The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 335, October 21, 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. Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people: ------------------------------------------------------------ The First Bay Area Tandy Assembly Meetup is on November 4 from 2-5 pm at San Francisco State University, and the organizer Arno has an update: "We are getting ready for the first Tandy Assembly Meetup here in the Bay Area. Over twenty TRS-80 enthusiasts have signed up and we are looking forward to the get together in two weeks from now. We will have a round of lightning talks where people can talk about their favorite machine. Some will bring their vintage hardware. I will keep everyone posted on this channel. Exciting!" Multiple luminaries past and present from the TRS-80 scene will be in attendance (See poster) VCF SoCal: Feb 17-18, 2024 in Orange, California Hotel Fera - Events Center 100 The City Drive, Orange, CA 92868 https://vcfsocal.com/index.html Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform) ------------------------------- 1) TRS-80 Retro Programing on YouTube has another video related to his Tales of Suburbia project - This time with a new scene for the backyard: https://youtu.be/MbtjSiy_eos?si=WHF9zaUbHwzIAdQ8 He also did a side exploration of the DRAW commands scaling and how accurate/inaccurate it is: https://youtu.be/Zb3BpjZHnzE?si=78hdIUWtkkFYb7iD 2) Coco Town returns to rewriting his old Moon Patrol style game - this time delving into stack blasting for the very first time: https://youtu.be/UzT6zypeC8Y?si=FVZZf8CwMGh70hh8 3) Ken of Canadian Retro Things takes another shot of getting his composite video board on his 64K Coco 2. Let's just say... Ken, did you record this on Friday the 13th? https://youtu.be/TFHnfcbktYQ?si=mb2vigfCmiTxHgBc He also released a video about working on getting his 256K RAM upgrade for a Coco 2 working: https://youtu.be/S6jJJlj-mek?si=snyLAs6wGt7heKhN 4) Justin D. Morgan received the composite board from Alan of AC's 8 Bit Zone and his Coco 2 that he has recently been working on (and has been disappointing with an older design composite board he tried) and installs it to see if it will improved the picture quality. It also adds a Monochrome/Color switch. He even gave The Coco Nation Show a shoutout: Coco 2 composite board update and test part of the stream starts at: https://www.youtube.com/live/cMUIAJkrh8Q?si=8JSFCZDuS0s58pYP&t=760 5) VCC has had an update to 2.1.8.1 that you can download from the project's github. This is the first version to implement their new version numbering system, and includes bug fixes. The readme explains the new versioning system, but unfortunately it just says "Minor Bug Fixes" with no mention of what was fixed. https://github.com/VCCE/VCC/releases/tag/vcc2.1.8.1 6) There are far too many things to go into here about all the bug reports/fixes for ugBASIC and it's Coco 3 support, but if you are interested in using this version of BASIC that you use on modern platforms to compile for actual Coco 1,2,3's (and many other systems), please join the Coco Discord and read the #ugBASIC channel. There is a ton of stuff happening in there every day. (Ask panelists to mention some of them, since I didn't have time to drill down) The 1.15 post on Facebook (but a lot has happened since then). There is brief video in the comments: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10160966755622641/ 7) Boisy Pitre posted a quick video showing the OS-9 Level 2 is now booting on the F256 Junior platform, which runs equivalent as a 6.29MHz 6809, and now supports an MMU and extended memory in OS9: https://www.facebook.com/groups/334403350011917/posts/6710787139040141/ The F256 website: https://c256foenix.com/product/f256-junior-mini-itx/?v=3e8d115eb4b3 8) MicroHobbyist did his first live video stream for his channel, with a bunch of guests from the retro community, including sloopy, who then managed to rope me in as well. By the end of the show, I think we managed to convince the host into try a 6809 or 6309 in an upcoming project, maybe even with OS9/NitrOS9 Level 1: https://www.youtube.com/live/iF4eTUwie2w?si=QcbEre_niuHSMj0D 9) George Janssen (who did an assembly language series for us awhile back and also ported the 2048 game to the Coco 3 within the last 2 months) is starting his own YouTube 6809 assembly tutorial channel, and has his first teaser video up this week (no audio, it's all visual): https://youtu.be/3jS3a-Fqvd0?si=fjmFHkEiftRnqBMz 10) RetroComputo did an almost half hour video on the history of TRS-80 and Coco computers in Columbia, where the TRS-80 and the Coco was the second most popular brand of home computers (CC and translate Spanish to English): https://youtu.be/6kYY4pUGROs?si=_C7W-qg42bfGl6B5 11) Portugeuese Youtube channel Retrópolis on their episode 146 (part 2) mentions that they plan on delving into the Coco 1/2 and Dragon in a future episode - I will keep an eye out for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1COOxzyMpg&t=2402s 12) Jeff of the Hey Birt! YouTube channel posted a 16+ minute walkthrough of the displays at this years Tandy Assembly: https://youtu.be/lgVsHN2DmKo?si=bChQcpfDIexb3t-4 MC-10 ----- 1) Jim Gerrie converted the January 5, 1978 TRS-80 Model 1 graphics demo program "Snoopy Curses the Red Baron" (from May 1978 Kilobaud magazine (and altered by D.A. Goldman in April of 1978) to the MC-10: https://youtu.be/HcWJQSE95KA?si=ifQUfGmXPuiyn86v 2) Robert Sieg posted some photos of the output on his TP-10 thermal printer from his Funny Reader program. He added an option that he calls "heavy printing" which basically means printing each line twice (burning in the text twice in the same spot) which greatly increases the readability and quality of the print: https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/6608880899238676/ Dragon 32/64 ------------ 1) Julian Brown has an update on the poll he posted a couple of weeks ago about what sound chip to install on his Dragon motherboard (which is now going beyond the original spec). He has a couple of options that he is thinking about: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3571198379806472/ He also showed pics of Rev 3 boards, and samples of both the PAL and NTSC daughterboards: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3570020029924307/ He also showed a concept video board - this would go directly to HDMI output and incorporates the PAL video board into it as well: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3569462773313366/ Game On news (all Coco related platforms): ========================================== 1) The Wargaming Scribe has covered (I believe) his first war game that originated on the Dragon - Empire from SHARDS Software: https://zeitgame.net/archives/11211 2) Chronologically Gaming finished July 1982 and started into August, both covering some Coco games: July 1982 - Warrior and Yahtzee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxgFkiJyBnk&t=1010s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxgFkiJyBnk&t=1829s August 1982 - Color Zap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FJI-hP712I&t=2521s Teaser - Monday's live show will introduce the Dragon 32 3) Tim & AJ of My Drunk Sibling put out episode 105 of Sibling Rivalry, a Halloween themed one featuring... Poltergeist on the Coco: https://youtu.be/vl2dA5ioaIU?si=qtwshKcurax3amM8 4) ExperTek did another of his Spanish language / amber monitor gameplay videos on a real Coco - this time covering Quix by Tom Mix Software: https://youtu.be/zyRSlmnq6mY?si=Bbsa0BD1BgLmhJPU 5) Tealgamemaster on YouTube posted a video about the first 100 games from Disney (expand the description to see the list) - and the Coco is prominent in this list. Although some of the later ones he doesn't mention the Coco ports of: https://youtu.be/cdKXQYZulNo?si=9w4tAlv2P9V4SgI0 6) Nostalgiavault on YouTube covered a couple of educational games on the Coco 2 this past week as well: Facemaker and Kids on Keys: https://youtu.be/NlUJF8QKCgU?si=fvZ8M3dNY31pKfR5 https://youtu.be/6SX-sqCv7_0?si=cT51JmAPgToY5jRo 7) RetroTrailer-2 on YouTube did a video on Steve Bjork's early Coco 3 game, Warp Fighter 3-D (the one we had demoing a bit at both CocoFest and BoatFest earlier this year with 3-D glasses): https://youtu.be/G75LZnLJzyM?si=OhurMEcJkb6CvPR7 8) RetroLoser on YouTube posted a video of Frogger on the MC-10 with 4K RAM (written by J. Krah): https://youtu.be/f1mFOAk-K18?si=B6rzHl0vF54saGQk Get connected with more of the CoCo, Dragon and MC-10 community here: ======================================= https://thecoconation.com/community/