Memofest 2015

Memofest 2015 was held on 17th October at Paul Daniels place, in Crewe.

Jim Wills, myself, Simon Clewly, Mark Kinsley, Bill Brendling and of course, Paul Daniels attended. Dave Stevenson attended virtually, via Facetime.

Things that were there included :-

The CFX was demonstrated and looks good. I commented that its fast too, perhaps even faster than REMEMOrizer.

Claus's newly ported Old Mac Farmer game was demonstrated, and was a hit. Here we can see it running on REMEMOTECH :-

Paul showed off Noddy+, which has new commands for transitions between pages, parameterised delays and accessibility of the key pressed in subsequent commands.

We (ie: Mark and his Rigol) attempted to fix Jims red MTX. The Z80 looked fine. The video daughter looks dodgy, and we worked around this by directly connecting the VDP Y output to the monitor. Then "Seady!!" (rather than "Ready") was seen. Switching the VDP didn't help. It could be dodgy VRAM, but thats a little tricky to fix on the spot, so Jim asked Mark to take the motherboard away and fix.

Bill showed off a node ring running between two MEMUs, one on a Raspberry Pi, the other on a laptop. I think I need to pick up some of his MEMU patches relating to this.

Simon showed off his wood molding and the acryllic case he made from it. He also had an aluminium SDX style add-on case he had made. Considerable debate about new casing and keyboards ensued.

As we had one, MAGROM was also demonstrated again.

I showed how I had interfaced C code compiled with the SDCC C compiler with assembler assembled with SDASZ80.

I also showed how BE, using BEMEMU, can peek within the memory of a running MEMU. To illustrate the point, I showed some of the innards of Speculator.

I made the bold and mysterious claim that at Memofest 2016 I would unveil a game that is quite unlike (in terms of style) any existing Memotech game - ie: something that hasn't been seen before.

Jim expressed a desire to be able to design new platform game levels using existing tools such as "Tiled", but is lacking a platform game engine to target the resulting assets too. Paul showed something similar (with some overlap) that runs on the ZX Spectrum.

A buffet was provided, and there were hot-dogs for lunch. We have to thank Paul's wife Julie for this. As was traditional, a cake was provided. This included pictures of 50 MTX games on it. In order to be entitled to eat the cake attendees were required to name the games. This proved tricky, even for people (ahem) who have written many of the games, and for the quiz-master himself (oops).

 

Dave was teased as he managed to make it to London, but not to Crewe. Dave offerred to host Memofest 2016 in Aberdeen.


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andy.z.key@googlemail.com