by Richard F. Drushel (drushel@apk.net)
Yes, after a hiatus of almost 2.5 years, TWWMCA is back. ADAMcon 0Ch was just last week in Toronto, and ADAMcon 0Dh/13/XIII will be run by me in Cleveland next year, so I will have lots of weekly ADAM stuff to do and to talk about. It seemed to me that resurrecting TWWMCA would be a good way to help keep me on track for the next convention, and to help insure that there would be lots of new and interesting ADAM things to show off then.
I will kick off the new TWWMCA series with a report about ADAMcon 0Ch. Some attendees have already posted reports, and others are bound to follow. Photos from the convention can be seen at http://www.adamcon.org/, and I imagine that reports will probably end up archived there as well.
The theme of ADAMcon 0Ch was "Dinosaurs into the new millennium"; and I came back from the convention with the conviction that the ADAM isn't ready to go extinct yet!
*Rich*
by Richard F. Drushel (drushel@apk.net)
Here's some of what I did at ADAMcon 0Ch (that's 12 decimal for the hexadecimally-challenged). Some stuff may get left out...apologies in advance.
My daughter Elanor (age 10) and I left Cleveland Heights, Ohio, at about 10:30 AM. We drove out to I-271 north, then to I-90 east, and onward along the "North Coast" of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. We stopped to eat lunch at the Denny's in the Angola service plaza just before you get to Buffalo. (This service plaza has a neat layout: Denny's/ McDonald's/restrooms in a building on the median strip, with covered walkways over the highway to parking and gas stations on each side.) Elanor saw some road department fun from the walkway: cracks in the road had been recently filled with tar, and someone had painted a smiley face in tar on the pavement. We stopped for about 45 minutes, then drove on to Buffalo.
Once we reached Buffalo, we took I-190 west to the Peace Bridge to Canada, and then the QEW (Queen Elizabeth's Way) to Toronto. Traffic flowed nicely until we got to Oakville, where there is a Ford automobile plant: it was 3:30 PM, and day shift was driving home from work, so traffic came to near-standstill for about 15 minutes. From the QEW we took 427 north and then 401 east to Keele Street, where the Triumph Howard Johnson hotel stands. 401 was "interesting" driving at 4:00 PM, as it is divided into separate express and local "collector" highways, which intertwine with one another like some crazy macrame project...fortunately I made all the correct lane changes and didn't get run down by vehicles far exceeding the posted speed limit of 100 km/hr. We got to the hotel at about 4:30 PM; so driving time (minus the stop for lunch) was about 5 hours 15 minutes. The trip was 291.8 miles.
We checked into the hotel and met Ena Greenshields of MTAG (Metropolitan Toronto ADAM Group) in the lobby. I ran into Dale Wick, the convention host, when I wasn't looking for him, so I gaped a few blank looks before I realized who was talking to me. Sorry, Dale :-) Before we went up to our room (on the top floor, 1002), we saw Ron Mitchell come in. Ron is probably our all-time man-miles award winner, as he lives on Vancouver Island and most of the ADAMcons are in the midwest or on the east coast; so for Ron, ADAMcon means a transcontinental trip.
We then took our suitcases upstairs, then came back down to unload my computer equipment from the van. I had originally intended to come to ADAMcon 0Ch as just a spectator, but I got several last-minute requests to troubleshoot/talk about/help install my ADAMserve program, so I decided to bring a complete ADAMserve setup (a stock ADAM system/monitor with serial card, and a 486DX2-66 PC system/monitor). So, Elanor and I unloaded the equipment onto a cart and we brought it upstairs. I didn't unpack anything yet, since Dale had said we were to meet downstairs 5:30-6:00 PM to decide what to do about supper, as a group. Setting up the computers could wait until later in the evening.
By 6:00 PM everyone had arrived (all 20-odd of us), and we went to the hotel restaurant. After supper, everyone went up to the 10th floor (all of our rooms were adjacent) and hung out in the "hospitality suite"--a nice double-sized room with lots of chairs, pop, and munchies. We spent the rest of the evening catching up on the last year's events with all of our ADAM friends. I did find time to unpack my computers and set them up in my room. Fortunately, everything worked, including the ADAMserve serial link between ADAM and PC--very important, since I was supposed to give a session on this topic, and it would be hard to do if the hardware didn't work.
Elanor got tired around 11:00 PM and went to bed. I stayed around the lounge maybe another hour, then went back to my room to read for a while. Lights out was about 1:00 AM, I think. Ron Mitchell has observed that we ADAMconners are getting older, and lights-out is coming sooner and sooner every year :-)
I got up at 6:00 AM, and I awakened Elanor at 6:30 AM (without too much prodding, amazingly). Breakfast was at 7:00 AM in the hospitality suite (conveniently right across the hall): a variety of cereals, fresh fruit, bagels, toast, etc. ADAMites trickled in gradually...we then went down to the basement level to the meeting room where we would be spending most of the convention. Dale Wick hadn't gotten all the computers set up yet for the 9:00 AM kickoff session, so we all pitched in and unpacked boxes and got 5 or so ADAM systems running.
The morning session was by John-Paul Gignac of MTAG, about "Conway's Game of Life", a famous computer simulation of population dynamics, with an ADAM implementation by Dale Wick. Briefly, the "game" is played on a grid of squares, each of which may be "alive" or "dead". The grid is seeded with an initial pattern of live or dead squares, and then the game is run: live squares can stay alive if they have a certain number of living neighbors (I forget how many), but die otherwise; and dead squares can come to life if they have a certain number of living neighbors, but stay dead otherwise. The simple rules give rise to a variety of stable and dynamic patterns. I remember writing a similar "artificial life" program in BASIC long ago with sharks and fish: the fish live rather like the rules for "Life", but the sharks prey upon the fish.
After lunch, Ron Mitchell talked about various methods for moving files between ADAMs and other computers (especially PCs, now that Marcel de Kogel's PC-based ADAMem emulator is so popular). Briefly, your options are modem transfer or direct reading/writing of ADAM disks in PC drives. For technical reasons, single-sided 160K disks (5.25-inch) are about the only format which can be read/written using PC BIOS function calls. Programs like 22DISK and ANADISK (from Sydex) bypass the BIOS and talk to the floppy disk controller directly; so does ADAMserve, which is also able to read/ write native ADAM disks.
After Ron's session, there was a lot of free time until supper, so I put it to use back in my room, doing some work with ADAMserve. During my system setup, I had discovered a 4-year-old bug in the ADAMserve HARDDISK program (for the uninitiated, HARDDISK is the shell/program launcher for ADAMs with hard drives under the EOS operating system). Brief technical digression: ADAMserve uses a serial link to allow an ADAM to access PC devices as if they were real ADAMnet devices. At startup on the ADAM side, the boot disk has one byte which specifies which of the 6 possible serial baseports is being used for the serial link. This baseport value is then stored in RAM and (theoretically) preserved across "soft" reboots (the SHIFT-UNDO key sequence, ADAM's version of Ctrl-Alt-Del). I said "theoretically" because it's supposed to be--but there was one case in which it was not preserved. ADAM has an EOS operating system in ROM, but ADAMserve replaces this at boot with a new EOS image from the boot disk (or hard disk if a soft reboot). There are actually 2 EOS images which can be used, depending upon what application software is launched from HARDDISK, since some ADAM software is "ill-behaved" and requires special handling under ADAMserve. You guessed it: when loading in the 2nd of these EOS choices, the global RAM byte containing the serial baseport was overwritten by the disk image. I never caught it because my serial card was configured with this same baseport. I did of course test ADAMserve boot using all 6 possible serial baseports, but I didn't test all apps with all ports...anyway, the fix was only a few lines of Z80 assembler, so by supper time I had made, assembled, and installed my bugfix version.
For supper, we all went down the street to Pizza Hut. This was good for Bob and Judy Slopsema, as they told us that it is their custom to eat pizza on Saturday night :-) Food was good, but service was slow: for some reason, restaurants can cope with 10 orders from individual people in line, but freak out if they get the same 10 orders from a group sitting at a big table. I have never worked in food service, so I don't know why this is; but we have seen it again and again at ADAMcons.
After supper, Guy Bona and I tried to reproduce some errors that he said he was getting with SmartFiler (a database program) if run under ADAMserve. He had a database which worked fine from a disk image file under the ADAMem emulator, but the same database cloned onto a real disk caused ADAMserve to crash. There were actually 2 separate problems: (1) the cloned disk was produced with the wrong interleave settings for the DCOPY program, and (2) SmartFiler/ADAMserve died when trying to write anything to an existing database (creating a new empty database and reading from an existing database worked). Interestingly, the other 2 Coleco programs which use the SmartFiler database engine (Recipe Filer and Address Book) *also* die in the same way as SmartFiler under ADAMserve. So, the best I can do for Guy is to start disassembling SmartFiler to discover what the problem is. My guess is that these programs are trying to write directly to ADAMnet's device control blocks (areas of memory-mapped I/O), instead of using EOS's _READ_BLOCK and _WRITE_BLOCK functions (which ADAMserve redirects to the serial link to the PC). It will take some weeks of work (probably), and will be future grist for the TWWMCA mill. Stay tuned.
In case you're wondering about Elanor, she attended the sessions, but got hooked on Steve Pittman's game ADAM Bomb II, and ended up either hanging out with the "Ladies' Auxiliary" of Judy and Meeka Slopsema and Dale's wife Jillian (who were playing it on laptops) or in our room playing it on my computer. (Hmm, is Jillian still J. Arnott, or is she now J. Wick? I don't know...Dale and/or Jillian, some clarification, please?)
More lounge conversation, then back to the room for a bit of reading and then lights out by about midnight.
The alarm still went off at 6:00, but I didn't listen to it until about 6:30. I got Elanor up at 7:00, and we went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. A few ADAMites were there (I think Guy Bona and Murray McCullogh), and the rest trickled in later. Continental-type breakfast (like Friday's) was free, add $CN3.00 per person to add all-you- can-eat pancakes/eggs/bacon. This ADAMcon was positively overflowing with food, in my opinion (Herman Mason take note), so we stuck to the Continental breakfast.
The 9:00 AM session was by Neil Wick (Dale's brother), about how to effectively use Web-based search engines. The sample search topic was, how could you find information about the hotel we were staying at, if all you knew was that it was a Howard Johnsons in Toronto? Neil had a nice handout comparing about 10 different search engines, the features each supported, etc. Of course, there is no native ADAM web browser (your only option is an 80x24 serial terminal using dialup to a UNIX or other shell which supports lynx), but nowadays ADAMites are not so insistent that their ADAMs be used for *everything* :-)
Lunch was a "working" lunch served in the meeting room--Greek barbecue (yum!). The first of 3 afternoon sessions was to be by Jillian and the rest of the "Ladies Auxiliary" about ADAM Bomb II. Before it got started, Richard Clee asked me if I'd like to skip it and go with him to his house nearby to pick up some software that I had previously wanted to purchase from him. (Richard runs ADAM Services in Toronto, one of the last full- service ADAM vendors.) Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to visit the Chateau Clee (and not being that interested in ADAM Bomb II, worthy adventure game though it is), I agreed, and off we went, in Richard's new truck-that- looks-like-a-big-van.
Richard and Frances Clee live in a nice brick house (but Richard tells me that *all* the houses in Toronto are brick), with one small room packed to the gills (but *neatly* packed) with racks of ADAM disks, tapes, and systems. Rich found the items I wanted to purchase (mostly public-domain volumes of in-house Coleco test software) and commenced to make disk copies. I also picked up a replacement image of the Donkey Kong Super Game tape (my original tape got mangled in 1989 or so and could only play 2 screens before hitting the mangled spot and aborting), an original unopened copy of Recipe Filer (for debugging the ADAMserve problem), and some blank 5.25- inch 360K floppy disks. Copies made, we returned to the hotel.
When we got back, the second afternoon session had been running for 45 minutes! I had thought that ADAM Bomb II would go for a couple hours, but no, only one...and this session was one that I wanted very much to hear: why old computers are still interesting, moderated by Ralph Veecock from MTAG. The consensus is that "old" computers are interesting because there's so much that you can do with them at all levels, low and high. You can tinker with them and hack them; the whole machine is at your disposal. My comment at the end was that those whose first computers were "old" microcomputers were part of unique user communities, created during the "adaptive radiation" period of microcomputer evolution--before the IBM PC architecture made almost everything else become extinct. Those user communities have remained as important parts of peoples' lives, even as computer technology has moved onward. There are no "Pentium Users Groups" with the same zeal and interest as the old C-64 and TI-99 and ADAM users groups (and probably will not be again, until some unforseen advance in computers requires that users form communities again in order to use their computers).
The rest of the afternoon was spent in Guy Bona's session on ADAMem and ancillary utility programs for creating disk and tape image files from native ADAM media. Guy has written QuickBASIC and Visual BASIC wrappers to make it easier to create the appropriate image files (the command-line switches on the apps themselves are somewhat difficult to understand).
Supper was at the hotel restaurant at 6:00 PM. At 8:00 PM, those with PC computers who had managed to install NetZero free internet access software (thanks to Bob and Doug Slopsema for having the 4 install disks conveniently available) dialed up and logged in to Dale Wick's Spaniel Chat server for the traditional Saturday Night ADAMcon Chat. In the past, this was held via CompuServe; but when CIS went graphics-only, there was no way for 8-bits with simple terminals to connect any more, and the ADAMites left. Most of the convention attendees managed to be near an online computer, and we were joined remotely by some non-attendees (Ron Mitchell's son Jeff is the one I can remember off the top of my head). I bailed out after about an hour to go help Ron Mitchell and George Koczwara debug some trouble with PowerPaint HD. After trying a few things, we narrowed it down to a bad boot block, which was restored from backup, thus fixing the problem.
I can't remember what I did next...probably talked some more in the lounge, then went to bed. I know I was in by 11:30 PM, and Elanor had gone to sleep at least an hour before that.
Again the alarm clock went off at 6:00 AM, and again I went back to sleep, this time for about 45 minutes. I got Elanor up about 7:15 AM, and we were ready to go downstairs for breakfast by about 7:45 AM. Again we were among the first to arrive, and the rest trickled in even later. I don't think that Dale and Jillian came down until almost 8:45 AM. So, it was a little past 9:00 AM when we started the first session.
The morning session was by Peter Searle of MTAG, a hands-on workshop on SmartLOGO. Peter's presentation was superbly prepared, with demo programs on disk at each workstation to save typing time. Most of his session explored uses of recursion to produce fractal patterns, and also to do animation cycles.
Another working lunch in the meeting room (various open-faced sandwiches; the red salmon ones were tastiest!), and then my session on ADAMserve. I had come to the convention prepared to install it on Richard Clee's PC-XT, going so far as to swap in a 360K 5.25-inch drive in my 486 system (replacing a 1.2M drive) to make it able to write suitable disks (360Ks written in 1.2M drives are unreliable in genuine 360K drives). However, Richard decided to wait...and my presentation reduced to theory of design, "fun" aspects of the implementation, and description of the bugfixing I had done while at the convention (the serial baseport bug, the SmartFiler crashes). I think that all the ADAMem people with easy-to-transport laptops would love it if my ADAM floppy disk I/O code could be added to ADAMem, so that they wouldn't need to lug ADAM consoles and NTSC monitors around...maybe it can be done. Though Doug Slopsema has yet to figure out how to get Marcel de Kogel's source code to compile...and while ADAMserve runs fine under WinNT 4.0, as far as the serial link between ADAM and PC is concerned, none of the floppy disk I/O code does--as it talks directly to the floppy disk controller, something which WinNT does not permit. (I'm surprised that it allows the serial I/O, as that also is written to talk directly to the 16550 UART.)
Dale Wick then gave another in a continuing series of sessions (over several ADAMcons) about writing games for the ADAM in assembler and/or C. This year was how to design non-player characters for games (e.g., the ghosts that try to eat Pac-Man). It seems that implementing them as finite state machines is the best way to go, especially if you want the characters to have complicated behaviors. My small experience in writing games in BASIC is that it is easy to write "enemy" characters which are too ruthlessly efficient in defeating you, and hard to find the subtle balance between challenge and player winability.
At the end of Dale's session, and right before the break to get ready for the banquet, we held the annual A.N.N. (ADAM News Network) meeting. Of late, the major business of this meeting has been to discuss the desire for another ADAMcon, and if interest warrants, to determine where it should be held, and who is going to run it. (The A.N.N. meeting also was used to decide, a few years ago, to suspend the awarding of ADAM Gallery of Honor memberships, as it was felt that all of the known worthies had already been enshrined.) There is always some tension toward the end of an ADAMcon about whether or not *this* one is going to be the last one. Well, we keep saying every year, some year it will end, but not this year, not yet. I had come to Toronto with permission from my wife, Joan, to offer to take the next ADAMcon if (a) there was "enough" interest that people would actually come, and (b) nobody else wanted to do it. I spoke about this with Richard Clee when we went to his house, to Ron Mitchell and George Koczwara when we were debugging PowerPaint HD, and to the Slopsema clan at breakfast on Sunday morning. I received nothing but encouragement; so at the A.N.N. meeting, I asked for support to take ADAMcon 0Dh/13/XIII to Cleveland next summer. The assembled delegates said that they were not ready to call it quits, and that I should plan to see them all in Cleveland...thus, I can officially announce that there *will* be another ADAMcon...details to be announced.
<SHEER_SPECULATION> I have a feeling that we will be set for ADAMcons at least through ADAMcon 16. I *think* that Scott Gordon is interested in having ADAMcon 14, I *think* that the Slopsemas are interested in another one on their turf in Michigan, and I *think* that the Vancouver Island contingent want another crack at a west-coast ADAMcon (they lost out to Seattle last year).</SHEER_SPECULATION>
As I said while proposing ADAMcon 13: 19 July 2001 is my 15th wedding anniversary. Joan and I can go to a hotel for 4 days around that date, and I can put an ADAM in the back of the van. Anyone who wants to meet us there during that time, bring an ADAM and we'll call it an ADAMcon. Otherwise, Joan and I will have 4 days of vacation. Some day, we may have to do this to keep ADAMcons going...but evidently, not yet.
The annual banquet began at 6:00 PM. Everyone wore the new ADAMcon 0Ch T-shirt (which has our pink, non-Barney dinosaur mascot, named, of course, Adam).
[I should mention something about T-shirts...most of us attending ADAMcons nowadays have been to most of them, so we have all the past T-shirts and wear them throughout the current ADAMcon. My first convention was ADAMcon IV, and since then I have missed only one (ADAMcon 10, but I designed the shirt for it, so I got one). So, I changed my shirt 3 times per day, morning/afternoon/ evening: Friday IV 5 6, Saturday 007 VIII 9, Sunday 10 11 and 0Ch.]
Back to the banquet...it was prime rib (also somewhat traditional) and very good. We didn't have a special ADAMcon layer cake this year, but dessert was an excellent death-by-chocolate cake. After the banquet came raffle and door prize drawings. There was another afghan crocheted by Jean Stone (she also crocheted handbags for all the womenfolk; Elanor got one, and since there was one left over, Jean gave it to Elanor to give to her mom), and a couple of complete ADAM systems in the raffle. The final door prize was for stewardship of Adam the dinosaur mascot. Elanor, who had been helping to draw tickets, drew the winner: herself! So, Adam came home with us from Toronto. At the very end was the traditional passing of the banner to the chairman of the next ADAMcon (namely, me; Elanor and fellow Clevelander and ADAMcons IV and VIII chairman George Koczwara were also in the acceptance party), and then the group photo. Normally, this is taken by ADAMcon photohistorian Bart "Zonker" Lynch, and includes a last-second dive into the picture after setting the time delay shutter on his camera; but Zonker wasn't able to make it this year, so Neil Wick and George Koczwara stood in for him. George made it easy at last: he brought a tripod this year! In the past, the camera has been stacked up on whatever could be scrounged...so, no dramatics, but I'm sure it will be a clear, stable picture :-)
After the banquet, everyone retired to the lounge, where a silent auction was in progress on various boxed lots of ADAM stuff, sent by who I can't remember. I got 2 boxes, one with lots of game cartridges and a Roller Controller, the other with lots of data packs. After this, I decided that I would rather just get ready and leave in the morning, so I took down my computers and packed them up in the van that night. All that I left upstairs was my and Elanor's suitcases. In the morning we could eat and check out. Elanor went off to bed, and I followed soon after; lights out was around midnight.
Actually, before I took the computers down, and while the silent auction was still running, I helped Bob and Doug Slopsema figure out if the DynoMite Audio Digitizer cartridge they had won in the raffle (part of one of the complete ADAM system setups) had a real-time clock chip in it or not. My SmartBASIC 1.x interpreter can recognize 3 different kinds of ADAM clock cards, so I used SB1.x to determine that yes, their cartridge also had the clock chip installed. (There is a socket inside; the clock was an add-on which cost extra. The clock chip itself is one of the Dallas Semiconductor kind which fit under a socketed EPROM.)
Alarm at 6:00 AM, actually up at 6:30 AM, Elanor up at 7:00 AM. Another Continental breakfast in the lounge across the hall. Except for Guy Bona, who had a very early flight out, everybody else came to the lounge at one point or another. We ate, chatted, and said our goodbyes; then checked out at about 9:00 AM. There was a gas station next door, so I went there and filled up; then we hit the road at about 9:30 AM.
The return trip was the same as the way there, except that I came back through Niagara Falls, so that we could stop on the Canadian side. Thus, we got off the QEW at 420 east and drove to Niagara Falls. Arriving at about 11:00 AM, we drove along the parkway, past Horseshoe falls, and found some parking available in front of a greenhouse (probably a quarter mile from the Falls). It was bright sunshine and warm, and the air was misty from the Falls. Elanor and I walked back to the Falls, taking pictures along the way. We stopped in the little pavillion next to the Falls, and had lunch, and bought some trinkets for my other 3 daughters. We walked most of the way up toward the Rainbow Bridge, so that we could get a good view of the American Falls; then we walked back to the car. Two guys from Australia asked me to take their picture; I did, after they showed me which button to press on their camera :-)
We left at 1:00 PM, taking Niagara Falls Boulevard (US-62A and US-62) to I-290 east, then to I-90 west, and back toward Ohio. We stopped again at the Angola service plaza to get some pop and use the bathrooms, then we drove the rest of the way back as we had come. I stopped for gas at our usual gas station close to home, and got home at about 5:45 PM. The return trip took about 6 hours (not counting the stops), and was 302.8 miles.
I didn't feel like unpacking the car right away, so I left it until the next evening :-)
See you again next week!
*Rich*
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