[Coco] Looking for CoCo astronomy and space software.

[John Riddle]

There was an OS-9 program called "Planet Engine".  There was a copy on ebay
recently, but I lost the auction.  I dug through some old bit.listserv.coco
archives, and found out that Lee Veal distributed it at one point.  A few
months ago, I sent him an email, asking about it.  Here's an excerpt of that
email:

(Lee Veal):
Concerning Planet Engine, the original author of that (a name I can't
recall at the moment, Paul somthing, I think), anyway, he signed over
all rights of that product to Dallas TRS-80 Users Group (DalTRUG)
several years ago.  DalTRUG is now defunct as well.  I had the Planet
Engine product for years, but I'm thinking now that I gave it to Boisy
Petrie (sp?).  It could be that it went to Dave Poitras, but I honestly
don't recall what I did with that specific item.  I didn't remember
selling Zanth or anything else to you either, too much water under the
bridge.

I do recall that Boisy ported PE to his MM1.  Since more tabular-type
information could be loaded in memory instead of being on a disk (hard
or floppy), it was quite snappy.  Just the higher speed of the 68070
made a big difference, but not having to go get the sky images from disk
each time there was an update to the sky display made a huge difference.
 Hell, it made a big difference on the CoCo when I loaded the "sky"
images onto an external RAM drive (Disto's as I recall) for demo
purposes at fests.  I saw Boisy's MM/1 version at one of the last
Chicago CoCo fests that I went to.  It was a fairly easy port, as I
recall, because PE used GShell and Mulit-Vue interfaces, which existed
almost verbatim in K. Darling's GUI for the MM/1.

If you can get a hold of Boisy, he might have all that CoCo PE material.
 I know at one time I'd given him the source code, so, I'm now thinking
that he has all the 'stock', too.
-------------------------

I was going to email Boisy asking about it, but never got around to it.  In
fact, this is the first chance I've even had to post to this list.  Been so
busy lately.  Boisy, are you still around?


-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com
[mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com]On Behalf Of jimcox at miba51.com
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2004 3:26 PM
To: coco at maltedmedia.com
Subject: [Coco] Looking for CoCo astronomy and space software.


Is there anyone currently out there using any astronomy or
space related software for the CoCo?  Is so, I'd like to
hear from you.  I think I can combine my interest in
astronomy with the CoCo and have some fun.

By "space" I mean satellite tracking or space simulation
software.  Thanks!

Jim

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