                News from AdamCon09                 By Dale and Neil Wick 

There is quite a bit of news and new products at AdamCon09. 

First the new products.  For the first time at an AdamCon a full Coleco Adam  emulator  was  shown running on a PC.  Neil ran it  on  his laptop computer and got several disk images transfered  over.  He was able to run AdamCalc and see the secret screens (see the news section),  and also got SmartBASIC, and TDOS running. Also Smart WRITER is built in. Additionally he showed some ColecoVision cartridges, and a new super game (talked about later).

The authors of the emulator have written a new game called Cosmic Fighters  which is available as both a cartridge game and a super game. Both work great under the emulator. This was also displayed at AdamCon for the first time.  

Also at AdamCon,  Gene Welch (who was a Gallery of Honour recipient this year) showed off a new ANN disk-a-zine  which  is an EOS article reader which  includes  the ability  to play music in the background,  and  possibly  include pictures  in the article.  Gene also had a session on how to make an AdamNET clock by converting a regular Adam Keyboard controller chip and buying a few components.  

Rich Drushel showed the latest version of AdamServe and demoed it with AdamCalc, PowerPaint, and SmartBASIC 1.0 and 1.X.  With AdamCalc it auto detects an AdamNET serial port and parallel port (for a printer), and this is suppo rted by the PC parallel port and serial port. He has also comple tely  patched File Manager,  and HardDisk 3.9 for use with  Adam Serve.  



AdamBomb 2,  which was introduced at last AdamCon was much talked about,  and Bob Bair (our Games Expert) taught impromptu sessions on  AdamBomb techniques to all of the gamers who were stuck.  The version  of AdamBomb was 1.2 which has some fixes that allow  the White Key to work,  and some other minor problems resolved.  



Dale finally got out version 1.0 of his GIF viewer for TDOS. Also Dale has finally finished his AdamCon 05 killer demo.  In it,  he displays an animation flying through the mountains to the site of AdamCon  in Salt Lake City.  The  player,  called  PLAYUTAH,  was written  in  another  new program called MIC.  MIC is v.77  of  a compiler for a DOS QBASIC-like language. The information about it is on the Web.

 

ANN  is  now publishing their disks on the  Web,  thanks  to  Bob Slopsema (also a Gallery of Honour inductee this year). 

Now for News.  On the Internet, Alan Neeley (formerly of AdamLink of  Utah) has just shown up on the the email discussion list.  He has  been working at Dell for the last 3 years as a Tech  Support expert.  He still has an Adam setup andis would like to catch  up on what's happening on the Adam.  Jean Stone has just had her hip replaced,  and so couldn't make it to this AdamCon,  but she made up  a  beautiful afgan as a raffle prize.  Kathy Vrancks  won  it finally, after buying 30 tickets. Last year, she dearly wanted to win it, but the Slopsema's won it instead. This year, it was close. The first ticket that was drawn was  for  the blank seat beside Dale.  The next ticket  that  was drawn was for the blank seat beside Bob Slopsema.  Finally a real winner was drawn and it was Kathy. 



AdamCon  10  will be hosted by PJ and Bob Herrington  in  Orlando Florida in October of next year.  

Although there are a few people on the Fidonet echo, but it is suprising to read about the people who  are  on there.  The Winnipeg group is ever strong holding  a picnic with well over 50 people. 



We  also discovered in the "Hard drive Setup and Repair"  session that Herman can break anything. Or at least so it seemed. 

We  also saw at AdamCon the prominent role that the  Coleco  Adam has  in  the Slug research world.  In a paper published  by  Rich Drushel, he used a Coleco Adam to time syncronize two videos of a slug  feeding.  These videos needed to have a regular time  flash (1/2  second  on,  1/2 second off),  and the Adam did  the  trick losing  only 1/30 of a second over 15 minutes.  In the  paper,  a Coleco  Adam is included in the experimental apparatus setup fig- ure. He gave out autographed copies of the paper. Rich Drushel is teaching Engineering students how to make robots using LEGO. They make robots controled by the latest version of the 6801 chip that is the same as the one found in the keyboard,  disk  drive,  tape drive and SmartWRITER printer. Rich brought one of the robots and demonstrated  it  to the delight of all.  Even  the  housekeeping staff  were impressed.  They said 'The blocks that it is made  of look like LEGO blocks' 'They are LEGO blocks.' 'Oh.'

The  regular online conference was done two fold this year.  

Both the usual CompuServe conference in the CLUB forum CO 18,  and one at  chat.yahoo.com on the World Wide Web.  Bob Sebelist and  Rich Cossaboon attended remotely on the Web,  and Rob Friedman chatted for  a  while  through  CompuServe.  

 

That's all for now.  --dmwick@csclub.uwaterloo.ca Ask me  about my  Coleco  Adam.  It does tricks Maintainer of the  Coleco  Adam list.  Mail  coladam-admin@csclub.uwaterloo.ca  Adam homepage  at CompuServe Mail http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/dmwick/adam.html

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