Devcon Summer 2004

In December 2004 the first edition of Devcon was held. Active MSX developers, mainly from the Northern part of the Netherlands, gathered to enjoy a full day of developing software for MSX. This day, of which you can read a report right here and see a photoshoot over here, turned out to be a great success. A discussion on the MRC forums a few weeks ago made us conclude it was time for a second edition of Devcon. A date was picked and the same location was arranged. Although the Devcon took place in a different room of the building, the concept was the same. The room was completely free, as long as all the people coming around took a drink or two.

Again there were some minor issues with the route-description. Last time some people were confused by the fact that the BP-gasstation (which was mentioned in the route description) had recently transformed in a Total-gasstation. This time there was some confusion as one of the roads Wolf_ had advised us to take appeared to be broken-up. Nonetheless it was not a real problem to find the location of Devcon and all people arrived in time. [D-Tail] and Ronnie were the first ones to arrive, but had kind of a slow start as they were suffering from Philips monitors which needed quite some time to get started. Not much later, Snout, Chao5 and Jorito joined, followed closely by MSD. A bit later, Wolf drove to the trainstation to pick-up Arjan and in the afternoon, GuyveR800 and his girlfriend Debby arrived. With the arrival of Legacy, the last attender joined the club.

The main activities of the day were watching demos and playing games whilst talking about recent developments in the MSX scene. GuyveR800, Chao5, [D-Tail] and Snout spent hours playing Guru Logic, both showing their achievements to the people around and trying to spot some bugs or visuals to improve. This upcoming game is already looking very well. Some of the graphical effects are just stunning. Wolf and Chao5 spent some time on initializing a bounce entry but in the mean time Chao5 started playing along with Guru Logic and Wolf took some time to ask for some MBWave features at MSD. Throughout the day Wolf gave several examples on how to get the best sound out of a Moonsound running MBwave. The Bitwise folks spent their time with demos and games, demonstrating the TMT_Net interface and developing a small demo in NestorBASIC. Team Bomba exchanged ideas and worked on both graphics and code for their upcoming game. Generally there was a lot of talking all day long. No matter how much time you spend on IRC or MRC, there's always something interesting to talk about in-real-life.

After a long day of MSXing, the time had come for the first people to leave. D-Tail and Ronnie left first to get some food and beer, the rest stayed long into the evening. After paying the foodbills and packing all the equipment we decided to have a drink in the bar. Snout was buying, yay! Naturally all the talking continued there, about (the) fairs, about MRC, logfiles, development, the NL scene, the foreign scene, MSX-veterans, future-challanges, hardware, drawing et cetera, et cetera. Although there were not many things actually being developed during the Devcon itself, it really showed the day had given a great boost to the motivation of all the people who had attended it. Another fine day had passed, and if all goes well a third edition of Devcon to be held in December 2004.

If you want another impression of the day, you can have a look at the Devcon Summer 2004 photoshoot