[Index]

The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 319, July 1, 2023
===================================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle

Happy Canada Day to Canucks in the audience!

BOATFEST:
---------
Ken (and me a little bit) will talk about and show some pictures from
BoatFest, and some pickups from the show.
(special thanks to Paul Jacobson - Pajaco6502 - for the Dragon User
magazine!)
Rob O'Hara (Flack) has some of his pictures up:
  https://robohara.com/gallery/?dir=Conventions%2FBoatfest+%282023%29
As does John "Boatofcar" Shawler:
 
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNYCGb5L8DbeFENIVNlpG5WN3LDkV_3cmPxHkBIT9aiPCJ0cFf8fdFsIqowyb-63A?key=VXkzWGpvbHNpdmJzcXZ6cjdWWVJ5Yzd5aEJuTTdB
And Paul "pajaco6502" Jacobson":
  https://photos.app.goo.gl/PHHfuRh8crFTUhz8A
Steven (Stephen?) "Mitsoyama"
  https://1drv.ms/f/s!Ajmv6RsudxjSuPsbGKatxMq1BJ7y6Q?e=ilfCYd
Jason Warnes:
 
https://next.retrorewind.ca/apps/photos/public/hM3mOrw69eZ56Lgq3CqM3eYhuqPBNx3N
Mr. Kola:
 
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipM2btu6e0z4AfQza2OVBsPYpfYrfihJAI3SgqcAZeLgW2K61bBOS8JENyiV1fVg7A?key=cndTRFZKVWhKbUJkWk9KQWFDWkp5VUM3a3FlaC13


VCF-SW:
-------
For the first time in 10 years, VCF Southwest was happening thing, on the
same weekend as BoatFest, in Dallas Fort Worth. Being in the hometown of
Tandy, Tandy computers were well represented both on the show floor and in
some of seminars, the latter of which we will cover later in the news. Even
to the point that the VCF logo this year is based on the 3 diagonal color
bars on the labels of all of our Coco's. Brendan Donahe posted some photos
he took, including of his own booth:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160739429207641/
And his full set of pictures:
 
https://photos.google.com/direct/AF1QipMTTUdKYLd-o4oCnypAnc7GzmsqajBqj3F3rSDKsC7xJEwlQCRGhQwaFVijjSWYlQ
Jeff of Chronologically Gaming also attended and took some photos:
  (see my desktop folder with saved photos)
Allan Batteiger (of RTSI.COM fame and now one of the people who own OS-9
and still sell and maintain it - and a guest interviewee of ours some
time ago) was there as well, and got his picture taken with Boisy Pitre,
who was one of the seminar presenters:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160739015457641/
He also met up with Mark Siegel, formerly of Tandy in various positions
including Software Project Leader, Product Manager and Senior Engineer,
and a regular in our live chat every week:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160739006697641/

August 12 we have Matt Harper on (developer of Wizard's Den sold by Tom
Mix Software).
August 19 we have a special treat - the original programmer of The Contras
for Sundog Systems, Doug Masten - and Glen Dahlgren who ran Sundog (and
who has been on the show several times before, including during our Dave
Dies interview) will be on to help co-interview Doug about one of the most
ambitious Coco 3 games done at that time (1991-1993)


Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
First, an reminder on behalf of Frank @ RetroRewind: Stock replenishment
will be slower for a month or two due to Frank recovering from wrist/hand
surgery (and being on holidays shortly to recover).

1) TRS-80 Retro Programing on YouTube posted a routine he came up with
that does horizontal scrolling in BASIC using GET,PUT and PCOPY):
  https://youtu.be/unIJmZ_lmWc

2) Ron Klein posted that the CocoPi can now get the latest XRoar 1.4.54
WIP update, which adds several things as well as fixes bugs in the emulation:
  https://coco-pi.com/new-xroar-1-4-542-wip-snap-package-available-for-coco-pi/

3) Coco Town posted a few of video this past week. The first is some other
strangeness in how characters are displayed by going through the BASIC
ROM routines vs. what the VDG chip itself does natively:
  https://youtu.be/x5SJyWTwBLM
And second is using BASIC's ROM routine for generating random numbers:
  https://youtu.be/Chk8MlF5buU
The 3rd covers several topics - structs in assembly code, modifying live
code in a debugger, and learning how slow the RND function is in BASIC:
  https://youtu.be/TyQjlFyhNAk

4) A humble thank you to Taylor and Amy, who gave us (both as The Coco Nation
and as Coco Talk) a tremendous shout as part of VCF-SW (in Dallas/Forth
Worth last weekend)) Streamer panel. The females on the panel were asked
about how they have been treated by commenters on YouTube. Chronologically
Gaming even makes an appearance as one of the people in the audience to
ask a question near the end:
  https://youtu.be/QL_ph_5PPOo?t=4959
At the same conference, Boisy Pitre (who had multiple very rare Coco related
things on display - both officially released items and unreleased prototypes)
did a presentation on Coco history:
  https://youtu.be/T6mMUFEJDw0
The Ultimate Tandy Panel went through some great stories behind the scenes
(including the Coco, Agvision and Videotex):
  https://youtu.be/RgHQeVCwXBY
The guys behind the Turbo09 (whom Boisy has been helping out) did a talk
as well, going deep into how it works:
  https://youtu.be/LPJ4IFz4fjE

5) Sad news from Robert Doggett, formerly of Microware: he reported that
Larry Crane, one of the creators of OS-9 itself, passed away:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/334403350011917/posts/6308835822568610/
Also, Boisy Pitre showed some scans of the Coco Column from Computer
Shopper back in the late 1980's that was written by Michael Wafkowski,
who passed away this past April:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160742023487641/

6) Richard Kelly has done several updates to his Maze Creator program,
and it is now much faster and into Beta 2, version 1. You can grab the
DSK image to try out in the Coco Facebook group:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160742151067641/

7) Simon Jonassen is doing some experimenting using special timing to
mix both the 64x48 SG6 4 color graphics blocks and actual text on the same
screen (normally SG6 mode tries to fetch text characters from a non-existant
external character ROM and only shows various vertical bar patterns):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160743017592641/
(See video in the comments that our very own Ron Delvaux made to show it
running on a real MC-10, not an emulator)

8) Allen Huffman did a blogpost which is a sequel to Jim Gerrie's 1 liner
(32 character limit) that is coming up in the MC-10 news, and converting
to the Coco. It's a little longer on the Coco (we can't type semi-graphic
characters directly like an MC-10) but it's not much longer:
 
https://subethasoftware.com/2023/06/28/10-print-chr205-5rnd1goto-10-simplified-by-jim-gerrie/

9) New YouTube channel "Pixel & RAM" posted a Coco 2 unboxing video... which,
other than his channel introduction video, is the very first video on
his channel. And he has a cat named Pixel! If you watch his introduction
video, he plans on covering a lot of stuff, from cash registers, to retro
computers, to technology use by religion and much more. He is new to the
Coco, so he makes some mistakes describing things, but we all have to
start somewheres. :-) :
  https://youtu.be/L7UunyN9-N4

10) Pedro (Rocky Hill on YouTube) posted a video of upgrading a Coco 2 T1 VDG
(true lowercase) RAM (static RAM upgrade) and ROM to Extended BASIC. This
a longer one for Pedro - almost 3/4 of an hour):
  https://youtu.be/bmorjLc36m0

11) Captain Commodore hosted his 3rd live stream #3 - YouTube Retro
Repairers. This one featured 5 guests, including two who have some Coco
backgrounds amd that we have featured on our show, and Peter (8 Bits in
the Basement) has even been on our show several times. Peter even plugs
Nightmare Highway:
  https://www.youtube.com/live/_luHemfscaM?feature=share

12) Episode 97 of the Coco Crew dropped yesterday, although I will mention
that the URL for the show notes is pointing to episode 96. I haven't had a
chance to listen to it yet, but it includes an interview with Jim O'Keefe,
and a host discussion that is a "Coco Crew Podcast retrospective":
  cococrew.org


MC-10
-----
1) Jim Gerrie released "Banner", ported from a 1978 original by Leonard
Rosendust in 1978 from David Ahl's book "BASIC Computer Games" (Dave being
the publisher of Creative Computing magazine). It's not a game, though;
it's a banner making program (common for line printers back in the 1970's
and 1980's):
Video:
  https://youtu.be/aL5Op-cpXCs
Source code to download:
 
https://github.com/jggames/trs80mc10/tree/master/quicktype/Productivity%20%26%20Education/Banner2
He also did an MC-10 variation of the C-64 eternal maze making
program... that fits into a single 32 character line (that we talked about
earlier in the Allen Huffman blog post):
  https://youtu.be/7FQ_ht5u2y4
He also put up a low res graphic version of the UK's Union Jack Flag:
  https://youtu.be/AR-cloOZi7w


Dragon 32/64
------------
1) David Linsley has announced that they have made the sourcecode to
Dragon 64 Microsoft BASIC available on GitHub (after many hours scanning
a printout version). This includes most of the original Microsoft comments
as well as additional Dragon ones. It should be mentioned that this would
be very close to the Coco's as well. Another important thing to mention -
they have Microsoft's permission for this (which includes some restrictions):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160743269217641/
Github:
  https://github.com/davidlinsley/DragonBasic

2) Julian Brown has received his Rev 2.1 Dragon 32 replacement motherboards
that he thinks will be the final of the initial testing boards... revision
3 is planned to be "more radical" (see Julian's comment that describes
that in some detail):
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160748663217641/


Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) As covered last week, Paul Shoemaker released the Coco 1/2 version if
his earlier MC-10 version of Video Poker.
And as of yesterday, he has made the Coco 3 version available now as well:
  https://pshoemaker70.itch.io/video-poker-coco-3-edition

2) Jim Gerrie has been busy. First up is his port of Monster Zap, originally
by Fred Harris in 1984 from the book "Me and My Micro: Program Translations"
(it had been ported to the Coco / Dragon earlier by Mike Moore). It's similar
to the popular old game Canyon Bomber, with a limited number of shots:
  https://youtu.be/icBUgazHxSE
Canyon Bomber seems to have been Jim's theme this week; he also posted
Blitz by Pierre Monsault, originally for the Matra Alice (which was an
MC-10 clone in France) from 1984 which is a much closer clone:
  https://youtu.be/M9AuD60EUCc
And finally, one named after the original 1977 Atari black and white arcade
game, which I think Jim did himself:
  https://youtu.be/_cq2zyvFKg0