[Coco] The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 338, November 11, 2023

Sun Nov 12 13:18:51 EST 2023

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 338, November 11, 2023
===================================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Interviews schedule:
--------------------
- We have a double interview coming up on November 25th's show - Joe Ahern
& David McNally, who created the newsletter/magazine "TRS-80 Computing
(renamed "Color Computing" late in it's life) back in June 1987 as pair
of 13 year olds. It ended up running for over 4 years, expanding in size
and getting advertisers and subscribers. Joe has scanned in all 28 issues
and uploaded them to the Color Computer Archive, and they will be on talk
about their histories with the Coco, creating and running a magazine as
high schoolers, etc.
Complete run of their magazine:
  https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Magazines/TRS-80%20Computing/

- The interview with Doug Masten (author of The Contras) with co-interviewee
Glen Dahlgren of Sundogs Systems that was originally going to happen on
August 19 is being postponed, due to a fairly major surgery. We are shooting
for around November/December depending on how fast his recovery goes.

Working on a 3rd interview as well...

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
VCF SoCal: Feb 17-18, 2024 in Orange, California
Hotel Fera - Events Center
100 The City Drive, Orange, CA 92868
  https://vcfsocal.com/index.html

CocoFest: May 4-5, 2024 in Carol Stream, Illinois (near Chicago)
Holiday Inn & Suites
  https://www.glensideccc.com/cocofest/

BoatFest 3: June 14-16, 2024
Social Event Space
Hurricane, WV

https://www.ticketsource.us/boatfest2024/boatfest-retro-computer-expo-2024/e-raedpb

Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
1) ChibiAkumas (Keith) posted a video tutorial showing how to make a Hello
World ML program externally and then import them into a disk image and
running it on an emulator (his previous lessons of this type were creating
cartridge image files):
  https://youtu.be/eEi-VTfwVNc?si=C_4GZShkTMMbgSfr
Text version of the lesson:
  https://www.chibiakumas.com/6809/helloworld.php#LessonH5

2) CocoTown released another assembly language episode about VSYNC &
6809 interrupts, and how to interface with them through the PIA's (and
especially on acknowledging interrupts - and what can happen when you don't):
  https://youtu.be/o4yWy7PTyj4?si=NW5DvvMEsKfHUIvC

3) Michael Furman posted his review of the mini Tandy Assembly gathering
from last weekend:
  http://www.ocs.net/2023/11/06/show-report-tandy-assembly-meetup-2023/
He also has new recording of his "lightning round" about Flex from the event
(the one at the event itself was not recorded):
  https://youtu.be/B0cFFe5ekK4

4) TRS-80 Retro Programing on YouTube released a video showing how he is
doing save games to tape for his "Tales of Suburbia" graphic adventure game:
  https://youtu.be/Fxht_jgdOic?si=Xr1FewdJdK9Ki3rg

5) Marc Maltais posted a disk image of a BASIC program written by David
McNally (one of our two guests on November 25) from their magazine Color
Computing (formerly TRS-80 Computing) Volume 5, number 3 from October of
1991) showing a Halloween themed graphics demo for the Coco 1/2, corrected
from an OCR version that Antonio Caballero had posted earlier. This can
be downloaded from the Coco group on Facebook:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161027258157641/

6) Richard Kelly released the DSK image for his "EasyDir" version 21c
utility in the Coco group on Facebook. This is a very small BASIC program
that will scan the directory, and then let you visually pick a program to
run. He also has it setup to run automatically with the DOS command:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161021230232641/

7) A rather strange one from YouTube: Bert Rickles did a 9+ minute video
as a followup to some other videos by others of reading out the Antarctic
Treaty in a variety of ways. His response video is having his Coco 2
(emulated) print it out to the screen while it's reading the data from
tape. With audio. :)
  https://youtu.be/HyPcuFtXb5Y?si=UO8XnWzzQs3jPoCb

8) George Janssen is working on his next episode of beginners assembly
language, and has a little teaser video as he is going to be covering his
own way of handling sprites:
			(see my local .mp4 file he emailed)

MC-10
-----
1)

Dragon 32/64
------------
1) John Whitworth of DragoPlus Electronics found out that his website was
glitched since the beginning of November, causing some issues with both
multi-buy discounts and downloads. It is fixed now, but because of this,
John is extending his 5% off Halloween promotion until the end of November
19th, with a new coupon code:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3584223235170653/

2) Steven Goodwin, the man behind the retro computer book 20 GOTO 10 that
we have talked about for over a year, had his official book launch at the
The Centre for Computing History at the end of last month, and also gave an
hour long talk about it's development and some of the contents. The museum
just uploaded the video of the talk last night, and it's quite fascinating,
and has several larger mentions about the Dragon (and a few mentions of
the Coco as well):
  https://youtu.be/15cC6hq66I0?si=MvHkzRsv5iextl1t

3) Julian Brown continues on his Rev 3 Dragon 32 board reproductions. Earlier
in the week he had some rather bad output from the NTSC daughterboard,
but it's fixed now for the text output, although he is still working on
color oversaturation:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3585150501744593/

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Jim Gerrie released "Tank Battle" AKA "Tanks-A-Lot" for the MC-10. This
was originally by Mark Koenig and written on November 27, 1980 and published
in Softside February 1981:
  https://youtu.be/C3t2zPXEqEY?si=o2_CS1D89BGJk9Ud
He also did "Lines of Action" originally by Canadian Claude Soucie, which
a gentleman named Sol Guber converted to BASIC in 1985 for the 8 bit Atari
line in ROM Magazine Dec/Jan 1985/1986:
  https://youtu.be/ruaQlFCf6UE?si=W0v45mi-Lhj4Kivu
He also updated his platform game inspired by Manic Miner with the updated
keyboard routines by Greg Dionne (I think this allows registering more
than one key at once):
  https://youtu.be/x0sPPi82OBI?si=bSsGhkVyVvpwO4xy
And finally, he released a version of the arcade game Rally-X (Rally-SG is
a recent Coco version of this game by Nick Marentes). This one features an
ML routine for refreshing the screen written by Darren Atkinson, creator
of the SDC solution for the MC-10:
  https://youtu.be/_C6j-4TnPGU?si=h4SMzv2snitfDyat

2) For those of our viewers/listeners on the Coco Discord, I have released
beta test versions of slightly optimized 6809 version and more optimized
6309 version of the 1986 Diecom game, Paper Route. If you have access,
please try either (or both versions if you have a 6309) and let me know
how they play for you, and make sure there are no added bugs. The original
version is also in the same general-game-posts, for comparison.

3) Brian Palmer has typed in another game from Australian SoftGold
magazine, this time a graphic adventure game called Quest originally
by Goerge Mclintock (no relation to game of the same name by Aardvark),
which you can download from the TRS-80 Color Computer group on Facebook
(excuse the screenshot's video ratio; they were done by an older version
of MAME which stretches the horizontal to twice what it should be). He is
looking people try it and see if there are any bugs he should fix:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161027894262641/

4) Jack Chadwick has done 2 polls last week and this week - voting for
what people think is the best and worst games on the Coco 1/2 and the Coco 3:
Worst:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161027763122641/
Last week's Best/Favorite (for reference):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161013968707641/

5) PatmanQC on YouTube released an almost 1 hour long documentary on the
video game series Robocop, which covers various ports to home computers
and consoles as well, include the Coco 3 version:
(48 minutes in is the Coco 3 version)
  https://youtu.be/dHs912L88gA?si=yWEEGV90lEengdgK

6) retrosutra on YouTube did a comparison video of every version of Manic
Miner released (including the Dragon), show some gameplay as well as the
death sequence in each (Dragon shows up around 9:55):
  https://youtu.be/YpBG8hNUrtM?si=YJYfjxKZNt0wzGFX

7) Tim & AJ's "My Drunk Sibling" episode 108 features Tom Mix's War Kings
head to head Warlords style combat:
  https://youtu.be/sQ8UtI4ha20?si=7Tkip4yjsTwR9Ga8

8) XperTek on YouTube - the guy who plays Coco games in real hardware on
an amber screen monitor with commentary in Spanish, released a video about
Androne from Tandy:
  https://youtu.be/cvK5Df6DS2U?si=3JdFvXNK_iyv7Fsq

=======================================
Get connected with more of the CoCo, Dragon and MC-10 community here:
https://thecoconation.com/community/

Please trim any replies to *just* the specific item replied to.
-- 
Robert "Exile In Paradise" Murphey <exile at weylan-yutani.com>
Weylan-Yutani Corporation