[Coco] NitrOS-9 EOU ("Ease of Use") Beta 1 released

[L. Curtis Boyle]

While, thanks to “normal life” workloads (It’s our busy season) means that I didn’t get anywheres near as much completed for the first public Beta than I wanted to, we have release Beta 1 to the public. There are docs included with it, and the older, semi-private Alpha versions are also available (mainly for regression testing), but the current version is labelled Beta 1. There are 6809 specific and 6309 specific versions available; download the one appropriate to your system (or both, if you want to see what kind of a speed increase is possible with a 6309 chip). System requirements for the Beta currently are:
1) A real Coco 3 with minimum 512k RAM, or VCC or MAME emulators
2) For a real Coco 3, CocoSDC.
3) Joystick or mouse (with or w/o high-resolution joystick interface) is highly recommended, although not absolutely required.

For feedback, you can send email directly to me, or share a question on this list, or on Facebook, or on the CocoTalk Discord server (which has a special messaging area set aside specifically for EOU. There are known bugs that we are working on, and some glaring omissions as well, that will all get gradually solved as further Beta’s come out. Once bugs/features have stabilized, we will start adding version(s) with extra support for things like Drivewire, etc. ; the only reason we are not doing that right now is to have a simpler, stable base platform to test and figure out the major bugs on, rather than having to try and figure out which unique combinations of various hardware configurations could be causing a bug.

We look forward to your feedback, and (even!) your bug reports.

FTP info to download the current Beta 1 (or earlier Alpha’s 1-3):

FTP Download area:
SERVER:  optimalcreations.com
PORT:  2121
username:  nitros9
password:  nitroupdate3

L. Curtis Boyle
curtisboyle at sasktel.net

TRS-80 Color Computer Games website
http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/coco_game_list.html