[Coco] The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 352, February 24, 2024

Sun Feb 25 07:27:44 EST 2024

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 352, February 24, 2024
===================================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Special Guests today:
---------------------

Interviews schedule:
--------------------
None upcoming... yet.

Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
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Interim Computer Festival: March 23-24.
Intraspace
3100 Airport Way South, Seattle, Washington
This is a pre-announcement for a retro computer show in the Pacific
Northwest Area.
  https://sdf.org/icf/

The Indy Classic Computer & Gaming Expo is April 13-14 in Indianapolis.
Crowne Plaza
Randy Kindig of the Floppy Days podcast helps with this one - and he was
our guest not too far back.
  https://indyclassic.org/

CocoFest: May 4-5, 2024 in Carol Stream, Illinois (near Chicago)
Holiday Inn & Suites
  https://www.glensideccc.com/cocofest/
Table bookings (the main hall is completely taken up now, and 1 of 14 has
been sold for the hall tables already):
  https://www.tandylist.com/

BoatFest 3: June 14-16, 2024
Social Event Space
Hurricane, WV

https://www.ticketsource.us/boatfest2024/boatfest-retro-computer-expo-2024/e-raedpb

VCF SouthWest: June 14-16, 2024 (same weekend as BoatFest)
Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas - Dallas
Dallas, Texas
  https://www.vcfsw.org/
UPDATES:
Also this year they are doing "Shows within the Show", and one of those
is a Tandy Assembly meetup:
  (scroll down on the main page)
Jeff Wires (the host of Chronologically Gaming) is also one of the speakers
at VCF-SW this year!
Speakers list:
  https://www.vcfsw.org/speakers

Tandy Assembly for 2024 has been announced for Sep 27-29, 2024.
Courtyard by Marriott Springfield
Springfield, Ohio
  http://www.tandyassembly.com/

Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
1) voidstar in the Coco Discord put up a blogsite with photos from last
weekend's VCF Southern California:
  https://voidstar.blog/vcf-socal-2024/

2) George Janssen has released part 4 of his assembly language series on
Coco 3 sprites, which includes some updates, corrections and speed-ups to
what he went over in part 3:
  https://youtu.be/L4RLqusdxxQ?si=tRmNMhbNwnd6ttXi

3) TRS-80 Retro Programing put up another Coco Ultimate video, this time
showing combat against a snake:
  https://youtu.be/AZEIvidEYbs?si=c5ulpyDvaFARCrT8

4) I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but Darren Atkinson has released an
new CocoSDC firmware update that should solve the problem booting NitrOS9
EOU/6309. Has anybody on the panel had a chance to try it yet? (It's on
the nitros9-eou channel on the Coco Discord, and was uploaded Thursday)

5) Todd Wallace posted a screenshot and short video of his Apple II emulator
for a Coco 3 (requires 512K RAM and a 6309). As he explains in the comments
to his post, it currently works in MAME, VCC and real hardware, but not
yet XRoar. NOTE: When you try booting it up, the Apple ROM tries to boot
from disk, which it doesn't support. ON real hardware, APPLE-RESET bypasses
disk and goes straight to the AppleSoft BASIC ROM. Todd has this emulated
using the CLEAR key instead. NOTE: You will have to supply your own 20K
ROM image and please note it is not the quickest thing in the world:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161173480972641/
You can download it (and look at the sourcecode) on Todd's github (includes
notes on the 1.0 release - like it now has rudimentary lo-res graphics
support.:
  https://github.com/dragonbytes/Apple2CoCo

6) Brenda Make posted in the Coco OS9/NitrOS9 Facebook page a proposal she
has for plotting out a parallel bus to use with various retro computers
and micro-controllers:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/posts/3579273812335537/

7) Retro Magazine, a European made magazine in PDF format that is a free
download and covers all kinds of retro home computers and video game systems,
has an article/review of Paul Shoemaker's Video Poker for the MC-10 (page
41) in issue 22:
  https://www.retromagazine.net/download/RetroMagazine_22_eng.pdf

8) Joel Ewy posted in the MM/1 Facebook group a photo of little mod he
did for his MM/1 case, adding 3 digit 7 segment display. Since this was
an empty spot on the MM/1 front panel, he hardwired it to say "OS9". He
also connected the Turbo button to the RAM jumper, so that he can select
1 MB RAM mode to help checking compatibility:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/3194643584094250/posts/4398561813702415/

9) Allen Huffman has been posting some old photos this past week, including
some related to Steve Bjork & the OS9 Archive host computer:
OS9 Archive (rtsi.com) host computer (with OS-9000 manual set on the shelf):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/334403350011917/posts/7170675646384619/
Some info on Steve's modern projects that he was working on recently in
the haunt hackers realm:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161173285282641/
Low resolution pictures of a couple of plaques Steve got that are Coco
related:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161167976927641/
Allen also posted part 4 of his porting the Lights Out game in Color BASIC
series... which will be at least 7 parts:
  https://subethasoftware.com/2024/02/20/lets-write-lights-out-in-basic-part-4/

10) Mr. Coco on YouTube posted a video about a Coco 3 that was gotten from
the Steve Bjork estate sale. It is a 6809/512K (using an early 512K SIMM
upgrade from Mark Marlette @ Cloud9). No commentary, but he opens it up
to show the inside (stock other than the memory upgrade):
  https://youtu.be/UjTVwwHVmPg?si=dASi6vl4wcjUSmO7

11) Bob Emery posted a video showing how to convert a PC Joystick to the
Coco on his YouTube page "La Coco Strangiato":
  https://youtu.be/ytO1BJXkUDY?si=D1UwNzDv_PIrHMPr

12) Primal-Bits released the follow up video to his short that we saw last
week, where he tries a couple of different ways to fix a bad keyboard on
a Coco 2:
  https://youtu.be/TvSog3ZTf9c?si=cGlaGI8EYyiy38jo

MC-10
-----
1) For those who want to try a homemade composite video/audio out mod for
the MC-10, Mark Dusko posted his on the MC-10 Facebook group:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/7079721405487954/

Dragon 32/64
------------
1) Ant Goffart is offering Dragon 32 PSU replacement boards, which lets
you run the Dragon 32 from a single regulated 12V 1A power supply, which
he posted about in the Dragon Facebook group:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3651150368477939/
Sell my Retro purchase page:
  https://www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/64165

2) Stephen Goodwin has put up his DragonDocker container for developing
Dragon 32 code up on his Github (and posted about it in the Dragon group
on Facebook). Currently only tested on Linux, it contains scripts to build
a container, and another to run it:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3650623975197245/
Github (includes documentation):
  https://github.com/MarquisdeGeek/DragonDocker

Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Jim Gerrie ported the "Haunted House" text adventure (originally sold by
Tandy in 1979 for the TRS-80 Model 1) and added some color to it's splash
screen as well, to the MC-10:
  https://youtu.be/nvYP6B1Xi2U?si=yc7D1pvoCjywZHR2
He also ported Sceptre of Kzirgla (By Rainbow Connection Software for
the Coco in 1982). He had to change some high res screens to low res,
but the main game always ran in SG4:
  https://youtu.be/E9ySw7LxTJQ?si=08URYVMTn9EFsKQs
He also ported an addition/subtraction drill program that came from an
original Dutch MC-10 tape. Jim translated it to english:
  https://youtu.be/Sj6w8T_R4NA?si=7ZFSPbKoysOemM8q

2) Chronologically Gaming just finished September of 1982, he covered a
few Dragon and Coco games:
Tyrant of Athens - he showed the Spectrum version for the most part,
but he did show the tape and manual from the Dragon 32 version:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvNkCf4X5Ps&t=115s
same thing with Warlord:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMPBnSZ4R6s&t=675s
and the last Coco entry was this past week, with Wildcatting by the Image
Producers (this originally came out for other machines like the TI-99/4
a couple of years later):
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWOmT8BHiBE&t=1425s

3) RetroTrailer-2 put up a short video of gameplay of Speed Racer, with
an old version of MESS (so artifacting looks much poorer than on real
hardware). But it looks like it might have some custom palettes for the
Coco 3. Thoughts?
  https://youtu.be/hntovYd-PpA?si=sdJhQSwY-uO9J85A

4) XperTek put up another Coco 2 game video in spanish, this time covering
Spidercide by Tandy, on his amber monitor equipped Coco:
  https://youtu.be/T7FSXjaq3K4?si=epHTJTwEiEKeG9Ck

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

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