SACC - Sacramento Amiga Computer Club

All officers re-elected for 2024

Chris, Jerry, Marshall, and Bill Borsari represented SACC last month (Dec 2023) at the SacGamersExpo held at the Scottish Rite Center. The event caters to retro gaming on consoles such as the NES/SNES/SEGA/PS1/XBOX etc. Given that they do not have any retro computers represented, the organizers generously offered us 4 tables to exhibit our machines. We had the A500 Mini in the "Free Play Room" and setup a C64 Ultimate, A600 Vampire, Mister in a Checkmate case, CD32, and A500 in a PRIME location in the MAIN LOBBY!! We were a hit, having people playing on our machines steadily throughout the weekend. We featured new releases and Christmas/Holiday games. Explaining how the Amiga community is alive and kicking impressed many attendees! We have a few pictures from the event thanks mostly to Chris and Marshall. Thanks Guys!

AmigaPrez, Brian, brought in 4 vintage Magazines from before the Launch of the Amiga. We looked at some of the articles providing information on the upcoming machine which sparked all kinds of conversation!

Robert Bernardo brought his A500 Mini to share, as well as providing a copy of the AMiNIMiga USB stick for the Club A500 Mini. This stick turns the little machine into a full blown Amiga with a workbench! Bring your own keyboard! We also installed the latest firmware onto each A500 Mini. We thought the process may have bricked Roberts A500 Mini, but it did survive after performing the NOT RECOMMENDED reboot during upgrade.

We had a new visitor to the Club, and there was more conversation going on than one webmaster can keep track of!

Discussion - Amiga Global Alliance. David Pleasance's new Kickstarter for his AGA initiative has been launched AND cancelled! What do you think? It was mentioned that this concept has been talked about for 20 years or more! Most of the attendees think the community is doing fine without the AGA.

Digital Retro Bay has their GoDRIvE1200s in stock. This is a GoTek type drive that works in your A1200/500 WITH the Original drive in place!! With shipping, it comes to around $120 USD.

Marshall brought in his CD32 with a selection of games including the Misadventures of Flink! Flink was only released on the Sega Megadrive and CD32. The CD32 version is has fantastic CD sound and graphics. It's a platformer type game whre you have to travel the levels to collect items, create spells, and complete the game. Unfortunately, the gameplay does seem to rely heavily on knowing the maps to successfully complete the level, resulting in a fair amount of trial and error gameplay. Still, it's worth checking out and giving it a try.

Vote on updates to the Constitution and By-Laws
After a brief discussion to refresh memories and clarify a few points, those in attendence unanaimously voted to accept the new Constitution and By-Laws.

CLASS speaker videos are posted

Chris brought in his Vampire A600, new wireless Tank Mouse, and Plipbox. If you don't already know, the Plibbox is a serial port newtork adapter for the Amiga. He shared the Plipbox setup steps as well as the challenges to select a good terminal program to use for accessing Builiten Board Services (BBSs) in 2023. See the Pics linked above to see the BBS access.

Chris also shared his work repairing Bill's A4000.

Michael brought in his shiny new SAM 460LE. He showed off the features of the motherboard as well as his choices of compatible cards for video and sound. We surfed the web, and has a nice discussion on how the Sam / OS4 handles emulation for Classic software. You can see a few pictures in the Pics linked above.

Dave Coombs shared his Spider robot, aka Boris, and some of the movements it had been programmed to do (like write it's name on a piece of paper) Dave explained how he used LightWave to model movement routines which he was able to export from the Amiga and translate to python code to operate the robot. An incredible technical feat bringing Amiga technology into 2023 in ways the orignal designers probably never dreamed about! See pics of Boris in the Pics link above.

Constitution and By-Laws vote - Not enough officers/memebers to take a vote

CLASS review Pics. Jerry talked about the show and the demonstrations. Robert has posted some CLASS 2023 videos on his YouTube channel.

Hyperion Lawsuit disucssion. It seems like this lawsuit simply clears up some groundwork for other cases.

QWAK - Platform puzzle game. Jerry played through a handful of levels to demonstrate the game mechanics and puzzle elements of the game. Incidentally, it turns out this game will be included in the upcoming Evercade release of classic Amiga games!

Jerry and Marshall talked about coding on the Amiga in C and Blitz Basic. Michael talked a little about his new SAM machine and is looking to give a demo at an upcoming meeting. We talked a little about the new QEMU release and it's capability to host OS4.1.

The Commodore Los Angeles Super Show (CLASS) is coming April 15/16

If you happen to be in New Jersey, VCF East is also April 15/16!

AmiWest Planning has begun

VCF West is tentatively in August 2023. We have put in our interest to reserve a table or town in order to promote AmiWest and show some systems. The organizer has mentioned that the Computer History Museum may not be available as a venue. If he can't find a venue, there will be no VCF West this year! I have shared this with the club and we have had some responses to help locate a venue.

Retro Gamer Expo is Dec 16/17 2023. It's too late in the year to use this venue as an advertisement for AmiWest, but we are going to attend to try to raise interest in SACC. While this is a gamer expo with a focus on consoles, we hope to find some retro computer/Amiga enthusiasts in the crowd. We are going to get a table for free in exchange for bringing a playable system or two for their hands on area.

Jerry asked "What storage solutions do you use for your collection?" After some discussion, several members expressed an interest in ordering some boxes from ULINE which will hold our Amiga and C64 breadbin style machines. These will be plain boxes, but will be in the $5 - $8 range (+S&H) where the repro boxes go for over $50 + S&h and are in short supply with the creator stepping down from ordering and selling more units at this time.

Demo - The singing VIC20 - Barrie Clark. Barrie brought in his VIC 20 with an external SAM module for voice effects. He showed the old Scott Adams Adventure, Pirates Cove, with the voice reading the screen. The singing VIC 20 did not make an appearance as technical difficulties prevented that part of the demo. Maybe next time!

Demo - View a collection of wireframe animations on an Atari 800XL - David Coombs. David showed an amazing demo of some 3D work he's done for the PC and Atari 800. The programming done to pull this off is took a great deal of dedication and the result is fantastic. In my opinion, if Atari had Dave's 3D demo running when they were selling back in the 80's, they would have sold a lot more units!!

Understanding WAM - This document explains the methodology and how the programs work to produce these amazing animations

WAM Terms - This document has definitions

WAM Development Diary - Detailed notes on the development process

Video of all animations on Disk 1 (of 3) from the Demo

Zip file of the disks for running in emulation

An overview of the RP9 file format included with Amiga Forever - Jerry Gray. Jerry showed how to creat a new rp9 file for a game disk (adf) including screen shots, documentation, and machine configuration. He also showed how to add the RP9 to the Amiga Forever menu so your personal RP9s show up with the collection provided with the package.

Minky - A new platform game released in October 2022 for the Amiga - Jerry Gray. Jerry also played a few levels of minky and explained some of the game features and game play mechanics.

Brian Deneen - reelected President
Jerry Gray - reelected Vice President
Brian Carpignano - reelected Treasurer
Chris Nelson - Nominated and elected Secretary

Jerry brought in a MiniMig v1.8 for everyone to play with.

We discussed the new AmigaZette and DOM pages on the website. To date we have had minimal response from members with material to archive. Brian has volunteered the materials from his collection to be archived. Chris is going to review and organize that project.

Jerry brouht in some IDE drives that Bill Clay donated to the club. One is a fully functional OS 3.9 drive. There were a couple of smaller windows drives that are cleared out and formatted for re-use. There were several bad drives. No one wanted to explore them further so they have now been e-wasted.

It's been pointed out that the December meeting traditionally lands on the same day as a big Marathon in town that severely disrupts traffic for several members. We decided to try moving the December meeting back to avoid this conflict.