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

Sun Jun 30 13:54:41 EDT 2024

On Sun, Jun 30, 2024 at 8:50 AM Robert "Exile In Paradise" Murphey via Coco
<coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> ==============================================================================
>
> Speak your mind! Let us know what you think at:
>     feedback at TheCoCoNation.com
>
> If replying on a mailing list, please trim replies to the specific items.
>
> Get connected with more of the CoCo, Dragon and MC-10 community here:
>     https://thecoconation.com/community/
>
> --
> Robert "Exile In Paradise" Murphey <exile at weylan-yutani.com>
> Weylan-Yutani Corporation
>
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>