The annual Wakefield Show at Cedar Court Hotel - lots of 8-bit fun with Chuckie Egg, Elite, Granny's Garden, the BBC Domesday Project and Retro Software. It wouldn't be a proper Wakefield show either without Ian hacking at code and swapping bits around!

Day 2 was a lot quieter, but featured talks by Mel Pullen (creator of the BBC Micro Teletext and Prestel adaptors), Rob Sprowson (who discussed RISC OS Open) and Steve Furber (designer of the original BBC Microcomputer).

It was a very busy Saturday at the Retro Reunited Show at Ainley Top in Wakefield. Quite a lot of bbc-micro maillist members popped along to say hi, and we think the Acorn World room may have been the largest concentration of BBC Micros in at least 10 years!

The Friday evening setup for the Retro Reunited show was vaguely chaotic - we wandered around setting various machines up in the Acorn World 2009 room and getting stuff working while arcade cabinets were hoisted up the fire escape and folks tripped over boxes. Still, my bit worked so that was OK!

Most of the owners of surviving Domesday Project system are attempting to archive the data into a more modern format. I had a brief go at getting data off the laserdiscs - starting by transferring 300MB over to a CF card using the Retroclinic setup. After a while, I worked out it'd go faster if I used the 16MB ARM7TDMI coprocessor, but still not much success sadly.

The annual RISC OS Computer Show took place at Cedar Court Hotel, Wakefield. Organised by Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club, it featured various vendors and new hardware and software for the RiscPC range of computers. I demonstrated quite a few 'new' projects for the BBC Micro, alongside a museum of old equipment from 1982-1989 including the BBC Domesday Project, an Econet, an MDFS and of course various vintage BBC computers.

I finally got enough time and worksurface to get the Compact Flash card drive working for the BBC Master. It uses a patched ADFS so the CF card appears as a hard disk, and so I started to back up things from the MDFS; I'll blog about the experience once I've worked out how to get around the 'Directory Full' messages. Nicky had the right idea, ensconcing herself next to the beer fridge with the bottle opener while I attempted to remember ADFS commmands and swore repeatedly.

Byte Back Retro Gaming Convention featured two halls full of retro kit including arcade games, consoles, home computers, projectors and other interesting bits. For my part I was demonstrating the BBC Domesday Project, and Ian and myself built an Econet to link the BBC Micros together (complete with shabby wiring and bizarre undocumented 'Net errors). Security came from a bunch of stormtroopers. Two days of retro-computing madness!

More BBC Micros in the garage, including a screen I'd not seen before on the 6502 Second-Processor version of Elite.

Another chapter in the Econet saga - this time using an SJ Research MDFS system to provide a fileserver appliance. I wired up the half-height rack, put the A4000 and A5000 machines in to support it, and wired the Econet across the garage to the desk. Hurrah!

The annual Acorn show at Wakefield. I seemed to be the only 8-bitter there this year, demonstrating the Domesday Project and some other interesting bits and bobs.

Throughout the years it's been known as Wakefield BBC Micro User Group, Wakefield Acorn Computer Group, and Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club - but in its many incarnations it's gone on for 25 years (I first attended in 1985!). I took along the Domesday Project setup which got quite a bit of interest.

Trying out some of the Micro Primer series, Podd, and of course more Granny's Garden at Ellie's request.

One of the classic BBC Micro educational games, under an emulator on a Mac. Ellie tried it, and enjoyed it. Oh, and I realised how much Beeb stuff I had stashed away *blush*

After some fiddling, I finally got the Domesday system running and was soon browsing the Community Disc. Some pics here of the steps along the way including debug screens, and showing the genlock overlay in action on the BBC Master AIV.

For the first time, Joel held a stand at the Acorn show selling 8-bit hardware and lots of different (and interesting) boards and software. There was much interest, and not much was left at the end of the day!

After many months of poking, prodding, soldering, sourcing and things, I managed to get a 3-station Econet working tonight. Phew, now I've got to work out how to do the next stage - dialup BBs!

Some more of the BBC Micro kit arrived to build the Econet, and I wanted to get some pics of the odd Watford Electronics kit I'd acquired.

I don't think friends and colleagues are fully appreciating the level of 8-bit madness which is in progress, so here's an update.

Picked up a pile of Beeb stuff from Teeside tonight - including a Master 512 with DR-DOS and a 30M hard disk, a couple of Beebs, an Electron with various interfaces, a pile of disk drives, and a metric f***ton of original games, ROMs and manuals.

I've just taken delivery of an original Domesday laserdisc player with SCSI interface and stuff. Woohoo.

I'll be honest, I went for the BBC Micro stuff - there was a fully working Acorn Domesday system and a development Acorn Phoebe (RiscPC 2) run by the guys from BinaryDinosaurs, as well as a mobile phone development kit running BSD. I was good to meet a few old friends too.

My old BBC Micro fetish has returned, and I'm building stuff together using old bits to create among other things a working Econet system with authentic BBC hard disk stuff. Oh, and there's a v23 modem involved too. Ohhhh the evil.

BBC Micros, Ben stuck in his chair, etc.etc...

I hitched a ride with Ron, to go to the Acorn World Show at Wembley and buy some more bits to pimp up my A310. Otis and Gareth came along too, and we met some fun people including the Acorn Computing magazine crowd.