Vintage Computer Festival East X (10)

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

New Jersey?  Gaah.  Well, might be able to make it...

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I was looking at that exhibitor lineup last week.  234 miles from me.  Tempting...  of course I'll wait until the last minute to decide but might make the drive up for Saturday.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Hey Mike, if you decide to go, could you swing by Michigan and pick me up?

Ah, bit of a round trip, eh?  :roflmao:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

True to my last-minute decision making, I'll be heading up to this tonight after work.  See y'all tomorrow, I'll be the dorky guy probably wearing either a NASA shirt, a roller derby shirt, or an Amiga shirt, haha.  I guess I bitch & complain about there not being any Amiga shows on the east coast often enough, I might as well head up to this one!  :lol:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Got into town late because of work (surprise, surprise). Checked about 15 of the seedy little rat-infested looking motels around here. Every single one was either "no vacancy" or the lobby was closed. Got pulled over by the cops in the process, I guess a guy pulling into every motel in town looks suspicious, or something.  Anybody going to this look for me in the morning. I'll be the a*hole sucking down coffee and looking like he just slept in his truck. FML.  I hate New Jersey. :-/

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Because I'm tired, here's my 30 second review and picture link.  Enjoy!  

..............


With the exception of it being in New Jersey, Vintage Computer Festival was awesome.    There was a couple dozen Amiga's and Commodore systems, and of course hundreds of others - stuff from the 60's through early 90's, mostly.  Building itself was much more than I expected - a former military post from 1913-1990s for electronic research and communications, had rooms full of radio gear and diorama displays.  Much of the stuff was hands-on, including fun science stuff for kids.  Operate a hand-cranked WWII field radio?  Why yes I can say, now I have.    All the Amiga folks were really friendly, Mac folks were kinda snobbish, stereotypes abound, but there were some kids and families there - it wasn't all geeky neckbeards, LOL.    Fantastic time, I might exhibit next year.  Will need a lot of coffee if I'm going to survive that plan.  224 pics on my flickr:

http://www.flickriver.com/photos/oldsmobile_mike/sets/72157649734735584/

We need more stuff like this in the Washington, DC, area.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Thanks for the pictures, Mike. There was also an early blue Amiga 3000D motherboard in the pictures, very nice.

Yes, it took me a minute to recognize that when I saw it.  Very nice!  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Very interesting show. Great photos. Not at all what I expected. Now I am mad I didn't make it to this show. Maybe next year.
It's a shame we can't muster something along these line here in the Washington area. I guess it's time for us to get to work.
I was surprised to see an SX-64 in there, and all of the Amigas. Great stuff.

Yes, next year!

I was playing around with the SX-64 for a while after someone turned it on.  I couldn't remember how to get a directory listing, after using those C64's for probably a decade...  1984-1994...  I felt really bad.  Had to google it this morning.  Damn this getting old thing.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Ha ha, thanks for the kind words Mike.  You were the guy who was really good at Turrican II right?  I think I can make out your face in the photo you took of the VideoToaster.  It was great meeting you and all the folks who stopped by the booth were great.  We had an absolute blast and enjoyed razzing our Atari neighbors all weekend.  Hope to see you again next year or sooner!

Ha, that's me!  I could've totally won that game, but nobody wants to sit there and watch me play it for the couple hours that would take, LOL.  :lol:

I wish there were meetups like that a little closer to the DC area.  Do you know of anything?

Hopefully by next year I should have my third Amiga put together, along with the closet full of books and other stuff I have, might be enough to put together my own exhibit.

Oh, and welcome to amiga.org!  :pint:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Thanks for the pics Mike! Very nice! Looks like a nice time. I can see that there is a lot of interest in the older computer equipment - that's great! I'll tell ya, sometimes I think I should just get rid of all the old computer [strike]junk,[/strike] err stuff, that I have collected. But I can see that it would be better donated someday. I gotta quit tossing stuff into the dumpster - I threw alot of IBM (real) XT/AT computers and boards away last summer simply due to space problems. I see there's some real nice Toaster setups too! I gotta get back to my A2000 project. Anyways, thanks again...

The Toaster setups were excellent!  The poor guy in one room kept having heat problems and the circuit breaker blew while I was there, but the guy in the other room had some really awesome remote control cameras, including one that could be wired to follow a person around while they were doing a presentation.  Funny that both of the Toaster guys had Derringer boards in them...  normally an A500 accelerator, you know?  I had to tell him about @Metalguy66's 128MB Derringer mod posted here on the forums a couple months ago.  One of these days I need to get that for my A500!  VXL*30 is great, but a bit starved for RAM.  

I had a fun time playing games on the PC Jr. setup, also.  Guy had that thing maxed out, he also loaded up Windows version 1.01a on there, how's that for a classic?  :lol:

And you know, if you ever feel like getting rid of that '060 card, *cough cough* *nudge nudge*.  :laughing:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

BTW, can I PM you later this week? I have a crap load of Q's on this 3.9 install....  It's running but....  :angry:

Sure bud.  What's it doing and/or not doing?

I just fired up my 2000 today to load the copy of PPaint I bought a month or so back on there.  I'm no artist but it was pretty slick how it worked "out of the box" with the GVP Spectrum video modes.  I've got Brilliance and DPaint V on there already, but they don't support the Spectrum screenmodes.  Good stuff, gives me "the warm & fuzzies" every chance I have to use one of my Miggy's.

I also tried that new 4.1 icon set on Aminet, but even with all my hacks & patches, it was still too slow to be usable, LOL.  I suspect this would require something along the lines of a PIV or CV64 and an 060 to be usable.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

BTW Mike, were you wearing a black Amiga shirt with boots?

This is me, on the right.  Playing Lemmings, of course!  :lol:



(from their Google+ page)

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I think the Mac guys got a little irked that I kept jacking up their Newtons.  I picked up the first one and he's telling me how it's connected to the web, but there's no backlight so I'm squinting at the screen 'cause it was impossible to see.  So then I pick up the second one and I press on the side to eject the stylus, and the danged wireless card comes out!  They put the "card eject" button in the same place as the "stylus eject" button on the previous model, LOL.  Then the third one?  I ejected the battery!  That's Apple for ya, no design consistency, and completely unintuitive!  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Man! I hated those things! :hammer:

Couldn't hold a candle to my old Palm devices, but I thought the handwriting recognition was pretty good.  A bit laggy, but it worked.  That is until I ejected the battery.  Oops!  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

And that's me on the left! Mike, your shirt was awesome reminded me of the days of World of Commodore and Ami Expo in Manhattan.

Thanks!  That's my "I only wear this on special occasions" shirt, LOL.