It's Summer 2026, nearly, so after last year's excellent weekend at STEAM! in Swindon we just had to go back. This year we were in the same room, but there were twice the number of exhibitors, around 50 this time, so I had to really consider what to take.

Geoff Sore, technical director of Camputers came to visit me a couple of months ago, and kindly brought me a new case top for my Lynx 128k which had been sprayed cream by its original owner. I thought this was the ideal chance to show a Lynx off, as well as the Microvitec CUB monitor he'd given me 20-odd years ago - this was the/a screen Camputers had used at trade shows, even more ideal! But it didn't work - it had vertical frame collapse which meant the entire picture was focused on one thin line across the middle of the screen.

Fortunately, this is a well known fault with Cubs so there are a few resources online to explain how to troubleshoot and fix this issue, which I did. There was still a horizontal line tearing issue where you can see that the timing is out, but this seemed to vary with the heat so I put it on the, ahem, back burner. Onto the machine itself. When I was given it many moons ago the original owner had put the very metal original PSU innards in a plastic case. Given how hot the original PSU got I'm amazed this was considered a good thing to do. Unsurprisingly it got stupidly hot, and perhaps when it was new this was OK, but 43 years later it definitely wasn't.

New PSU time perhaps. I have a couple of modern Meanwell PSUs that could do the job, but it seems that the purity of the 5v rail really affects the graphics of the Lynx. The MW RQ50 really made the screen tear so I bought an RT125A which doea +5/-5/+12, perfect. Only that produced a wobbly picture that I couldn't fix. The only PSU that worked consistently was the one from my Lynx 96K, so that became the default though I had to put a fan on it to keep it cool. There followed several days of swears and words that would make the vicar blush while I fought with a frequently locking up machine in order to make new disks for CP/M. Even now, after the weekend, the machine still has an issue. BUT the CUB worked flawlessly, even though it spooked several people on Sunday morning with the degauss coil making some interesting noises because it was cold :D

C128D next. I'd bought this machine last year and hadn't yet exhibited it so this weekend was perfect. It all worked flawlessly, and I even had CP/M+ disks to use with it. Nothing else though; no other applications. I had a fraught few days learning how the various components of the machine worked, and how to write .d71 disk images back to real floppies in the internal 1571 floppy drive. Got there in the end though, and late on thursday got a Kaypro version of Wordstar 3 running. Time for a little bop around the workshop :D

My third machine was the almost mythical H|H Tiger, a really splendidly put together CP/M machine from 1983 which sported a Z80 for CP/M, a Motorola 6809 for I/O, an NEC D7220D graphics processor with its own NINETY SIX K of RAM, plus a Ti TMS9916 running the GPIB port on the rear. Technically that's FOUR processors. Not many were sold, not because it was expensive (it was - ukp2750 at launch) but because H|H's parent company went bust and the new owners weren't interested in microcomputers. Terrible shame.

Thanks as always to Short Circuit's Tony and Pete for organising/marshalling, STEAM for hosting, family members for running the door and all the exhibitors for being excellent people. Both days were sold out so well done everyone :D See you next year?

By the way, I snapped all of these during a quick run round on Sunday just after the doors had opened, so I didn't capture everything. I'll just have to go back next year.