Friday 16 March 2012

March 2012 meeting this Sunday!

Midi Maze in all its glory!
Just a quick reminder that MACE will meet this Sunday the 18th of March, 2012 at the usual spot.. We expect to have a lot of company on this occasion, with a LAN party being hosted by our parent organisation, Melb PC.

The ST Offline Tournament game being played currently is Xenon II. I'll try to have it set up! Atari-forum thread is here.

The February meeting was an enjoyable one, with Roger setting about getting MidiMaze set up on some ST's for some multiplayer action in the coming meeting. Perhaps we can add a new FPS to the LANner's agenda this month!

Finally, we may be lucky enough to have an old member, Mark, make a guest appearance this meeting with some hacked up Atari hardware to show. If not this meeting, maybe April!

Stay Atari!

Raspberry Pi

Proving that lots of people can still get excited about enthusiast hardware platforms has been the recent runaway success of the first batch of Raspberry Pi computers offered for sale in February 2012.
The Raspberry Pi computer is a tiny, very cheap, modern spiritual successor to the Acorn BBC Micro. Its makers pay homage to the BBC Micro by including a clone of BBC Basic in the distributed Linux operating system, and continuing the model naming convention used by Acorn.
Raspberry Pi measures approximately 3.3 inches by 2.1 inches in size, costs $AU54.75 delivered, and is capable of playing back full 1080P video. It features a low-power, powerful DSP-based VideoCore IV (the less powerful VideoCore II was used in the iPod), an Arm11 700mhz CPU, 256MB of RAM, and an onboard SD card slot for storage.

An initial production run of 10,000 units was manufactured, however global demand has been very high, with retail servers crashing and millions of expressions interest being registered in the days after its release.

Whilst we here at MACE are very happy for the success of a retro-referencing, enthusiast platform, we feel it only fair to mention that marketing and viral, word-of-mouth communication is a funny thing! A number of equally interesting alternatives have been around for longer!

EDIT - someone was going to do it sooner or later! Here is a picture of a Raspberry Pi emulating an Atari 2600