{"id":1230,"date":"2017-09-30T19:10:30","date_gmt":"2017-09-30T18:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/?p=1230"},"modified":"2017-09-30T19:10:30","modified_gmt":"2017-09-30T18:10:30","slug":"and-youre-back-in-the-room-retro-computer-festival-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/?p=1230","title":{"rendered":"And you’re back in the room – Retro Computer Festival 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

I has been several months since I last posted<\/a> anything here. In fact is was my wrap-up of the work I had done during the RetroChallenge 2017\/4<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I certainly haven’t been idle on the retro computing front. In fact I have been busier than ever. I just haven’t been writing about it.<\/p>\n

Retro Computer Festival 2017.<\/h2>\n

Most of my efforts have been preparing for and attending Retro Computing Festival 2017 at the Centre for Computing History<\/a> in Cambridge.<\/p>\n

My old friend Tristan and I volunteered to fill a table with old bits and bobs and at the time of booking we brainstormed ideas coming up with “something to do with ASCII art”.<\/p>\n

For those of you not in the know, ASCII Art uses the characters of the 7-bit ASCII set to represent brightness levels of bitmap graphics.<\/p>\n

We decided to use a web cam, an old machine and a daisy wheel printer to take photos of people visiting the museum and print out low resolution ASCII version of them.<\/p>\n

Non of the old machines we had in mind will support a web cam. They don’t even support USB so we decided to use a Raspberry Pi to grab images from the camera, turn them into low resolution grey scale images and send them to a retro machine over serial using the X-Modem protocol.<\/p>\n

We weren’t going retro with the image capture but we were from that point on.<\/p>\n

My first thought for a suitable machine was to use the Exidy Sorcerer but a quick internet search suggested that there was a problem with its serial port that might make things difficult.<\/p>\n

Next up was my beloved Sharp MZ700 but that developed a fault in the PSU and started blowing fuses. The Wang laptop was to slow in GW-Basic and too unlike a PC for Qbasic or Turbo C.<\/p>\n

We finally settled upon Tris’s 386 Toshiba laptop with its funky amber plasma display.<\/p>\n

The printer of choice turned out to be an Epson dot matrix.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Other stuff.<\/h2>\n

It took a lot of mucking about to put this project together\u00a0 and as the date drew closer we were getting a bit worried that it wouldn’t be working properly on the day and so we thought it wise to take a few other bits and pieces.<\/p>\n

I the photo above you can see the Toshiba on the left, my Exidy sorcerer on the right. We also took a BBC micro incase of emergencies (we didn’t need it), my Creed 7B teleprinter and a Ti-99\/4A.<\/p>\n

In the end, the ASCII art worked pretty well and people seemed happy with the results.<\/p>\n

Now, what to do next year.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I has been several months since I last posted anything here. In fact is was my wrap-up of the work I had done during the RetroChallenge 2017\/4. I certainly haven’t been idle on the retro computing front. In fact I have been busier than ever. I just haven’t been writing about it. Retro Computer Festival … Continue reading And you’re back in the room – Retro Computer Festival 2017<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47,126,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c93-blog-posts","category-retro-computer-festival-2017","category-c84-retro-tech"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"andy","author_link":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1231,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions\/1231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}