WOzFest $04 Recap

Well, I had a lot of fun at WOzFest $04 – and got more done than I usually do.

Thanks again to all attendees for making it a great day. Denis, a first time WOzFest attendee from Canberra, brought his original europlus and //e – it was nice to see the original monitor he’d bought for the europlus as well. Jeremy, also from Canberra, brought the fruits of his search for educational material, including a //e clone.

Craig brought a Laser 128 – unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to play with it much or watch too much of the work on it, but seeing an interface card plugged into the external slot was very disconcerting.

Andrew worked on an adaptor for connecting a colour QuickCam to an Apple ][ – it’ll be interesting to see when he gets that working (no pressure!).

Jon as usual was helpful on lots of fronts, and Leslie also offered his expertise and experience in lots of discussions and projects, including replacing key switches on one of Jeremy’s //e keyboards.

Jon’s ESR meter was put to good use testing some power supplies’ capacitors to see which were out of spec. He’s kindly left it with me so I can test more of my PSUs.

For those not attending, the second hookup was to Antoine Vignau and Olivier Zardini from Brutal Deluxe, who revealed that they have been able to recover the Soundsmith source code files from the original author’s hard disk and have been busy working on v2, which, amongst other things, supports one or two 4soniqs.

The hookup to KFest went well as well – there were about 8-10 people at the other side who hung around to say G’day, and I finally got to personally say “Boo Atari!” to Kevin Savetz.

A reasonable amount of disk preservation was done, with more to happen with disks left behind for me to do so – it’ll be good to have Michael’s EDD+ card he won at KFest in the mix as well. Now that 4am’s Passport has been publicly released, some disk preservation might start to happen on a more distributed basis.

My special decoration project was a europlus badge reproduction…except it’s 550mm wide (a europlus to scale would be 2m wide, 2.4m deep and 0.5m tall!). The letters and Apple logo segments were laser cut at Robots & Dinosaurs, a local makerspace I’m a member of, and I hand-painted it all over the last week or so. I’m pretty pleased with the result.

I was happy to do more hands-on stuff this time around than I’ve been able to the last couple of WOzFests, and I’m certainly looking forward to the next one, look for the announcement as soon as I settle on a date.

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