I hope most of you will all be able to attend the dinner on the 19th. The menu is available on the website and will also be mailed to members. Please let me know as soon as possible by email to iceni@woolridge.org.uk or else by phone to the contact number on the website if you can come and what menu selections for Starter and Main course you have made. Please specify chips or new potatoes with your main course as well. It promises to be another good evening. I am looking forward to seeing you all there.
Another interesting evening, with equipment brought along and demonstrated by a number of members. The evening started rather unconventionally, in that we took a long time to set up, over drinks and lively discussion, while old A4's attempted to charge the internal battery enough to boot, and while Tony swapped ROMs in various vintage Acorns.
Kicking off with Paul, we had an Acorn A4 laptop in attendance. Paul initially had problems with the A4 refusing to boot up, which he believed could be overcome if the battery pack would accept enough charge. Unfortunately after promising noises were heard, hard drives spinning up, no video output could be gained. A shame to see the old bastion of mobile RISCOS finally succumbing to old age, and hopefully Paul will be able to repair the A4 in the future.
Next up we had Tony, who for some time now has been hoping to demo "3D World", a 3D construction kit from around 1990, and in the past had been unable to, due to a lack of a RISCOS 2 machine to conduct the demo. Fortunately for the evening, John was able to bring along a selection of machines, and with some swapping of ROMs Tony was able to get the software working for a demonstration.
3DWorld was very impressive, certainly for an application from 1990 it had lots of features for creating 3D worlds, battle scenes etc. It was possible to program actions, such as doors opening. It had taken Tony the best part of a year to accumulate most of the necessary hardware for this, from charity stalls at RISCOS shows and other donations, and he is now trying to get a lead made up to connect the A3000 to his telly to use this software further.
Michael brought along his Windows laptop, running Virtual PC which enables you to run multiple PC operating systems concurrently on top of windows. He brought along disk images of Windows 1, 2, 3.0 and tried to install them into the Virtual PC virtual machine. Windows 1 and 2 didn't quite work, due to even the emulated display being so much more powerful than what was available at the time, and hence lack of driver support. Windows 3.0 was much more successful, and we were able to demo its features well, it is starting to look very dated now.
John Rye, as well as supplying Tony with much older 
RISCOS hardware, brought along a Brunsviga mechanical calculator, once a very common device in industry. He showed us some calculations, and which dials, handles performed the various functions, along with some of the tricks you learned to perform certain calculations faster.
After a short refreshment break, Frank showed us the Cambridge Z88, an early A4 size PDA/Tablet.
I can remember this device well from my childhood days when my Father used to bring one 
home on occasions. Frank's Z88 sported a 128k RAM expansion module, and a PC LINK ROM cartridge allowing file transfer to PC's and to the !Z88 application on RISCOS. It was originally bought for document writing, and spreadsheets on the move, running PipeDream and BASIC, making it very much Acorn/RISCOS compatible. The Z88 did not like rechargeable batteries Frank found, and using alkaline batteries was quite expensive. John told us how it was possible to make an external battery pack using 5 rechargeable batteries rather than 4 normal alkaline cells, allowing much improved working time away from mains power. Non-volatile storage was also available in the form of EPROM cartridges. These predated later EEPROM/Flash memory in that data could only be written in the Z88. Once full, the cartridge could be erased using a UV erasing device, which shined UV light through a small window in the cartridge to erase the EPROM chip.
By now time was running out, but I (Gareth) demo'd MaME, an arcade machine emulator, running on 
MacOSX. MaME runs on many platforms, and emulates most common arcade machine hardware. Many ROMs are available although quite a lot of these are not strictly in the public domain and care should be taken over copyrights. A number of arcade games were demonstrated, ranging from very early 80's games with simple graphics and sound, to more modern games, encompassing classics such as Airwolf along the way. MaME shows the hardware a particular ROM requires, and it was interesting to see the majority of games ran on either 1, or multiple Z80 processors, sometimes with dedicated sound processors. The Mac version of MaME using OpenGL graphics acceleration present in modern graphics cards, to apply quite complex dithering to the graphics, making them look surprisingly good on modern computer/laptop screens.
A very enjoyable evening for all involved I think, held informally with much discussion which seemed to work well. I look forward to seeing you at future meetings, and at the New Year dinner at the Crown.
Gareth
I would like to wish
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Many thanks to Gareth for the report on the December meeting in my absence and to Michael for the photographs of the various exhibits.
I am very pleased that Paul Beverley of Archive and Living with Technology Magazines has agreed to come and speak on our AGM evening on April 6th. The exact subject has not been finalized yet but no doubt will cover both RISCOS, PC and other technology issues. Paul is an old friend of the Club and I am sure he will give a very entertaining talk.
Have you any suggestions for topics for future meetings, which would aid the Committee in planning next year's programme.
| Date | Topic | Speaker |
| 19th January 2005 | Dinner at Crown Hotel at Manningtree at 7:00 p.m. | |
| 2nd February 2005 | AppBASIC | Joe Taylor |
| 2nd March 2005 | Using Nikon Coolscan for slide scanning | Tony |
| 6th April 2005 | AGM followed by a talk by Paul Beverley | |
| 4th May 2005 | IYONIX and RISC OS | Jack Lillingston |
Talks with Visiting speakers are shown in Red. As you can see we are hoping to have a few more talks with outside speakers this year. We will give more details as soon as they are available.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events their next meeting will be:
Next Tuesday, 11th January 2005,
Don with Jeanne's assistance will be presenting an evening tutorial on
R-Comp's "HTML Edit"
and how to construct a personal website. Having done that, there will be an explanation of how to get your personal web pages uploaded to that unused webspace which your Internet Service Provider so kindly (we hope) gave you to use for your personal website.
Even if you already have a website and know the rudiments of HTML document construction, you may not have experienced just how easy it can be made using this custom software.
The latest versions of HTML Edit have a lot to offer.
For details of the above see the website
http://www.watsnees. demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall,
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ven.htm
or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ppl.htm
See you soon!
Frank.
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the new website. Our website URL has changed to
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk