[Coco] The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 368, June 29, 2024

Sun Jun 30 08:49:56 EDT 2024

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 368, June 29, 2024
===================================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Special Guests today:
---------------------
 None

Interview schedule:
--------------------
 None

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
The Canberra Vintage Computer Exhibition 2024 (supported by VCF) takes
place in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia was a 1 day
event from 10 am to 3 pm on June 29 at Radford College. They had a wide
variety of machines on display, and Ian Maveric (of the Trash Talkers
podcast, Coco RS-232 pak clones,etc.) is one of the people helping from
the TRS-80 & clone side:

https://www.facebook.com/events/s/canberra-vintage-computer-exhi/693500242752070/
I think they recorded some of the seminars; I will try to find them for
next week's show.

VCF-West looks to be happening August 2-3 (Fri-Sat) at the Computer History
Museum in Mountain View, California. This year they are a full partner with
the museum, so that admission for both the museum and VCF can be done with
one purchase, and the are taking people booking to be speakers/presenters
now as well.
CHM (Computer History Museum)
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA
  https://vcfed.org/2024/03/14/vcf-west/

VCF-Midwest has announced their new, larger venue for this year (#19)
- the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, IL. Sept
7-8, 2024 (Sept 6 evening (Friday) is reserved for vendors, etc to set
up). Unfortunately, their original block of rooms already sold out in 3
hours after they announced yesterday. VCF is working with the hotel to
get more, but that won't happen until Monday)
  https://vcfmw.org/

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/

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. NOTE: thanks to Randy Kindig, it is confirmed
that it is a 2 day show.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/72253/Retro-Computer-Festival-2024-Saturday-9th-November/

The Dragon Meetup is being worked on - two possible venues (only a few
blocks from each other in Cambridge) and dates are still being ironed
out. Some discussions about it on the World of Dragon forums:
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11179

Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
1) Coco Town, after multiple episodes on optimizing graphics, sound,
etc. is back to adding new features to his Moon Patrol project, originally
started in his teens. This time around, he adds level encoding (mapping),
and holes in the terrain:
  https://youtu.be/a0LWibCzVLg?si=hZl6E_XuXsXEOG0Q

2) The next live TRS-80 Trash Talk (episode 40) will be July 6. They are
looking to try and get their largest panel ever... if anybody is interested
in joining (I just might), you can do so via the Tandy Discord, or send
me a message and I will pass it on.
Their YouTube channel:
  https://www.youtube.com/@TRS80TrashTalk

3) The "Fujinet state of the union" talk that Thomas Cherryhomes gave a
few weeks ago at VCF-SW (including a lot of Coco updates) is now available
on YouTube:
  https://youtu.be/dmrtCV4nC54?si=ZfuGpCg9oYeHYSr6

4) A bit of strange news - the Home Computer Museum's Coco 3 exhibit (This is
the hands on computer museum in the Netherlands) had their SD Card stolen,
so the Coco 3 part of the museum had been shutdown for a few weeks. But
they now have a populated SD card back, and the display is back up!
  https://www.instagram.com/homecomputermuseum/p/C8rzjpOIcNq/?img_index=1

5) Boisy Pitre posted a quick video showing how fast OS-9 Level 1 (and
BASIC09) boot from the F256 machine that he has been porting OS9 to. Level
1 boots from Drivewire, and with that loaded (including a driver for the
512K flash disk) he shows it running a few utility commands and BASIC09
from the flash (not pre-loaded), showing how fast the flash drive works:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161401493397641/
And for a lot more detail on the F256 and OS9 in general, you can see
Boisy's full presentation from VCF-SW (which includes the mention that
there is a 6809 specific version coming out as one of the models for the
upcoming F256-2 version... combined with the Turbo09 project that Boisy
is also involved with, this should run faster than the Coco3FPGA (which
is equivalent of a 25 MHz 6809...):
  https://youtu.be/KY_qHCr-zh8?si=kiiYUNFCrHsPmqfA
The preliminary product page for the upcoming F256K2 (expected out October
2024, for $495 USD):
  https://c256foenix.com/f256k2/?v=3e8d115eb4b3

6) John Whitworth put up a video showing his sRGB boards working with audio
(as well as a photo of the adapter) on a Coco 2:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161390090247641/
Details and how to order the board can be found on John's DragonPlus
Electronics site (this works with Coco 1's, 2's (including T1's) and
Dragons... possibly with CP-400's, etc. from Brazil?):

https://dragonpluselectronics.com/product/superrgb-6x09-for-dragon-and-coco-12-computers/

7) Inspired (or challenged?) by Mark Siegel, Simon Jonassen is working on
extending his Coco 3 demo from a few years back to add "pseudo" alpha blend
transparency, and uploaded a video showing it moving across the screen. The
final version will have the ball bouncing instead of just gliding sideways:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161388066407641/

8) Lee Perkins posted to Facebook and Discord that he would like some
further testers for his 8 way hardware scrolling engine for his 6309/2
MB RAM port of a PC game to the Coco 3... particularly timing switching
screen modes from 320 / 16 color graphics to 40 column text. I think he
has the timings between different GIME's figured out now, and has been
helping emulator writers get their emulators to match real hardware). A
screenshot showing the effect can be seen here:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161386004117641/
UPDATE: He has the player's sprite added to a screenshot from Discord:
  (load local file cloud_kingdoms_withplayer_screenshot.jpg. Taken from
  a real monitor)

9) I don't know if any are left, but Leslie Anderson is offering FREE
HD63C09ECP's - 3 MHz rated 6309's with external clock but in the PLCC
(square) form factor. This matches nicely with the adaptor board to 40 pin
DIP that we showed recently (and there is a picture of it in the comments
for those that missed it):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/3399325737027451/

10) Ultra Gamer81 on YouTube posted a video showing the entire original
Coco 3 in store demo that Tandy themselves made to sell the Color Computer 3:
  https://youtu.be/grD8Ez0ezpc?si=wmEIp8tgR-MjtcNv

11) Randy Kindig and Earl Evans talk about ugBASIC on episode 13 of the
NEXT WITHOUT FOR podcast. This is the cross platform compiled BASIC that
has Coco 1/2 and Coco 3 options along with many other computers:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/floppydays/posts/3743654522559627/
Episode and show links:
  https://www.nextwithoutfor.org/2024/06/show-013-ugbasic.html

12) Jason "CocoMan" Reighard uploaded his BoatFest video right before
showtime:
  https://youtu.be/xNsW-XlkxWM

Thanks to Jason Timmons for mentioning CocoFest and it's growth during
the VCF Showrunner panel from VCF-SW!
  (https://youtu.be/bVJoF-5w-Mw?si=F-0Wem3g8dQbDORO for those interested
  in the history of VCF and where it is now)

MC-10
-----
1)

Dragon 32/64
------------
1) Vintage Geek (who have a great hands on museum if you are ever in
Knoxville, Tennessee) released a video about the Tano Dragon. This is the
Dragon 64 with NTSC output:
  https://youtu.be/FxVvGZAWumw?si=xltyvvkBvGR0GH8X

2) FranzL on the World of Dragon forums mentioned that he has scans of most
issues of "Siegfrieds Drachenpost" - a German Dragon newsletter from the
early 1980's. He just uploaded scans of the 21 issues he has this morning,
and they are currently being processed:
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11182

3) Julian Brown has further updates on his "Kitchen sink" Dragon motherboard,
which has a ton of extra features. He also just sent me this morning the
complete list of what he has accomplished on this project in June (with
the caveat that his time was limited by him doing an engine swap in his
son's car as well). So, I will show a picture of his latest board design,
and read his complete update:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3740494966210145/
(read file from my desktop, "CoCoNation Dragon RevX4 progress update June
26 2024.txt"

4) KukmanPL on YouTube put up a Polish video showing his running the Dragon
32 emulator thanks to the Recallbox system on the Raspberry 5. Unfortunately,
there is now Close Captioning or auto-translate available... does anyone
listening speak Polish? (from his screenshots, it looks like it is more
emulating a Coco 1/2 with artifact colors (or the NTSC Dragon Tano):
  https://youtu.be/KdroBsz3A5U?si=YFfbeuBK46vG2tIQ

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Jim Gerrie has converted another sample game program from the book
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to Artificial Intelligence" by Richard Forsyth
and Chris Naylor in 1986. This one is called the "Four-site game" and was
originally written for the IBM PC in GW BASIC:
  https://youtu.be/yuzd6NuDdt0?si=v52XJqf-6HKWFxWO
Download it from the Internet Archive where Jim now has all of his programs.
He also ported "Fuzzy Rita" (originally written by Tim Hartnell in 1985
from the book "Exploring Expert Systems on Your Micro Computer"):
  https://youtu.be/CmXf_gXYr2Y?si=lwiBti0vLUK15sxU
And he typed in The Tower of Hanoi, originally by J.L. Elkhorne in 1985,
which was an actual MC-10 listing from the UK book "Bumper Book of Computer
Programs" (published in 1986), which was a book made by "Your Computer"
magazine:
  https://youtu.be/QyVSngsDNtA?si=2Flbxqm4hQA0-8pD

2) XperTek covers the original Coco launch title Chess on his amber monitor
equipped Coco 2 (real hardware):
  https://youtu.be/8h0diUSi2sg?si=eCg23YQvgLvAFr6f

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