We are reflecting on a very special VCFe, as it marked the 10th (or 10 1/2th) birthday of the Steckschwein.

Reconnecting with old friends, making new friends, and celebrating and eating our 12 cycle muffin NOPslide together were all incredibly enjoyable experiences.

Additionally, Marko allowed an exciting sneak peek into his nearly complete Pacman implementation, the first ever on a 6502 that closely replicates the behavior of the original Namco Pacman Arcade.

The 23th annual European Vintage Computer Festival will take place on 7./8. September 2024!

The special focus of this year’s VCFe is _50 years of 8080 and 6800 with a lot of exhibitions and talks around those CPUs.

Also, the Steckschwein will celebrate it’s 10 year anniversary (more like 10 1/2 now) with you!

We will be showing all Steckschwein incarnations from its humble and nameless beginnings on a breadboard to the current 512k SBC version! Also, we will host a talk about the most important milestones and challenges in the last 10 years, and of course we’d like to celebrate!

Update

VCFe 23.0 has been postponed until September 7th due to issues with the building.

Save the date! The 23th annual European Vintage Computer Festival will take place on 7./8. September 2024 !

And of course there can be no VCFe without Steckschwein. This time is special, as we first presented the humble beginnings of our (then nameless) favourite homebrew computer at VCF 15.0 in 2014. So this year not only marks the 10th anniversary of the Steckschwein, but also the 10th anniversary of the VCFe being “home” of the Steckschwein.

After some troubleshooting, we finally finished Revision 0.6 of our boards, and the new boards are finally there, ready to be assembled. We managed to fix all the issues we found, and also did some cleaning up, used better footprints for the resistors and the mini DIN jacks.
Soldering session coming up..

Revision 0.6 boards are there

Our debugging journey at VCFe began right at powering up the board the first time, when something got real hot real fast. Fair enough, and easy to spot. There was a mixup of VCC and GND at U29, a 74HCT244. Embarassing, but not that critical, as U29 is only used to connect the joystick ports to Port A of the VIA. We can live without them for now.
The mixup likely happened when I transferred the IO-board schematics from KiCad 6 to 7 while updating the symbols from the current library, which happened to be different than the old ones. I had to mirror the new symbols to fit the schematic. This meant that GND is at the top now, and VCC at the bottom. Which I happened to overlook. While routing, I was briefly wondering why U29’s bypass capacitor was at the opposite corner compared to all the other 74HCTnnn chips. I maybe should have become suspicious at that point.

Our plan for VCF2 22.0 was to assemble the first Steckschwein SBC right at our booth as some kind of show-cooking event. That only half worked, as this quickly turned into show-debugging instead of show-cooking. It was only just right before the end of VCFe 22.0, just before we had to pack everything up, we managed to get the SBC to talk to us via serial:

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