[Coco] The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 415, May 31, 2025

[R. Allen Murphey]

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 415, May 31, 2025
===============================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Interview schedule:
-------------------
Alan of AC's 8 bit Zone, and the creator/seller of the new GIME-Z,
will be on to talk about precisely that, on May 31.

Special NOTES:
--------------
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 (please note that
this an active development machine so the BBS occasionally goes down
when Terry is working on hardware, etc).:
telnet ribbs.griswoldfx.com 6809


Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
Retrofest 2025 is on today and tomorrow in Swindon, England May 31-June
1, 2025. Some Dragon people (like Richard Harding and Chris Poacher)
have already committed to attending the show, and some other guests
that we have had on our show (like some of the people from Pixel
Addict magazine) will be there as well. It is 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

The VCF-East people are having a vintage computer swap meet &
fundraiser on June 7 in Wall, New Jersey. Vendor setup starts at 7
am, and the swap meet is open to the public from 8 am until 2 pm. $5
admission per person (except children 12 and younger are free), and
food will be available on site. It is taking place in the parking
lot across from 800 Monmouth Boulevard:
  https://vcfed.org/vcf-swap-meet/

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.
I will mention that Dr. Boisy Peter has a special seminar on doing
brain transplants to an Atari 800 and Commodore 64, replace their
6502’s with 6809’s.
  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

International Retro Computer Expo (formerly BoatFest) 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. NOTE 1: If you
attended CocoFest this year, bring your badge to Tandy Assembly, and
you will get in for FREE! NOTE 2: Peter Cetinski issued an update on
May 13 - all tables are officially sold out:
  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/


**** NEW NEWS ORDER TO HELP OUR LIVE EUROPEAN VIEWERS ****

Dragon 32/64
------------
1) Julian Brown posted an update to his series of boards for his new
Dragon 32 ITX (enhanced), in this case some changes to his SRAM board
to solve some issues with write corruption:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4042626602663645/
On the other hand, the main display is working now:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4041795706080068/
He also showed general updates to the board set earlier in the week:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4041570066102632/
Julian has also started fooling around with the ugBASIC compiler,
and used it to do a quick demo of using Semigraphics-8 (effectively
64x64x8 graphics):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4040919082834397/
Since Julian wasn't able to make it to RetroFest today, he has
continued work on the Dragon ATX, this round a compact and optimized
version of the NTSC->PAL conversion logic in VHDL. More details in
his Facebook Dragon group post:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4047973842128921/

2) John Whitworth posted on the Dragon Facebook group that he is
getting the next batch of sRGB boards out for the Dragon, even with
all the regulations for selling within the EU. He also posted some
screenshots of it in action - really good quality picture!:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4041139622812343/


Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
1) Ken of Canadian Retro Things - en route to this summer cabin -
released a video before he left exploring why JDOS won't work on his
Coco 3:
  https://youtu.be/FqGSoMhNEhc?si=2UiHpKqZTPwlRo2E

2) Our guest today, Allen of AC's 8 bit zone, posted a couple of
videos this week.
The first is a "how to" video showing how to install his new GIME-Z
project, which has now shipped out it's first batch:
  https://youtu.be/zxkgcXt59kU?si=NIXITun0uRyHbCnG
The second is showing a Coco mostly made of brand new pars - including
Pedro Pena's Coco 3 motherboard replacement, as well as his Pepper
board (replaces the SALT chip) and Daiquari board (replaces the
SC77562P DAC) replacemnts, combined with Allen's GIME-Z and a
mechanical keyboard of his own design:
  https://youtu.be/fB1BmakU_pg?si=VJRPbcYOBvUFj-UW

3) Coco Town posted a video showing his using the MAME debugger with
the *original* source code file, using some modifications to MAME
itself that he has done (and submitted to become part of the official
MAME, although they aren't approved yet.. but he has a beta version
available for you to try out). It even works with NitrOS9:
  https://youtu.be/qvFHv0Z3p8s?si=G-R4-MaOyBj3tcRA

4) YouTube page Earthbites put up a quick video showing a quirk of
the SOUND command, where if you add a 3rd parameter it will cause
an error... but it still plays the sound if the first two parameters
were legit:
  https://youtu.be/c-sU-17Y5_I?si=P0woamofzMMkHuYN

5) Dim Cave Software (Neliton Pereira Jr.) on YouTube posted a 1
minute video of Matrix style Raining code, this time showing the 6809
version in action (running on his CP-400-II):
  https://youtu.be/HDuVyQrWYB0?si=eyqidYg6QsMmt4-M
Dim Cave's blog (use Google Translate):
  https://dimcavesoft.blogspot.com/

6) La Coco Strangiato (our very own Bob Emery) released an over half
hour video where he goes into detail about the BASIC load module from
his Coco F.O.G. (File Operations GUI) program for the Coco 3. He
explains the source in exquisite detail, going through it line by
line and explaining what each line does, including POKE's and PEEK's:
  https://youtu.be/B1J-xFNhhUM?si=L4qk-ac66Lf3u6p-

7) Pointed out by Dr. Boisy Pitre, is the french CPU project
63F09. This is a vhdl extended version of the 6309, which adds some 64
bit capability, hardware signed & unsigned multiply & division, sixteen
32 or 64 bit floating point registers, up to 600 MHz equivalent speed,
and more. I don't believe that this meant to be a drop in replacement
for an existing 6309 (or 6809) design, but meant for new projects
with 6309 backwards compatibility plus a slew of new features, based
on the AMD Artix7 family of FPGA's:
NOTE: This project actually came out last year, but I don't think we
found it back then.
  https://63f09.systella.fr/cpu-63f09/

8) I think Steve Strowbridge has pretty well all of the old CocoTalk
espisodes and specials up on his new CocoTalk YouTube channel:
  https://www.youtube.com/@cocotalkforever/videos

9) Richard Lorbieski of BoysonTech has released details of his
re-release of his Paragon Joystick adapter (for Atari 2600 or Sega
Genesis joysticks, which does have some revisions since his last
release several years ago) on the Coco Discord (Buy-sell-trade
channel):
  (Show local file 'Paragon joystick adapter announcemnt (Boysontech -
  from Buy-Sell-Trade Discord).png')

10) Richard Cavell posted a program he wrote for the Coco 3 called
Sorcery (Version 1.3 released May 29) with the cryptic description
"A short program for the TRS-80 Coor Computer 3 that does something
intriguing!". It changes the cursor so that it behaves somewhat like
Henry Gernhardt's cursor in his Forth ROM:
  https://github.com/richardcavell/sorcery

11) Eric Canales released another update to his 6dev09 package,
fixing some more bugs:
  https://gitlab.com/trs-eric/6dev09/-/tree/master/release?ref_type=heads

12) Simon Jonassen has been working on SG-24 graphics rendering,
using "Wobble mode" as he calls it, to increase the image quality. He
uploaded screenshots of a few examples this past week; here is one
with Jennifer Beals:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162679409172641/
And Britney Spears:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162675367157641/

13) Antonio Caballero posted another update video on the Coco Facebook
group for his cartridge towers:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162675069552641/

14) Erico Monteiro did another graphic image using all the tricks in
artifacting to make a Coco 1/2 style screen for a popular arcade game:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162669454007641/

15) Paul Thayer announced that he is now taking orders on the 2
button game controller pad that he showed last week, on the Coco
Facebook group:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162668235677641/

16) David Collins posted an update for his HB63C09M Single board
computer project to the Motorola 6809,6309 & 6800 Facebook group. He
is working on getting assembly language code ready to interact with
the C-like CMOC compiler to work with Flex for his board:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/3685701921723163/

17) Pierra Sarrazin has released version 0.1.91 of CMOC. This update:
 - fixes a bug with casting a long to a char as part of an expression
 - Augments strtol() and strtoul() to support leading white space
 and leading + sign
 - reports and error in a case like enum { A } enum { B };
   where a semi-colon is missing before the 2nd enum
 - other minor bug fixes, improvements and optimizations:
  http://sarrazip.com/dev/cmoc.html

18) Terry Trapp has released version 0.2 of his "RiBBS to go", which
now includes directions on how to boot it from a CocoSDC:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162689749007641/


MC-10
-----
1) Jim Gerrie posted another Flag displaying program for the
MC-10/Alice, this time originally by Canadian programmers W. Harris
and J. Cope in the March 1981 from Softside magazine, and originally
for the Atari 8 bit machines:
  https://youtu.be/9MGwt8rgfxU?si=RdhNgjPRffDoJXTY
He also ported "3D Graph", originally from the Timex Sinclair PD
Library tape 1002, a set of programs compile by Tim Ward:
  https://youtu.be/Lze5gRnjOJ8?si=R6lkln53M8IwN-H4
And Clock from tape 1007 of the same PD Collection:
  https://youtu.be/fAqJQ9b9qk8?si=mXq1Ulky_t6Sgm4m


Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Aquanat 471 has re-released a lot of his Dragon 32/64 gameplay
videos, some with photos of the original tape cases, etc. I won't
play any of them here (we saw his earlier version a few years back,
but here are some thumbnails:
  https://www.youtube.com/@CuthbertintheJungle/videos

2) NMI on YouTube released a YouTube short of Clowns & Balloons
running on a real Coco 3 with RGB monitor - but this time using the
RGB patched version:
  https://youtube.com/shorts/qI7-dr2Z6ck?si=cyqP8H9TeXgpT8GS

3) Jim Gerrie ported Tune In!", a game originally by Canadian
programmers William Morris and ohn Copy from Softside magazine Volume
6, number 1 from 1982 (originally for the TRS-80 model 1 port of an
Atari 8 bit original):
  https://youtu.be/3zc5NYmh0oI?si=D9F_ewHF4XwnDw14

4) Retro Borsuk i Montek on YouTube (Polish retro channel) did a 6 hour
show about the Dragon 32, and used the CocoSDC for the presentation
on real hardware. I will mention that some of his facts appear to
be wrong (if the auto-translate is correct, that is - I saw one part
near the beginning where claimed only 40,000 were sold - there were
10x that many sold of the Dragon 32 alone, and another 100,000+ of
the Dragon 64, from what I understand. On the other hand, he went
through and tried a ton of games:
  https://www.youtube.com/live/ZPkWlY3U1Zk?si=JP9aZpCT9i9AEZ6f

5) The Dragon group on Facebook just had a celebrity join: Matthew
Short the original author of Fearless Freddy (sold by Pocket Money
Software back in the. He covered some of the details and history of
the game in his post:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/4041567276102911


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

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-- 
R. Allen Murphey <exile at weylan-yutani.com>
Weylan-Yutani Corporation
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