VCF West Home – Speaker Details – Saturday Speakers – Sunday Speakers – Speaker Registration
* Show is Saturday and Sunday.
* Speaker Room:
- Hahn Auditorium – Located upstairs
Detailed list of speakers their talks, including the days, times and locations, can be seen found in that link, or you can click on the title of the talk below for the details.
Summer of the talks:
Talk 1
"Artifacts" at 25
Christine Finn
In 2001, MIT Press published "Artifacts: an archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley" my left-field survey which spanned the end of the dotcom boom and the start of the bust. In this illustrated talk, I will reprise the story of that book, and what happened next. Over the past two decades, computer archaeology has become about more than the use of digital tech in excavation, but the excavation of old computers and peripherals, and an appreciation of floppy discs and memory sticks as artifacts. Not just hardware, but software and I will discuss retrieval projects, lost data, and the different notions of tech "value" both sides of the Atlantic.
Talk 2
FPGA CATBOX for testing 6502 hardware
DALE A LUCK
The FPGA CATBOX is a reimplementation of the original Atari CATBOX used to help find problems in Atari arcade games. The original 1981 CATBOX had a small numeric keyboard and the ability to read/write the 6502 bus, display results, and do digital signature analysis. The FPGA version is like that but on steroids. It brings those capabilities under control of a Windows based UI that can automate testing of ROMs, RAM, and I/O. It uses config files to specify address ranges and what they do.
Talk 3
How Sphere Hid a Minicomputer Inside Their Micro
Ben Zotto
Sphere Corp of Utah designed and shipped one of the earliest and most forward-looking commercial personal computers. But its BASIC looked backwards instead, emulating a full 1960s minicomputer on the Sphere's Motorola CPU! This technical and historical talk will break down Sphere BASIC and reveal how Hewlett-Packard's BASIC jumped to the obscure SEL 810B and then got reused by Sphere, describing these older systems along the way. If you're curious about what all those strange "minicomputers" really were and how they worked—and how they differed from the micros we all came to use later—this talk is for you! Bring your octal calculator (just kidding).
Talk 4
Resistencia Atari
Diego Javier Alberti
Resistencia Atari is an art project in which I reinterpret digital image creation using the Atari 2600 (VCS) console. The resulting images evoke patterns found in textiles from northern Argentina and the Andean region. These designs do not arise from specific programs but from very simple algorithms executed on the VCS, making specific use of its video generation capabilities for CRT screens. This system presents analogies with the textile field, where the warp (analog video lines) and weft (VCS playfields) function in a manner analogous to a loom. In this talk, I present my entire creative process, from restoring the consoles to programming these visualizations and creating new cartridges: we will go over the details of the technology that made the VCS possible, its programming language and features, the system's limitations, and the development of new cartridges using modern open source/diy technologies.