[Coco] The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 387, November 9, 2024

Sun Nov 10 08:37:37 EST 2024

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 387, November 9, 2024
===================================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle and Mark Overholser

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
Retro Computer Festival 2024: November 9-10, 2024
Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, England
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.
** NOTE: AS OF OCTOBER 9, THE SATURDAY SHOW IS COMPLETELY BOOKED AND SOLD
OUT. THERE IS STILL SOME SPACE ON SUNDAY. **
** AS MENTIONED IN THE NEWS, THERE IS A NOW ALSO A COLOR ROBOT BATTLE
TOURNAMENT! **
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/

Retro SC, the retro show in Brazil, is having their 2024 event on November
16. This always has a strong Coco/CP-400/etc. contingent, including multiple
people who have been guests on our show.It is happening at 1670 Haroldo
Soares Glavan road, Cacupé, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina.
  https://retrosc.org/

The World of Commodore 2024 is November 30-Dec 1 at the Admiral Inn in
Mississauga, Ontario. Why am I mentioning this? Well, it's sponsored by TPUG,
and they created the SuperPET (a special PET with a 6809 CPU added...) and
they helped port OS-9 Level 1 to it. So it's a sister computer to the Coco
after those improvements.
  https://www.tpug.ca/world-of-commodore/world-of-commodore-2024/

Virtual Coco/Tandy Fest is January 25, 2025, and now has it's own website
site up: Mark Overholser is the driving force for it, and can give updates
on speakers, etc.
  https://tandyretroshow.com/

VCF-SoCal - Feb 15-16 (Hotel Fera in Orange, California.
  https://www.vcfsocal.com/

VCF East has had a date change for next years show due to a scheduling
conflict. It is now April 4-6, 2025 - same facility as this year. Info
Age Science Museum, Wall, NJ.
  https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-east/

CocoFest is May 2-3, 2025 (with takedown on the morning of May 4/Sunday) at
the Holiday Inn & Suites in Carol Stream (Wheaton), Illinois. Hotel rooms
at the special Fest rate are available now ($122/night for two queens or
1 king bed), and apply for May 2-5. You will need to use the Group Rate
code of G30 to get this rate, and getting the special rate ends April
7. Bookings for tables will be going up in January.
  https://www.glensideccc.com/cocofest/
Tables go on sale January 1 at noon, Central standard time.

VCF-SW in Texas has been booked with dates: June 20-22, 2025 at the Davidson
Gundy Alumni Center, University of Texas, Dallas, Texas.
Tables & Tickets will go on sale January 2025. $20/adult ($25 if bought
at the door), $10/student ($15 at the door). 17 and under are free (with
accompanying adult). Tables are $50.
  https://www.vcfsw.org/

Tim Lindner let me know that next year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo runs
from October 17-19 in 2025 (they just had this years Sept 27-29).
  https://www.retrogamingexpo.com/

Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
1) 8bitinthebasement on YouTube released a video that aims to demystify
6809 assembly language (in this case for the Thomson MO5 from France:
  https://youtu.be/bZXEDxlbSJI?si=tKRHJG13tV6Vsl7U

2) Coco Town goes down the rabbit hole of fixing a bug in the MAME debugger
GUI, and then seeing if the pull request was accepted or not:
  https://youtu.be/SYW-HDDw_xM?si=WnWpDCJzOqfMxzxe

3) Randy Kindig has released the audio version of his Floppy Days interview
with BOTH Steve Leninger and Don French (creators of the TRS-80 Model
I)... a video version should be out in a month or two (unless you are a
Patreon for the Floppy Days podcast... then you watch the video version
now). The Coco gets mentioned a bit as well:

https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-144-interview-with-don-french-and-steve-leininger

4) The "All Things Atari & Then Some" page on Facebook posted a couple
of photos from the "House of the Future" built by the Frank Lloyd Wright
Foundation in Arizona in 1979. Why I am mentioning that here? The photos
show it being used in a kitchen for recipies, with a large keyboard, but
the screen shots are unmistakably produced by a Motorola 6847 VDG. Photos:

https://www.facebook.com/allthingsatari/posts/pfbid0XzHhoChraWf6c7TJjeRA8uyJEjhkxnLNYcmT99HBpF2E6AmaUs2aX3ZhTgs6f77Dl
Information on the "House of the Future" itself (scroll down for additional
photos), including details on the Motorola computer system it used called
"Tuke" (pronounced 'tu-kee') which apparently cost $30,000 at the time
and featured ten interconnected Motorola CPU's that "monitor and control
all aspects of the house", including monitoring windows & doors, adjusting
blinds, temperature controls & logging energy use. It even featured speech
synthesis:

https://the-haunted-closet.blogspot.com/2020/01/awhatukee-house-of-future-1980-1984.html

5) David Collins posted an update for his 6309 single board computer,
allowing use for the HD63C09M:
Post in 6x09/6800 Facebook group:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/so-i-updated-the-hack-a-day-site-for-the-hb63c09m-for-those-that-like-this-forma/3512505102376180/
Hack a Day update:
  https://hackaday.io/project/193108-hb63c09m-10x10-hd63c09-based-sbc
He was also the person that got the S.O.S. (Small Operating System) manual
that we talked about recently that was up for sale. He uploaded a scan
of the front cover and a list of the files on the original 2 disk set;
unfortunately the disks themselves are not present. He plans on uploading
the full manual to both the Internet Archive and the Color Computer Archive,
once he has completed scanning it:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/users-guide-is-captured-into-individual-tiff-images-two-pages-needed-to-be-redac/10161792224372641/

6) The election will be long over (I hope), but if you were on the Coco
group on Facebook this past Monday, Thomas Cherryhomes, over the span of
2 days, created a program for 8 platforms to show live election results
through Fujinet, including the Coco:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/fujinet-users-can-track-the-us-election2024-via-their-atari8bit-colecoadam-trs80/10161781043282641/

7) Scott Cooper (Tazman) put up a new video on the #assembly channel on
the Coco Discord, where he has incorporated Simon's Plasma routine into
the background of this maze solving program - which is his first foray
into assembly language programming
  (show video from Nov. 5 from #assembly Coco Discord channel)

8) RetroAndGaming put up a video showing his installing an S-Video (PAL
version) modification to his Coco 1:
  https://youtu.be/18LA86uwNx0?si=LDglyFrGUcO1WGTY

MC-10
-----
1) Jim Gerrie posted another part of his MC-10 Flag series - this time
the flag for the Canadian province of Nova Scotia:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/8478982955561785/

Dragon 32/64
------------
1) Richard Harding (archivist of Dragon history) posted an article about and
interviewing Derek Williams, who was the technical manager at Dragon Data
from early on right through it's final days. This goes over a lot of the
history of Dragon/Dragon Beta, Dragon production, some on Tano, and why a lot
of Dragon people ended up at Thorn EMI within weeks of Dragon shutting down:
  http://dragondata.co.uk/history/People/Derek-Wiliams/index.html
He also put up a short video clip from the 1984 Personal Computer World
show in Olympia, London, which was broadcast during the show Micro Live
on BBC2 October 27, 1984. It shows the Touchmaster Graphics Tablet on the
Dragon (SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE FOR THIS VIDEO):
  http://dragondata.co.uk/history/videos/index.html

2) Jim Gerrie announced on the World of Dragon forums that he has updated
his ZIP file of all of the .CAS file versions of his games that he has
ported to the Dragon. This new ZIP includes his Dragon port of Nick Marentes
Stellar Odyssey, which Nick originally wrote in October 1982 for the TRS-80
Model 1/3.
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4760&start=70

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) The Coco Show (with Aaron running solo this episode) reviews Sinistaar
from Sundog Systems, written by Dave Dies:
  https://youtu.be/6lerbkc_neo?si=FeqHqHjG6F2UyVM7

2) Erico Patricio Monteiro showed a screenshot (and an animation in the
comments) of some SG4 characters he is doing for a possible game:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/new-pilantras-coming-soonopen-pilantra-v02/10161780995357641/

3) The Wargaming Scribe does a review of CINCPAC - The Battle of Midway from
Ark Royal Games on the Coco. This one required somebody he knows to fix
the archive copy of the game (it would freeze in sports); the new version
has been uploaded to the archive; it should be up soon if it isn't already:
  https://zeitgame.net/archives/15827

4) Steve Rasmussen alias Buck Owens put up an hour long video on Twitch
showing him creating new levels for Nick Marentes H.E.R.O. game, using a
Visual BASIC program he hacked together:
  https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2295654639

5) Pere Serrat is now planning on doing re-releases of his AGD game ports
for the SuperSprite FM+ boards (graphics/sound upgrade board for the Dragons
and Coco 1/2's), where he is updating the palettes to more closely match
the original Spectrum versions of the games. He has released the first
pack, which has 6 games. Details, games list, download and screenshots
using the new palettes are available on the World of Dragon forum here:
  http://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11203&
Games are:
Astronaut Labyrinth
Astronaut Labyrinth (with music)
Aeon Part 1
Aeon Part 2
Aeon Part 3
Aeon Part 4

6) XperTek on YouTube did another gameplay video - this time featuring
the Semigrapics-24 color extravaganza Protecters II (labelled Protectors
on the screen, but Tom Mix Software already had a game called that on the
Coco). Of course, he plays it on his real Coco 2 with an amber monitor,
so he doesn't get to see the color (and he doesn't know the gameplay):
  https://youtu.be/KAUecTKLjBY?si=-rXxsB4p6IeKMAjr

7) Vitaskhr on YouTube did a YouTube short showing his Coco 2 with Zaxxon -
including the "fun" of getting the volume right to load from tape:
  https://youtube.com/shorts/HFK5R5sVtm8?si=VDsKWhUVziVd8NHa

8) Our guest from last week, Pedro Pana aka Rocky Hill on Youtube, did
a followup video about his Coco ATX, playing some games on it show it's
Coco 1/2 compatibility:
  https://youtu.be/0cTdysFJ4JA?si=-OTq8z5n7L6UWQuk

9) AJ returns to Dungeons of Daggorath for part 8, having cleared out part 7
in the previous episode. She does very well, and then.... a surprise ending!
  https://youtu.be/kQSu3oUsNa8?si=2GwibnHTKc4QPlwn

==============================================================================

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R. Allen Murphey <exile at weylan-yutani.com>
Weylan-Yutani Corporation
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