|  Party Report |
Well, the party was one week ago, and almost all the details (results, pics, etc.) are already out, but I still feel compelled to write down my experiences and memories from the party at Mohács. At least there will be an English write up :-) It's not going to be in chronological order!
It's no secret that for me this was quite the trip! Total travel time (not including wait times): 1h (car) + 6h (plane) + 2.5h (plane) + 1.5h (car) + 2h (bus) + 3h (bus) + 15min (walking) = 16.25 hours :-) Even though other folks registered from abroad, apparently I was the only one who came. I wished I could have met Degauss, Luca or Chicken (or any of the other sceners, really :-)) but they couldn't make it. At least language wasn't an issue: everyone spoke Hungarian all the time.
 My original plans were to meet up with Gaia in Budapest, and he would drive us down to the party place. Unfortunately he had a last minute issue come up and could not make it :-( I still met up with him though, he drove me from one bus station to the other and we had a good chat. It was good to see him :-) Because of the original plans, I was assuming I wouldn't have to be the one to actually find the party place, so I didn't do a very good job of looking at the details (even though it was posted on the website). Just look at this photo, who could miss it :-) Anyway, I eventually showed up!
I was one of the first to arrive, just a little after noon. I quickly found Csio (and scared him by jumping out from behind a door, that was funny). He showed me around the party place and we chatted a bit. I also met his lovely wife, Csilla (Frau Tappert), Csio's dad and Csilla's grandma. It was quite nice to see the family helping out with organizing the event. The place was quite big, the walls were decorated ith scene related pictures.
 TLC also arrived early on. I hardly recognized him with the long hair :-) But apparently he had it for a while. He didn't fail to impress either: he has shown me (and everyone else who wanted to see) a working mouse (rat, in Hungarian slang :-)) to Plus4 connection, along with an image editor that handles the mouse. Extremely cool stuff! I'm hoping that both emulators and new software will support this in the future. I listened to him explaining the details of it all and I can honestly claim that I understood some of it :-)
 TCFS arrived not much later. I met him personally only once before, and I recalled most of our first conversation to him. We talked about a ton of fun and interesting stuff. First, it's official: TCFS gave his blessing for his Lemmings project to be finished. We discussed Battery 3 in great detail. I *knew* that I've seen it... I had very specific memories of it, and when I told him about those, he confirmed that indeed I did not dream all that stuff. I think I'm going to update the Battery 3 page soon with some of the details. Let me says this again: the loss of Battery 3 is probably the biggest software tragedy of our scene. Since Gaia couldn't drive me to the party, I was going to ask some people if they could drive me back to Budapest - TLC and TCFS both offered, and I ended up getting a ride from TCFS (eat your heart out Luca ;-)).
 Then Mucsi showed up :-) Apparently it wasn't for sure that he will be able to make it, but fortunately he did. Him, I've only seen once at a Compy Xmas, but back then we were no-name lamers and I didn't approach him. He's a very friendly guy. I told him I'd like to sit down with him to go over some of the stuff that's in our database and some time during the party we did. Jeva joined in for a while as well. They remembered a lot of stuff! I think Mucsi enjoyed thinking about the old times. He told me about other MB members. I asked specifically about Batya - it would be so nice to get in touch with him, but as Mucsi said, Batya is a very private person.
 I met Moldi for the first time. He greeted me with "Hi Csabo, I have a gift for you!" and handed me a pen-drive. Apparently it's a backup of his near 400 disk archive :-O It's an incredible treasure trove that going to go into our archive. His wife and son (Bence) was also there.
Jeva gave a very interesting interview. We watched several of the short films he did or worked on. Some of this stuff is still up on jeva.hu. He totally "made it", he's had an amazing career and now works at the "top" in his industry. We asked him many questions, I brought up the "Jeva logo", that face. He mentioned that it was fashioned after the Thalamus face.
BSZ demonstrated the SID-card prototype. There was a lot of technical talk. The important take-away was that he is very serious about seeing this project through. Finally we got to listen to it in action, but for some reason, the unit stopped working during the demo. Later, I found out that when he got home, he tested his SID-card and it was working - so the unit didn't die, which is good news.
I met Atisoft, which was cool :-) I'm really glad to know about anyone who is interested in the Plus/4 stuff, and he even surprised me with 3 gfx releases. DCD showed up as well, I didn't get to talk to him as much as I would have liked. He brought the latest version of "Bomberman". It is definitely in a playable state - there was a Bomberman compo (Atisoft won :-)) ! Let's hope for a complete release soon. I met Siz personally for the first time as well. Very smart, methodical guy. He's shown me his Plus/4 Eclipse plug-in and a new game conversion he is working on (the name, for now, I won't mention, I'll let him make the public announcement if he chooses). Hitman also tagged along with him.
For dinner, we collectively had the famed "Sokácbab" (local specialty dish with beans) - I really, really liked it, very tasty stuff.
At night, the compo entries were presented. The graphics compo was the most popular one with 9 entries. I think everyone was blown away but the Wonderland entry, and there was a huge laugh when we heard "Busofõr". Pigmy must have been very proud to see his name, we used his fast-loader to load the programs on the real iron. After a mere 22 years, it's still useful.
Then we had the results announced and the prizes given out. People started to take off. Some C64 folks retired to sleeping rooms, besides them Króna, Csio, TCFS and I were the last to stay. And with that, Busodore 2011 was over :-)
It was an awesome party, I'm glad I was there. Big thanks to the organizers once again for making it happen! |
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