Cyber Legends 2025 - Some words and pictures.

Cyber Legends- Saturday 11th October 2025 - Toddington

Cyber Legends has been organised by various people close to the Exxos forum. As opposed to other kind of meets, such as demo parties or more gaming inspired retro computing events, Cyber Legends  focuses more on the hardware side of things. The rare and old do often feature here. Not just Atari related either. Also cutting edge add-ons, faithful replicas of old hardware and prototypes and motherboards are likely to be found here. There is a bring and buy/barter element for people wishing to get rid of surplus items. I had a buyer for my defunct Mac Mini to bring with me.

The very first one was somewhere on the South Coast of England, so it was not practical for me to get to. The second event however, was very much closer to home, about 10 to 15 minutes away in fact. So I went to it. The third and current editions were held at a village hall in a place called Toddington about an hour away. The place name is better known for a motorway service station nearby, but not otherwise connected to it.

Ahead of the date, our little group of four made some plans. Felice and I were to head over to Cyber Legends for a day of pure geek adoration. The two ladies, Paula and Nicky, were to wreak havoc on the retail area of Central Milton Keynes.

There were no journey related complications. Toddington Village Hall was found in the middle of one of the most peaceful villages imaginable. Not too far away from the urban hellscape of Luton Town, but I guess Toddington passes beneath their scrutiny?

When we arrived, most exhibitors were already there, having set up their wares, or in the process of setting up. 

Felice and I had Felice’s travelling Falcon to add to the mix. A stock machine, albeit with a full fat 14MB of RAM. I had a plan to get the USB side of Felice’s NetUSBee working. He had transferred files before, but using the Ethernet transfer application. More about how that went later.

Speaking of which, Sqward had made his way here. He travelled light, so didn’t have anything with him. We learned a bit more about his recent movements. A journey out to this year’s Sillyventure party not being one of those. There was too much else going on. Maybe for next year. He remarked on Felice’s Falcon having a number sticker ‘2’ on there. “So that suggests you have a collection of Falcons?” (Which he does!)

A tour of the rest of the venue followed. Which I did go back to various people at different times to have a more detailed chat.

It might be polite to mention Exxos first of all. He had brought over various stages of evolution of the ST motherboard remake project. The idea being to produce a reworked, debugged STFM motherboard. Something capable of accepting upgrades and remade and enhanced ST custom chips in the future.

ST. Motherboard remake, in various stages of evolution.

You’ll have to bear with me, some of these names/pseudonyms won’t be familiar to many of you, but here goes anyway. 

A board member known as ‘Rubber Jonnie’ had one of the most impressive displays. He created replicas of some very old machines. We had the pleasure of a very ‘blinkenlights’  Altair 8800 mini replica, along with an ODP 8/1 mini replica. 

So many flashing lights, it's like a 1970's version of computing!

There were a couple of others whose names escape me. One of these was a pirated (design) UK101 board, but this culminated in a faithful recreation of a Sinclair ZX80, including an expensively 3D printed plastic case. The 16K RAM pack on the back was original though.

An expensively created replica of the real ZX80.

There was a first sighting of a captive Raven 060 in a gorgeous transparent tower case. This is a ‘what if' Atari decided to go down the route of making something very like a DOS PC from 1995, but with an MC68060 and Atari TOS inside.

The instigator of the Raven was Agralund, but this example came to Cyber Legends, courtesy of ‘Phil  C.’ The Raven allows you to experiment with various add-on cards, pretty much like the DOS PC of the era. It’s all still very hand-built and experimental, but Phil’s interpretation has got as far as being able to run a plausible version of Quake.

A Captive Raven 060!

Someone I did go back to have a chat with, was ‘Mrbombermillzy’ with his Mega ST running a Transputer ATW800/2 board. He had come pre-prepared with various demos and things running to show it off. All of which was kicked in the head by an update that he ran after he had set up! Moral being *not* to fiddle too deeply with that which already works perhaps. A lesson that could have been applied to me as well but more of that story later! I got as far as playing a small Mortal Kombat demo on it, but crashed the system by touching the fire button. It’s still early days here.

In the corner near to where Felice and I had set up, we found ‘Stephen_Usher’ with his  ‘stunt’ Sinclair QL board. This was happily active and running various recent demos made for it. The recent GERP party releases being featured. This ran with a  pico keyboard matrix emulator, which could be applied to other retro systems?

A stunt QL, running a stunt demo!

Across the hall, I found ‘JezC’ with his Falcon and sound module, with a serious keyboard close by. This had an accelerator card (DFB1X) in it, but was very much set up as a serious music machine. JezC was the purchaser of my Mac mini and was very helpful with another matter, later on.

A serious keyboard!

The most visible contribution from ‘Steve’ was his Silicon Graphics O2 in a 3D printed case. This was running a nice fractal demo and a Nintendo N64 emulator later on.

Silicon Graphics, not sucking all the O2 out of the room.

I think ‘Badwolf’ had intended to have something in a running condition to bring, but this didn’t work out. Instead he had a display of various upgrade projects combined on one motherboard.

Lots of things on there, lots of labels.

Alex Holland, who is known in various places in the scene and retro community, had a variety of ST and Amiga things set up near to us.

There was a talk given, with questions afterwards on the Phoenix project. This is a replacement of various ST custom chips, debugged with a view to enhancements. There was a Phoenix H5 constantly running the title sequence from ‘Frontier’, pretty much as you would expect an ST to run it. I almost forgot there was a pristine Spectrum Next set up near the stage area. One of the guys had brought an MSX with a music maker add-on module.

There are others which I’m sure I’ve forgotten. Apologies to those items I’ve omitted. I did see some old BBC Computer cases peeking out from somewhere. There were some semi-modern laptops running things, also being offered for sale. I gather that some spare Atari mono SM124 screens from Exxos that were passed on to people who requested these.

So now to Felice and I.

Felice was giving his ‘travelling’ Falcon, the ex-Cheshunt Computer Club machine, an outing. We had discussed adding USB transfer to his NetUSBee whilst at Cyber Legends. CiH spends a little time creating a pre-loaded USB stick with various goodies to try out with it. It turned out that perhaps I needn’t have tried so hard.

Felice's Falcon, after the crisis had been resolved!

After copying the Perdix drivers from a floppy of dubious provenance, the boot sequence to detect a USB external device responds correctly, but nothing else happens. A first look reveals that this Falcon has a huge CF-Card for a hard drive, so *all* of the drive/partition letters had been taken leaving none spare for any additional devices to add on. A second boot, with Magic O/S shows there are more drive letters available than for standard TOS, but these have also been taken! The only way to go further, would be with a Mint installation that allows numbers for drive letters, but that is not on this Falcon.
 
CiH is determined to not let this go of this just yet. An attempt to force-boot and bypass the hard drive manages to get the drivers to auto boot from floppy, but still the sound of desolate howling winds blows through, as nothing is picked up from the attached memory stick on the NetUSBee. Felice tried to resort to the trusted and previously working Ethernet transfer, but this remains unresponsive. Sqward, the creator of the transfer app, is there to offer trouble-shooting. We may have a bi-directional USB cable that the old chips cannot cope with?

CiH goes in a bit deeper with HD-Driver. Trying to get it to recognise the additional attached device.

Perhaps he should have stopped there, as ’something’ appeared to be detected upon doing a device scan. That ‘something’ got written to the HD Driver Sys settings, then ground the whole system to a halt when it rebooted.

It looks like I was trying to force boot the USB stick, without the main drive kicking in.

It was fortunate that we were in a venue with a lot of Atari people. It was JezC that had a copy of HD Driver on a floppy disk, that had unintentionally come with him in the floppy drive of his musically inclined Falcon. The rescue part of the mission was quickly accomplished, with the bad stuff removed, HD Driver reinstalled and Felice’s status quo being restored.

There were several factors working against Felice getting NetUSBee this time. The jury is still out on even if the cartridge port is working or not? I’ve suggested Felice try again at home with a different Falcon (or ST). 

From there, we indulged in some traditional showing of famous demos. Tere Ra’i got a request for a second viewing. Lost Blubb, Hmmm and Obnoxious (at a non-obnoxious volume for once) demos definitely got in there too.

Sobering thought for the day - Lost Blubb has already celebrated its 30th Anniversary!

In terms of food and drink, that was covered nicely. A joint contribution was made for a bulk pizza order, as well as an extra order made by Felice, so food was covered along with some sweet options. Sensible drinks options included tea and coffee made to order, some soft and fizzy drinks too. Some of the honourable Exxos board members spouses/significant others had made the trip and donated their precious time for these services.

Computers and pizza's. Go together like Geeks and erm, obesity?

Around 17.00hrs, people were starting to pack and slowly depart. We did the same and re-met our female contingent in Central Milton Keynes, then made our way home.

I enjoyed Cyber Legends. It offers a very different experience from the standard demoparty or retro event generally. If you want an in-depth discussion of the various hardware projects, not all of them Atari themed. This is the place to come to. The Exxos forum people are very knowledgeable and very friendly. In one case helping me to rescue a disaster in the making!

If this returns to Toddington, or a similar central UK venue next time, I’ll be sure to go, and I’ll think very hard about bringing something along with me.

Written by CiH 12.10.25. Photographs by CiH and Felice.