Performa
Member
Evercon was last weekend, and it was the most significant stress test for a lot of the machines we've ever had- 10+ hours of continuous operation in some cases. The equipment selected for the show was of the "hardier" variety- I purposefully avoided things I knew were prone to overheating or other reliability problems. That said, I knew we'd have things go down, and we did.
The Magnavox Odyssey 2 developed a fault partway through Saturday where the first (left) controller wasn't behaving properly. As these controllers are hard wired in, I elected to pull the Odyssey and flip in an alternate machine that would be playable. Disappointing, but not the first time the Odyssey 2 has given us trouble. For the next round of repairs, I think I'll go ahead and try out that composite video mod to help clean up the video signal a bit.
The Click-ez mouse straight up stopped working on Saturday. I swapped it with another, and haven't had a chance to test it with anything else to see if the issue is really with the mouse, or with the system it had been hooked up to.
I took two Pentium 4 powered Shuttle PCs to the show as small yet capable alternate machines for the proposed LAN section of the WCC setup. While the Shuttle X did great all weekend, the XPC by Shuttle (pictured) died the moment it was plugged in. I'm guessing it's a capacitor issue, based on the age of the board.
The final one is a surprise- the small ARM-based "The C64 Mini" plug-and-play console. This small modern emulation box was new to us in 2020, and has almost nothing to it in terms of electronic parts. However, at the show it refused to take power, and wouldn't fire up. We passed it's TV to the other Evercon exhibitors to replace some of the CRT TV sets they had die on them so their consoles could carry on doing their thing. I'm not sure what happened to this one, nor do I know quite how to approach it for a fix.
Additionally, we had several machines go down temporarily on the show floor (the Compudyne, for instance), but were able to revive them. Then @PS2it had several of his PC's go down. Other exhibitors noted that most of the things that went down for them were TV sets that quit working.
In all, I'm pleased with the results. I expected a much higher rate of attrition given the timeframe, and none of our CRT's went down. Additionally, we were able to send our extra flat panels to help get others back into the game. It was great to work on a collaborative show like this, and I'm looking forward to the next one!
The Magnavox Odyssey 2 developed a fault partway through Saturday where the first (left) controller wasn't behaving properly. As these controllers are hard wired in, I elected to pull the Odyssey and flip in an alternate machine that would be playable. Disappointing, but not the first time the Odyssey 2 has given us trouble. For the next round of repairs, I think I'll go ahead and try out that composite video mod to help clean up the video signal a bit.
The Click-ez mouse straight up stopped working on Saturday. I swapped it with another, and haven't had a chance to test it with anything else to see if the issue is really with the mouse, or with the system it had been hooked up to.
I took two Pentium 4 powered Shuttle PCs to the show as small yet capable alternate machines for the proposed LAN section of the WCC setup. While the Shuttle X did great all weekend, the XPC by Shuttle (pictured) died the moment it was plugged in. I'm guessing it's a capacitor issue, based on the age of the board.
The final one is a surprise- the small ARM-based "The C64 Mini" plug-and-play console. This small modern emulation box was new to us in 2020, and has almost nothing to it in terms of electronic parts. However, at the show it refused to take power, and wouldn't fire up. We passed it's TV to the other Evercon exhibitors to replace some of the CRT TV sets they had die on them so their consoles could carry on doing their thing. I'm not sure what happened to this one, nor do I know quite how to approach it for a fix.
Additionally, we had several machines go down temporarily on the show floor (the Compudyne, for instance), but were able to revive them. Then @PS2it had several of his PC's go down. Other exhibitors noted that most of the things that went down for them were TV sets that quit working.
In all, I'm pleased with the results. I expected a much higher rate of attrition given the timeframe, and none of our CRT's went down. Additionally, we were able to send our extra flat panels to help get others back into the game. It was great to work on a collaborative show like this, and I'm looking forward to the next one!
