[Coco] CoCoFEST! 2010...

[Allen Huffman]

Well, shucks, it looks like I missed some interesting stuff on Saturday. I rolled in just after 5 p.m. as things were shutting down, so I did not get to hear the talk from one of the designers of the 6809 processor!

The interesting things...

1. Roy Justus brings weird stuff. This year, a six legged "spider" looking robot, moved by 18 servos. He had the CoCo fully controlling it, with signals going out the CoCO bitbanger to a Bluetooth adapter, then another bluetooth on the robot. Every step was a ballet of commands to move all the motors to make the creepy thing crawl.

2. John Mark Mobley has the only booth besides HawkSoft that looks like a real Fest booth of days gone. He had a nice backdrop, color printouts, and was showing HI COLOR (Sockmaster program) images. He did a talk on Sunday explaining a bit about the options. He also had some old computers, including an abacus (older than a CoCo, finally!).

3. Cloud-9's DriveWire 4 boggles the mind. Gone is the need for a PC or Mac to host the system -- anything with Java can do it, including a reprogrammed $80 ROUTER! This opens up a ton of possibilities that I want to investigate. THey also had some FPGA experimenters board running the virtual CoCo hardware -- it was doing crazy fast GIME CHIP graphics, complete with VGA output, PC keyboard, BASIC, etc -- if they hadn't told me what it was, I would have swore it was a real CoCo. Can't wait to see what happens with this project (I forget who is working on it, but you guys probably know more about it than I do since I've been off the list since last year).

4. John Linville's video player for the CoCo 3 is amazing. It reminded e of the low resolution web video from 1996-era internet. He had clips and several full movies, with sound. Not what you'd want to watch in your livingroom, but amazing that it can even be done. I'll post videos of this soon.

I sold out of all the DVDs I had time to make, and have more to ship out. If you want a copy of my 1999 CoCoFEST! video trip report DVD, send me $5 and I'll ship one out. 

Video from 2010 coming in a bit, too, time permitting...
--
R.I.P. Howard Luckey. You will be missed. We will honor your memory at this year's CoCoFest.

2010: 30th Anniversary - Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo) - http://www.coco30.com