[Coco] Fresh new retro computing article!

[Mark McDougall]

On 28/05/2019 9:28 am, tonym wrote:

> Has ANY other group of user around a machine ever had as much
> in-fighting as the CoCo has over the past 2 decades? We've had so
> many "events," battles, and situations, that it is absolutely beyond
> belief.

I don't think you'll find the CoCo community is any worse than other 
retro-computing/gaming based communities on the net.

I have a fairly broad interest across the retro computing/gaming hobby 
arena and there's squabbles and in-fighting everywhere. A lot of it 
fairly minor and isolated, but every now and then it can erupt into a 
"religious" war between factions. The NeoSD vs Darksoft is a very 
relevant example in the Neo Geo scene where two recently developed 
products that have essentially the same function seem to have polarized 
the community.

The Neo Geo community is notorious for its general intolerance towards 
"noobs". The Atari forums are rife with constant, albeit low-level, 
squabbles. The Apple II scene has recently had its feathers ruffled by a 
very green would-be hardware developer. Plenty of squabbles behind the 
scenes of the MAMEDEV group. The list goes on...

The CoCo community is relatively small but thanks in no small part to 
the CoCoCrew Podcast, Stevie's Videos and CoCoFest & Tandy Assembly 
events has seen a huge resurgence in recent years. I also personally 
think the CoCoSDC has been the most significant hardware development in 
quite a while, and itself responsible for people spending more time 
playing with their CoCo hardware. But to be honest by the same token 
I've sort of being expecting the bubble to burst; for some of the 
leading personalities to burn out and move onto other things, and the 
scene to settle back down to a less chaotic - although hopefully still 
vibrant - status quo.

Lastly, I'll re-iterate what I said in a post somewhere a few weeks ago. 
If you do decide to ignore the excellent advice in Boisy's article and 
go ahead and produce hardware in direct competition to an established 
product, at least refrain from specifically targeting that product and 
drawing up a hit-list of cherry-picked "features". That's just kicking 
sand in someone's face.

Regards,

-- 
Mark McDougall
<http://retroports.blogspot.com.au>