Re: KFest 2010 Report

[Kirk Mitchell <kirkmitchell@gmail.com>]

None of us at KansasFest are saying TGIF...  It means that our fun is
rapidly coming to an end.  B-)

Friday is the second day full of sessions, and I'm getting a bit
blurry.  Nothing more annoying than a blurry, excited Geek...  After
breakfast, Martin Haye presented the second half of his NakedOS/Super-
Mon duo.  This program adds more power to the built in machine
language Monitor built into every Apple II... and I mean POWER!  It
makes it simple to list, edit and write in assembly language,
including labels!  I encourage those folks interested in assembly to
follow http://bytebucket.org/martin.haye/super-mon/overview and at
least check the sites links to features.  It's worth your time!

Ken Gagne lightened the techincal nature with his session on how
various Apple II games influenced titles written for the Mac, with a
side by side comparison of 5 or 6 titles.  Enjoyable session!

Wayne Arthurton couldn't make it to this years KansasFest, but that
didn't stop him from paying us a visit via Skype, and giving us a
session entitled "Optimizing Algorithms in AppleSoft Basic".  He
tested the effect that such things as variable allocation and loop
construction and demonstrated how you could speed calculations up a
significant amount.  I was happy to see the results of his testing
because some "hints" I'd always taken for granted in the past didn't
really do anything to speed things up.

After lunch, Stavros Karatsoridis demonstrated how to use ADTPro to
bootstrap Apple II's over serial connections to get system disks and
other disk images to your Apple II, even if you just have blank disks
at hand.  He then used it to get Modem.MGR which he then used to set
up a dumb terminal connection to his Mac, using a USB to Apple II
serial cable, which opens up access to all kinds of Apple disk
images.  Impressive!

Geoff Weiss did the first KansasFest demonstration of the GNO/ME Unix-
like extention for the Apple IIGS.  Even at an hour and a half, it
proved difficult touch on but a small subset of the features of this
free, open source program...  It can be downloaded w/ 18 800K
floppies...  Yikes!  Participants expressed interest in working on
updating features and bughunting.  I bought this package ages ago, and
loved playing with it.  When Marinetti came out, though, the promise
of a TCP/IP stack dwindled for GNO, and interest slacked off.  I hold
with Geoff's hope that we can get folks to polish this resource up
again!

Melissa Barron demonstrated her hacked/modified version of the classic
Oregon Trail game... changing in-game text to 1337, and other amusing
features...  Using tools that surprised most of us!  An eye opening
session!  I didn't sleep through this one.  B-)

The Dinner Banquet was next, and most of the crew dressed up an had
ties on.  If you could call them ties...  They were for the Roger
Wagner Tie one On contest, and judging was fun!  Tony Diaz swept the
field in the end.  We had table clothes and crystal as well... fancy.
It made the Chicken Cordon Bleu taste pretty darned good!  We also
welcomed Tom Vanderpool and Dennis Doms of Open-Apple/A2Central/
Resource Central fame as our special guests, where they, another
members of that crew received plaques for their contributions to the
Apple II world.  Tony announced that all of the publications that flew
under their banner had been offered freely by publisher Tom
Weishaar...  years of great reading will soon be available!

We wrapped up the dinner with a game of ""Action Castle"...  Ken
kicked some butt as MC for Life as well!  Great job, Ken!

Later, we had our group picture take, and shortly afterwards,
scattered to the wind.  Some to visit the Apple Store, others to
unload James Littlejohn's bus which was filled with the contents of
Sean Fahey's famous garage.  Equipment, cards, cables, floppy disks...
all to be picked over by KFesters tomorrow morning.  I can't wait!

Keep in mind, these aren't the high points of the day.  Those come
when we visit with each other, and share our knowledge and a few bad
jokes and all.  Which is where I'm headed now.

Wish you were here!