UPDATED 15-NOV-2024
Prodatron asked me if I was interested in joining him to ride-along to France
to go to the BENEDICTION-CODING-PARY
After a quick check on finding a gites (hostel) nearby and getting days off at work
the trip was planned.
As usual altough I was a passenger in a car this time, I stuffed everything in my backpack.
Yep that is
- an CPC 6128
- t-shirts/underwear/socks/toiletry
- external mini Gotek (see here MINI-GOTEK) adapted for CPC use
- GEOS mouse to try to use with OCP Art Studio (got it working n(ow since yesterday)
- all hardware expansions ULIfAC/USIfAC/Memotron/AMSTEAM (more on AMSTEAM later)
- my needing-a-belt-repair internal 3 inch floppy drive
- 12 inch HDMI/Composite LCD screen with a VESA stand
And so on Thursday the 31st of October I was picked up at home in Antwerp,Belgium
and we continued to drive towards la Normandie.
Around 18:00 after dropping off our stuff at the gites, we went straight to the party
just in time for the melted Camembert degustation :)
Benediction coding party is organised by Eliot/Benediction and is very friendly,
well-organised weekend of getting together, working on CPC related stuff,
and sharing knowledge or just memories.
The main focus lies on coding, so gaming is “not preferred” but in all honesty
there such a one-big-family vibe that you are automatically inspired to do
something creative on the CPC.
As the plastic cups of the event will tell you
However testing new previews of games like Sonic on the CPC+ or the new Castlevania , falls under the testing category :-)
40 attendees , mostly from all corners of France, a lot of names which I had
read about, I must apologise upfront, I have a hard time remembering names.
Roudoudou made a video report about the event and also provided us with very
yummy own-made pizzas on Saturday.
Yeah, I once again must compliment Eliot for the food being provided at the party.
It was really the-chefs-kiss and this for a fee of 16 EUR pro day, WOW.
In addition to providing pizzas on Saturday evening,Roudoudou who is the
author of ACE-DL hinted me that there is a Linux version of the emulator
which apparantly I had totally missed since I was running the Windows
version with wine on Linux.
He also brought old magazines, floppies, tapes, and hardware which was
free to take.
I got home with a few floppies, magazines, tapes, an Amstrad PC1512 serial mouse
and apparantly a rare old-school 2 MB RAM expansion RAM7 which I still need to test.
There were also a few newer magazines and books for people to read and have look into like
MemoryFull
the recent released GENERATION-AMSTRAD
the beautifull CPC-FANZ-BZH
I would learn the next day that both the authors of CPC-FANZ-BZH were present
and had a really nice chat with them.
Everybody was extremely helpfull and invested to me as an Amstrad newbie, a few
thank-yous in particular
- CrackY who replaced my internal diskdrive belt and aided me with my external GOTEK as well as dropping me and Prodatron off at our gites at night.
- AST who helped me in getting palette values from OCP Art studio dumped into an
INK file
- NickyOne and Bouba who helped me understand how to load an SCR and OCP Art Studio in general since I had never used it in my life
- Hicks who helped with VBL sync and loading a palette from an INK file,
also made me understand why you need to disable interrupts and not using system calls
( yeah I get the concepts and have a basis 8-bit PC Assembler from 33 years ago but that’s all )
Other noteworthy people that I had nice conversaties with and sorry I didn’t remember everybodys name so if I didn’t mention it doesn’t mean I might not have had a nice chat with you :)
- Pulkomandy one of the Haiku devs and provider of hardware
- OffseT the author of ACE on Morphos with whom I share a PowerPC (lasticppc) interest
- OneVision who saw me butchering a drawing in my first attempts at OCP Art Studio and promptly offered to do a better job himself in Grafx2
Yes a lot of authors of CPC things were present so if I had a question they were
very approachable as in only 5 steps away LOL
I thus made my first attempts in Z80 Assembler by using example sources and quickly decided I had a faster turn-around doing it on the original hardware.
So in the video-report of Roudoudou at 6:41 you will see me hammering around on
my 6128 using ORGAMS whose author MADRAM was also
present.
Thanks once again at Candy/OVL for showing it to me at ShadowParty, it is a wonderfull application, it is so intuitive I was using it in 5 minutes.
People were also surprised I adopted to it so quickly.
Almost all CPC’s present were running it , most people still coded on the real
hardware.
MADRAM also did a presentation on a new AY/YM music player which incorporates a
lot of the Atari ST YM effects/tricks now available since the release of the machine back in the days.
Krusty showcased a work-flow tool BNDBUILD using django/jinja which aids in offloading
your development, it will only recompile what is needed (that is my very noob understanding of it)
Targhan, author of ArkosTracker demonstrated the new features in ArkosTracker3 which is still in beta at moment which you can find here Arkos3
AST/Impact showcased the new features in IMPdraw.
Saturday Evening was concluded with showing the COMPO entries followed by the already mentioned pizzas.
Sadly Sunday morning had arrived and after leaving our gites, me and Prodatron said our goodbyes at the venue and started on our journey back.
Around 17:00 I arrived back at home, fullfilled with retro-creativity, hospitality and fun.
My thanks to Eliot once again and everybody present, thanks for allowing me to partake in your little community.
Last but not least MY THANKS TO PRODATRON for taking me along this ride, I had a really great time and unless life gets in the way
I sure will be present next year.
You can find some more information here BND4 also the link to the photos here on that same page.
And a nice blog REPORT by Hwikaa (with whom I shared experiences about backpacking for retro travels versus airport security)