[Coco] The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 388, November 16, 2024

Sun Nov 17 10:05:14 EST 2024

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 388, November 16, 2024
===================================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
Today is episode #41 of TRS-80 Trash Talk is being recorded live later today
(8 pm) on YouTube:
  https://www.youtube.com/@TRS80TrashTalk

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)
-------------------------------
First, I want to clarify a few things from last weeks news:
A) The Randy Kindig interview with Steve Leninger and Don French isn't
just about the TRS-80 Model 1 creation, it does go into a little early
Coco history as well.

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

B) The "House of Future" article with pictures of the VDG screens, as some
noted, is not a Coco but a custom set of computers created by Motorola that
used their VDG chip. This house was built in 1979 with those computers
integrated, a year before the Coco 1 came out. MarcO missed the last of
my notes on this story, so I will go through them briefly here:
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

In the Dragon news section, Marc did show the text interview with Derek
Williams (By Richard Harding) which has some real cool history about the
Dragon, but he missed the second part where there is a brief video clip
from the 1984 Personal Computer World show in Olympia, London, showing
the Dragon with a Touchmaster graphics tablet:
 (SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE FOR THIS VIDEO):
  http://dragondata.co.uk/history/videos/index.html

I was hoping Nick would have a chance to watch Steve Rasmussen's (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 (PLAY FROM 10:23, can fast forward a little from finishing
the level design, exporting DATA statements, saving them to LEVELS.DAT on
disk and the running VCC with the new level):
  https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2295654639

1) Jim Brain added a 3rd blog post the day before last weeks show concerning
his exploration of alternate character sets.

https://www.go4retro.com/2024/11/08/expanding-the-mc6847-deciphering-the-interface/
As Jim mentioned on the show last week, Having a way to load character sets
directly from the Coco while it's running would be the ideal goal, allowing
some CocoVGA functionality on the Coco 1/2. I had seen some comments in
the chat sidebar speculating that redefining the character sets to do
256x192-like graphics was basically a waste and that at that point one
should just switch to the 256x192 true graphics mode, but I don't agree;
One has to take into consideration that the text screen (even with the new
font(s)) is still only 512 bytes of data to move around; the equivalent
full graphics screen (PMODE 4) is 6K. So a program could be *much* faster
(especially if you are writing in BASIC vs. Assembly), and with properly
defined characters, one could even get smooth pixel by pixel (or 2 or 4
pixels at a time) movement vs. the more blocky 8 pixel chunks that text
characters currently use. Kicking in higher Semigraphics modes (like the
12 and 24 modes that we can now use from BASIC) would allow designing
some such offset characters to give smoother scrolling both vertically
and horizontally.
And lastly, the ability to trigger and IRQ or FIRQ based on a count of
scanlines (or multiple counts per screen frame) not only allows one to change
the character set & screen mode (and/or color set) for different parts of
the screen, but it could serve double duty for doing sound effects in the
background between the 60/50 times per second that we have with VSYNC and
the 15,000+ times per second we get with HSYNC, allowing background sound
(sampled or generated) to run on a Coco 1/2 without so much CPU overhead.

2) CocoTown on YouTube returns to his Moon Patrol style gaming with a
video about adding scoring:
  https://youtu.be/kygaCZgpIUs?si=1rM_2eufMcolMnYT

3) RetroAndGaming on YouTube (who just got his Coco 1 working with S-Video
recently) released a video showing how the speedup POKE's work on Coco's:
  https://youtu.be/138scXKZNIE?si=w4ld88xngoo9kchW

4) SjslTech on YouTube picked up a Computer Buyers Guide, which actually
goes into surprising depth about how computers work before listing a bunch
of machines and their specs, including a section on TRS-80's:
  https://youtu.be/3jW4VCgKniQ?si=6SiCvbfEaDxanecq&t=480

5) Erico Monteiro has been experimenting with animated characters (Which
he is showing at RetroSC this weekend!) in low res graphics with comic
book style word balloons. He showed a preview on Facebook (the text is in
Portuguese for the show this weekend)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/big-trouble-in-retrosc-tomorrow/10161822164712641/
A slightly earlier post showing some other characters (There are 10 in all)
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161810828697641/
And what all 10 look like (not animated):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161799409247641/

6) Daniel Flakelar posted a photo of his PAL Coco 2 upgraded to composite -
and how he used the case design to make it neat and tidy:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/just-did-the-composite-mod-to-the-pal-coco2-nice-convenient-spot-to-put-some-hid/10161796824137641/

7) David Collins announced that he has entered his 63C09 based single
board computer into PCBWay's yearly design contest:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/ive-entered-my-sbc-into-the-yearly-design-contest-at-pcbway-this-weekend-i-hope-/3520556828237674/
PCBWay page entry:
  https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/The_HB63C09M_SBC_97a82b55.html

8) ugBASIC continues to get updates and bugfixes. The past two weeks has
included fixes to DATA statements with empty strings, CLEAR now clearing
variables correctly, and fixed blit register allocation & dynamic strings
for 3 CPU's (including 6809), as well as many updates for specific machines:
  https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/changelog/main

MC-10
-----
1) Jim Gerrie updated his Nova Scotia flag program on the MC-10 that we
showed a couple of weeks ago to show 3 flags associated with the maritime
province: Provincial Flag, Acadian Flag, and the Grand Council Flag of
the Miqmaq/L'nu native peoples:
  https://youtu.be/et_TqnCkLS8?si=V2W-y_SCJFTtuYUD

2) Jim is also looking for assembly coder volunteers to convert the chess
game Usurpator (originally written for the 6800) to the MC-10 and it's 6803:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/8538150252978388/

Dragon 32/64
------------
1) Richard Harding has uploaded high quality scans of original Dragon Data
software artwork:
  http://dragondata.co.uk/Software/artwork/index.html

2) YouTube channel Fix or No Fix did a 3/4 hour followup video about
restoring The Dragon 32 system he got. This round he works on the cassette
deck and joystick adaptor:
  https://youtu.be/GqAXhu4FtmI?si=nFXan9MiknbPII66

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Jim Gerrie has The Caves of Narzod (originally by Max Bettridge from the
Australian Coco magazine, October 1985) running on a Coco , but only from
tape. He is asking for some help to fix any ML routines for disk. Both Paul
Fiscarelli sent him versions fixed for disk. It's a graphical adventure game:
  https://youtu.be/tjgiDv8tJ4E?si=TGOPnziRsl7Nj0D8

2) Stu, of the Tandy (TRS-80) Discord and Stu's Game Reviews) revisited the
Coco this week, this time tackling Cyrus Chess (vs. the original Microchess
he played earlier). This is a title written in the UK and appeared on the
Dragon first, and then Tandy got rights to sell it here in North America
about a year later:
  https://www.youtube.com/live/rg1QMxqiRdU?si=JxDBHiMsgiQn_QT4

3) non_maskable_interrupt on YouTube did another Coco 3 gameplay YouTube
Short, this time covering Tandy/Greg Zumwalt's official Tetris:
  https://youtube.com/shorts/0xPRun7LPqQ?si=nPbfOFPpZq0QWh9Q

4) As promised last week, Pere Serrat is keeping himself busy making
updated versions of the AGD engine games for Coco's and Dragons with the
SuperSprite FM+ upgrade board. These new versions feature changed colors
sets to more closely match the ZX-Spectrum originals that the Coco/Dragon
versions are ported from.
Pack #2 features 6 more games:
Antiquity Jones, Apulija-13, Baldy ZX, Baby Monkey, Bean Brothers and Bol
Ke Ase:
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11205
Pack #3 features an additional 6 games:
Bomb Bomb Buster, Boxes, B-Squared, Cap'n Rescue, Cap'n Rescue - Reprisal,
and Cap'n Rescue - The Escape:
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11206

5) Chronologically Gaming covered the Dragon 32 game "Jerusalem Adventure 2"
from Microdeal this past week, which originally came out in November 1982
(it was originally out on the Coco a year earlier):
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS6C_D6_SPc&t=28s

6) French YouTube channel "GENERATION MICROS" went through the
November/December 1984 issue of TILT magazine, which covers video games
for both Micros and game consoles. there is a general review of 500 games
in alphabetical order (starts about 25 minutes in) including 6809 machines
like the Thomson MO series, the Vectrex and the Dragon 32. Each of them has a
photo as well, and some Coco / Dragon games are included, like Blochead (#27)
(although the photo is upside down), Bridge Master (#35), Cyrus Chess (#60),
Cosmic Cruiser (#79), Crash (#81), Cu*Bert (#90), Cuthbert Goes Digging
(#92), Cuthbert In the Mines (#93), Dragon Chess (#115), El Bandito (#123),
Fruity (#152), Glaxxons (#159), Junior's Revenge (#211), Kriegspiel (#221),
Leggit (#243), Lunar Rover Patrol (#263), Nerble Force (#298) (they have
Skramble pictured instead), Shenanigans (#387), Skramble (#390) (here is
the swapped Nerble Force picture), Touchstone (#455), 3D Lunattack (#464),
3D Seiddab Attack (#466), 3D Space Wars (#467), Ugh! (#472), Whirlybird Run
(#488). They also do brief specs/reviews of the Thomson series computers,
The Alice and Alice 90 (44:07), and the Dragon 32 (54:43), MC-10 (1:08:21),
TRS-80 Color 2 (although they bizarrely show a photo of a Coco 1 - and an
older model at that!) (1:09:00)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuSettBKiHE&t=2649s&ab_channel=GENERATIONMICROS

7) After the .... "accident" last episode, AJ finally calmed down enough
to rejoin her sibling Tim Lindner for part 9 of Dungeons of Daggorath for
their Sibling Rivalry show:
  https://youtu.be/4NaMxJEej4E?si=Uo7s4CA0glZb94Nl

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

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