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M.A.R.C.A. Fair Notes (COMAL-related)
========== ==== ===== ===============
by: Joel Ellis Rea
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Commodore
User's Association's (MARCA) second
annual Commodore Fair, was held July
26-28 at the Vally Forge Sheraton
Hotel and Convention Center in King
of Prussia, PA.
This article covers the COMAL
related happenings at the Fair. For a
more general account of the Fair, see
the MARCA Reports in the 'Paperless
Pages' section.
The COMAL User's Group USA (CUGUSA)
booth was a double-sized booth located
almost directly in front of the main
customer entrance! Borge Christensen,
the inventor of COMAL, had set up some
of Lego's prototype robots, hooking
them up to a C64 via the user port and
controlling them with some procedures
written in COMAL. By typing:
LEFT(104);GRAB;RIGHT(104);DROP
the arm on one robot would turn left
104 degrees, grab a "piece" off a tiny
pedestal, rotate back 104 degrees to
its original position, and open its
hand, dropping the piece onto a belt!
Another robot was a simulated washing
machine.
The booth also sold these cute blue
T-shirts with white lettering and a
white picture of Calvin the COMAL
Turtle on the front, and the word
'COMALite' on the front and back.
Also introduced at the Fair was
Jesse Knight's "COMAL QUICK", a disk
containing COMAL 0.14, a HEAP of
utilities, and (best of all) a
fast-loader that loads COMAL 0.14 in
16 seconds on either a 1541 or a MSD!
Plus, Jesse's "QUICKCHIP", an EPROM
that plugs into the black (CBM) COMAL
2.01 cartridges, speeding up COMAL
loads by a factor of up to 5, also on
both 1541 and MSD!! COMAL QUICK sold
for $10, QUICK CHIP for $25 installed
if you already had a CBM COMAL
cartridge.
There were 3 seminars on COMAL:
Introduction to COMAL (for beginning
programmers) by Valerie Kramer (known
as Valerie K on PlayNET) and
Introduction to COMAL Graphics (also
for beginning programmers) by Melinda
(Mindy) Skelton (Mindy S), both of
which were one-part seminars. There
was also a two-part seminar for
intermediate to advanced programmers
entitled COMAL In Depth, by Len
Lindsay (Len L, Captain COMAL) and
Borge Christensen! Len's
presentation covered COMAL features
and advanced graphics such as the
WINDOW procedure, and Borge
demonstrated a software-simulated,
programmable "robot" he uses for
teaching programming concepts to his
students in Denmark. All three were
very worthwhile seminars!
Friday evening in Borge and Len's
hotel room, we had a small COMALite
party. A lot of us demonstrated COMAL
programs we had written. I
demonstrated my "GreyMAT" interface,
which is something that has to be
seen to be appreciated. It will
appear on a future COMAL Today Disk.
All in all, MARCA was something I'm
quite happy I didn't miss. If you
weren't there, you should have been!
Be there next year. I'll keep you
posted when and where! See you then!
=========== End of Article ===========