The goings-on at the weekend's meetup in Leicester might be of interest here. It's the second at this venue, and this time we had two rooms rather than one, but still it was over-subscribed and very tightly packed.



People were fixing hardware and writing software, helping each other, playing games and making music. It was very sociable (and quite noisy) but even so people reported making progress. The most numerous machines there, I think, were the Acorn BBC Micros and their successor the Master, but also there were the earlier Atom and the later Electron, as well as some yet-later ARM-based machines. There was a network - Acorn's Econet - connecting machines of all generations to each other and to a vintage fileserver. It's a multi-drop serial protocol somewhat related, I think, to the Cambridge Ring network idea. (There's a "bridge" device to connect networks running at different clock rates which is itself 6502-powered.)

Among the project themes:
- writing 8 bit games, often pushing the limits of the hardware
- extending the repertoire of second processors (co-processors) connected over the Tube
- solid state storage projects to replace SCSI, floppy, IDE, ROMs
- graphics extensions
- hardware debugging and repair
- demonstrations and explanations as people circulated informally

There was also one person building his first 6502 breadboard system, another working on a backplane-based RC2014-like 6502 computer, and another debugging an Apple II with an FPGA-based in circuit emulator.

My (captioned) photos are here, more photos and background info in the event thread here.

Here's the group photo just before the evening meals were served up: