Saturday
My ambitious plan to get a decent night’s sleep was thwarted by e-mails from work with new server problems demanding immediate attention. I think I finished those up and crashed around 3:30am or later. Next year, the phone and laptop stay at the office. Someone else is going to have to deal with all that.
This morning I was in Vince Briel’s “Build Your Own Replica-1” workshop. This was the session I had been looking forward to all week. It’s been several years since I did any soldering, and I was a little worried about my technique, that it would be slow and sloppy. Plus, I was feeling the sleep deprivation from the night before — did anyone really want to be around me AND a super-hot soldering iron? I briefly considered giving up my seat to someone else but decided to hang in there and do my best.
Right off, I have to say this: if you have an interest in building your own Replica-1 kit, and have the opportunity to do so during one of Briel’s workshops, do it. Vince is a great teacher — he’s informative, patient and really upbeat. Whenever one of us had a question or made a mistake (we had a several of those), Vince jumped in and used the moment as a teaching opportunity to get us back on track. So, it wasn’t just a “do this, do that” experience; we were learning something… and while we were busy, hunched over our boards doing the tedious stuff, Vince kept us engaged, sharing great stories of his Apple II, and Replica-1 experiences (for example, how Woz gave permission to clone the Replica-1). It was a lot of fun.
Edit: Ken Gagne and partner documented his experience assembling the Replica-1 and posted it at Computerworld.
In the end, my board was the last one to be finished (I was sooo tired). I had made a few mistakes along the way (d’oh!), bent a few pins on tight-fitting machine sockets (double d’oh!) and I needed help undoing a few soldering defects (triple d’oh!). Personal thanks go out to Paul Zaleski for bailing me out on those.
Eventually, after correcting all that, we tested my board. While it seemed electrically sound, it did not work as expected. Vince began tracing the board with a meter (seemed OK) and testing individual components on another Replica-1 and one by one, they all checked out. So, somewhere I had really mucked something up… badly.
Vince said my soldering looked fine but went ahead and reworked a few places just in case. He also went on to say that rarely, he’ll come across a bad board from the fabricator. At that point, I think he was trying to save my pride. Nevertheless, Vince tenaciously continued to troubleshoot the board until finally, he decided he had to take it home and work on it there. Wow, I had stumped the Master! Epic.
Even though this session didn’t turn out well for me, I personally consider it to be one of my best KFest experiences ever. It was a pleasure to meet Vince Briel in person and I hope he’ll be back for 2010.
Now while all this was going on, there were other sessions underway. Ryan Suenaga was recording a new episode of A2Unplugged, show #0032 and Sheppy was announcing new products from Syndicomm. I think we’ll get those posted separately later.
Other sessions I missed:
New attendee Ivan Drucker presented a session on how to get the game Time Zone to work on Virtual II, using 14 drives to avoid disk swapping. If you’ve played Time Zone for any length of time on a real Apple II, then you probably know how tedious this is and understand completely why it would be a clever hack. Sorry I missed that bit of fun.
I also missed Jon Lipp’s Garmin GPS session and I passed on Geoff Weiss demonstrating OpenSolaris. Sorry guys. I’m here for the Apple II content and those sessions were a little too much like the technology I support at work… which by now, I wanted to avoid.
This afternoon, I was supposed to demo the Carte Blanche, an exciting new FPGA-based expansion card which theoretically can be programmed to recreate the functionality of nearly any other Apple II expansion card.
Unfortunately, while in shipment from Australia, something happened to the card and I was unable to demo it. It sure looks nice though; the build quality appears to be top shelf and I’m confident the Carte Blanche will end up being a big hit for Apple II enthusiasts.
Edit: I’ve since learned that it was our old, weary power supplies that we were using that prevented the Carte Blanche from initializing properly. The CB has since been “fixed” to account for that little problem.
Once again, I had the great pleasure of being a Hackfest judge, along with Sheppy and Ken Gagne. This year, we awarded First Prize to Peter Neubauer who programmed a “Game of Life Simulation” in MacroSoft. Second Prize was awarded to Martin Haye for an old school, 8-bit Paint program written in good ol’ Applesoft. Margaret Anderson put together a snazzy disk cataloging application written in Hypercard, earning her third place, and Ryan Suenaga took fourth with a classic desk accessory (CDA) program he wrote.
Saturday afternoon’s swap meet and vendorpalooza was a little bigger this year. More vendors participated, and we had more individuals bring stuff to sell. I came away a happy camper because in addition to some hardware, I scored a complete set of Nibble Express books to complete my Nibble collection.
After dinner, some of us went out to see the Star Trek movie. I’m glad I went, but while we were out, there was a ton of last minute hardware hacking and repairing going on. Note to self: take all my busted crap with me next year.
Sunday
It’s move out day; everyone has to be packed and gone by 1:00pm but some people choose to stay a little longer. Some go out to a local restaurant for one last social, while others wait for their flight times.
This year, I didn’t linger — I was anxious to get home to see my plucky (sometimes-going-on-17) 7 year-old daughter. A few friends helped me load up my car, so I was ready to go much earlier than usual. I decided to follow James Littlejohn out of the city, in case his rusty ol’ bus conked out. We made it down to Harrisonville MO. where my exit was without incident, and with a wave goodbye, my KFest was officially over.