Check out the pictures and video of our exhibit at the April 6 Los Angeles Maker Faire 2024! We had many attendees come and talk about the Commodore and Amiga computers that were on exhibit. Thanks to SCCAN member Jerold K. for helping out through the day and also for bringing his exhibit of using a MIDI keyboard with the C64 and Nintendo Entertainment System. Those who knew music were fascinated what was on display.

http://blog.retro-link.com/2024/04/los-angeles-maker-faire-2024.html

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network – http://www.portcommodore.com/sccan

P.S. The day started off cold and breezy as we set up our systems at 6:30 in the morning. And we didn’t get electrical power until the park engineers switched it on at 8. When we did get power, we could test out the equipment, and I found that I hadn’t brought a VGA cable for the A3000 with 24-bit video card, and I was getting no picture through the RGB port (I found out later that if I had gone through the early start-up, I could bypass the load of the 24-bit drivers and thus use the RGB port). So, I put A3000 away, and I used the back-up A600. The A600 worked all the way to 3 p.m., but then it started having loading problems, gurus, and green screens. I attributed that to heat problems; it had always run hot in the past. Sorry, kids, no more gaming on this computer.

P.P.S. As usual, the kids loved the games on the computers. The parents loved talking about how they grew up on the classic programs and computers, and showing their kids that this was a floppy disk! The more technically-minded loved to talk about the equipment and the programming they did back in the day (I even met an engineer whose East Coast company used the Video Toaster and Lightwave to make videos for corporations). A few asked where was a Radio Shack/Tandy computer (I said my Santa Clara friend had one at the Bay Area Maker Faire), a few asked for Texas Instruments (I said I left my TI-99 at home), and a few asked for Atari (I said I didn’t bring one this year). Looking at the Commodore PC20-III, several said they didn’t know that Commodore Business Machines had made MS-DOS machines.

To the interested, I passed out flyers that named the California Commodore and Amiga clubs and that detailed the upcoming West Coast Commodore and Amiga events. Of course, I plugged the April 13-14 Commodore Los Angeles Super Show, and some said they would check it out.