The Toronto PET Users Group (of which I'm a proud member) held their annual World of Commodore show in Toronto on December 1, 2007. The expo was very well organized and ran like clockwork. I gave a talk on the technical details of copy protection; here's a link to the PDF (patience, it's a large file). The talk I really wish I had a picture of is the guy who showed us photos of his potato packing plant, where a Commodore 64 is used as the controller for a device that sorts potatoes by size. And we thought we'd seen everything...
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As soon as the doors opened at 10:00, there was a line going down into the basement of Alderwood United Church, where the expo was held... |
...and we knew we were welcome when we saw this! I was told it came from Commodore's headquarters back in the day. |
Upstairs, there was a room dedicated to the memory of Jim Butterfield, with some mementos and a DVD player showing footage of his appearances on TV and at Commodore expos. There was also a book for people to sign, which was given to Jim's widow, Vicky, who attended the expo. |
Karl Hildon, who edited the Transactor magazine, told us some great stories about Jim. He also introduced Vicky, who shared her own fond memories. |
Jim's Commodore 128 was donated to the Personal Computer Museum (held in this picture by the museum's curator, Syd Bolton)... |
...as was his slide rule (shown with one of Jim's business cards). |
Brian Lyons showed the VIC-20 megacart (which contains more games than you probably ever knew were released for that machine). On reset, it shows a menu system with games arranged by category. |
The VIC-20 experts at the show. Left to right: Leif (Schema), Golan, Jason, François (Eslapion), Paul, Robin (Macbeth/PSW). |
An interesting variation on the multicart is the BehrBonz cart, shown here by Eslapion. It is simpler to make and contains a few less games. |
Here's a closeup of the board Eslapion demonstrated. |
LimeMack shows that the C64 emulator on his iPAQ can even run demos! |
He also had a copy of the debugger he's working on. Note the status register display for each instruction and the color coding of mnemonics to show which registers they affect. |
One of the more spectacular demos was by James Long and his brother, who showed a novel MIDI setup involving a C64. |
Here it is in the exhibit hall, with their custom cross-development environment on the screen. |
The C64's SID chip is used to play the MIDI notes, and some extra processing was done as the signal passed through a PC. |
Curious onlookers try to figure out where all the cables are going. The MIDI cartridge was one of Fotios' boards. |
The C64's software was hard-coded for this specific instrument (note the labels on the sliders and knobs). |
A special treat was this talk by Georg Feil, who wrote the Synth Sample demo we all remember seeing. After all these years, Georg has re-released it with the editor he used to create it. |
Dr. Joe works to resuscitate a Commodore 128. |
Jim brought his Plus4, this time with a stylish matching monitor. |
Leif gives a talk about the various options for "real" networking on a C64 (standards are naturally a problem). |
Greg, current TPUG president, conducts the raffle. Prizes included a 1750 clone and an Aprospand cartridge port expander. |
In the evening, we went to dinner at The Grille, where our tables stretched all across the dining room. FireflyST smiles for the camera. |
Jason Compton and Vicky Butterfield contemplate the conundrum of the inconsistent cheesecakes. |
The after-party, back at the hotel during a snowstorm. Occasionally, someone was sent upstairs to see if the real world was still there. I left at about 03:30. |
Eric and Eslapion study the inner secrets of a third-party Commodore device that is unfortunately no longer available except to the most dedicated collectors. |