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