[vcf-midatlantic] 16 station MidiMaze Atari FPS @ VCF East 2022

[Ethan O'Toole]

Hello,

   An idea came to mind as a friend was repairing a bunch of Atari 8bit 
systems.

   There is a game called MidiMaze, where you can network up to 16 Atari 
8bit (and supposedly ST systems) together. It's a first person shooter 
with smiley faces. I can find talk of 11 station system being setup, but 
was thinking it would be cool to do a 16 player station @ VCF.

   I am having PCBs made right now for all the carts, all of the midi 
interfaces, as well as fujinet boards for machines. I can definitely 
populate the carts and midi interfaces, will try to do Fujinets depending 
on ESP32 availability.

   It requires XL or XE, 64K of RAM.

   I have 3 machines, my friend has ~7. So we would be looking for the 
final systems to fill out this project.

   I have a spreadsheet I will post once I get my counts and Reggies system 
count.

   The current idea/dream is to run on physical Midi interfaces for the 
first half of VCF, then cut over to fujinet where the midi network is 
created over TCP/IP. We won't be loading the game from fujinet I don't 
think since we will have the carts and the fujinet version of the game 
requires a RAM expansion. Just easier to run carts. Will try to use an 
automated script to hit the web servers on the fujinet based on DHCP lease 
MAC address info and autoconfigure it all.

   Thoughts? Hype? How many Atari XL/XE does VCF have?

 			- Ethan