LUCKI Expo 2005

By Robert Bernardo

Late out of Los Angeles! Late out of Chicago! Darn airline! Oh, well, at least I was getting plenty of sleep on these red-eye flights to Louisville, Kentucky and the LUCKI Commodore Expo. This was my first LUCKI Expo (the acronym standing for Louisville Users of Commodore Kentucky, International, the club hosting this Commodore 8-bit computer event). I had been to other Commodore shows/expos, and they always had an attendance of about 50-75 people. Other than that, I didn’t know what to expect.

The Expo had already begun on Friday, May 13, with night-time festivities. However, due to work obligations, I couldn’t participate in those. Saturday, the Expo was to begin at 11 a.m., and my flight was supposed to have arrived at 10:20. Nope! More like 11:20. I phoned for a ride to the Expo and then freshened up. An hour later, LUCKI member, Steve Grassman, drove up in his van, and we headed out through the rainy city. Traffic was backed up on the freeway, and he took me on an impromptu tour through city streets, bypassing the traffic jam. We crossed over the Ohio River and drove into New Albany, Indiana. First turn-off from the bridge and there was the Holiday Inn Express, site of the Expo. Steve let me out, and I went directly to the Expo room.

The Expo was in full gear. I hastily paid my $10 entry fee and bought a one-dollar, a three-dollar, and a five-dollar ticket for the raffle. Grand prize was to be a SuperCPU 128 accelerator cartridge with 16 mb. of RAM. I yanked the camcorder out of its case and started videotaping. Bo Zimmerman was demonstrating how to play MULE on the Commodore 64. I had never met Bo Zimmerman, collector of Commodore prototypes and programmer of GEOS utilities. Dressed in a baseball cap and jersey, his long, dark hair streamed out over his shoulders.

I went around the room, videotaping the 13 or so C= set-ups. I recognized many people from previous shows; others, I had only known via the #c64friends chat or from the Commodore mailing lists/newsgroups; others were brand new to me. K. Dale Sidebottom, organizer of the Expo and president of LUCKI, noted that attendance stood at 58, down from the previous year’s Expo. He attributed the lower attendance to the fact the Commodore Vegas Expo (CommVEx) was coming in July. However, this LUCKI Expo would be the last for awhile; Dale wanted a break from the yearly organizing.

After Bo’s demonstration, Jeff Ledger, BBS guru, talked about the growth of telnet BBS’s, and specifically, how to connect the Commodore 64/128 to a PC and thus use the PC’s abilities to connect to the Internet. (Of course, I didn’t have to worry about that; with my ISP’s shell account, I could easily telnet with the Commodore alone.) He spoke of his Telnet BBS Server 1.2, a Windows program that provides the necessary serial to tcp/ip connection from the Commodore to the PC.

Next up was Jim Brain, Commodore hardware hacker and all-around-Commodore-knowledge-man, who segued off of Jeff’s subject with his own talk about using the “screen” command in UNIX shell accounts. With the screen command, he demonstrated how it was possibly to switch from chat to e-mail to the Net, all without closing one to open another.

Greg Nacu, programmer of WiNGs utilities, then gave his demonstration of SpiffyPaint, an alpha version of a paint program for WiNGs. (WiNGs is a multi-tasking operating system for use with the Commodore 64 and SuperCPU accelerator.) Some features in this hi-res paint program had never before been utilized on the C64, like layers, transparency, and masking.

Leslie Bird, a newcomer to the Commodore expo scene, had trouble getting her disk drive going, and so, her BBS demonstration was alternately delayed and interrupted. She had programmed her own BBS back in the 1980’s, and it was seeing the first modern light of day since those days. She also showed a C128 40-column drawing/paint program she created in the 1980’s.

Pizzas! Lunch was delivered to the Expo room -- eight giant pizzas in various forms, combination, pepperoni, vegetarian, and more. Those who had paid the luncheon fee lined up, grabbed a slice or two or three, and hungrily wolfed down the food, washing it with copious amounts of cola, lemon-lime, or diet sodas. To top it off, a LUCKI member had provided boxes of chocolates and jellybeans! Ah, the diet of computerphiles!

After pizza, Jeri Ellsworth, developer of the CommodoreOne and the C64 DTV 30-games-in-one joystick, took the floor and discussed version 2 of the DTV, which was to come out very soon. The factory had gone through a trial run of v2 DTV’s, and v2 samples were awaiting her inspection as soon as she returned home. On a whiteboard behind her, she expertly detailed the fine points of the DTV -- a full 256 colors, 8-bit sound, almost all illegal C64 opcodes included now, and more. However, Jim Butterfield, old-school Commodore programmer, caught her on a few programming points, much to Jeri’s chagrin.

Jim Brain returned with the penultimate talk covering three of his prototype projects, the PSXJoy (an adapter so that Playstation controllers could be used with the Commodore 64/128), VIP (Virtual IEC Peripheral), an “intelligent” cable to connect PC’s with Commodores and have them communicate with each other), and the uIEC project (for want of a better name, it is a small device so that IDE drives and CompactFlash cards could connect to the Commodore via its serial port). All very interesting! All with people wanting to have them right now!

Jim Butterfield closed out the official talks of the day with his recounting of computer television programs of the 1980’s, specifically a Canadian show in which he appeared. “The Academy” was geared to computer novices, and Jim appeared on the show, seeming to be very much like his self these days, except with darker hair. The show treated its material in a humorous, almost patronizing manner, but it was unusual to see how home computers were such a new entity back then, instead of being the ordinary tool that they are now.

With official end of the day, Dale Sidebottom reminded everyone of Sunday morning’s roundtable discussion, “The Future of Commodore.” Many people broke up into groups around the Expo room for more personal demonstrations and other activities. Little did I know how late they would be up that night!

Eric Kudzin broke out the “hard” stuff, i.e., a case of whiskies. While a few imbibed, others hung around just to hear Dave Moorman’s private demonstration of dotBasic, his Visual-Basic-like language for the Commodore and offered through the Loadstar disk magazine. Design a screen, and dotBasic would interpret it!

Jeri Ellsworth’s night talk on the CommodoreOne was cancelled, due to what she said was a lack of interest (though I tried to convince her that was not the case). However, I did put up video of Jeri’s December interview on KGW-TV news; that drew a good crowd... and scared Jeri out of the room, because she did not like the sound of her voice. After that, I ran the video that Raymond Day gave me months ago, the video of first-day sales of the C64 DTV on the QVC shopping network. That was followed by some clips that Raymond recorded of Jeri at earlier expos, like the Chicago Expo in 2000. Once again, Jeri ran back to the safety of the hotel lounge while her videos were up on the screen. There she kicked back, e-chatting on her laptop computer and talking to Jim Brain and others who came over to the lounge sofas.

I had a chance to talk to Maurice Randall. He told me about his run-in with the overly-eager cops of Lansing, Michigan. I told him to write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper and to possibly contact TV stations. He was still considering legal action. On the Commodore front, he said that HD-DOS+, the first upgrade to the original CMD hard drive DOS in years, would be ready before the September Chicago Expo. Among other things, HD-DOS+ would break the 4+ gig limit of the current DOS. I also asked about problems in a very old RAMLink (16-meg RAM expander for the C64/128) I had and about a quirk in GEOShell (gives shell functions when used within the GEOS or Wheels environment).

While others in the room watched cartoon DVD’s on the large TV monitor, I talked to Greg Nacu, asking for a demonstration of IDE64. He couldn’t do it tonight but would try on Sunday. Earlier in the day, he did show a scene of Star Trek VIII playing through the WiNGs movie player, though he admitted that there was a bug in playback when it passed a certain frame number.

I got onto Maurice’s Commodore set-up and tried out the Wave graphical web browser. I was connected to the #c64friends chat on irc.eskimo.com and chatted a bit to the news-hungry members there. Eventually, I moved to the corner of the room where Jim Mazurek had set up his C128 to be on-line via Novaterm 10.2r2 and a Palm Ethernet cradle. Jim gave me a one-on-one tutorial about how to configure Novaterm and how to get the C= on-line through an Ethernet. On Jim’s computer, I got back to the #c64friends chat and gave more info on the happenings of the day. I was even able to get other Expo attendees on the chat, like Maurice.

Meanwhile at the table next to us, Eric Kudzin, Earl Williams, and Raymond Day worked on modifying Palm Ethernet cradles to be C= compatible. Convinced about the need for such a device, I bought one of Greg Nacu’s last cradles ($10) that he had brought in, and I gave it to Raymond Day, who started modifying it free for me.

It was 2 a.m., and it was time for me to sleep in a comfortable bed, getting some rest before the Sunday activities. There were still about a dozen people in the Expo room. Raymond was still hacking the cradle, but I had to go. Passing by the hotel lounge, Jeri and others were still gathered, talking. I waved to her; she smiled. Back at the room, I finally lay down for about 5 hours of sleep.

Sunday I awoke to light streaming through the thin curtains of the room. Dressing quickly and gathering my equipment, I rushed to the Expo room and found the chairs gathered in a large circle spanning nearly the circumference of the room. A few people were there already for this 9 a.m. discussion, but it looked as if I had a few more minutes. Running back to the hotel breakfast bar, I picked up some fruit, pastries, and orange juice, and went back to the Expo room. More people had gathered, nearly everybody from the previous night, except for Jim Brain. Jeri Ellsworth, Earl Williams, and Eric Kudzin arrived in pajamas!

Dale Sidebottom was the moderator of the discussion, “The Future of Commodore.” Dale would pose the questions/problems, and everyone was invited to respond. The discussion ranged from speeding up the process of manufacturing SuperCPU’s to future Commodore Expos to the Commodore person-of-the-year. Maurice Randall was non-committal on the idea of simplifying the SCPU in order to speed up its manufacture. The Commodore Vegas Expo (CommVEx), the SouthWest Regional Association of Programmers (SWRAP) Chicago Expo, the Toronto World of Commodore, and the Commodore Show of the Netherlands were all discussed. Too many shows this year? No, people in different parts of the country now have a chance to make it to some expo/show. Who was the Commodore person-of-the-year? By a nearly unanimous vote, it went to Jeri Ellsworth (Jeri being the only one to vote against herself).

After over an hour of discussion, the roundtable broke up. Looking very sleepy, Jeri ran back to her room for more shut-eye. Others went back to their rooms while others started disassembling their equipment left on the tables. The Palm Ethernet Cradle table was empty, save one cradle left for me; Raymond had finished his work. I went over to the Expo sales room. On Saturday, I just had a brief look at what was there. This time I would go through the hundreds of packages of programs in-depth. Joe Palumbo had his sales table there; I bought a few programs and the top half of a 1581 disk drive case. He had plenty of 1581 cases with motherboards sans mechanisms; his explanation was that Commodore Canada had swiped all the mechs to be used in Amiga 500 computers. I told him that now all people had to do was find derelict A500’s and take the mechs to put back into the 1581’s. Dave “Snogpitch” Witmer and Roger Hoyer had taken over several tables in order to sell the Commodore and Amiga programs from their club, the Cincinnati Commodore Computer Club. Running out of cash, I bought a few disks with Star Trek graphics from them.

In the same room, Dale Sidebottom had a massive Commodore set-up, complete with Lexmark Postscript color inkjet and laser printers. This set-up was dedicated to printing out iron-on’s for T-shirts. I ordered a “I Survived Friday the 13th at the LUCKI Expo” T-shirt. Dale had run out of medium T-shirts, and I would have to wait while he bought some more at a nearby department store.

No problem. Dave Moorman, his wife, Sheri, and I went out to a late lunch at the Waffle and Steakhouse across the street. Wow, steak the thickness of cardboard and not very steak-like at all.

When I came back to the hotel, almost everything had been hauled out of the Expo room. A few people were left, like Jim Brain and Greg Nacu, talking casually about Commodore matters, including the European scene. I helped clean up a bit and took a gander at the C64 DTV plans that Jeri had left on the table. Eric and others cleaned up for her; they would return the items back to her room. My LUCKI T-shirt was finally delivered. Finally, with the room clear, I headed to the lounge.

Steve Grassman would give me a ride back to the Louisville Airport, but not before he and Dale counted their monies from the expo. Fortunately, the count proved that they didn’t take a loss. It was about 4:30 p.m.. I said good-bye to Dale, thanking him for a great show and hoping that CommVEx would be as good as the LUCKI Expo. I said good-bye to Dave and Sheri Moorman who had jumped in their van to drive off and visit friends. And I jumped into Steve’s van for the drive to the airport and the long journey back to California.