Memofest 2018 was held on 13th October at Martin Allcorns place in Hastings.
Attendees were Bill, Dave (via Skype), Jim, Mark, Martin, Mike and myself.
This year, the videogame competition was Turbo. Embarrassingly, I scored 0 on my own game. As if the game wasn't embarrassingly bad enough as it is. Jim won with a score of 3200.
The cake was a fruitcake and it was Turbo themed. I commented that although the icing on the cake was only 5mm thick, it was more "3D" than "3D Turbo".
Martin showed the latest MTXPlus+, which as far as Dave knew, had an empty space on the circuit board, but then Martin inserted a WizNet module. The MTXPlus+ had Bill's PS2/USB keyboard hardware on it.
We saw the MTXPlus+ running a web server, from my NFX project. Some images failed to load, probably due to the MTXPlus+ not being able to keep up with the rate at which web requests were arriving - increasing the clock speed helped, and changing the web server to listen on 4 rather than 2 sockets would probably help further.
Martin reported seeing an "out of memory error", under load, although there is no memory allocation in the code. The network code has a "net_send_chunk: no free space" assertion message which should never be displayed, as it implies the WizNet has said it has transmitted all its data, and yet the transmit buffer is not empty. Perhaps it was that.
I spotted that Martin and Dave tend to use Altera CPLDs, so passed on some Lez has recently given me.
I described my embryonic VGA Videowall project, which will hopefully be ready for next years Memofest. Later in the day, Mark was describing power distribution, noise and decoupling, and so I made a couple of changes to my design.
Bill showed his tiniest MTX. It was a Pi with a small keyboard and a small LCD display.
Martin and Dave have been beavering away on MTXPlus+, and CFX 3, and various other circuit-boards were handed out and inspected.
Martin showed us his cool component tester (£10 eBay kit).
Martin showed us a shocking way to mount a V9938 chip on veroboard. Pin spacing is 1.78mm, every other pin is 2*1.78=3.56mm apart, and the veroboard diagonal is 0.1*2.54*sqrt(2)=0.3592mm - close enough.
Apart from the cake, brunch with bacon and sausages was laid on, along with tea/coffee, and later pizza. We were spoiled, as ever.
Between items and at breaktimes, there was lots of good discussion around hardware, retro history and general engineering.
The only unfortunate thing is that not all of the usual enthusiasts could attend - maybe next year.
More photos and detail on MEMORUM.