Hulsie

I've still never met with the group but would love to. Is there any interest in meeting up sometime again soon?

Yes, October sounds great. Let's make it happen, brothers.

Hello everyone, I really, really, really want the book Matilda the Computer Cat (digital copy here: http://www.atarimania.com/documents/Matilda_the_Computer_Cat.pdf) Is there any chance somebody has this and would be willing to sell it to me? Thanks, Hulsie

Fair renough. I made my attempt so I'll let somebody else pick the next date. I might still go today because I'd like to check the place out. It sounds cool.

I had to remove my Happy Drive board not too long ago and I stupidly broke three of the pins off (see attached pic). It is too tiny to solder (at least for me) and I don't know how to fix it. I would feel bad throwing it out, so if anybody knows how to repair it and wants to take it off my hands I'll ship it to them for $5. I will be ordering a new one from Atarimax. If you're interested, send me a PM. Sorry, I no longer have the pins.

Sure, I'd be down.

All right, guys, are we still good for Saturday at 2ish? Pinball Pete's?

Great! I'll see you guys there then. I'll wear something Atari-oriented so that it is painfully obvious who I am. I'm also looking forward to the convention on Saturday. theloon, what are you working on?

I'd definitely contribute as well!

Fascinating stuff. I wish I was older and active in the community at that time. I was but a wee lad and didn't really have the social experience that seemed to come with the Atari computer scene. I just learned and acquired games from various family members who also had Ataris. Though I did go to computer shows and get disks from the MACE booth (Michigan Atari Computer Enthusiasts), who were sympathetic to my plight about being too little to have money to buy games, and they were amused that such a little kid was an Atari fan, so they would give me free shareware disks from time to time. I was always fascinated by "cracking groups" from the moment I learned what they were, and would begin to follow who was cracking what, even though I didn't know anybody or anything about it. I would think, oh yeah, this game came from Captain Wizard, he also cracked my Spy Vs. Spy II game, etc. Glenn was always particularly enigmatic because I just couldn't fathom the concept of a guy converting games to a new system, though it seems a lot more reasonable now.

You guys wanna do the first Saturday in July? Maybe 2:00 or so?

I will be checking out the Cleveland show for sure. It will be my first time. Let's do Pinball Pete's sometime, guys. When is best for you all? Weekends are best for me personally but I can make other nights work if necessary. I need to meet some other Atarians because there are far too few in my neckothawoods.

We've all heard of him, but how did he do it? How was a guy in the 80s able to port Atari 5200 games to A8 without some crazy expensive hardware? Does/did anybody know him or know how he achieved this?

Fascinating. Thank you.

This question is more of a general computer question than just an 8-Bit question, but since I've experienced it the most there, I thought I would ask it here. Do CRC errors always equal damaged/corrupted/unusable data? I've been imaging a lot of old disks I've accumulated and got a lot of CRC errors in ProSystem. The disks weren't kept very well. All the games on the disk still seem to work though, and I don't get any load errors, and everything works on the image file too. I can also write the image back to a disk without a problem. I only vaguely understand what CRC is used for (other than the fact that it is a method of checking for errors) but it isn't clear to me if CRC errors always mean bad data. Also, does copying/imaging disks actually copy the bad CRC properties?