[Coco] Introduction

[John Guin]

I have an odd Australia + Coco story.

In 1999, I was in the US Navy and my unit was sent to Gladstone, Australia.
It is a small town and we had to live in "tent city."  My unit was fortunate
- the marina for our patrol boats was out in town so we got to use the
facilities there for showers and laundry and such.

As I was doing my laundry, I was waiting for my stuff to dry and saw a pile
of magazines.  I wanted something to read, and grabbed the top one.  It
happened to be an Australian issue of a  TRS-80 Coco magazine!  Kind of beat
up, but made me smile at the coincidence.

Welcome to the group,
John

-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
Behalf Of Jayeson Lee-Steere
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 11:21 PM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: [Coco] Introduction

Hello!

I've been doing some work with my Coco recently and discovered this list
while exploring the vast collection of Coco info across the internet. I plan
on discussing what I am working on shortly but figure an into might be in
order.

I'm from Australia and got my first Coco (2) one Christmas during my early
teen years, after what must have been a whole year of asking for one. I
loved that machine and eventually managed to wrangle a hard disk and then a
Coco 3. I played a lot of games, some homework and entered a pile of music
into Musica. I enjoyed playing Daggorath and later Super Pitfall II a lot
but I think I have the most nostalgia for the Mark Data adventures. The
beach/jungle scenes in Calixto island seemed like amazing art at the time, I
still think it looks pretty great.

I recall that I did a lot of programming, but in reality it must have only
been a few hours every now and then. Mostly BASIC but I did force myself to
learn assembler around the time I went to college which turned out to be a
good idea. As I recall, I only ever finished two programs. One was a BASIC
demo that I "sold" to the local Tandy /Radio Shack store for a blank
cassette tape. It was cool to see it running at the front of the store
instead of the official demo. The other was an assembly disk backup utility
that made use of a 512k Coco 3 to avoid swapping disks so much (I only had
one floppy drive).

I used to get hold of a Rainbow magazine from time to time and it was tough
seeing all the great stuff folks in the US had: proper artifact colors (PAL
artifacts too, but quite differently to NTSC) and all that mail order
hardware and software. Every now and then I'd come across someone who was
importing some things on the side.

I had the good fortune of getting into games programming, first for
companies making PC sound and video cards, and then later on games directly.
Fairly recently I finished an 8 year run with Electronic Arts where I was
Technical Director for Madden at the time I left. I left mainly to come back
home to Australia. I threw all sorts of goodies into the shipping container
that would be a pain/expensive to get down here, but it didn't occur to me
at the time that an NTSC Coco 2 should have been on the list.

I'll share more on my current project later, it involves Daggorath.

- Jayeson Lee-Steere

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