so he gets to move that stuff twice. We encouraged him to take inventory and store everything in an organized manner. We concluded several years ago that he needs an intern to help with this task. Any volunteers? After lunch, the presentations began. Robert connected the Tech Sketch Music Port keyboard to the club C128 and ran the software. The Music Port was the hit of the Commodore Los Angeles Super Show and the Pacific Commodore Expo NW, and Robert showed off new features of the software that he had learned at those shows. It was very sophisticated software which allows the user to choose instruments, to create custom sounds, and to record compositions. Robert had recently picked up a collection of Commodore equipment and software from the San Diego area. He had given away most of that collection to the members of the Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network. However, he kept one item - the classic Zoomer flight controller/steering wheel which connects to the joystick port. He found out that the Zoomer worked better as a steering wheel than as a flight controller, and so, the Pole Position driving game was loaded up from Roger's SD2IEC drive. The game worked very well with the Zoomer. The Ultimate 64 was connected, and Super Mario 64 was loaded up. Randy tried out that combination for awhile, and afterwards, some SID music was played on the U64 so that the UltiSIDs in the machine could be compared to the original SID sound. Finally, the Shatner-autographed Amiga 600 was connected, and Robert ran the game, Battle Squadron, which was popular at CLASS and PaCommEx. Roger commented that the game was true to the arcade version of Battle Squadron. |
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July 2019 By Robert Bernardo and Dick Estel
Dick dug out some stuff from the bottom of his “FCUG Briefcase,” including a flier for The Write Stuff Companion, a collection of articles and tutorials on The Write Stuff word processor, which the club sold years ago (we can still find a copy if you’re interested). In fact, Robert had many of the Write Stuff packages with him in a box that came from the collection of Rolf Miller, former editor of the CIVIC 64/128 Gazette newsletter. Also in the pile was an August 1997 copy of the Commodore Product Source List, a comprehensive listing compiled by Roger Long. We speculated that not 5% of the items listed were still available. Recently, Roger Long put out the list on Internet, editable by anyone. However, Robert found out that it was not easy to edit the list to include new resources and to delete the many old resources. Robert gave up in updating it. During lunch we discussed the vast number of old and very old TV shows now available in our multi-channel, multi-streaming service world. Some of the classics that have caught members’ attention recently include The Cisco Kid, The Danny Thomas Show, and The Jimmy Dean Show (where the Muppets made their first appearance). Dick’s grandchildren were surprised when he told them Jimmy was known for more than just sausage. That “other” Commodore show in Robert reported that he has signed up for the Downtown LA Maker Faire, to be held December 7. That show will continue, even though the Maker Faire parent organization was going through reorganization. He also gave us a look at the 2019 CommVEx commercial going up on YouTube and featuring some famous Commodore names saying goodbye to the show for its final appearance. Robert has been cleaning out his storage house in Robert connected the Ultimate 64 and ran the latest 2019 C64 games -- Crystal Caverns, Death Weapon, Run Demon Run, Super Goatron, Stercore XD, Super Galax-I-Birds, Robots Rumble, and the silly Royal Hunt (the wild pigs of the forest hunt naked humans!). However, immediately there was a problem. None of the games had any sound! Robert couldn't figure out the solution. The audio settings in U64 were all correct. Were there bad speakers in the monitor? Robert connected external speakers and still didn't get any audio. Was it a bad HDMI cable from the U64 to the monitor? Unlikely. Roger did some cross-checking. He took the SD card out of the U64 and put it in Robert's external SD2IEC drive. He connected that to the club C128 and ran the programs. The sound was perfect coming out of the C128! Were the U64 and its internal UltiSIDs faulty? Robert ran some SID music out of the U64, and the sound was all right. Everybody was ready to give up when Roger came upon the solution; how about reverting the U64 back to its older firmware? Instead of using the current v1.21, go back to the v1.18. Robert took a few minutes to reinstall the older version. Voila! Audio problems solved! The new games played back their audio correctly. Robert said that he would e-mail Gideon Zweijtzer, developer of the U64, and tell him about the v1.21 audio incompatibilities. |
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August 2019 We
had a good turnout for our mid-summer meeting at the Panera Bread
restaurant that is our new gathering place. On hand were Robert
Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt, Dave Smith, Randy Stoller, Mike Fard, and
Dick Estel. Long-time member Keith Sohm, who has not been active in
the club the last few years, stopped in and was introduced to the
newer members. |
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September 2019
The October 20 meeting will be our annual club lunch, at Hometown
Buffet on
Robert reported that CommVEx videos and photos are now on-line.
He will be going to the AmiWest show in
Recently Robert made a trip to
Robert also visited the Seattle Commodore Club, which meets in the
evening at the leader’s workplace. There were a dozen in
attendance. Activities were divided between gaming and hardware
hacking, with no formal agenda or business.
On his return back to
We took a new group photo for the website. In keeping with our
interest in old technology, Dick used a Nikon film camera with black
and white film. The photo is now on
line.
Moving on to software demonstrations, Robert loaded up several C128
80-column programs. First was a nice genealogy program, Pedigree 128
from Loadstar. It offered the standard ancestor tree display, with
options to print out the tree as well as additional notes that can
be entered about each individual.
Next was an 80-column graphic editor, Electropaint 128, a
color-graphics screen editor for the C128, in which you use PETSCII
keyboard graphics to create 80-column graphic screens for such
things like a BBS.
There was ST View ][, a C128 picture viewer for graphics that were
originally made on the
Robert could not get Fast Hack’em 128 v.6 to work from the SD2IEC
drive, probably because the program was expecting a real disk drive.
However, he was able to run SIDPlayer 128 (for playing music
SID’s), Millifoot 128 (a game), and the ZED 0.77 text editor that
he’s been using for many years instead of a word processor. Roger took over the keyboard for Home Designer, a cross between a CAD program and a drawing program. We were able to create lines and boxes, and with a little more research, we have high hopes for this one. |
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October 2019 In keeping with a tradition going back decades, the October meeting is our annual picnic. Or maybe “picnic.” We used to have a potluck picnic in the beautiful back yard of one of our members who has since passed on. So we eventually transitioned to an annual lunch, with a few well defined guidelines: It’s held at a different restaurant from the one where we have our regular meeting. It’s held at a different restaurant each year. There is no formal business, no demonstrations, and only minimal discussion of computer-related matters. Also family members are invited, and the club pays. This year we had seven in attendance – Robert Bernardo, Dick Estel, Roger Van Pelt and his brother Aaron, Dave Smith, Mike Fard, and his wife Sherry. We ate at the Hometown Buffet, just across the street from our regular Panera Bread meeting place. It’s an “all you can eat” buffet, and we made a good effort to live up to the name. There’s a big variety of food – a salad bar, two or three kinds of chicken, pasta, vegetables, a ham and roast beef carving station, and of course way too many tempting desserts. We checked in with Robert on the storage building going up in his
back yard. It’s mostly completed, and he has started moving some
of his huge collection of Commodore, Amiga, and other equipment and
software into it. A film crew that’s been following him around for
a decade came up from southern Robert also let us know that he will be attending a party put on by
Amiga engineer R.J. Mikel. The situation is somewhat complicated by
the fact that the event will be held at the Heineken brewery in the |
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November
2019 By
Robert Bernardo Our
November meeting started with Dave arriving early, Robert arriving a
few minutes late, and Roger arriving later. Because the weather was
good, Robert decided to set up all the computer gear in the covered
patio of the Panera Bread Restaurant. That decision would come back
to haunt him. After
small talk and lunch, Robert talked a little bit of his job of
videotaping the presentations at the October Amiwest Show in He
then spoke about the upcoming Downtown Los Angeles Mini-Maker Faire
which was to happen on December 7. He would have Commodores, Amigas,
and a Texas Instruments TI-99A at an exhibit entitled, “Classic
Los Angeles Computers!” He invited all to come to the show. Robert
brought in some hardware from the collection of the late Bogdan
Macri of the Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network. The
hardware was Hewlett-Packard graphing, scientific calculators, and
Dave and Roger picked up a few of them – all for free! Dave,
Robert, and Roger then tried out the latest C64 games -- Rocket 'N
Roll (shoot spaceships), Keystone Kapers (a platform game ported
from the Atari 2600), Croaky (a Frogger-type game), Alien 8 (based
on the Spectrum game where the player searches various rooms to
solve an unspecified mystery), and Zilsspleef (a game in which you
have to avoid hidden mines and solve an unspecified mystery, too).
Then there is the music player compilation, XOXOX Softpack (which
was incomplete because it was missing certain player modules). Unfortunately,
Dave had to leave earlier than usual; the car exhaust coming from
nearby With
Dave gone, Robert wrapped up the meeting by showing off the new C64
Halloween games – Luna (fly a witch and shoot the flying skulls),
Forbidden Forest (move a Rambo-type character and burn down spiders
with his flame thrower), and Get Witchy (a Flappy Bird-type of game
except the player controls a witch). |
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December 2019 By
Robert Bernardo & Dick Estel First,
the roll call: Present were Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt, Mike
Fard, Dave Smith, Dick Estel, and Randy Stoller. Roger’s brother
Aaron joined us for lunch only. The
club voted to make a $50 donation to St. Jude’s Children’s
Hospital, a charity we have supported for many years. It
being election month, the existing slate of officers was re-elected
by acclamation: President, Robert Bernardo; vice president, Roger
Van Pelt; Secretary-Treasurer, Dick Estel; and Board of Trustees, Robert
talked a bit about the Classic Los Angeles Computers exhibit that he
had at the December 7 Downtown Los Angeles Mini-Maker Faire, but he
talked more about how filmmakers Rory Muir and Jerold Kress were
still videotaping his Commodore activities (videotaping which has
carried on over a span of more than 10 years!). In fact, they
traveled all the way to The
Commodore L.A. Super Show (CLASS)
returns for a second year, Dave
reported that newly-built C64s, named the 64 Maxi, are now available
for pre-purchase in Robert
showed the Ultimate 64 from the estate of the late Bogdan Macri, the
machine being valued at about $650 as customized with new
Kickstarter case and MechBoard 64 mechanical keyboard. We checked
out a number of programs saved on the USB sticks that came with the
computer. One was GEOS 64, which ran from .D64 file in joystick
mode, but did not recognize any RAM expansion because it did not
have the proper Configure file. Another one was We
took a look at Lenard Roach’s bill and budget work disk 3.1, but
without entering actual data and without a connected printer, we
could not really appreciate all the program’s features. We
also tried to look at our New Member disk, with plans to update it,
but the menu would not load. We have other copies in the library, so
hopefully we can return to this project. |
2020 |
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January 2020 By
Robert Bernardo and Dick Estel We
started the year with just four in attendance. Was it the gloomy,
overcast weather? Or did they stay home to watch the Whatever
the cause, Roger, Robert, Dave and Dick arrived at the Panera Bread
Restaurant ready to delve into the amazing world of Commodore. But
first we ate lunch, and the conversation during this part of the
meeting is often as interesting as the formal meeting or more so. There
was a brief discussion of diets, particularly the paleo diet. No one
in the group was interested in exploring the possibilities of eating
as did our ancestors of thousands of years ago. Going
back a shorter distance in time, Dick reminisced about his early
days with the club, which he joined in 1988. At that time membership
was around 150, and we had a Thursday evening meeting as well as the
monthly Saturday morning meeting. Exploring the genesis of the club,
Dick had recently talked by phone with one of the three original
club founders. An article on the beginnings of FCUG will appear in
the newsletter some time during 2020. The
topic of life expectancy came up, with someone questioning why in
1900 it was considered to be around 50 years. All of us had
grandparents or great-grandparents born before 1900 who lived well
past 50. Dick had read an explanation theorizing that the figure was
an average. With the high infant mortality rate of that time, the
average was based on a large number of people who lived less than a
year combined with those who lived into their 80s, After
all this non-computer foolishness, it was time for business. Dick
presented the annual financial report, which will appear elsewhere
in this newsletter. Our total assets have moved up and down slightly
the last few years but have stayed close to $1,200. Income is nearly
all from dues, while the only expenditures were the club dinner and
a donation to St. Jude Children's Hospital. Robert
reported on his planned trip to Moving
on to software and hardware, we made one small step in updating our
new members' disk which had been unchanged for perhaps 30 years.
Robert downloaded a text editor so that we could revise some very
outdated information in the welcome message. While
Roger worked on that project, Robert loaded up the new version 1.2
of Super Mario Brothers 64, and several of us tried our hand at this
classic game converted from Nintendo. Though Nintendo had reportedly
tried to shut down websites that carried the game, the developer did
not care and released the bug-fixed version in December. Next
up was the C64 game, Gruniozerca, from The
new Elite 128 v2 was tried, but it always crashed, even though it
was the NTSC English version. Perhaps it didn't like the JiffyDOS on
the club's C128. More
successful were the other C64 games – Manic Miner 64 (a
slow-moving platformer game, even in its new version), Super Vortex
(a vertical-scrolling spaceship shooter), Deer Creek (an adventure
in which the club members couldn't get very far), Kraken (guide a
swimmer in a maze with octopus obstacles), and Amazon Tales 2019 (a
sideways-scroller in which you avoid arrows and animals in the
jungle). Of all these games, it seemed that Amazon Tales 2019 was
the best of the bunch. |
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February 2020 Once again we had just four in attendance at our meeting – Robert
Bernardo, Dave Smith, Randy Stoller, and Dick Estel.
Members from the Sacramento Amiga Computer Club were supposed
to make the three-hour road trip to The big news during the business part of the meeting was a new computer show in Los Angeles, City of STEM. It’s a month-long event in April; Robert will have a display table one Saturday. The Downtown Maker Faire in L.A. will no longer be “mini”; it will be a two-day event for 2021 with no show for 2020. Robert talked about the arduous task of translating 69 pages of the German instruction manual for the C64 desktop publishing program, Pagefox. On his A.L.I.C.E. laptop, he has to type a page-at-a-time the German into LibreOffice (an OpenOffice clone), copy it, dump it into www.translate.google.com, copy the translation, dump it into a fresh page in LibreOffice, clean up all the Google translation so that it sounds like natural English, and then upload that translation to Las Vegas C= enthusiast, Saj Awan, who will add in the graphics from the original manual, and then finally make a .pdf of it. To kick off the day’s presentations, Robert passed around a little box that he thought had been stolen during a break-in at his house in 2017, but which he recently discovered. It contained a Vampire accelerator board for the Amiga A500 and 2000, which he bought back then for over $500. On Robert’s laptop the members watched an on-line YouTube video of how to install it. Robert talked a little about his first computer purchase in 1983, a C64 for around $200. Although he coveted an Amiga 1000 in 1985, the $995 price was out of reach at the time. In today’s dollars, that’s $2,885! He had to settle for a C128 for $200. On his Amiga 3000, Robert started some classic demos which he has shown at the Commodore Vegas Expo, Bay Area Maker Faire, Pacific Commodore Expo NW, and Commodore Los Angeles Super Show, the demos being State of Art and 9 Fingers, both by the group Spaceballs. Then we tried out some recently-released Amiga games, like
Killerball (which looked like it was based on the cult movie,
Rollerball), and utilities like DPaint V (Robert worked on a
roughly-drawn starship For the C64, we looked at the new Shoot’Em Up Construction Kit game, Spearhead. When all the members had left, Robert starting packing up the equipment but was delayed by a restaurant guest, Jose. He had a strong interest in classic computers and game consoles, so Robert stayed and showed him the Amiga 3000 and the Ultimate 64. For the next 2 hours, Robert let him try Amiga games, like Shadow of the Beast, Cannon Fodder, Star Wars, and Return of the Jedi, and C64 games, like the newest version of Super Mario Bros. 64. |
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March 2020 No meeting due to coronavirus restrictions |
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April 2020 No meeting due to coronavirus restrictions |
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May 2020 No meeting due to coronavirus restrictions |
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June 2020 No meeting due to coronavirus restrictions |
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July 2020 No meeting due to coronavirus restrictions |
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August 2020 No meeting due to coronavirus restrictions |
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September 2020 No meeting due to coronavirus restrictions |
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October 2020 By Robert Bernardo and Dick Estel Many years ago the club had an annual picnic in October, actually a potluck on the patio of a member who had a large tract of land and a beautiful home on the edge of the Fresno-Clovis metro area. This couple passed away in the early 2000’s, and after a couple of half-hearted attempts to meet in another member’s back yard, we settled on an annual lunch, which has a few well defined guidelines: It’s held at a different restaurant from the one where we have our regular meeting. It’s held at a different restaurant each year. There is no formal business, no demonstrations, and only minimal discussion of computer-related matters. Also family members are invited, and the club pays. LUNCH IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS Readers will certainly understand that this year we faced the
greatest challenge ever – where and how to safely gather under the
rules in place and within the members’ comfort zone. Fresno
President Robert Bernardo scouted a number of locations, and found that Casa Corona, an excellent Mexican restaurant in northeast Fresno, had sufficient outdoor seating and separation that we were comfortable scheduling our lunch there. As it turned out, we had only five in attendance; we sat at three different tables, and no other patrons were seated in our area. Attending were Robert Bernardo, Dick Estel, Dave Smith, Roger Van Pelt and his brother Aaron. All of us had been adhering to safe practices – limited close contact with family members, no close contact with others, and masks in place when out in public. We had not had a club meeting since February, so it was great to get together with friends once again. Discussion revolved around what we had been doing, how we were holding up, and especially Dave’s regression to hippie days, since he had not been comfortable about getting a haircut. Robert reported that AmiWest is still scheduled to take place later
in October, with about 20 people expected. He was still uncertain
about being inside with that many people, especially for the several
hours he would normally spend at the event. With that uncertainty,
he decided not to attend. Instead, he is planning a trip to Washington, to take items to repairman Ray Carlsen, with no-contact drop-off
and pick-up. All FCUG-sponsored Commodore events in 2020 were cancelled, but we are checking on the various venues and hopefully Commodore LA Super Show (CLASS) and/or Pacific Commodore Expo (PaCommEx) will be back in 2021. |
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November 2020 by Robert Bernardo Where was the electrical outlet? In our first FCUG meeting since February, Roger and I had arrived early to set up the computer equipment in the patio of the Panera Bread Restaurant. The Covid pandemic had canceled all of our other meetings for the year. However, for October and November there was a relaxation in the restrictions, and we decided to chance a meeting. In October we had had our club “picnic” lunch in the patio of a local Mexican restaurant. Even though indoor dining had opened up at 25% capacity at the time, we decided that eating outdoors was safer. We decided that the November meeting would follow the same tack, i.e., having a meeting outdoors would be safer than having it indoors. Yet, to the surprise of Roger and me, the Panera Bread patio electrical outlet was gone… sealed off with a metal plate. I figured that the homeless were getting into the patio, and that was the reason the outlet was closed off. Thinking quickly, we decided to hold the meeting indoors. I found some socially-distant tables near the front entrance, and that’s where we placed the minimal set-up of an Ultimate 64, HDMI monitor, and 1571 disk drive. Why the minimal set-up? Because our time was limited to 90 minutes, the new rule at Panera Bread during this time of Covid. We had to get in quickly and then leave quickly. Member David came in a few minutes later, and we had to wave him into the restaurant instead of into the patio. After we ordered and received our food, we settled down to small talk. But not too much small talk, because of our time limit. As we finished the last of our food, I called the meeting to order. There was no old business, but for new business we had two items on the agenda. First off was our annual donation to a charity. In absentia, treasurer Dick had recommended that we donate $50 to the Central Valley Food Bank. Motion made, seconded, and passed. Then I made the motion that we have the same roster of officers for 2021 as we had for 2020. Seconded and passed. I mentioned to the group that in all the months we hadn’t had meetings, I was still collecting software. Here was a chance to show some of it in the brief meeting. Not really software but a hardware update, I showed the new Turbo Mode setting of the Ultimate 64. In Turbo Mode, the user can pick CPU speeds from 1 MHz. up to a blistering 48 MHz., making the U64 the fastest implementation of a C64 ever. To show off the 48 MHz. speed, I tried to run the latest 3D Construction Kit updated game, A Chance in Hell. However, it was taking too long to load, and I gave up. It would have to be presented at another time. While we had been eating, Breadamp v.05, a music player for the U64, had been playing in the background. Now we had a chance to look more in-depth into the features of Breadamp. First, on the demo playlist was the THX audio opening for movies, played at 22 KHz in 16-bit audio. The other 3 music samples that were played topped out at 15 Khz in 8-bit audio. Very clear sounding and not rough like the usual C64 1-bit or 4-bit audio. Because the U64 had been configured to display PAL video, we were able to watch 3 of the 170+ nuvies collected on SD card. Having been around since 2012, Commodore nuvies were composed of up to approximately 760 still-frame NuFLI (Flexible Line Interlace) images strung together to make a video. The collected nuvies were either silent or had non-synced audio. (Well, there was one with synced audio, but it seemed that for those creating nuvies, syncing audio was difficult.) We watched the nuvies: C64- WebungRemastered 2019 (two Australian Commodore commercials put together), A-Team (opening credits of the iconic TV show), and TMS-JCN (video captured of a demo created on an Amiga and other computers). Finally, we had to play a game. It was “Wreck It, Ralph,” a new C64 game just released a few months ago. It was a marvelous implementation with bright colors, beautiful characters, smooth movement, and good music. Roger immediately sat down to play the game and knew what to do, commenting that he had seen the animated motion pictures based on the game. While we carried on with the meeting, a young woman on the other side of the nearly empty dining room had been watching us. Finally, she spoke up and asked what we were doing. Roger explained about our club, though she didn’t seem to know what Commodore was. It was only later that I realized that we should have invited her to our next meeting (whenever that was going to be). We had come to the end of our limited time, though no one really came to push us out. We disassembled the equipment, and before we carried it out to the car, I opened up a box of C= stuff that Ray Carlsen gave when I visited him in October. Almost all of it was VIC-20 software and documentation neatly packed in plastic bags. David got a Super Graphix Jr. printer interface. I handed over seven VIC-20 cartridges to Roger for him to examine. His expertise would come in handy for these rare carts which looked as if they were meant to be used by ham radio operators. All of the carts had typewritten labels from the company, “Kustom Computer Response, Rt. 1 Box 57A, Helotes, Texas 78023,” with the programmer identified as Harry M. Crouse. The carts came with names, such as ARRLDXTEST and CQDXTEST (a few days later, Roger told me that ARRL stood for Amateur Radio Relay League). The carts could be a subject of a future meeting. However, because of the pandemic, a few days after our meeting, indoor dining in Fresno was closed, and so, our next meeting is delayed until indoor dining comes back. That probably won’t be until some time in 2021. |
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December 2020 Meeting cancelled |
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2021 |
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All meetings through June 2021 are canceled |
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July 2021 After
a year and a half with only one meeting and the annual club lunch,
the Fresno Commodore User Group resumed regular in-person meetings
on |
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August 2021 By Robert Bernardo |
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September 2021 The Fresno Commodore User Group (FCUG) is getting back to almost normal. We still have to wear masks in some situations, but we are confident that the people who frequent our meeting place and other locations we are likely to visit are the type of people who have the good sense to get vaccinated, so our worries are few. |
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October 2021 Back in the day, the club held an annual picnic in October, at the home of a member who had a large tract of land and a beautiful home on the edge of the Fresno-Clovis metro area. This couple passed away in the early 2000’s, and we eventually settled on holding an annual lunch, which has a few well-defined guidelines: It’s held at a different restaurant from the one where we have our regular meeting. It’s held at a different restaurant each year. No formal business and no demonstrations are given, and discussion of computer-related matters is minimal. Family members are invited, and the club pays. This year we called a couple of places in advance, only to learn
that The DiCicco family emigrated to the Different family members branched out and opened other locations over the years, and it has been a Fresno-Clovis favorite for roughly 70 years. Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt and his brother Aaron, Dave Smith, and Dick Estel were in attendance, and all agreed that the food and service were excellent. Conversation ranged over a variety of topics. One was the closing of Rasputin Records (CDs, DVDs, etc.) in the old Tower Records building and the re-opening next door of the Mad Monk, with an even bigger inventory than Rasputin’s. Robert and Roger told of their project to film a demo to be shown at
the Commodore LA Super Show (CLASS) in November. “Bernardo
Productions,” set up in the University Square Hotel the previous
evening, had to deal with the usual glitches, keeping them up ‘til
just after The relative merits of Dish-TV, DirecTV, cable, and the increasing rates were thoroughly reviewed with some discussion of how to obtain discounts. There was a related financial topic, the scarcity and excessive cost of DVD recorders. Despite being full of pasta, calzone, pizza, and/or spaghetti, we managed to conclude the lunch with dessert – for some of us a modest piece of cheesecake, and for Aaron, a sinfully decadent “Chocolate Madness” – dark chocolate cake, dark chocolate frosting, and more. Read the DiCicco’s story here. At our November meeting we will have our usual program, plus observance of the club’s 40th anniversary. |
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November 2021 At
first it looked as if the attendees at our 40th Anniversary club
celebration would be the “usual suspects” – Robert Bernardo,
Roger Van Pelt, Dave Smith, and Dick Estel. As we were helping
Robert bring in equipment from his car, a man got out of the vehicle
parked next to Robert’s car and said, “Hello, Robert.” It was
Andrew Wiskow, from Riverside County, and his son Alvin. Andrew had
joined the club years ago and drove up from southern California a
few times, bringing little Alvin with him. Military service and his
subsequent civilian job prevented Andrew from visiting us for a long
time, but a schedule change allowed him to join the special
celebration. “Little” Alvin was now 20, about 6’ 3”, and
best of all, able to share driving duties. As we were setting up the equipment, we talked to a couple eating
next to our tables. They were familiar with the C64 and had used one
for record-keeping in their photo business back in the day. When the meeting got under way Dick reported that we had been
receiving donations from Interface Editor Lenard Roach every few
weeks, which the club greatly appreciated. Then the membership voted
to make our annual charity donation, $50 to St. Jude’s
Children’s Hospital in Memphis. Robert reported on the Commodore LA Super Show (CLASS) held November
6 and 7 in Burbank. Attendance was 27 people, slightly down from the
first CLASS in 2019. Among those attending was Mark Rifkin who
worked at Commodore Business Machines from 1988 to 1993, and David
Pleasance who worked at CBM UK from 1983 to 1994 and who video-conferenced
into CLASS. CLASS attendees were enthusiastic about continuing the event next
year. A major part of CLASS was funded from remaining CommVEx funds;
with those funds and CLASS 2021 ticket and raffle sales, there was a
$24 profit to be applied to the next show. With rent in the $1,000
range, paying for a 2022 event will be a challenge. CLASS used to be
in the spring, and CLASS 2022 will probably move back to spring with
a May date. Dave Smith brought a number of old newsletters printed out from the
Internet, most from Australia and most from 1981 (FCUG’s founding
year). One single issue was a half-inch thick; most were the more
typical ten or twelve pages. Dick brought the first issue of the
FCUG newsletter from November 1981. About two years ago he had
talked to the man who produced the first year’s newsletters. For the presentation segment of our meeting, Robert showed a few
minutes out of the Roger Van Pelt video on CAD-M, a Loadstar 64
program from 1986. The video was filmed for CLASS 2021, and
subsequently, it was put on YouTube. CAD-M was a sophisticated but
easy-to-use computer aided design program which ran adequately on
the C64 but runs much faster with acceleration from a SuperCPU or
Ultimate 64. Robert had the Ultimate 64 set up, and he described its functions to
Andrew and Alvin. He mentioned that it was out-of-stock at the
moment, due to parts shortages caused by the pandemic. Then Robert showed some hardware and much software that he bought
from Wayne and Sonia Aller at CLASS 2021. The Allers were university
professors who had a Studio City (Los Angeles) business, CompuLearn,
which taught kids about computers. With VIC-20’s and C64’s, they
taught children such as Colin Hanks, son of actor Tom Hanks; and
Ahmet and Moon Zappa, the kids of songwriter Frank Zappa. The hardware included a boxed Wico trackball, a Tech Sketch LP-10S
light pen, and a Chirpee voice recognition module. The software was
composed of several educational programs – Match Maker Spanish,
Batalla de Palabras, Hop Along Counting, Lion’s Workshop, Trains,
and In Search of the Most Amazing Thing – and the Chirpee voice
recognition software, Studio 64 music creation program, and the
Micro Illustrator program that went with the Tech Sketch light pen. The educational programs were saved for another meeting, and Robert
started off with the Chirpee module and its software running off the
club C128 and its CRT monitor. Out of the several programs on the
Chirpee disk, Robert ran the Balloon program in which the player had
to fly a balloon by speaking into the module, “Up” or
“Down.” Robert had some success with flying the balloon, but
when Andrew tried it, the microphone in the module did not respond
to his voice. Because much of the program was written in Basic,
Robert thought that with compilation or with acceleration, the
program would respond better to voice commands. Robert had brought chocolate cake for the 40th anniversary of the
club, and as the club members took turns at Chirpee, the cake was
passed out. It was totally devoured! Next up was a look at the Studio 64 music creation program running
off the C128. Not as sophisticated as the Deluxe Music Construction
Kit for the Amiga which was demoed in past meetings, Studio 64 also
let the user put musical notes on a staff for playback.
Interestingly, the notes were made of PETSCII characters and thus
appeared graphically rough in appearance. After a quick look at Studio 64, Robert connected the Tech Sketch
light pen to the C128 and ran its Micro Illustrator program. Robert
had connected the light pen to the wrong joystick port, and the
program was not responding correctly because of that. However,
before he could correct this and run the program again, Dave had
investigated why the restaurant was so empty. Where had everyone
gone in Panera Bread? He returned to the meeting and stated that
because of a lack of employees, management had decided to close the
indoor dining area at 2 and to keep the drive-through open. It was
almost 3 when we discovered this. Feeling guilty for going so long past closing time, the members
decided to stop the meeting right there. The equipment was hurriedly
disassembled, and Andrew and Alvin left for the long drive back to
southern California, saying that they would return for another
meeting. |
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December 2021 By
Robert Bernardo FCUG continued celebrating its 40th anniversary with its December
meeting, but only president Robert and v.p. Roger were there. In old business, Robert remarked that he still had to post his left-over photos from the Commodore Los Angeles Super Show 2021. In new business, it was time to hold FCUG elections. Robert motioned to keep the same 2021 officers for 2022. The motion was seconded and passed. For CLASS 2022, Robert said that there was $26.00 which was the
remainder from CLASS 2021. CLASS 2021 had started off with a $400+
amount to devote to the show. With only $26 this time, the show
would be hard-pressed to break even with only ticket sales and the
show raffle to cover a $1,000 Burbank VFW venue fee ($1,200 if the
venue decided to raise rates). Robert and Roger bounced around ideas
to raise money for CLASS. Sell items on eBay? Possibly. Raise CLASS
admission? No. Because CLASS 2022 was going to be in the spring and
the last show had been in November 2021, the show would have to be
organized relatively quickly. Who would be the CLASS presenters?
Podcaster Doug Compton from Then Robert and Roger proceeded to the presentations of the day. Robert showed off the new C128 commercial game, “Attack of the Petscii Robots,” the first commercial C128 program in decades. (Attack also sold in C64 and Plus/4 versions.) The Attack program disks (a 5 1/4” 1571 disk and a 3 1/2” 1581 disk) came in a very professional-looking box, along with a color manual and a C64 adapter for the use of a Super Nintendo joypad. The SN joypad would conveniently place several buttons in-hand which was necessary for easy gameplay. Without the joypad, control was left to keys scattered across the C128 keyboard. Attack wouldn’t load with JiffyDOS, and Robert turned JD off. Roger found that the graphical adventure game itself had sprites on a colorful, bit-mapped, graphical background; that’s on 40-column screen. At the same time, on the 80-column screen, a map would be shown of the game area. Unfortunately, Roger brought the wrong club CRT monitor and also had not brought an 80- column cable. The next meeting, he’d bring the correct items and a SN joypad, too. Then came the C64 games. Slip Stream was a 3- D shooter; you flew an angular spaceship, shooting the objects that appeared before you in space. It was hampered by a very slow loading time and somewhat monotonous music. Based on the novelette, the Briley Witch Chronicles was another graphical adventure game with good graphics. Like the above Attack of the Petscii Robots, it would take several hours to get through the game. Then there was Sonic the Hedgehog, a port from the classic Sega game. Authentic to the original game, Sonic was declared a milestone in C64 programming by those who 0thought that a port was impossible. However, to do its amazing scrolling background and gameplay, the game needed a Commodore RAM expander (1700, 1750, 1764, or emulated RAM expansion in the Ultimate 64 or Turbo Chameleon). And it took a long time to load as it put all that data into the RAM expander. This was version 1.0 (at the time of this writing, the improved 1.2 and cracked versions had been released). On another table, Robert had set up the Amiga 500 with v8 motherboard and a Vampire 500 v2 accelerator, which made the A500 hundreds of times faster than its original specification. First, Robert loaded up SysInfo, a little Amiga utility which calculated and displayed the speed, identified chip versions, and showed the amount of RAM in the system. The utility confirmed that the A500/V500 combo was one of the fastest classic Amiga computers available these days! Then Robert ran a full-screen, HDMI version of Doom. This notorious first-person shooter used lots of computer resources, but on the A500/V500 combo, it ran smoothly and without any problem. To further show the speed of the combo, Robert ran a MPEG video, “Gali the Alligator,” a bit of computer animation which was a funny spoof of a kids’ TV show. It, too, ran smoothly. However, due to funny “gore,” it was not meant to be shown to young children. Unfortunately, a child with her parents was passing near when the video was running and saw the animated puppets being slaughtered. The child was amused, as were her parents. Robert could only sheepishly say, “Sorry!” Finally, Robert got into what the A500/V500 combo could emulate. It had many emulators on its Compactflash drive, like C64 and two Macintosh emulators. Robert said that one of the Mac emulators, Fusion, had come with a folder full of apps, which worked for awhile but then deleted those apps (Self-destruct? Virus? Autodelete after trial run?). The apps were replaced by a video entitled, "Don't Copy that Floppy," filmed by the software industry. In the part-humorous, part-serious, early 90’s video, a rap song asked people to not copy disks! Both Robert and Roger laughed at the cheesy acting and the boring industry types in the video. |
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2022 January February March April May June |
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January 2022 By Robert Bernardo and Dick Estel Most of the regulars and a couple of our occasional attendees made up a group of five for the first meeting of 2022. These were Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt, Dick Estel, Randy Stoller, and Bruce Nieman. It was noted that Robert had been president for 25 years. Most small organizations like ours are held together by the efforts of one dedicated member, and we appreciate that Robert is filling this role. We had planned to hold the Commodore LA Super Show (CLASS) in mid-May, but the venue was not available, so the dates will be June 25 and 26 (a change from the dates we discussed at the previous meeting). The CLASS location is the Burbank VFW hall. More information is available on the event website, the Commodore Forum, and on Facebook at the Commodore Los Angeles Super Show – CLASS page. Robert had set up the Commodore Amiga 500 with Vampire 500 accelerator. Usually, our meetings were very 8-bit oriented, and member Bruce, who was a big Amiga fan, listened politely to that talk. However, with the emphasis on Amiga this time, Bruce’s interest shot up. As Robert spoke of how an Amiga 4000 was repaired at CLASS 2021, Bruce chimed in on how his Amiga 2000 needed repair, too. Randy jumped into the discussion by asking what was wrong with the A2000 with Bruce answering it was having hard drive problems. Robert said it could be cured by replacing the drive mechanism with a solid-state solution, the SCSI2SD board (SD card to SCSI connector on the A2000). Bruce also wanted certain programs found and restored. Robert and Randy said that .ADF (Amiga Disk File) archives were on the Internet and that .ADF’s could be run like a disk from a Gotek drive, essentially a unit which took USB sticks and ran the .ADF’s off the sticks. Bruce didn’t know about .ADF’s and Goteks; Robert said that he would bring his external Gotek for Bruce to try out at the next meeting. In fact, Bruce said that he would bring his A2000 to the next meeting… no easy task because of the computer’s bulk and weight. One game for which Bruce had been looking was found on Robert’s A500/V500. The game was part platformer, part exploration. Though Bruce played it on the Robert’s A500, he really wanted it back on his A2000. Robert and Randy assured him that the game could be found on the Internet as an .ADF or as a WHDLoad game. Bruce didn’t know what WHDLoad was, and Randy explained that they were formally disk-based Amiga games which had been converted to run off a hard drive. Then Robert showed off more of the capabilities of the A500/V500, the fastest classic Amiga you can get. In the desktop folder of Videos, he ran the MPEG-1 video of a Megan Trainor song. The computer ran the video with perfect sound sync, though there would be the slightest video “stuttering” at times. He hadn’t downloaded any MPEG-2 videos to try out, though he surmised that the computer would have a harder time at running them smoothly due to their larger file size and higher resolution. To finish off the meeting, Robert ran Lightwave v3 on the Amiga.
Lightwave was the 3-D rendering program used to create scenes for
movies and TV shows, such as |
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February 2022 By
Robert Bernardo Traveling from
Stockton two hours away, Robert arrived first to the meeting place.
He was able to start setting up the equipment, and soon member Dave
joined him, followed by Roger. They ordered lunch, and near the end
of it, Robert commenced the meeting. Having no old business to
discuss, Robert went into new business. First new business… the
preparations for the June 25-26 Commodore Los Angeles Super Show.
Robert had made the down payment for the venue, the Burbank VFW
hall. Roger agreed that his CLASS video presentation, C64 Giga-CAD
objects being converted to Blender, would be filmed in April or May. Second, Robert said he had applied for exhibit tables at the April 2
City of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) festival at
the Columbia Memorial Space Center in Downey, California. He was
still waiting approval for one or two tables which would show off an
Ultimate 64, an Amiga 500 with Vampire 500 accelerator, and possibly
more. Also in new business, Robert reported that a new,
long-distance member had joined the club, and he would need a New
Member Disk. A brief look at the New Member Disk directory showed
that the opening text file had to be revised (the late 1990’s text
file said that a free C64 would be given to new members!) and that
certain utility programs (which were already on the 1541 Test/Demo
disk) could be replaced with something else, like a fun game. Robert
made a motion to update the disk, and the members approved the
motion unanimously. Robert would take the disk and modify it Robert
said that he had ordered the Retro-Printer Module from England.
Consisting of a “hat” to be attached to a Raspberry Pi 4b
computer, the RPM would let the user use a modern USB printer with
Commodore computers. The module itself cost over $115! Roger was
very interested in having new printers for Commodores. Dave talked
about the best Epson printers which used individual tanks of ink,
thus cutting down the cost of buying all-color-in-one ink
cartridges. Dave said the best deal on Epson printers was through
Costco. Using the laptop, Robert went to Costco.com and found some
likely Epsons to purchase. Before
going to the hardware/software presentations, Robert showed a few
minutes of the "FX-Grabs 3" Tape (Video Toaster "Kiki
Effects" raw footage studio shoot)” which was on YouTube. In
the early 1990’s, NewTek’s Video Toaster was the premiere,
low-cost, NTSC video switcher for the Amiga 2000/3000/4000. Built
into the Video Toaster were special effects that could be overlaid
onto broadcast video. The effects included Kiki Wipes (and more),
named for actress and Newtek spokesperson, Kiki Stockhammer. In the
video, Kiki was directed to go through various motions in front of a
whitish background. Robert
only showed about 4 minutes of the 30-minute video; as Kiki went
through her silhouetted motions in front of the camera, it was too
provocative to keep showing, especially since restaurant goers were
passing by! Robert said that if the members wanted to finish seeing
the rest of the video, they could go to this
link. There was also an 8-minute video of Jack Tramiel, head of
Commodore Business Machines, filmed in 1983, but Robert decided to
show that at a future meeting. Robert showed
the new Unijoysticle 2+ and a little bit of its accompanying
video. The Unijoysticle 2+ was an adapter that connected to the
computer joystick ports and would let the user wirelessly use
Bluetooth controllers, joysticks, and mice. It worked with Commodore
and Amigas (adapters may be needed, depending on the computer).
Robert had brought two Bluetooth NES-style joypads, but he forgot to
charge them up, and so, the demonstration with the Unijoysticle 2+
was put on hold until the next meeting. Next, Robert
showed off the Muppet Learning Keys, a very large tablet built by
Koala Technologies, the same company famous for the Koalapad drawing
tablet. Muppet Learning Keys came with a box but with no
instructions nor floppy disk for the C64. Fortunately, Robert had
downloaded the .D64 of the Muppet Diskovery Disk from the Internet,
though unfortunately he had not found the instructions on the Net.
He connected the MLK to the Ultimate 64 and ran the likely LOAD file
from the disk. Though the U64 had a built-in SD drive (i.e., no
mechanical drive to slow a LOAD), the .D64 still took a long time to
load, and Robert thought this would test kids’ patience (young
children were the audience for MLK). With a lot of poking at the MLK
keys, Robert and Roger discovered that the cursor keys and the
RETURN worked but couldn’t get the other tablet keys to do
anything. Some animal images appeared on the screen, but without the
instructions, Robert and Roger didn’t know what to do with them.
Conclusion – some success with MLK but more had to be learned.
(Weeks later on the Commodore 64/128 forum of Facebook, Robert was
finally able to find a user who uploaded the MLK instructions to
him.) Last played at
the January meeting, the C128 version of Attack of the PETSCII
Robots returned, but this time the correct 40/80-column monitor was
available. Now the members could see the game in 40 columns, and
with the push of a switch, in 80 columns, too! It was a revelation;
not only was there a 40-column opening screen to the game, but there
was also an 80-column opening screen. The members saw the game map
on the 80-column screen; in fact, they could navigate the game by
going through the map and then switch to 40 columns to see the game
in close-up detail. Very sophisticated! On the 40-column screen, the
robots looked like the Daleks from Dr. Who. There was a
little bit of confusion on how to activate the Super Nintendo
gamepad to be used with the game, but Robert and Roger figured it
out by a careful reading of the opening menu. With the SNES gamepad
connected to the C128 user port via an adapter, the gameplay was
excellent and very convenient. No more poking at various keys on the
C128… Just use the buttons on the gamepad. To end the
meeting, the members looked at some C64 games – the new games,
Retaliate, Berzerk (PAL), and Santa Force; and the classic games –
Pooyan, Katakis, and Boom. Retaliate gave the player no weapons at
the start, Santa Force had Santa in his sleigh shooting at enemies
in the sky, and Berzerk (PAL) had lots of speech but no background
scrolling. Pooyan was cute with the player having to shoot balloons;
Katakis had good music, interesting enemies, and a nice background;
and Boom, which was a Doom clone, failed to load. |
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March 2022 By Robert Bernardo and Dick Estel |
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April 2022 On a cool Sunday morning, five faithful FCUG members gathered at the Panera Bread restaurant. On hand were Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt, Dave Smith, Bruce Nieman, and Dick Estel. Dick brought in a Canon EOS 10D camera body he wanted to sell, having recently acquired a new Canon EOS Rebel T7. The old lenses fit the new camera, so Dick kept them, and gave Dave a good price on a venerable 10D. This triggered a discussion of cameras, lenses, and prices, which continued over lunch. As usual, our computer set-ups attracted the attention of a few other patrons. One told us that a C64 was his first computer, and he was eager to tell his 14-year old daughter about the sighting. A teenage boy was especially interested, and we gave him a phone number and our website for further exploration. Moving to official business, Robert and Roger were planning a video session in which Roger will record a presentation on converting C64 Giga-CAD objects to Blender, the presentation to be shown at the Commodore LA Super Show (CLASS) in Burbank in June. More information is available here. Showing
us some of his photos and video, Robert reported on his attendance
at the April 2 City of STEM festival in Downey. He had set up three
systems – a SX-64, an Amiga 1200, and an Ultimate 64. Murphy’s
Law reared its ugly head about three hours into the day when the
SX64 stopped working. The Amiga lasted another three and a half
hours and also gave up the ghost. Happily, the Ultimate worked
perfectly all day. On
Robert’s to-do list for future such events – bring back-up
computers! Robert estimated attendance at about 3,000, dozens of whom stopped
by his tables to see and play with the old and new classics, like
Oregon Trail, Donkey Kong, Ms. PacMan, Super Mario Bros., Sonic the
Hedgehog, Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the
Jedi. Roger gave Bruce a GO-64! Interface cartridge for the Amiga computer. He had found it at a Clovis antique store and had bought it for $10. The cartridge would connect to the external disk drive port of an Amiga computer and then with a serial cable, you would connect a Commodore 1541/1571/1581 disk drive to the Amiga. Then you would run the GO-64! disk which would start a C64 emulator on the Amiga. With the emulator running, you could then load disk programs from the above drives into the emulator and run them. Robert said that he had the same interface and would look for the disk(s) and instructions for Bruce.
Moving on to computer games, Robert loaded Cloneimals, the first and
possibly only 80-column scrolling game for the C128. Robert bought
the program in 2008, but developer John Brown had provided him with
a new and improved version (better scrolling and collision
detection). The program used software-created sprites (not hardware
sprites) to create the shooter and targets. Robert had downloaded an archive of about 500 Commodore 128 text
adventure games. He
showed the first two to us. The
first one was Ten Little Indians.
At the start of the game, you find yourself in a railway
carriage and only have a limited number of responses before the
train crashes. Roger
tried the game twice, but no matter what text command he used, the
game didn’t understand. The
second was the 7 Doctors, which seemed based on Dr. Who.
This text adventure was more sophisticated and understood
more commands than Ten Little Indians.
You start the game by being in the phone booth (Tardis), and
Roger figured that you have to find your way out of it to continue
the adventure. Through much
trial-and-error, Roger finally used the command, “pull lever,”
and the door to the booth opened. That’s
how far we got into the game before going on to the next program. Cloneimals
and 500 C128 text adventures were not the only surprises at the
meeting. Robert showed off the new Flight Simulator II XL, a
bug-fixed version of the original 1984 program.The XL version was
just a couple of weeks old. Both Robert and Roger took turns trying
to fly the plane off the runway, but they didn’t know where the
throttle was to accelerate. They
both crashed into the water near the runway.
They would have to study of the FSII flight manual in order
to pilot successfully. Robert didn’t know how the XL version
compared with the SuperCPU version of FSII.
Roger mentioned that his brother would be very interested in
this program since he flew model airplanes. Robert had some games that would not load, but he finally loaded
Sever the Wicked, a game in which you only had 24 seconds to shoot
as many skull sprites on the screen, and there were dozens of them
to shoot. Roger was able to
get to 76 shot in 24 seconds. Then Robert loaded a game that FCUG newsletter editor Lenard Roach
had been developing, the Bible Trivia Game.
Lenard said that it was a Wheel of Fortune-type game, but
Robert and Roger thought it was more a multiple-choice type of game.
You were presented with a question and had to pick answer A,
B, or C. If you picked the
correct answer, you had some music and a flashing screen.
If you picked the wrong answer, you got a strange-sounding
beep. Robert thought the
program needed some color graphics to break up the boring text, and
both Robert and Roger thought the rapidly-flashing screen was too
irritating. However, there was
a flaw which Robert and Roger observed and about which Lenard had
warned. Sometimes, after the
correct answer was picked, the game would break instead of playing
music – a Data Overflow error. The
guys examined the offending BASIC line but could not see anything
wrong with it. They examined
the lines around the offending line. Still
nothing. Though Robert was not
a programmer with good debugging skills, he thought that running the
program through the Blitz 64 compiler would reveal all the bad BASIC
lines. (In the compiling
process, Blitz 64 lists all the bad lines and then stops the
compilation of the program.) With
all the bad lines revealed, then Robert could try to debug them or
give those lines over to somebody else on-line to debug. Speaking of Wheel of Fortune, Robert ran the classic program in
hopes that the phrases could be modified for Bible Trivia.
Except for the opening menu, he found nothing which gave
access to the phrases already built into the program.
He even ran a program which purported to be an editor for the
Wheel of Fortune. That
program came with no instructions on how to save any new phrase
within WoF. Just in case Blitz 64 wasn’t good enough in making a BASIC program
run faster, Robert showed off some more compilers, Laser Basic
Compiler, Basic Boss Compiler, and Diablo Compiler v3.2.
The first two ran, but the Diablo refused to run.
Roger joked that it would have been contradictory to have
Bible Trivia compiled with Diablo (the devil!). As at the March meeting, Robert ended the April meeting by showing
the latest C64 nuvies – three from gaming shows, HomeCon 57,
HomeCon 68, and CVGL 16; one of the Yesterchips’ Museum, and one
which was a commercial for Forum64, the German on-line discussion
forum for Commodore. |
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May 2022 The
Fresno Commodore User Group’s May 2022 meeting brought together the
“usual suspects” – Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt, Dave Smith,
Bruce Nieman, and Dick Estel. The big event of the day was to be a group photo, to update the
website front page. Alas, it was not to be. Dick had a new camera, and
despite a lot of research on You Tube, had not fully mastered some of
the settings. Using the self-timer, Dick was not able to get fully in
the frame before the shutter went off, and he was just a blur in all
the photos. A couple of weeks later he found that the self-timer was
set for eight seconds, not the ten he assumed, and also that he could
select a 14- second delay. A re-take will surely produce better
results. Also in the realm of photography, Robert and Roger were going to
re-activate Bernardo Studios, to film a presentation for the Commodore
LA Super Show (CLASS) coming up in June. Their efforts produced much
better success. Robert reported on the Vintage Computer Festival East in New Jersey.
Speakers included a dozen former CBM engineers, like Bil Herd and Dave
Haynie. Though Robert had arrived on the Thursday before the
festival’s start on Friday, by the next day he was suffering from
severe jet lag. However, he filmed about 13 hours of
Commodore/Amiga-related video at the festival, and when he returned to
California, he posted all of video to YouTube. He considered that the greatest festival moment was when the dozen CBM
engineers gathered on-stage and spoke for 2 ˝ hours; when would such
a gathering happen like that again?! Robert also met a few fellow
Californians who had traveled all the way to the festival, too,
including Erik Klein, organizer of the Vintage Computer Festival West
in Mountain View. VCF West was going to be on a different date this
year, and that will allow Robert to attend and have an exhibit table
there. Robert showed a Raspberry Pi 4b which will be connected to the
Retro-Printer Module that allows the user to connect modern USB
printers to any Commodore. However, the equipment had not been
assembled nor configured yet. In fact, Robert had not yet bought the
modern printer; he had been eying the Epson EcoTank 3850 printer from
Costco.com. At the end of the club meeting, Robert and Roger tried out three new
VIC-20 games: Bloody Xmas, Mystic Sword, and Jovian Moon Lander. In
Robert’s opinion, the best of the bunch was Jovian Moon Lander,
because it had the characteristics of previous Moon Lander games
(overcoming gravity, using retro-rocket fire) and combining those
characteristics with rescuing people and having to land on various
moonscapes. |
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June 2022 June 2022 By
Robert Bernardo Robert arrived at the Panera Bread meeting place first, followed by
David and then Roger. Setting up the equipment seemed to take longer
than usual, probably due to an abundance of small talk. In old business, Robert reminded that the Commodore Los Angeles
Super Show was to happen in two weeks (the June 25-26 weekend). He
still had to edit the CLASS commercial and Roger’s GigaCAD-to-Blender
video presentation; he would do the former on Monday and the latter
on Tuesday. Talk wandered to Robert’s imminent purchase of a new
Epson EcoTank 3850 printer from Costco.com. David assured him that
the Epson would be a very wise purchase, remarking that the ink in
that printer would not be used up for a long, long time. In a hardware presentation, David showed off his recently-received
A500 Mini, a machine he had ordered many months ago on Amazon.com.
Robert’s trustworthy Dell LCD monitor with its many video inputs
was not working; in fact, the members discovered that its inner
glass panel had shattered. Without a HDMI monitor, David couldn’t
power up the A500 Mini and demonstrate what it could do. However,
Roger and Robert were still very impressed. The Mini was solidly
built. Though called an A500, it was more like an Amiga 1200,
because A1200 applications could work on the machine. It came with
25 built-in games, had 2 USB ports, a USB-C power port, and the
requisite HDMI video port. Its keys and disk slot were there as
decoration, i.e., they were non-functional. It could be used with an
external keyboard and other USB controllers, not just with the USB
joystick and mouse that came with it. It could access a USB stick so
that more disk images and files could be loaded and run. The A500 Mini was still listed on Amazon.com as being available,
whereas its sister machines, the 64 Mini and the 64 Maxi were
unavailable, and when found on eBay, were being priced at a much
higher price than when they were originally offered. In
regards to the Epson printer mentioned above, Robert had printed out
the .PDF manual of the Retro-Printer Module. The print-out was very
thick! Robert still had not assembled the RPM with a Raspberry Pi
4b, and time was running out before it was supposed to be ready by
CLASS time. After reading the manual, Robert discovered that he
should have bought the pre-configured microSD printer driver
configuration card that was offered for sale. He now had to download
an image of the printer driver configuration and get it onto his own
card. However, he didn’t have the means to get that image onto the
card. He hoped that friend Larry Anderson, host of Portcommodore.com/class,
could help him image the card. With the Dell LCD monitor broken, the software presentations had to
go through the club’s CRT monitor. First, Roger ran the CAD-M
program on the club C128 in C64 mode. He loaded up the CLASS logo he
had created. Very nice! In solid fill, the logo had been colored
nicely, and the lettering was well-formed. He tried to rotate the
logo, even though the computer was in 1 megahertz C64 mode. After
the members waited several seconds, the logo would finally move.
Later, they tried the logo on the Ultimate 64 and its 48 MHz.
acceleration. (See below) Then they tried the new game, Amaurote 128, which had been converted
from the Spectrum computer. Though the opening screen loaded, they
could not get the game to run, neither in 80-column mode nor in
40-column mode. They successfully ran Amaurote 64 which used the
C64’s high-res screen. It was very interesting to control the
four-legged walking machine as it walked on the isometric pathways,
but other than that, the members couldn’t figure out the object of
the game, how to release a bomb, and the symbols at the bottom of
the screen. Other C64 apps that were presented: Junior
Pacman, Ms. Pacman (both
games attracting the attention of others in the restaurant), the new
Empire Strikes Back, Street Fighter 2 demo, Italian Star Trek, We
Are Stardust, Tasered in the Crotch, and Playpiano. The last seemed
to be a program for playing music live, i.e., there was no way to
save any composition. Both Roger and Robert agreed that the program
would be easier to use with the Incredible Musical Keyboard, a piano
keyboard which laid on top of the C64’s keys. Finally, Robert transferred the CLASS logo (mentioned above) from
Roger’s floppy disk to the Ultimate 64 SD card. Then he ran CAD-M
on the U64 and loaded up the logo. Even with the U64’s 48 MHz.
speed, the logo rotated very slowly, though nominally better than
the 1 MHz. original speed of a C64. Why so slow? It was a matter of
object complexity. Last year Roger drew the object C= on CAD-M. That
rotated speedily, even in solid fill. However, drawing CLASS was
much more complicated. Roger estimated that he had built the CLASS
object with 100 polygons, far more than the C= object. The U64 was
speedy but not speedy enough to overcome the complexity of drawing
all those polygons and rotating them. Roger said that the only way
to get more speed was to run CAD-M in VICE on a PC/Mac. |
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July
2022 Fortunately, the air conditioning inside the Panera Bread restaurant
was working beyond what was needed - probably about 70 degrees.
Wearing his usual summer t-shirt, Dick had emerged shivering from the
May meeting and brought along a lightweight, long-sleeve shirt which
he wore throughout the July meeting. Robert, Roger, Dave and Bruce put
up with the extreme cool or perhaps even enjoyed it. The discussion just before and during lunch was warm but polite, as it
always is no matter the outside conditions. Complaints were filed
regarding stuff that used to be easy to find in stores but have now
disappeared – a favorite brand of bottled water, Hi Ho crackers,
Apple Time apple butter (nice and thick, not runny like what’s
available now), and other favorites. The slow fading away of Sears was also lamented, and particularly
their iconic Diehard batteries and Craftsman tools. Both are still
available from other sellers, but the automatic go-to locations are
gone. Sears does have two locations in our area, known as Sears Home
Services, offering only appliance repair. It was noted that Pep Boys
no longer does retail sales and is a service only company. What has all this to do with Commodore computers? It just shows that
we are Renaissance people with wide-ranging interests. Getting down to business, Robert reported on the Commodore LA Super
Show (CLASS). It was a success for those who attended, but there was a
financial loss. Attendance in 2019 was 36; in 2021 26, and in 2022 16.
It was speculated that skipping a year and other issues related to the
pandemic reduced attendance. However, Robert received several
donations after the show to help offset the loss, and the show will be
back in 2023, hopefully in May. Robert will be in Europe much of October, followed by attendance at
AmiWest, conflicting with the normal date of our annual Club Dinner
(formerly picnic). This event will now be held on October 30, 2022. Dave brought a sample revision of the flyer that FCUG created years
ago to hand out at shows and to interested persons. The original flyer
was badly out of date, and Dave did a great job making it fit our
current situation. We discussed possible ways to get out the word on
the existence of our club. Some ideas included Vintage Days at Fresno
State University and farmers’ markets, With the business meeting concluded we watched the presentation
produced by Bernardo Studios for CLASS 2022, featuring Roger
demonstrating and explaining the conversion of objects created in
Gig-CAD to Blender. Both the star and producer did an excellent job. As usual, our presence attracted the attention of a few other patrons.
This time we talked with a gentleman who was very familiar with Atari
products. His 12-year old nephew Michael was especially curious about
our machines and was invited to participate in the demo of Dave’s
A500 Mini. The Mini came
with 25 built-in games and many more can be downloaded. Michael played
these unfamiliar games almost by instinct and also said he was a Super
Mario fan. Mario and Luigi appear to be immortal and are enjoyed by Dick’s great grandsons, age 7 and 9, and obviously by many other kids who are much younger than Michael. Many of their parents are probably also younger than the Super Mario game. For
the rest of the meeting, Roger and Robert pulled up game after game to
entertain Michael, Roger loading up games from his SD2IEC onto the
club C128, which was in C64 mode, and Robert showing the latest games
off his Ultimate 64, games like Zoomies, Gold Quest 6 Extended
Version, Rowman, Poing, Space Chase, Ball-n-Chain, and Minijump.
When Michael was through with all of those, Robert even brought
an Atari 2600 gaming console that was given to him by Duncan
MacDougall of The Other Group of Amigoids in San Jose.
The Atari 2600 came with a few game cartridges, and Michael
played each of them. Michael promised to come to the next FCUG meeting, and we wondered if
he would show up again. He
was very much a shot in the club’s arm with all his youthful
enthusiasm. (PS:
Michael became a member at the next meeting.) |
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August 2022 By
Robert Bernardo & Dick Estel Michael joins a short line-up of youth members, including one who ran
a software sales business as a teen and continued this work into
adulthood, and another who went on to design video games. Who knows
what the future holds for Michael? Robert met others he had not seen in some time, like Amiga engineer
Dale Luck, Ricardo Quesada who builds the wireless Unijoysticle and
had attended the Commodore Vegas Expo, Gabriele Gorla of GGLabs whose
company builds Commodore and Amiga add-on’s, and Mike Hill who has
developed PETpix and other devices.
Robert had good conversations with all of them, including
Leonard. It was like a
reunion! Member Bruce commented that he was having trouble running/displaying
games on his newly-updated Amiga 2000, the computer which had been
updated to OS 3.1, had been given more memory, and had been given a
second floppy drive by Duncan MacDougall.
Robert told Bruce to bring the A2000 to the next meeting so
that its problem could be examined. For the end of the meeting and to quell Michael C.’s insatiable
desire for gaming, on the Ultimate 64 Robert presented some classic
and some of the latest C64 games, like Goshawk, Topsy Turvy, Onslaught
2064, Something Epic, Mutetus, Little Nippers, Turrican I and II,
Sonic the Hedgehog, Cliffhanger, and Totoro 64.
He even showed the demo – Comaland. Michael complained that the eBay joypads that Robert was using were not responding correctly, and Robert confirmed that there was a delay or sometimes no response from them when used on the Ultimate 64. Perhaps the joypads were best used on a regular C64. Robert reminded himself to bring some regular joysticks for use on the U64. |
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September 2022 By Robert Bernardo Members Robert, Roger, David, Bruce, and Michael attended the
September meeting. As usual, the first part of the meeting was devoted
to setting up the equipment, the club C128 system and Robert’s
Ultimate 64. As usual, then the members ordered their lunch and had
their small talk while eating the food. All during lunch, the new
multi-color picture, Kaos, was displayed on the Ultimate 64’s Dell
monitor. Michael was eager to get on with the presentations, but first Robert
had to go through old and new business. In old business, he reminded
the members that the Amiwest Show was coming to Sacramento on Oct.
20-23. In new business, he would be leaving on a 4-week trip to
Europe, visiting Commodore/Amiga clubs, computer museums, and even a
show – the Netherlands Commodore Show. When he returned, he would
almost immediately go to the Amiwest Show in order to film the
presentations. Because of the trip and Amiwest, the club “picnic”
dinner was moved to October 30, the fourth Sunday of the month instead
of the usual third of the month gathering. In honor of Queen Elizabeth’s passing, the first software
presentations had a royal emphasis. There were the classic C64 games,
Flunky and Spitting Image (both with Queen Elizabeth II in them), and
other royal games, Split Personalities, Di’s Baby, and Henry’s
House. Michael had problems with the eBay gamepads used on the U64;
the gamepads were not responding correctly. Robert verified this and
said that new, better gamepads or joysticks would have to be bought. For the C128, Robert and Roger tried to run Quest for Lubok, a new
text adventure. Unfortunately, the game kept crashing. No matter what
they did, whether the C128 was in 40-column or 80-column mode, the
game would hang in loading its very large data file. They did not try
out the C64 version of the adventure. Instead of using the Amiga 600, the members decided to investigate why
Bruce’s Amiga 2000 was not running certain WHDload games. His A2000
had been upgraded recently by Duncan MacDougall of Santa Clara, and
Duncan had put a full suite of games on the computer’s hard drive.
Bruce said that only certain games would be displayed through his CRT
monitor. Bruce went to his car, pulled out the A2000, and placed the heavy
machine on the table where the U64 had been. Then Robert connected the
Dell multi-scan LCD monitor to the A2000. Robert had no problem
running games through the Dell. Robert showed that he was using a
buffered RGB-to-VGA cable to go from the Amiga to the monitor. Bruce
had been using a VGA cable to go from his Amiga’s hi-res video card
to his monitor, and therein was the problem. Most games couldn't be
displayed in hi-res but only in their normal lower resolution. Bruce
would have to buy a multi-scan monitor and a RGB-to-VGA cable or
adapter so that he could display the games correctly. |
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October 2022 By Robert Bernardo and Dick Estel The Fresno Commodore User Group will be eternally grateful to our
late friend Sandy Dippollet and his wife. Not long after Once Sandy and Ingrid passed away, we held a couple of lesser
quality picnics at the home of another member, but we eventually
settled on having an annual lunch in place of the October meeting. Of course, we get together every month for lunch, since our meetings
are held at a Panera Bread Restaurant. But one of the rules for the
October event is that we go to a DIFFERENT restaurant. The other
rules are: No formal business and no demonstrations are given. Family members
are invited. The club pays. This year’s event was held at El Rodeo Mexican Restaurant in Attending were Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt and his brother
Aaron, Dave Smith, Bruce Nieman, and Dick Estel. All were satisfied
with the food and service. Conversation ranged over a variety of topics, most notably
Robert’s recent visit to We’re not sure how long we’ve been having this annual picnic,
but my older grandson attended the first ones when he was about six,
which was more than 30 years ago. With the club celebrating 41 years
in November, we’ve been holding his event for 3/4 of the club’s
life. I’m sure |
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November 2022 Thankful
for each other and that the club and Commodore computers have
continued to live more than two decades into the 21st century,
Robert, Roger, Dave, Dick, Bruce, and a guest, Roger’s brother
Aaron, were at November’s meeting. Young Michael arrived late but
was overflowing with enthusiasm. There were some interesting topics during our November pre-lunch
discussion. We definitely discussed the availability of pizza with
peanut butter and speculated on whether or not it included tomato
sauce. Somehow, we got onto the subject of explorers, how cats
accompanied them on their ships, and how cat litter was invented in
1947. Before 1947, who
knows what methods were used for cats going to the bathroom? All the
more reason to stay out of cat sandboxes in those days! On Monday, Robert will be heading to Washington with several pieces
of equipment to leave for Ray Carlsen to repair. Ray is cutting back
on his repair activities but will take care of loyal, long-term
customers, like Robert. After dropping off the equipment, Robert
will visit the Seattle
Commodore Computer Club. Robert has a Commodore PC20-III DOS
machine that is not working. Ray cannot work on this product, but a
member of the Seattle club has the identical machine, and Robert is
hoping he will be able to repair it. Robert heard from Stephen Jones of the Living Computer Museum in
Seattle. Stephen offered to host the 2023 Pacific Commodore Expo NW
(PaCommEx) at the “Interim Computer Museum” in the Old Rainier
Brewery, a landmark building which had been transformed into
business offices and into an event venue. Robert learned that he will have to wait ‘til early December to
learn if we can hold the 2023 Commodore Los Angeles Super Show at
the Burbank VFW hall, and what the cost will be. He had received a
recent donation that reduced the 2022 show deficit to $171. In
addition, the club voted to donate $50 which would reduce the
deficit to $121. We make an annual charitable donation each November, this year the
club voting to donate $50 to the Central California Food Bank
(Fresno). This agency is able to turn a dollar donation into about
eight dollars worth of food which is badly needed this year. Robert had visited Europe in October, and he passed around British
newspapers that mourned the death of Queen Elizabeth II and praised
ascendance of King Charles III.
Our demonstrations got under way with Robert presenting a
slide show of equipment at the National Museum of Computing in
Bletchley Park, England. We saw familiar Commodore machines as well
as products made and sold only in Great Britain. He presented a new hardware item, the Orange Cartridge, which was
plugged into the expansion port of the club C128.
The cartridge had what it called “Super-REU” mode, a mode
that gave it 16 megs of RAM. It
also had a movie player installed.
Unfortunately, Robert did not bring a microSD card with the
particular movie files, so the movie player could not be
demonstrated. At the
next meeting, Robert promised to bring the required items. The big demonstration of the meeting was TheC64 (Maxi).
Due to copyright concerns, this new computer could not be
called a Commodore, though it looked almost exactly like a brown,
full-sized Commodore 64 breadbox. The computer was really Linux
computer board emulating the C64 under VICE 2.4.
Roger and Robert compared its case with that of a real, brown
C64. The badge now said TheC64.
The C= key was now labeled TheC64.
TheC64 didn’t have the traditional ports – user,
cassette, RF, serial, expansion, a/v, coaxial power in, nor 9-pin
sub-D’s for joysticks. It
did have 4 USB ports, one momentary power switch, HDMI out, and
microUSB-in for a 5V USB power adapter.
At the computer’s rear edge, it sat a millimeter or two
higher than the original brown C64.
The keys had almost the same feel as the original C64. Several months earlier, FCUG member David had given a presentation
on TheC64 Maxi, but this presentation was meant to be more thorough.
Robert’s Dell U2410 monitor could be forced into 4:3 mode, and so,
when TheC64 screen was displayed, it had widescreen mode for its
“game carousel” but 4:3 mode for the games were played.
TheC64 Maxi ordinarily would power up in its game carousel
mode where the games were graphically represented with a short
description, and the games would be chosen by moving the included
Competition Pro-style USB joystick either left or right and then by
pushing the joystick button to select.
However, in the Tool part of the Maxi (chosen by pushing the
fourth accessory button on the joystick, moving the joystick to the
Tool graphic, and pushing the joystick button), you could set
whether you wanted the game carousel screen or the BASIC screen at
start-up, set PAL or NTSC, set C64 or VIC-20 mode, and adjust other
settings. Robert told the story of how he bought TheC64 from the Menkind store
in Crawley, England, after seeing it at the Menkind store in
Brighton, England. Knowing
that it was unavailable on Amazon.com, he had this last chance to
buy it directly for 129 pounds. The
rest of the meeting was devoted to playing several of the 64 games
built into the machine. Michael
eagerly played them, and Robert and Roger tried out the one VIC-20
game, a text adventure, that came with the computer. |
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December 2022 By Robert Bernardo |
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This page is sponsored by the Fresno Commodore User Group |
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