14th September 1996 @ New Lynn Community Centre Hall

A warm, overcast day saw the start of the annual Acorn Show. The Club didn't hold one last year. The Waikato User Group was present as well as some of the Acorn dealers.

Acorn Computers NZ had a corner showing us the latest, as well as selling off old BBC and Master software.

The Electron I have been using for submitting text to EUG has been playing up so I am using a friend's machine. I notice the screen is brighter so I believe the output from the computer must affect it.

There has been quite a lot of interest in the Elk. Possibly as it becomes more of a rarity, it gains more interest.

Much of the accent is on graphics, videotitling, large plotter printouts and music.

The show kept busy all day but much of the activity came from visiting members. I'm told that Acorn took good orders for the Strongarm.

One of our club members is also active in education in New Zealand and Australia with a MIDI setup and, of course, the Sibelius program. I am told that this is rapidly becoming a world standard. Another was providing a selection of digitised music.

My two Electrons on display attracted more interest than last time and several people, out of curiosity or nostalgia, stopped by to play a game or two. Two actually left the show and returned with their old Electrons for me to fix for them. Amazing how many have had Electrons.

One of my Elks was set up with the Cumana Disk Drive Interface which for me is the 720K on a 5.25" disk. This is where I came unstuck, as I had the Pres AP2 ROM in the Acorn Plus 1 and I have found since (I may be wrong and it could be some other fault!) that the CUMANA DFS is not compatible as it would not pass CDFS commands to the cartridge. I was trying to start this report at the show but without much success. That was because the computer I had there was also faulty. But even substituting a good computer, I could not get the CUMANA INTERFACE working with the Pres AP2 in the Acorn Plus 1. There is no problem using the Cumana with an Acorn Plus 1 containing the Slogger EXPANSION 2.02. I wonder if anyone else had had this problem?

The other Elk at the show had the Pres AP3 ADFS interface and 3.5" disk drive. This unit was working well without any difficulties.

All in all, an enjoyable day that passed quite quickly. I did not have time to type half of this at the show and barely had time for a quick look around at what others were doing and check the bargains from Acorn.

Alan Richardson, EUG #29

Alan Richardson