[Coco] No Coco Nation News stories for this week?

Wed Aug 7 17:44:17 EDT 2024

For reference, they are downloadable off DIscord, but here is that is there:

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 373, August 3, 2024
===================================================================
Keeping this handy from now on as it keeps coming up and I never
remember. lol The Coco Nation Show website: https://thecoconation.com/
Coco Discord: need to grab fresh link each week from Discord app by
right clicking on group itself, and select "Invite" Special Guests
today: --------------------- None Interview schedule:
-------------------- None Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest
to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------ Michael
Furman & Henry Strickland are at VCF West right now. Michael uploaded a
raw/unedited video to show a bit of the show, last night. He met up with
Henry and they talk about RT/68 - the real time operating system that
Ken Kaplan and one other person wrote for the 6800 CPU while in
university. It was because of this that they developed a relationship
with Motorola, and got hired to make BASIC09 (and eventually OS9 to host
it) while the 6809 was being developed (starts at 49:10). And later
about the CoPiCo (Tom Shanks) & CocoIO (Rick Ulland's) with Henry as
well (1:17:55): https://youtu.be/ST_qDWVt7MA?si=YMw0J-PgICCCX1U5 Henry
Strickland added some photos as well:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Sa6M8Cg6LMeEAQbj9 New England Classic Gaming
is having an Electronics & Computer Retro Swap Meet on Aug. 24 starting
at 9 AM CST, at the Norfolk Public Library in Norfolk, Massachusetts (2
Liberty Lane): https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557290357725
VCF-Midwest has moved (slightly) again to the 50,000 square foot
"Convention North" space (they sold out of table space with the original
"Exploration Hall" area which was 33,000 square feet at the Renaissance
Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, IL. Sept 7-8, 2024 (Sept 6
evening (Friday) is reserved for vendors, etc to set up). They have
added multiple hotels which people can book into, as the original sold
out quickly. https://vcfmw.org/ The World of Retro Computing 2024 is
September 14-15 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada (west of Toronto). This
year it is located in the old Goudies Department Store, 8 Queen Street
North. Free admission, and this covers all kinds of retro computers.
Some people in the Coco community are planning on going, and I believe
that Stacy Vetzal from the Coco Facebook group is planning on having a
booth: https://worldofretrocomputing.com/2024-worc-expo Tandy Assembly
for 2024 has been announced for Sep 27-29, 2024. UPDATE: THEY HAVE
STARTED POSTING EXHIBITORS ON THEIR WEBSITE Courtyard by Marriott
Springfield Springfield, Ohio http://www.tandyassembly.com/ The Dragon
Meetup will be October 12-13, 2024 at the Museum of Technology in
Cambridge, England:
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11179&start=10
Retro Computer Festival 2024: November 9-10, 2024 Centre for Computing
History, Cambridge, England In the early stages of planning for this
year, this is (I believe) the largest general retro computing show in
the UK (it's their VCF style show), covering all retro machines. Tickets
can be ordered online for individual days or both days. All of their
events (including separate entries for both days) at the bottom of this
page: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/30677/What-s-On/ The
Saturday event specifically:
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/72253/Retro-Computer-Festival-2024-Saturday-9th-November/
VCF East dates for next year have been confirmed April 25-27, 2025 -
same facility as this year. Info Age Science Museum, Wall, NJ. Coco
1/2/3 (and multi-platform) ------------------------------- 1) Coco Town
posted Game Revolutions 16 - where he adds "squishy tires" to his Moon
Rover in his Moon Patrol style game:
https://youtu.be/sVL7iAsRFUc?si=e8CkwvwNCTbWK8SB He also decided to try
our Semigraphics 24 from Extended BASIC tricks - and how to fix it to
fully run properly on a T1 VDG:
https://youtu.be/3e-cAwXRfWg?si=rC9YIxQZR1ENnCAt 2) Henry Strickland
posted a short (3&1/2 minute) video showing the Rescue facility (and how
to use it) of the Axiom ROM Code that is part of the Frobio software
that is used with Rick Ulland's CocoIO network card. This will actually
rescue the ROM itself: https://youtu.be/1sscHkU8k5c?si=r7y5--FtNz-lpkbO
3) TRS-80 Retro Programing posted a video of him making his PMODE 1
Luigi character jump (and constructing a 2nd level):
https://youtu.be/Rz2AwiafBc8?si=jo77NV0UQK9AGMXJ He also did a quick
update on his progress with no commentary:
https://youtu.be/JjdktJt_BYg?si=VBYMynZnLmZVXEvt 4) TJBChris has
released his video of getting a Tandy Network 3 controller working with
the Coco (with a TRS-80 Model 12 as a host). He implemented this
promised but never released functionality using the DLOAD protocol that
the Coco 1/2 has built into the ROM. This includes sharing a drive
amongst the Coco's, and to print to a shared printer:
https://youtu.be/HYpXNBna7wU?si=-c-8Xyfvud-zchXe 5) Pedro Pana on his
Rocky Hill YouTube channel showed him installing Bob Emery's VDG
breakout board on an MC-10:
https://youtu.be/Vlx6dmu4q0k?si=bP9Zsla6Oe_C7m0g 6) Glen Hewlett has
been posting bug fixes and is mentioning some enhancements he wants to
do to his new BASIC cross-compiler. To keep up with the latest, check
the 'basiccompilers' channel (under Programming and Development) on the
Coco Discord. There is a video of a sort program running side by side in
Extended BASIC (on the right) and with the compiler on the left (by
Jamie Lee Cho): (load local file 'sort (glen hewlett compiler).mov') 7)
micro games basic (ugBASIC) has updates on both the main branch and the
beta branches as well: Main branch (coco related: BELL instruction fied
on Coco 3, improved CLS color for all Coco's, several bug fixes):
https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/changelog/main Beta branch
(cpu_jump_indirect under 6809 added):
https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/changelog/beta 8) Jamie Elliott posted some
photos of a 64K Coco 1 he recently received - that has a lot of home
hacked modifications:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161474243157641/ 9)
David Collins announced that he finally got his homebrew HB63C09M board
down to SBC size... so he is close to releasing design files so others
can build it:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/3427170434242981/
MC-10 ----- 1) Jim Gerrie ported "Salesman" originally by Keith and
Steven Brain from their 1984 book "Artificial Intelligence" for the
Commodore 64 (Jim mentions "with some help from their other book for the
Dragon 32). It attempts to simulate a computer salesperson:
https://youtu.be/gPdEbRer5-s?si=2CaJQMhePZE5z5Nc Dragon 32/64
------------ 1) The TVRDb channel on YouTube put up a television
commercial from 1984 for INPUT magazine, a cross platform programming
magazine that included the Dragon 32 (and even some Tandy Color
Computer) listings: https://youtu.be/4xi56hitd-Y?si=epOAd2Wz29kGGkmd 2)
Steven Goodwin posted a photo from his Mandelbrot set renderer that he
wrote for the Dragon in C, and it uses fixed point (10.6) to further
increase the speed. His render took under an hour; by comparison, Tony
Jewell wrote one in BASIC takes up to a day (he posted a link to the
source in the comments):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3767538043505837/ He also
uploaded a video (he says without rate limiting, so I assume it is
running much faster than normal?):
https://youtu.be/ZyyQU0R3sSc?si=zo4jxANxjB2MKnhs And he has his CMOC
source code available:
https://github.com/MarquisdeGeek/DragonDocker/tree/main/dragon/src/c/mandelbrot
3) Julian Brown posted thqt he has received Issue 2 of his SRAM boards -
but he is still waiting for some parts:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3767382286854746/ He also
posted about his replacement VDG project in the Dragon forums at
worldofdragon.org:
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11185 Game
On news (all Coco related platforms):
========================================== 1) Jim Gerrie updated his
MC-10 port of the game "Ark Royal" (originally for the Sinclair ZX-81
that appeared in the December 1981 issue of Your Computer magazine),
where he has added some instructions, added a 2nd difficulty level, and
changed the canopy from cyan to white to make it easier to see on real
hardware: https://youtu.be/lkdfXckUdm4?si=jSqzBUAvROhgg3sx He also
updated his "Moon Rover Patrol" - his own version of Moon Patrol. He
added a few new speedup techniques, and Greg Dionne's key input routine
to this version from his original 2020 version:
https://youtu.be/smwJN0BCWdI?si=qlv7xRnAbuRbBCN5 He also published
"Softball" - an entry from Jim for the upcoming 10-Liner BASIC
programming competition. Loosely based on a softball game on the Sharp
MZ-700 computer: https://youtu.be/RNM03cuYLIA?si=TegxuGbRrGFFlhY- He
also updated his game Tunnel Jumper that he originally did in 2013 to
use Greg Dionne's newer key input routines & a better inverse text
routine: https://youtu.be/4E8hSezumrg?si=mob0T5kxJSxREeE1 2) Wayne
Campbell has put up a page explaining the history and features of both
his Super Extended BASIC (SECB) and OS9/BASIC09 versions of Sokoban -
which includes 80 levels from the various Japanese & American releases:
https://wayneca.neocities.org/Sokoban/Sokoban_CoCo3 3) Jim Mullis has
added animations for 4 more heroes that can be played in his Super
Friends game (currently in development in BASIC and GrafExpress 2.0):
The Flash: https://youtu.be/dGAjEPLF-fk?si=Yng246yvYrgclkh2 Robin:
https://youtu.be/EOvPJjo4avg?si=ifnEb3XfkMGPV3mu Batman:
https://youtu.be/sIs7skrPSd4?si=Sk3F7Y1SKO3RoGSi Aquaman:
https://youtu.be/UxlImrfNnew 4) TRS-80 Retro Programing has released an
update video to his Tales of Suburbia game (which is almost ready for
release). This covers some improvements he has made on what will be the
final screen in the game:
https://youtu.be/e1gJWsevlR0?si=V8rwqV0lI-ajNI8q 5) NostalgiaVault on
YouTube (which does gameplay videos on a wide variety of platforms) did
multiple Coco games this week: Scrambled Eggs (a counting game aimed at
young kids, I believe): https://youtu.be/UzBWh5bCCFg?si=-LJ-k3rtFExb3R_y
Talking Ghostbusters by Jeff Beckerman (it sounds like Computize's Speak
Up! program): https://youtu.be/nkxjE-3tn3I?si=KxCTDMyNoQH3nEGF Rocky's
Boots (sold by Tandy): https://youtu.be/8im6C0Vaaak?si=84IVygybj8CJV9TJ
Frogger (unfortunately with composite/RGB colors mixed up):
https://youtu.be/cSYMFcx2myA?si=87zV3HiCu3s-JYJ5 Amphibia (by Nick
Bradbury from the August 1985 Rainbow, but programmed in 1983):
https://youtu.be/faMGCFRk4xA?si=BgqDM5kZb1xDvouy Popcorn by Steve Bjork:
https://youtu.be/HSL4dGhJhHo?si=ZBk8u5r8HNf3cJg6 PacMan transcode by
Glen Hewlett: https://youtu.be/0sGJbhUmlfA?si=kcq2czzNQM6Ucix_ 6)
XperTek released a Coco 2/amber monitor gameplay video featuring Donkey
King: https://youtu.be/Yrb-JRZ7Iz0?si=0VLf18C1A7GsgjrR 7) Davy Mitchell
has released a new Coco / Dragon 32 game called Lucky Egg, including
source code. He has a quick blog entry about it on his blog:
https://davysretrocorner.blogspot.com/2024/08/new-game-lucky-egg.html
Video of gameplay: https://youtu.be/cXaWRmWL4bI?si=L0elSJRcIMCP2hcE And
source code (in BASIC) is on his github:
https://github.com/daftspaniel/RetroCornerRedux/tree/main/Dragon/Originals/LuckyEgg

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