[Coco] The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 402, March 1, 2025

[R. Allen Murphey]

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 402, March 1, 2025
===============================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
The Interim Computer Festival is happening at Intraspace in Seattle
Washington from March 21-23. This is the Pacific Northwest Show that is
hoping to get back to VCF status in the near future:
  https://sdf.org/icf/

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 (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 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/

Canada is getting it's own official VCF - Montreal, January 25-26 of
2026. I don't see any more details (the venue, for example) yet:
  https://vcfed.org/vcf-montreal/


Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
1) George Janssen has uploaded the video for Lesson 15e of his Coco 3
assembly language programming series:
  https://youtu.be/SpqlQa1TxIQ?si=_HScjLN8Rcvjjs5o

2) Pierre Sarrazin announced that his host website for his CMOC compiler
(and various projects written with it) has moved to a new location:
  http://gvlsywt.cluster051.hosting.ovh.net/dev/cmoc.html

3) Coco Town, having completing his "Bumbling in NitrOS9" series, gets a bit
more serious and delves into assembly language in NitrOS9 - thus saving me
from having to do a Coco Tech episode on it (just kidding, probably still
will, but using it's own assemblers). He goes into learning some of the
quirks of writing PIC, OS9 data memory areas, etc.:
  https://youtu.be/RV0VYWGPx1Q?si=1NJL-ASm4NxDr9qM

4) Henry Strickland posted a 2&1/2 minute video showing his updates to
the Bonobo board on both Coco 2 & 3. Quoted from Henry:
" My new BONOBO 2.4 circuit boards are working in both a coco2 and coco3 now
(and a year ago we did roughly the same thing with a 4K coco1).  These cards
simply have a Pi Pico wired up to do three things: 1) Spoon-feed a boot
program into the Coco's RAM.  2) Be a "device" for the coco with a Control
port and a Data port (similar to a Becker Port idea).  3) Can optionally
create FIRQ or NMI interrupts for the coco, mainly for sending Audio samples
out the coco's DAC port [these are untested yet].  Eventually these boards
should be one way to provide network to the nekot-game-os."
  https://youtu.be/DxUBmvOEaiI?si=9Foexm_vzrNwiuSN

5) Allen Huffman posted a question on the Coco Facebook group - does
anybody have an archive of the princeton university Coco list (a usenet
style list) messages? I remember referencing this myself (and may have
even posted occasionally), but as Allen points out, it the old archive of
it seems to have disappeared:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162333363427641/
He has also been busy on his Sub-Etha Software Facebook page and blog this
week, going through old disks of sourcecode and finding some gems he had
completely forgot about:
(Scroll down for the various things he has found)
  https://www.facebook.com/subethasoftware
These include:
 - A newer version of the SEMaze demo that we have included in NitrOS9/EOU -
 2 revisions higher:
 - InfoPatch - a program to patch Infocom game disks to run on Coco 3 80
 columns plus 6ms track speed (rather than DECB's default 30):
 - Source for what may have eventually became a Missile Command style game,
 written in C and even using Mouse signal events:
 - Source for his Phantom's Lair game project (sort of a port of Phantom
 Slayer to the Coco 3/OS9) that was never finished:
 - ADFedit - a utility to make Auto Dialer Files for the Supercomm OS9
 terminal program
 - Updated Towel 1.05 - newer than the release included with EOU
 - Labor program - for making work schedules for employees, etc.
 - Ethamate - a Deskmate style program for the EthaWin text-window interface
A Blog post about a bug in Super Extended BASIC - where a large CLEAR will
cause WIDTH 40 or WIDTH 80 to crash the computer (BASIC maps in the 40/80
column screens at a certain fixed MMU block - and that clear will cause it
to get completely lost when trying to run a BASIC program at the same time,
as the system stack is now pointing into the block BASIC just mapped out):
 https://subethasoftware.com/2025/02/28/how-to-crash-a-coco-3/
A Blog post about Coco 3 BASIC quirks with ON ERR GOTO and negative line
numbers because of the way BASIC handles 16 bit line numbers:
 
https://subethasoftware.com/2025/02/25/coco-3-basic-and-on-err-goto-and-negative-line-numbers/
This was actually a follow up to an earlier blog post about the quirks
of decimal, hexadecimal and octal, and how some are signed and some are
unsigned, which gets odd to work with when doing AND, OR, etc:
 
https://subethasoftware.com/2025/02/24/color-basic-decimal-hex-and-octal-are-not-the-same/

6) TRS-80 Retro Programing posted a quick video showing his using PMODE
4 graphics in Extended BASIC to simulate a rotating asteroid like in the
arcade game Asteroids:
  https://youtu.be/wDA613YFBKA?si=GT3tosRobND-b6_9

7) Mauricio Matte posted a photo of what he is calling the "Brazilian
Black Beauty" joystick - looks pretty slick!
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162336498887641/

8) Simon Jonassen put up a photo from a real Coco 2 showing PAL type
Semigraphics-24 artofacting, but on an NTSC system, showing some extra
colors by "wobbling". Some combinations clearly show horizontal stripes,
but some blend to give more than 9 colors (There is a screenshot in the
comments from a CP-400 from Brazil as well):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162323505222641/

9) Terry Trap posted an update for his Coco 3 composite sync board that
he was sending for manufacture earlier this week:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162316202862641/

10) Thomas Cherryhomes posted a note for Fujinet developers (all supported
platforms, including the Coco) with an update on how to program for doing
HTTP GET:
  https://fujinet.online/2025/02/23/developers-when-doing-http-get-use-mode-12/

11) David Collins posted an update to his 63C09 based SBC project,
where he mentions that has all of the interrupt functions and handling
now generated by his Arduino based micro-controller which also includes
a priority interrupt control system:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/3596360817323941/


MC-10
-----
1) Following up on Jim Gerrie's release of Bally's Alley text adventure
that he ported to the MC-10 from the Bally Astrocade BASIC cart, he did
a full blog post on the subject:
  https://jimgerrie.blogspot.com/2025/02/ballys-alley-by-john-collin-1980.html

2) Jim Gerrie ported "Poetry Writer", a program originally written by Ron
Clark in 1981 for Arcsoft Publishers. It has been ported to the Coco before,
but I don't think that is where it originated. It creates poems:
  https://youtu.be/QrN4GDbBBJU?si=Dhuznw1l8TTEUyBk

3) The Clueless Engineer released Part 4 of his video series on fixing
up his Matra Alice. In this episode he finally receives his replacement
6803 to see if he can fix the keyboard issues that he has been having,
and does some other hardware upgrades:
  https://youtu.be/OvdkhOnV7no?si=_E2hOWNjN8psJVao

4) Robert Sieg did another update for his 128x96 24 bit BMP to MC-10
converter (although it's using the VMC-10 emulator with enhanced graphics
modes, I think - it might work with a CocoVDA upgraded MC-10?):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/9094891663970908/


Dragon 32/64
------------
1) WhatHoSnorkers on their YouTube channel put up a BASIC little
graphics/sound program for the Dragon 32 that draws a snorker, I presume? I
am not sure what this is a reference too... can any of our UK or European
viewers help?
  https://youtu.be/i-iYAiVsFr8?si=1tc1RVXCtmsnZXTD

2) Julian Brown posted some board design updates for his Dragon ATX
protoyping setup:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3953337948259178/

3) Tomeu Capo posted some pictures in the Dragon Facebook group of his
running a Televideo 910 terminal logged in to his Dragon 64 with OS-9
Level 1:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3951067318486241/

4) Quick update from last week - John Whitworth's run of 7 Supersprite FM+
board kits are sold out.


Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Chronologically Gaming returned after a week break this past Monday,
with a fair bit of Coco gaming content from November 1982:
Nibbler from Nelson Software Sysetms / Colorful Software:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj1pWfAlD9M&t=31s
Nova Pinball from Bumblebee Software - he was definitely having some
issues with the keyboard controls on this one. Emulator issue or bugs in
the current copy on the archive?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj1pWfAlD9M&t=559s
Pac-Droids:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj1pWfAlD9M&t=1673s
Planet Invasion:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHXlCxqr0EA&t=744s

2) Buzzsaw Gaming on YouTube did a tour of his 2025 Game Room, including
many consoles, old PC's etc. Near the end, he shows his Coco 3 system:
  https://youtu.be/d25VUtrMxs4?si=5vdVAeTia4C3di9h&t=1094

3) Pere Serrat posted on the World of Dragon forums that he has ported
11 text/graphic adventures originally by Channel 8 Software to disk (they
were all originally cassette only). He has ported them to the Coco as well,
although that currently only supports the text mode of the games (same with
the Dragon 32). The entire sets can be downloaded in ZIP format. It should
be mentioned that saving/loading games in progress are still cassette based;
this simply lets them play properly from a disk system:
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11255

4) While he was at it... Pere also ported another Adventure International
tape only game (Questprobe 1 - The Hulk) to run from disk. He has uploaded
ZIP files for both the Dragon and the Coco that have all 13 of the original
Scott Adams text adventures plus the new Hulk one, set up to run from
disk. These also have a prompted option for true lowercase if you have a
Coco 2B or Coco 3:
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11256

5) Jim Jewett has posted an updated DSK image of his Spacewar game that
he resurrected from the 1980's. The new ZIP file in the Coco group on
Facebook features game updates and an updated manual:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162333507037641/

6) NMI (Non Maskable Interrupt) psted another quick Coco gameplay video on
his real Coco 3, this time covering Adventure International's Sea Dragon,
played on a low skill level (the skill level determines the speed of the
game, including scrolling):
  https://youtu.be/9Mi3It1Ymhg?si=Mto2BBGZ63VmEoFT

7) Erico Monteiro posted a video of his entry for the BASIC 10-Liner contest
(For the "Extreme-256" category, called "5 Tides at Purple Oyster Beach"
on his YouTube channel. This is written in ugBASIC, but he has to cut it
down a bit... He is currently just over 11 lines:
  https://youtu.be/6XKbijcKlyg?si=as2SzgMIe_NV3Q-Z

8) RetroGamerDiaries on YouTube did a review of 12 ports of Robocop,
and then ranked the versions. The Coco 3 version placed pretty low (10th):
  https://youtu.be/5bn8nCUqfhs?si=eTxNcZJQicHfcpJw&t=2453

9) Ellimist on YouTube posted a half hour video showing speed runs on
multiple platforms of the Scott Adams/Adventure International game Voodoo
Castle, including the Dragon 32/Coco versions:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNZdBX_v7os&t=572s

10) Polish YouTube channel gregok1973 did a couple of Coco gameplay videos
this past week:
3D Maze by Scott Bain (from 1982) (escaping a maze written in BASIC). He
shows both versions of the game, the wireframe version runs fairly quick
but looks a bit messy, the filled in walls version looks much better but
is much slower to render:
  https://youtu.be/zR1_mGTykko?si=BH4nSQDBfbDdCLPt
64 Witches by Richard Ramella, who wrote columns for a variety of magazines
including Hot Coco and Rainbow. This game has the player attempting to
place 8 queens on a 64 square Chess board in such a way that they can not
hit each other:
  https://youtu.be/lv7GvHqCRV8?si=krQ-yjKko0GtyIRQ

11) BrewOtaku posted on the Coco Facebook group that they have re-released
their first issue of their gaming magazine of the same name, which covers
new game releases for retro systems, this time as a free PDF download. Looks
pretty slicka, although they mention that they don't have many releases for
the Coco / Dragon, and would like to cover any that are. From looking at
their website, 4 issues are already out since they started a year ago. They
both show new releases (with a screenshot for each) as well as more in depth
reviews of close to 2 dozen per issue. They are published in Germany and you
can get both physical magazines or digital downlads at a fairly decent price:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162332049167641/
Actual first issue:
  https://www.brewotaku.com/2024/01/brewotaku-001-january-february-2024/

12) Paul Shoemaker released an update video for his high res Star Trek
MC-10 game. He has switched the music to on the the Star Trek movie themes
instead of the original TV theme music... more famously remembered as the
them for Star Trek The Next Generation. He also shows a bit more of the
menu selection game play:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162330708707641/

13) Marco Spedaletti announced that the Dragon 32/64 version of his BASIC
10-liner entry using his ugBASIC is out (we covered the Coco version
last week):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3948001112126195/

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

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