Andrew Roughan’s KFest presentation (live from Australia!) covered the new 3.0b3 beta release of Marinetti, a TCP/IP driver for the Apple IIGS. Download the 8.5 MB zipped PowerPoint file here.

Glenn Jones of A2RetroSystems has committed to another production run of his popular Uthernet card scheduled for this September. Get on the waiting list now so you don’t miss out!

Kirk has been posting his daily KFest 2006 summaries in this Usenet thread.

Sorry for the late post. I’ve been so busy with projects, catching up with friends and participating the various activities. Even getting a good night’s rest has taken a lower priority.I ended up staying awake until 5:00am or so the night before working on a project. I did manage to roll out of bed in time for breakfast but I didn’t make it out to the cafeteria. There was a server crisis at my job that had to be fixed remotely (I’m the only IT guy) and so, that had to come first.

I’ve yet to make it to a breakfast, a phenomenon I think I will refer to as the “KFest Diet” because that sounds better than saying I was too lazy/busy to make it to breakfast.

First up was a video provided by Andy Molloy, called Hackers: Wizards of the Computer Age which I’ve seen before, and highly recommend. It’s a collection of conversations from the 1980’s with Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld plus several others discussing the Hacker Ethic.

Few people know how to play Silvern Castle better than Bruce Baker. We got to see that and several 8-bit classics from the Softdisk collection. If you’re a fan of retro gaming, this was the session to be at.

Lunch happened but I didn’t go… too busy.

Austin Phelps kicked off the afternoon sessions with a demo and discussion on one of the hottest trends in the information technology sector – Virtual Computing. Using applications like VMWare, Parallels Desktop and Virtual PC (just Google those – I’m feeling lazy right now) it’s possible to set up a second or third virtual machine that may run a completely different operating system than that of the host. Very cool.

Sheppy was up next with “Getting Started With ORCA”. ORCA is the default development environment used by many of the programming languages offered by The Byte Works. Sheppy took us on a tour of how to navigate and write a Hello World program and then compile it to an executable application.

Ryan Suenaga, easily the busiest man on the planet then announced the immediate availabity of volumes 2 and 3 of GS+ from Syndicomm. These aren’t merely scans of the archived issues – they are searchable PDF files of the articles and accompanying disks. A lot of hard work that we all appreciate! Thanks Ryan!

Dinner was next. Rockhurst served fajitas or chicken, potatos and green beans. The cherry pie was also awesome.

The rest of the evening was comprised of a trip out to the Apple Store, and then the annual Krispy Kreme donut feast followed by more hanging out with everyone in the dorms. It’s been fun, really.

Alex Freed reports that he is working on an Apple II storage device that uses multi-media cards (MMC), which are similar to SD cards. The device acts as both a ProDOS storage volume, and a disk II controller card. Check out his usenet post for more details. He wants to know if there is enough interest for him to move forward with an initial production run.

Eric “Sheppy” Shepherd has released the new Mac OS X version of Sweet16. While not as fully-featured as Bernie ][ The Rescue, this new Universal Binary emulator is a good step forward, running natively under Mac OS X.

Apple Game Server has been updated to version 1.1 with full super serial card support, bootdisk support and other enhancements.

KFest OFFICIALLY kicks off today.I’m just relating from my personal experiences, but I’m pretty sure nearly everyone else did what I did, and stayed up very late. It was at least 2:00am last night before I even looked at my bed, and much later when I actually laid down in it. We were busy visiting, working on projects and doing Apple II stuff.

So, I missed breakfast. I meant to go, really, but I overslept.

Regular registration started today, and we had a few new arrivals. I didn’t check the weather today, but it seemed just as hot as yesterday. The good news, more people were on hand to help with the move-ins.

Today was the KFest Kookout. Kirk “Grillmeister for Life” Mitchell and Ryan Suenaga hosted their annual feast of burgers and hot dogs (real meat and something vaguely tofu-esque that resembles meat for the vegans) that we all very much appreciated. I love food events.

Our first session of the day was presented by Mark Percival, programmer of the popular DiskMaker 8 utility. Mark shared with us how he developed DM8, plus what issues and decisions drove its development. He also mentioned his next project, ImageMaker 8 which will also run on older 8-bit Apple II computers. That’s fantastic news for people like me who are die-hard IIe lovers! DiskMaker 8 is $5 USD shareware and available from Syndicomm.

Eric “Sheppy” Shepherd next unleashed Sweet 16, an Apple IIGS emulator for Mac OS X. Sweet 16 (known as project SlyDog by it’s beta testers) is based on Bernie to the Rescue from F.E. Systems. In development for over 3 years, it looked like our new favorite emulator wouldn’t ever see the light of day due to licensing issues, but recent events have encouraged its release. Oh, and one more thing… it’s FREE and available NOW! Sweet 16 is a universal binary application that will run on any Mac using Mac OS 10.3.9 or better.

As we were winding down from Sheppy’s Sweet 16 demo, Tony Diaz gave us a preview of things to come. Hold on Apple //c fans – Tony briefly showed off his working internal //c hard drive! Tony is working on a couple of cool projects but one of the most exciting is a combo RAM/IDE-CF/Clock card for the //c. Wow… I want one, or two or three.

Tonight’s dinner was a choice of fried rice and eggrolls or sliced turkey with mashed potatos and gravy plus vegetables. Sure, it’s cafeteria food but Rockhurst’s menu and facilities are superior to Avila’s. We ate good.

Sheppy gave this years keynote, which I can only sum up as “What have YOU done for the Apple II Community lately”? Shepherd’s presentation revisited the theme of his 2001 KFest keynote which covered the state of the Apple II community and its dependence on a shrinking number of developers and contributors. Sheppy implored the attendees to get out there and actively contribute something to the community, not just be an Apple II wallflower. The keynote generated a great deal of discussion that will hopefully result in more participation in the community. Specifically mentioned were the Wikipedia efforts underway that anyone can contribute useful information to.

Later tonight will be the annual PizzaFest generously provided courtesy of Syndicomm. Yum!

After all that, it’s back to our Hackfest projects and more hanging out with friends. It’s a been a great time for everyone.

It’s the first day of KansasFest and it’s also the hottest day of the year yet for the KC Metro area.The temperature with heat index was at least 104 degrees on Tuesday, making moving in a very hot and sweaty affair. We have to be careful not to over do it in the heat and stay hydrated.

We’re in the Xavier-Loyalla (XL) dorm this year, which is similar to Corcoran aside from the lobby and basement. A few steps have to be negotiated by those of us using carts to haul in equipment, but all in all, it’s not that bad. It helps to have friends lend a hand.

I arrived a little later than I wanted to, around 3:00pm. Several other campers were already here, some of the new people and veterans of KFests past. It’s always good to catch up with your buddies, but it’s a definate pleasure to meet new people and learn about them and their interests. To all the new people, WELCOME and we hope you’ll enjoy yourself and come back next year.

There really aren’t any official activities on move-in day, except for the excursion out to Sweet Tomatoes for vegan-friendly (carnivore neutral) dining. Tonight we all enjoyed salads and pastas while discussing anything and everything imaginable.

Afterwards, some of us headed back to XL while others went provisioning to get supplies for personal needs and Wednesday’s KFest Kookout.

Once back in the dorms, it was time to settle in and make the rounds to visit with friends, old and new to catch up on things and see what goodies they had brought. Tony Diaz for example brought a number of prototypes and other interesting items — more on those later when they’ve either been demo’ed or announced.

Wow, one thing is for sure. Rockhurst takes network security seriously. Many of the ports we need are locked down tight. Hardly anything works except http and pop3/smtp. To their credit, Rockhurst does a good job accommodating our needs
and I expect we’ll be better off by Wednesday.

It’s really good to be back for another KFest. Wish you could be here with us.

Being checkin day, there wasn’t a lot of structure to Tuesday, other than the run out to Sweet Tomatoes for dinner. Yum. Still, there was a lot going on, as most attendees got moved into their rooms, with the exception of a few stragglers that haven’t arrived yet.This is my first year at KFest since the switch to Rockhurst University, and I have to say that for the most part, it’s a change for the better. I do miss the loop formation of the rooms, rather than the straight-shot line we have here, but otherwise everything seems nicer.

With one exception: at the moment, our network access is severely limited. Only ports 110 (POP), 80 (HTTP), and 443 (HTTPS) are open. Which means no iChat (although we did realize finally we can tell iChat to use port 80), no telnet, no FTP, etc. That’s really, really painful.

We’ll be talking to them this morning to see if they can ease up on us some. Here’s hoping…