The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 326, August 19, 2023 =================================================================== Collected by L. Curtis Boyle - The interview with Doug Masten (author of The Contras) with co-interviewee Glen Dahlgren of Sundogs Systems that was originally going to happen on August 19 is being postponed, due to a fairly major surgery. We are shooting for around October/November depending on doctor's orders. - September 9 we have Mark P. & Charlie from Portacoco.com. If you were at the Fest, you would have seen them at their booth showing Coco's (and monitors) running wirelessly together and off batteries that do NOT require modifications to a Coco case to attach. Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform) ------------------------------- 1) ChibiAkumis Has started a new 6309 assembly language tutorial (and more parts are coming). In this episode he covers the extra registers, and some of the new 16 bit math: https://youtu.be/4PCKd4gJRlc 2) Coco Town released a video this week expanding on doing sorts in machine language. He tackles 3 different sort algorithms: Bubble, Insertion and QuickSort. He also shows how to access Extended BASIC's TIMER: https://youtu.be/8JL9dlRmxKg Sourcecode for the sorts: https://cocotownretro.wordpress.com/2023/08/14/bubble-sort-insertion-sort-quick-sort-assembly-code/ He also did an episode called "Unravelled Gems", which shows some programming tricks he found in the Spectral Associates BASIC Unravelled series. These are ones that we use in NitrOS9 too - like putting in a useless CMPX immediate opcode to skip the next two bytes, rather than a BRA which would take 1 more byte and still be the same speed: https://youtu.be/n-e1GBr9gtg 3) TRS-80 Retro Programing posted another update to his Tales of Suburbia game: https://youtu.be/547aX66TkLs He also took an old game I had barely started way back in 1986 (and then I got distracted with my new Coco 3 so I never took it further) and is working on making it into an actual game. I am not sure why he has such an aversion to the high speed POKE, but it does run a fair bit faster with it on: https://youtu.be/yEP_jDTkieM And he did a follow up as well: https://youtu.be/Fto963TV-M0?si=JhJQDYWHMB4vNnvs 4) Glen Hewlett put up a blog post about his 4 way scrolling ML subroutine that one can use from BASIC - and has now added an 80 column Coco 3 version as well. Blog Post: https://nowhereman999.wordpress.com/2023/08/15/introducing-advanced-text-screen-scrolling-solutions-for-coco-basic-programmers/ 32x16 version on his Github: https://github.com/nowhereman999/CoCo_Scroll 80x24 version on his Github: https://github.com/nowhereman999/CoCo3_Scroll80 5) Bill Pierce announced that VCC 2.1.0.8 has now been released. This includes bug fixes, RS-232 pak emulation, a pause function, execution trace feature artifact color fixing and improved windows mouse cursor position when show, all contributed by various authors: https://github.com/VCCE/VCC/releases 6) Thomas Cherryholmes (of the cross-platform Fujinet project) is looking for some help for maintainers for the Coco side of the project. I personally don't have time myself, but would anyone else in the community like to help? Details as to what it involves are in his Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160841095127641/ 7) Jamie Cho posted on the Coco Facebook group an update to his BASIC to BASIC09 converter program that he is working on, this time covering on sound frequencies are translated from BASIC's 256 tones to BASIC09's 4096 tones: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160840514812641/ 8) Allen Huffman did a blog post that is based on a behaviour that Robin of 8-Bit Show and Tell found on the Commodore PET, Vic20 and Commodore 64 versions of BASIC (also a Microsoft BASIC). If one tries to use scientific exponentiation with a number too long, it produces an Overflow error (which is expected). What is not expected is that it will corrupt some of the BASIC program itself. Since Coco BASIC is also made by Microsoft, Allen decided to try this on the Coco. Spoiler alert - the Coco suffers from the same problem. (NOTE: William Astle explains what is causing the bug in the comments): https://subethasoftware.com/2023/08/17/color-basic-overflow-bug-same-as-commodores/ 9) Boisy Pitre announced on Facebook that he has ported CoreMark (an industry standard benchmark program) to the Coco. It is built using the CMOC C-like compiler: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160848877567641/ Github link: https://github.com/boisy/coremark 10) Retro Relix did a video on YouTube going through using an Orch 90, Speech Sound Pak and CocoSDC on his Coco, does some serial connections to his PC, and then throws in some games as well: https://youtu.be/cid1fQViI7M?si=JQ7FhzlG13ebXYY6 11) Pierre Sarrazin has released version 0.1.84 of CMOC. This fixes some bugs and allows verbatim assembly language blocks in your sourcecode: http://perso.b2b2c.ca/~sarrazip/dev/cmoc.html MC-10 ----- 1) Dragon 32/64 ------------ 1) A reminder: This year's Dragon Meetup (the 6th one) is October 7 & 8 at the Center for Computing History in Cambridge. This years theme is software, including a lot of games and competing for high scores. Details here: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/71156/dragon-meetup----7th-8th-october-2023/ 2) Wisteela (Paul Ryan) on YouTube put up a 2 part video about his Dragon 32: part 1 is asking for help in fixing it, and part 2 shows that it is alive (basically some loose connections seems to have been the culprit): Part 1: https://youtu.be/nj7FOBUeOjE?si=YWaZhRybsL92F_EB Part 2: https://youtu.be/vBm86GZ34y0?si=vsDBTIYtfae7XIMt Game On news (all Coco related platforms): ========================================== First up - an update from Nick on the 5,000th version of Neutroid: 1) The YouTube channel "Brown Robin Bird !!!" is planning a live stream at 6:15 pm Eastern time, August 22 of playing Sock Master's Donkey Kong Remixed from VCC. He has over 6,000 subscribers so it will be interesting to monitor the chat during the live stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/9QDM-wEY20o?feature=share 2) Chronologically Gaming covered Aardvark's Venturer on Monday's show (May 1982) https://youtu.be/V2ee9uKixC8?t=3241 And in closing out May of 1982, he also covered Viking (both Vic20 & Coco versions) and War Kings by Tom Mix: https://youtu.be/y0nlzdBdw7g For June (and I think this is early, but there were conflicting release dates) is Canyon Climber: https://youtu.be/vHFPs1eLVdE?si=M3UV6bmMwZjLCWzC&t=1229 3) Our very own Ken of Canadian Retro Things did another comparison video - part of his "One Game, Two Computers" series - comparing the Coco and C64 versions of Shamus. Shamus is one of the few games that was sold directly for the Coco by it's creating company (Synapse Software) and then Tandy later sold exclusively in their own stores (Zaxxon and Pooyan by Datasoft are two others): https://youtu.be/RLmIbAgQo0w 4) Paul Thayer posted a video update to his Shmup You Up project on Facebook, which includes his showing various rapid fire parameter changes to show their effect on the game engine: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160843951322641/ 5) Christopher Lee has announced on Facebook that his Kickstarter for funding the development of his Infocom engine based adventure game "The Forgotten Pyramid" has started, which will be available on a variety of machines including the Coco and the Dragon: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160843571357641/ 6) Paulisthebest3uk on YouTube released a bunch more Dragon gameplay videos this week, including Leggit, Bubble Buster, Moon Cresta, Dark Star, Tanglewood, Chambers and Kamacarzy: https://www.youtube.com/@paulisthebest3uk/videos 7) David Mitchell posted a Dragon 32 game he wrote from scratch based on a game from rosettacode.org, called Flipping Bits. Basically, you can flip (invert) a row or column of bits at a time, and the object is match the pattern on the right side: https://youtu.be/KMLwFkYOSlQ?si=9sW3ge5eK9m2Bu5K Github source code: https://github.com/daftspaniel/RetroCornerRedux/tree/main/Dragon/Originals/FlipBits 8) La fondateur did a quick gameplay video of Time Bandit on a real Coco 3, although unfortunately with the artifact colors reversed: https://youtu.be/61Wy4gja8-M?si=NnCRYli6GTq3PFge