[Coco] The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 399, February 8, 2025

Sun Feb 9 08:10:06 EST 2025

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 399, February 8, 2025
==============================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
VCF-SoCal - Feb 15-16 (Hotel Fera in Orange, California).
  https://www.vcfsocal.com/

VCF East is April 4-6, 2025 - same facility as this year. Info Age Science
Museum, Wall, NJ.
  https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-east/

The next Manitoba Retro Computer & Gaming club meetup is at the Fort Rouge
Leisure Center in Winnipeg, Manitoba on April 12. This is the same one I
attended last weekend, along with D. Bruce Moore and David Kroeker. This
next one is more themed around the Commodore 128, but I expect a wide
variety of machines like they had this past one, which was TRS-80 themed
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/mbretro/posts/1830196931063991/

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/

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 will be July 11-13 in Hurricane, WV. There is now a promo video
for it:
  https://youtu.be/4KRVVRHlj6g

VCF-Midwest (the largest retro show in North America, I believe) is September
13-14 at the Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumberg, 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 dates have been announced - it will be Sept 26 to Sep
28 at the Courtyard by Marriott Springfield Downtown in Springfield, Ohio:
  https://www.tandyassembly.com/

This 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) Bob Emery posted a video about the PLAY command on his La Coco Strangiato
YouTube page, based on a program he wrote more than 20 years ago:
  https://youtu.be/zkClAtFq4GM?si=NJqdXDn6ZT62xO2x

2) Terry Trapp released a video about the Coco 3 system he bought on
Facebook, and getting it up and running:
  https://youtu.be/nBwhokgA0jI?si=1if9OpjLwPwzvJC7

3) Coco Town posted a video update on why he hasn't been posting videos
lately; like LGR, some trees broke and damaged his house:
  https://youtu.be/y5FWymTJcNs?si=fd2Y6J5qYJVqAuhB

4) George Janssen has released the DSK image with source code for Lesson
15C (continuing on with palette automation/animation) on his channel on
the Coco Discord server. The accompanying video is on his YouTube channel:
  https://youtu.be/afrTkU85voI?si=T82b8j52k6a1bwe8

5) For those that program in CMOC (Pierre Sarrazin's C-like compiler for
all Coco's, and for both DECB and OS9), earlier this week he r3leased a
new version of it's graphics library 'BGraph's, which is now up to version
0.1.9. This adds a new Trig.h header file that defines some trigonometric
primitives, which help drawing 15 degree circle arcs. Other updates include
Ellipse now allows a 16 bit radius. He also added some demo programs;
a PMODE 3 painting demo that paints with patterns instead of just solid
colors, and a Semigraphics-24 mode has been added to the shapes-demo.c mode:
  http://perso.b2b2c.ca/~sarrazip/dev/cmoc.html
(search for "BGraph" to find the spot on the page)

6) Many updates and bug fixes affecting Coco's 1/2/3 have been done to
ugBASIC the past few weeks:
  https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/changelog/main

7) And speaking about ugBASUC - Erico Monteiro posted a video showing some
animations with background sound (simple 1 voice) that also uses ugBASIC's
recent add on of the 64x64x4 color true graphics mode (that only takes
1K RAM):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162268027542641/
Earlier, playing with that screen mode, he drew up a map that was based
on Download and/or Prince of Persia:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162263411242641/
He also did a quick graphics editor in ugBASIC to use this same graphics
mode:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162262629352641/

8) Henry of The Break Key fame (oh, and he's a regular panelist here) gives
us our first peek at the hardware upgrade that the Coco version of Fujinet
is getting - full bus through the cartridge port, no serial bit banger cable
needed. Should run a *lot* faster, when it is finished. Henry starts with
soldering tips (ha!) (and Henry - that does *NOT* sound like my definition
of "fun")..., then goes on to programming & uploading the firmware:
  https://youtu.be/LCChualtzTw?si=cmYNthmW75-Tl5e7

9) Allen Huffman posted a bit of his Coco commercial program history on
his Sub-Etha Software blog. It shows original ad copy from even before
the company name (Sub-Etha Software) was decided on, and how it progressed
before they were advertising in Rainbow:

https://subethasoftware.com/2025/02/05/our-magazine-ads-before-they-were-typeset/

MC-10
-----
1) The Clueless Engineer returns with part 3 of his getting an original
Alice to work. Last episode he had issues with the keyboard. He starts off
showing the differences with the MC-10 (which he just got). One interesting
thing - the Alice uses less screws:
  https://youtu.be/A9SVZOl3z24?si=xqX1KiDmK2ywl-f-

Dragon 32/64
------------
1) Steven Evans has uploaded DragonDOS 64 V1.0 to the World of Dragon
forums. This version modifies DragonDOS to operate entirely in 64K RAM
mode. This enables it work properly with his RESET Patch that we covered a
week or two ago, and a second version of the upload adds a paged directory
list, so that it pauses each screen full of filenames:
You can read about (and download it) here:
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11238
He also uploaded DragonDOS NX01 in a separate forum thread, which also
has regular and Dragon 64 versions. This includes all of Philip G. Scott's
bugfix patches from the May and July 1985 issues Dragon User magazine. The
posts lists all of the Faults and patches that it installs, as well as the
download itself. The latest version at the bottom offers the page pause
in addition to the patches, and updated documentation:
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11239

2) Julian Brown posted some more updates about his work-in-progress of
his new Dragon 32 motherboard, the latest being where he added most of
the power circuit:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3935035893422717/
He also sent me a note about the SECAM boards that he is working on... he
says they are to create a record of the original SECAM boards that Dragon
Data designed, and that these were unique in that they split the video
circuit over the main board and the power board.He plans to use it as a
reference to make his own design to eventually create analog RGB from the
VDG using just transistors and resistors.

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Back in mid-January the CPRG Addict started reviewing The Power Stones of
Ard II: The Five Towers of Trafa-Zar, a graphical Coco 3 RPG game written
by Bill Cleveland and sold by Three C's Projects back in 1990. All in all
up through this past week, he wrote 3 blog entries about it, and won the
game in the third:
Part 1:

http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2025/01/game-537-power-stones-of-ard-ii-five.html
Part 2:

https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-five-towers-of-trafa-zar-ashes-and.html
Part 3:

https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-power-stones-of-ard-ii-five-towers.html

2) With the many updates that have happened in ugBASIC lately for the Coco's
and Dragons, a bit of an aside by it's author Marco Spedaletti is a new
entry written in ugBASIC for the current BASIC10Liner competition, called
"Beyond the Door". On the webpage are screenshots for multiple machines,
including the Dragon/Coco 1/2:
  https://spotlessmind1975.itch.io/btd-10liner
The 10 liner webpage (note: it defaults to German, so hover over the
"2025" at the top to get the Rules and Game List (so far) for this year
in English, although you will have to scroll down on the new page to get
to the English part):
  https://www.homeputerium.de/

3) James Jewett uploaded an updated version of his Spacewar game, speeding
up some routines, adding some graphics to the Quadrant Viewer, and adding
an "M" command that will draw a line to your destination in the viewer if
you are moving or warping. You can find it in the Facebook Coco group:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162270130642641/

4) Jim Gerrie ported a game to the Coco and Dragon that originally was
written as a wargame programming tutorial by Marshall Cavendish for the
educational magazine INPUT (which taught programming). The source listings
were for multiple platforms (including the Dragon) at the time of it's
publication in 1984 to 1986 (The Internet Archive copy shows it being 1997,
but the copyright dates on the inside front cover say otherwise). The link
to download the game to run is in the comments of the original Facebook post:
Game Play video
  https://youtu.be/cBih2JxvUYw?si=m_3NdoSfhold52aN
Original article Part 1 (go through subsequent issues for the remainder
of the wargame tutorial):

https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbFNGeDhYaFN5aWl3dklaM0xMaFVKUDlXVHctd3xBQ3Jtc0trYXNiNXVPUTVaRXVBeFRFb05oQ2NhYUVJNWR6bzZSdXB2TmNWd0RBREhjYzVDR1k1VDY0TUQ0LUhMR2YzNzhUTExKdXhtRU1jVjhfSWZ4WUh2S09QLUNuZWJTMTFEVDJjMF96ZFp3UXY3Vy00bWtzdw&q=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2FInput_Vol_4_No_40_1997_Marshall_Cavendish_GB%2Fpage%2Fn19%2Fmode%2F2up&v=cBih2JxvUYw

5) Nostalgiavault on YouTube did a bunch of MC-10 game videos this week. #1
is Dinosaur Run! - based on the popular Google game - except it's running
on an MC-10 (Jim Gerrie's 2021 port):
  https://youtu.be/pakOML7WYZU?si=quW-ZVnz8qXWGCtI
He also played "Animal" - a very early AI program, and this is a port of
one of the very early ones that Creative Computing published:
  https://youtu.be/vJs1X5VzEPY?si=30mvLcmlA3iI9FyR
2048 (the sliding numbers game that George Janssen made a Coco 3 version not
too long ago). As he warns in the description, this is a very slow version:
  https://youtu.be/RwOu3fBqPcs?si=tnHYLEZ4P1mjSlTK

6) YouTube channel Aldo1235 did an almost 4 minute playing the official
Coco version of Frogger:
  https://youtu.be/hxLwV0sn1RQ?si=4OHFDE1viC5Jcln9

7) Attempts: A gaming channel by LRU did video playing Tom Mix's Skramble,
shooting for an official score. He did make it up to level 5:
  https://youtu.be/rw-V7iLfplg?si=LU48LRNUk939mRUr

8) Chronologically Gamings has been busy this week with both Dragon and
Coco games released in November 1982:
The original Dragon version of Cyrus Chess:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhXRQuXJsCY&t=31s
Defense for the Coco:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhXRQuXJsCY&t=377s
Devil's Island for the Dragon 32:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhXRQuXJsCY&t=833s
Doodle Bug for the Coco - with a custom cartridge/label pictured done *much*
later (Is this Dave6309's?):
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUKij-_ifI4&t=863s
Dragon Trek for the Dragon 32 (graphics, steerable photons are a couple
of more unique things to this version):
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCq43AYoOUs&t=27s
Invasion / The Force for the Coco:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAnClJ8194U&t=850s
Conveyor Belt for the Coco:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAnClJ8194U&t=1418s

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

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