[Coco] The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 409, April 19, 2025

Mon Apr 21 15:59:29 EDT 2025

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 409, April 19, 2025
===============================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday April 26 is the Spring Dalls/Fort Worth Retrcomputing meetup,
from noon until 4 pm, at Bingo Bingo in Grand Prairie, Texas:

https://www.meetup.com/dfw-retrocomputing/events/306965157/?utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=share-btn_savedevents_share_modal&utm_source=link

Later that same day (Saturday April 26) is the next Amigos hosted
"International Computer Club", which has people talking about a
variety of hardware, software, collecting, etc. retro computer &
gaming projects. Both Nick and I have been on this show multiple times,
and Nick will be on it to show his Pinball project.
  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaD3XRYu1lQTWrMYYPmaOa4AIj4xArroD

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 14 (a week later than
previous). Bookings for tables will be going up in January.
  https://www.glensideccc.com/cocofest/

Retrofest 2025, organized by Tony Jewell, is a retro computer festival
happening in Swindon, England May 31-June 1, 2025. Some Dragon people
(like Richard Harding and Chris Poacher) have already committed to
attending the show, being held at STEAM (the Great Western Railway
museum):
Retrofest website:
  https://retrofest.uk/
They even have a promo video:
  https://youtu.be/UCZ-BtFW9Ok?si=B441wLvpDI2iekLN

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/

BoatFest (now International Retro Computer Expo) will be July 11-13
in Hurricane, WV. There is now a promo video for it:
  https://www.ticketsource.us/ircexpo2025/t-eanjyje

VCF-Midwest (the largest retro show in North America, I believe) is
September 13-14 at the Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg,
Illinois. This year is the 20th anniversary of this show, and there is
a lot of collaboration between CocoFest and VCF-MW, so expect a large
number of Coco and Glenside people at the show! Still free admission,
and hotel booking is open already.
  https://www.vcfmw.org/

That same weekend, Retro World Expo will be held September 12-14 at
the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, Connecticut. Tickets
and vendor applications aren't quite ready yet but will be soon. This
is a gaming oriented retro show (including tournaments) but also
includes things like wrestling:
  https://retroworldexpo.com/

Tandy Assembly for 2025 is Sept 26 to Sep 28 at the Courtyard by
Marriott Springfield Downtown in Springfield, Ohio:
  https://www.tandyassembly.com/
And they have some exhibitors already (click Exhibitors link)

This year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo runs from October 17-19 in
2025 (they just had this years Sept 27-29). Oregon Convention Center,
Portland, Oregon.
  https://www.retrogamingexpo.com/

Canada is getting it's own official VCF - Montreal, January 25-26
of 2026. It will be held at the Royal Military College outside of
Montreal, but I don't have any more details (the venue, for example)
yet:
  https://vcfed.org/vcf-montreal/

Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
1) Coco Town returns with Game revolutions cycle 26 - this time
covering Double buffering "gone wild"... and even some outtakes at
the end:
  https://youtu.be/CcH1MjgF9qs?si=9f9klniJsdhCwBAR

2) Ken of Canadian Retro Things fame did a video showing the J-DOS
with Memory Minder and the very elusive alignment disk, for re-aligning
heads on floppy drives:
  https://youtu.be/HckD6dLXz1I?si=5Pu9u6sZBsV-Pp6g

3) RichL on the Coco Discord shared on his github a neat trick for
converting BCD to ASCII, based on the Lance Levanthal 6809 assembly
book (and Lance cites Dennis R. Allison from a February 1977 article
of Computer magazine that did the same on an 8080), including a deep
dive into how the algorithm works:
  https://github.com/rlucente-se-jboss/hex2ascii

4) A sad note from Maryland - it's last surviving Radio Shack is
closing:

https://marylandmatters.org/2025/04/14/end-of-an-era-the-last-radioshack-in-maryland-is-closing-its-doors/

5) Henry of The Break Key fame has released his next video showing
his progress on his Coco Forth ROM project, after being busy with some
side projects (like Fujinet, and teaching classes at VCF East earlier
this month). This time he goes back to fix up some things he needed
to changed to proceed, and now has his Forth implementation able to
compile new words (the Forth language lets you create new keywords
based on ones previously in it's dictionary). It's a long episode;
almost 1.5 hours:
  https://youtu.be/uBZST7-pBls?si=t7f3UtxZ4xGhvxtP

6) Erico Monteiro decided to use ugBASIC to try using the visual style
of Tut's Tomb (Mark Data Products) for the backgrounds, but with an
isometric character ala Chaos Engine, to see what it would look like,
which he posted into the Coco group on Facebook:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162498889312641/

7) TRS-80 Retro Programing posted a video updating his Tales of
Suburbia map, and also a quick Data file reader Utility (Version 1)
that he can use for debugging:
  https://youtu.be/1bJj5t0hNj4?si=Gb53XjuhKRm04ETc

8) RetroDudes 1978 put up a YouTube short about the Coco 3, although
the AI voice keeps called the cpu names as if it were a regular
number (thus "six thousand eight hundred nine" instead of "six eight
oh nine"). Also, not many people at all ran the 6309 at 5 MHz -
usually 2.86 Mhz (GIME-X) or with a crystal replacement, 2 to 2.4
MHz. (Some other 6809 based terminal systems, etc. were set up to
run much faster; the main limit in the Coco is the screen is based
on the clock speed and needs special hardware like the GIME-X to go
much faster but still be compatible with video signals/chips, etc):
  https://youtube.com/shorts/ZIW-XhEk5Ew?si=E60XtN41id90rcjy

MC-10
-----
1) Adrian (of Adrian's Digital Basement (on his 2nd YouTube channel)
did a mail call episode, and the first thing up is an upgrade he
received for the MC-10 - the 16K RAM upgrade. So he will have an
MC-10 video coming in the future:
  https://youtu.be/3XApa-s1nhc?si=JGxXyP_ujOHHo6or

2) Jim Gerrie posted a video of his MC-10 port of Anagram Cracker,
originally by Bob Chappell for Micro Computer Printout from the May
1982 issue (Bob completed the program Feb 21, 1982. It's a utility
for solving anagrams using some "intelligence" features:
  https://youtu.be/-eVHZyFMnBQ?si=X-zqedf6CAux_S_z

Dragon 32/64
------------
1) John Whitworth posted an announcement in the Dragon group on
Faceobok that for now, he will sell DragonPlus Electronics stuff
to non-EU countries, due to the EU requiring every component to be
validated and EMF tested. From reading the comments, some suggestions
have been made that may help alleviate this, but even that will take
some time, I gather:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4003580876568218/

2) Julian Brown posted on the Dragon Facebook group that he laid out
Stewart Orchard's MkII PCB, and posed a picture:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3999867096939596/

3) Sixxie (Ciaran Anscomb, author of XRoar) has been working on
Fuzix support for his SAMx8 board (which we covered recently), and
has posted updates on the World of Dragon forums:
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11269

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Renga in Blue - the adventure game only chronological gaming/review
site, covered some more Coco text advetnuring this past week:
Aardvark's Haunted House (originally released around August 1982)
for the Coco.
Part 1:
  https://bluerenga.blog/2025/04/12/haunted-house-anderson-1982/
Part 2 (Where he mentions a bug, but does finish the game):
 https://bluerenga.blog/2025/04/13/haunted-house-alfred-hitchcock-presents/

2) Ken Reighard has a new version of his Nightmare Highway game - the
Final Edition. This officially adds the Power of Terry 2025 version
(as well as the original 2020 version), and you can buy the digital
versions from his itch.io page for only $3.00:
  https://kenscococorner.itch.io/nightmare-highway-final-edition

3) Tim and AJ cover the game Maze Land that we just had as a featured
game on the Game On Challenge for episode 176 of Sibling Rivalary,
on their My Drunk Sibling YouTube channel:
  https://youtu.be/oB5MGK736CU?si=E6Jax_A7T-NsRder

4) Newly rename YouTube channel "Fabio's NMI" (previously just NMI),
put up a video of Lunchtime gameplay on his real Coco 3 with real CM-8
(and a real door!). Since this is running with a CM-8 and originally
used artifact colors (which the CM-8 doesn't support), he is playing
a patched version that does show color.
  https://youtube.com/shorts/_9lKEpvmut8?si=ezUTqvwYGjHv5zcB

5) ZXFrankie on YouTube posted a gameplay/official scored for the
Dragon game Eddie Steady Go! He gets all the way to Section 11:
  https://youtu.be/M2cBPhU-P58?si=VtqRnOxQnkc2_vGt

6) Ellimist did some more adventure game speed runs with the Coco
this past week:
Night of the Living Dead (a fairly extensive text adventure, requiring
a disk drive and allowing multi-part sentences). Unusual is that he
show two alternate endings winning the game:
  https://youtu.be/peJe7WG6fP8?si=wL1YNXrmOvZ_GscU
Blackbeard's Island (a graphical text adventure sold by Novasoft,
the reduced price division of Tom Mix Software, and written by Greg
Miller of Greg-E-Term and Colormax 3/Colormax 3 Deluxe fame):
  https://youtu.be/itryY2A8MwU?si=Wm4eND2sLGwKYOcG
He played another multi-platform game as wel, Escape Pulsar 7 (#5
in the Mystery Adventure Series). This is supposed to include the
Coco version, but the video appears to have cut off before the Coco,
Atari 800 and other versions are to play. The BBC Micro and Apple II
versions are present. I left a message asking if the video got cut
off by YouTube, or if a second part is planned:
  https://youtu.be/8V04kfOWAXc?si=dJ4kumVV9HhpYQV1

7) XperTek did his next Amber screen Coco 2 game video - Volume
5 games of the 80's, which includes 6 games combined in one video
(I think he has already covered this separately):
Sprouting, Buzzard Bait, Clowns & Balloons, Graphos and Lurk, Ninja
Warrior, and Spacewar (which he covered in a separate video last week):
  https://youtu.be/MnLcvlwieGk?si=IB0gN-fOLTUC63qA

8) Ultra Gamer81 posted an over 13 minute gameplay video of the Tom
Mix classic, Donkey King on it's YouTube channel. Although it appears
to be using the ore coarse artifact color emulation than some of the
latest emulators are capable of, it also has really nice clean audio,
and he easily gets to all 4 screens:
  https://youtu.be/qtX-BmcQFWI?si=Xy56Gxk_GTy8CfI3

9) Attempts: A game channel by LRU on YouTube posted a high score
gameplay video of Slay the Nereis, an underwater Centipede style game
by Spectral Associates and sold by Tandy:
  https://youtu.be/0bsFfkIyYPE?si=GzGoMB3isxSux1dj

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