World of Commodore 2007

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.
 

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