[Coco] The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 411, May 3, 2025

[R. Allen Murphey]

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 411, May 3, 2025
===============================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

For those who want to try an online BBS running on a real 512K Coco 3,
you can reach Terry Trapp’s RiBBS system here:
telnet ribbs.griswoldfx.com 6809


Special Guests today:
---------------------
Some CocoFest goes, perchance?
Bob Emery will be on to recap the Texas meetup he was at last week?


Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
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/

The Southeast Michigan Vintage Computer Club is having their 8th public
meeting/display June 28, 2025 from 11 AM to 5 PM Eastern at Grace
Chapel's Gymnasium, 2515 N. Williams Lake Road, Waterford Township,
Michigan (near Pontiac). This covers all retro gaming consoles and
home computers.
 
https://semichiganvcc.blogspot.com/2025/04/se-michigan-vintage-computer-club-ver.html

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/

Also that same weekend, for Canadians and anyone wanting to travel
up to Canada, the WoRC (World of Retro Computing) show is September
13-14 at the old Goudies Department Store location at 8 Queen Street
North, Kitchener,ON, Canada (West of Toronto, and right beside The
Museum). This is a general retro show with a bunch of gaming and home
computer platforms, vendors, seminars, LAN parties, workshops, door
prizes & raffles and is sponsored by Retro Rewind. Admission is free,
and it runs noon to 5 pm Eastern on both Saturday and Sunday:
  https://worldofretrocomputing.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) For those who want to catch the seminars at CocoFest, Glenside is
live streaming them from their YouTube channel, and you can go watch
ones you missed:
  https://www.youtube.com/@glensideccc/streams

2) Ken Waters (Canadian Retro Things) has posted his part 2 video
of using his Memory Minder with special Diagnostic disk to check a
variety of the floppy drives he has in his posession:
  https://youtu.be/jRY5-fVVuOQ?si=Q2bn0GCGsPjJ-Ox1

3) For those who didn't get a chance to watch it live last Saturday
night, the TRS-80 Trash Talk live show episode #43 is available for
view on their YouTube channel. They had some Coco related segments
from myself, Henry Gernhardt III and Nick Marentes:
  https://www.youtube.com/live/I0Z0q9zdvbU?si=SeN482vUXbYVvURp

4) And for those of you who missed the Amigos International Computer
Club last weekend as well (almost 6 hours!), which also had several
of us showing off Coco project updates, as well as stories from
developers on other machines ranging rom the ZX Spectrum to mobile
games in the 2000's, you can watch it here:
  https://www.youtube.com/live/zrGB_ngpaY8?si=MDmGVb2Gpb2kVt3B

5) Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant) on YouTube put up an almost
3/4 hour video showing Mickey's Alpine Adventure from Disney/Tandy in
1983 - a very early multi-media educational game. He is even running
it on his real Coco 1 through RF:
  https://youtu.be/InXsRT5c9hM?si=PPngeMIe03Ulqqb4

6) Henry of The Break Key has a new video on his YouTube channel,
where he adds an OLED status indicator to the keyboard, using the
i2c interface:
   https://youtu.be/FvQc6m-HgZY?si=xGZyu6qRpGsy1Biq

7) Guillaume Major (owner/proprietor of the Color Computer Archive)
announced that he has done an updated "master" CocoSDC image,
containing over 100 new files from the last time he did one of
these. This is basically downloading the whole archive in one ZIP
file. He also has a changes.txt file that shows what has been added
and/or updated:
  https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Disks/Coco%20SDC/Image/

8) Jim Brain posted some photos from the currently ongoing CocoFest
in Chicago:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/glensideccc/posts/10162920351976163/

9) Richard Goedeken posted the source code for a 6309 assembly program
to calculate pi to arbitrary precision:
  https://github.com/richard42/calcpi

10) While being released at the totally wrong time of the year, Caleb
Short on YouTube released a Coco 1/2 artifacted color animation with
music for Away In a Manger:
  https://youtu.be/A6Wn-8_GSKc?si=tYGzaJI_HUGejduD

11) Terry Trapp has another update on his Multimedia/network board
project Coco Blender - he has it talking properly to the network now:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162561131842641/

12) Stew Kensley sent some updates on the I/O board he is working
on for the Coco. This board supports many features (like RGB to VGA
output, PS2 keyboard/mouse and more, as shown in the email he sent me:
  (show PDF from my Coco Nation News folder, plus some of the
  schematics and photos)


MC-10
-----
1) Jim Gerrie released an MC-10 conversion of a Snoopy printout program
(his version does graphics as well) from way back in June of 1972
from the HP BASIC Program Library Handbook. I think he is using SG6
(64x48 resolution) for this one:
  https://youtu.be/TQRbNQOVBf4?si=ZOjMV83Em2Pw3sre


Dragon 32/64
------------
1) Julian Brown showed that he received one of the SAMx8 boards
designed by Ciaran Anscomb - and plans on testing it on his Dragon
64 later. We covered Ciaran's board last week:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4018008548458784/


Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) The Amigos full review of Nick Marentes' only 6309 required game
to date, Gunstar, is now out on YouTube (and Twitch, if you look it
up on their page):
  https://youtu.be/Mdl9fvbO4TA?si=6t24CzALa2JNpLDZ

2) Jason Reighard made a 2 minute of his brother Ken playing Rich
Natali's Coco 1/2 Spy Hunter - with the special controls that he
teased last week - at this years CocoFest:
  https://youtu.be/iAyJgmx-O-k?si=kmn1AvrdVsF4sgaQ

3) Tim & AJ review Beanstalker on the Coco for their latest episode
of Sibling Rivalry on their My Drunk Sibling YouTube channel:
  https://youtu.be/F7Dy-InmuZ8?si=JS9EZ5vaLUbb3C5x

4)Ultra Gamer81 on YouTube did a longplay video of the Coco version
of Pooyan, getting a quite impressive score of 155,250 points (and
even had a perfect 1st bonus stage):
  https://youtu.be/zYqbe5HyCfU?si=mqUey0QvwW1TPU3Z

5) Buck Owens (Steve Rasmussen) put up a complete playthrough (in
6.5 minutes of game time!) of current Game On Challenge game Chispy:
  https://youtu.be/7RpwFDbU-5I?si=eP-FuFRsNPN9Rwtd

6) Renga in Blue did a two part review of Genesis Sofware's Enchanted
Forest - a 1982 graphical adventure game written in Extended BASIC
for 32K Color Computers. It had some unique features like look in
different directions from the same vantage point. Part 1 shows some
definite (and multiple) bugs making the game impossible to win; it
looks like this is because it was created for tape only. It uses
a couple of variable names that became reserved keywords in Disk
BASIC (one example is "AS"), so those had to be renamed throughout
the code. The second is when one of his readers patched the game
(through several tries), and has made it available for download:
Part 1:
  https://bluerenga.blog/2025/04/30/enchanted-forest-1982/
Part 2 (and winning):
  https://bluerenga.blog/2025/05/01/enchanted-forest-circle-thrice/

7) A different platform comparison video of a classic game -
the soundtrack for Leisure Suit Larry on a variety of computers,
including the Coco 3:
  https://youtu.be/Ofmd4NXCiZQ?si=XcexbGWCbHOJgjnp

8) Tea Leaves on YouTube does a > half hour video on Madness and
the Minotaur:
  https://youtu.be/5cnIU-fCIFo?si=dQoZ1ihzP9kIXeC4

9) Jim Jewett released another Spacewar update (and instructions) for
Spacewar, and also added "Spoofwar", to the Coco group on Facebook. He
does mention that he runs it in an emulator at 21 MHz:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162574712037641/

10) The Mastertronic Collectors Archive released a game review this
past week for one of the old Mastertronic Dragon games - Bug Diver
for the Dragon 32. I think I tried this some time ago; I think it
has gameplay similar to the earlier Shark Treasure?:
  https://mastertronic.co.uk/game-review-bug-diver-dragon-32-mastertronic/

11) Attempts: A gaming channel by LRU, put in a score of 4,390 playing
the Dragon 32/64 release of Star Spores:
  https://youtu.be/HCgI1mnmKJY?si=_uAp7KO-8kQGlyRm

12) ZXFrankie released multiple Dragon videos this week as part of
Yakzee week (Yahtzee):
Yakzee for the Dragon 32 by P.B. Software in 1983:
He did 4 videos, with 1-4 rounds in each corresponding video:
4 round as an example (since he shows the grpahical title screen in
this one, as well as the credits screen):
  https://youtu.be/xzwbEdCUiW8?si=zJ_QeCallKBMftRm

13) Pere Serrat and Kees von Oss have released two new AGD engine
game packs this past week:
MPAGD pack #71, featuring 4 games:
Cocoa and the Time Machine
Duckstroma Part 2
Magenta Jim
Smelly Cat
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11283
And they released NP game pack #17 (Supersprite+ enhanced and with
the new color palette), which also has 4 games:
Grumpy Santa
Hyperkill
Mr. Hair & the Fly
Rubicon
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11284

14) For those that didn't catch it earlier this week, a bug was found
in Chispy's initial conversion. The bug fixed version is on both the
Coco Discord and on the world of dragon forums, upload section:
  https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11275


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Weylan-Yutani Corporation