FCUG Meeting Reports Page 3

   

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, 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.

  

Latest Meeting Report     Older Meeting Reports          Commodore Links

2010 - 2016 are on Page 1          2017 - 2022 are on Page 2          2023 Reports

    

Latest Meeting Report

February: Coming soon

Other 2023 reports

   

Older Meeting Reports

Below this point, reports are in chronological order, oldest first

  

2023

January     February     March     April     May     June

July     August     September     October     November     December

  

January 2023

By Robert Bernardo and Dick Estel

The third Sunday of the year was cold, with dark, cloudy skies, and rain expected any time. This was on the heels of weeks of record rain that brought deadly flooding to California. However, it was warm and welcoming inside the Panera Bread restaurant at Shaw and Marty in Fresno, as members of the Fresno Commodore User Group gathered for lunch, conversation, and computer stuff. On hand were Robert Bernardo, Roger Van Pelt, Bruce Nieman, Dick Estel and Michael Calkin.

Pre-meeting conversation during lunch touched on the variety of drones now available and enhanced movie experiences in theatres, such as 3-D, ScreenX, 4DX, and even Sensurround, the much older technology of theater seats that shook during the 1974 Charlton Heston disaster epic, “Earthquake.”

Plans are pretty well set for the 2023 edition of the Commodore L.A. Super Show (CLASS) in April. A generous donation from Lenard Roach covered the last $121 of the 2022 deficit, as well as providing $20 toward 2023 rental costs. The show will feature a class on using BASIC 7.0/7.8 to create a simple C128 game, and a possible Zoom visit from the owner of the Commodore name, based in Italy .

Also in April, Robert will show various vintage computers at the Los Angeles Maker Faire at the Los Angeles Historic Park.  He thinks there will be 3 or 4 computer systems at the Classic Los Angeles Computers exhibit – an Ultimate 64 or TheC64, an Amiga 600, and an Atari 800XL and/or Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.

Robert is looking forward to receiving a Mega65 from Trenz Electronics in Germany. This update of the almost legendary C65 (fewer than 200 prototypes were produced) comes in at $830, including Euro conversion, shipping, and the wire transfer fee (no other payment options were offered).

Robert let us know that the jillions of things available on the Internet now include an archive of Radio Shack catalogs from 1939 to 2011 when this iconic chain slowly faded out of existence.

Our attention next turned to a demonstration of TheC64 (none dare call it a Commodore), with the newly acquired C64 Enhancer flash drive containing over 800 C64 games and over 100 VIC-20 games. Another flash drive from Retro8BitShop offered the top 100 games. Member Michael got on TheC64, bouncing from game to game without ever really concentrating on one.

He had that same attitude when Robert brought out the Amiga 600 with its Arcade Game Selector II, a menu system that showed a thumbnail picture of each game screen on the Amiga’s hard drive. With the AGS II and hundreds of games loaded on the hard drive, it was easy for him to select one to play… much too easy because he looked from thumbnail to thumbnail without really deciding on one. Robert finally picked one for him, ML Tank, an Amiga version of the classic, wire-frame Tank game. Even on the A600’s unaccelerated 7.14 MHz speed, the game ran very quickly, the tanks zooming around the landscape on the screen. Michael became engrossed in the game for... a few minutes.

Next, Roger’s venerable VIC-20 was powered up, running the TRIANGULAR microOS. This upgrade required use of a RAM expander. Another variation of the TRIANGULAR microOS for the C128 was also presented.  As old-time GEOS users, everybody appreciated the effort done to make TRIANGULAR easy to use, and though it came with a few built-in applications, was it really necessary to boot up a graphical user interface in order to use a Commodore? Michael played with the settings of the OS and changed the colors and screen pattern.

Instead of using a classic ham radio, Roger loaded up a ham radio program on his laptop PC that accessed weather stations in Germany and the Netherlands. Incoming data was then fed through a Kantronics device to translate it into plain text on the club’s Commodore 128 (in C64 mode). This was a fairly specialized version of “plain text,” much of it consisting of radio shorthand comprehensible only to Roger. Later, Roger tuned into stations in the United States and found one where the user was speaking mostly in normal English. Robert urged Roger to have this as a filmed presentation for CLASS 2023.

 

February 2023

See above

 

March 2023

Meeting date: March 19

  

April 2023

Meeting date: April 23 - Note date change

  

May 2023

Meeting date: May 21

  

June 2023

Meeting date: June 18

 

July 2023

Meeting date: July 16

  

August 2023

Meeting date: August 20

 

September 2023

Meeting date: September 17

 

October 2023

Meeting date: October 15 (Annual Club Lunch)

  

November 2023

Meeting date: November 19

  

December 2023

Meeting date: December 17

Meeting date: December 

   

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Hamtext Cartridge Demo

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Bernardo in England

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Updated March 19, 2023