The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 342, December 9, 2023 =================================================================== Collected by L. Curtis Boyle Special Guests today: --------------------- Mike Snyder, who authored many games/programs for all 3 Coco's for T&D magnazine and SPORTSware (Gnome, Firespire/Gnome Quest II): https://www.cocoquest.com/ Interviews schedule: -------------------- - January 6 we have a double interview with Doug Masten & Glen Dahlgren, covering the Coco 3 game The Contras. http://www.lcurtisboyle.com/nitros9/contras.html - January 20 Glen Dahlgren comes back - he has the final book in his Chaos series coming out, and possibly some further Coco stuff as well. https://mysteriumstoryworks.substack.com/p/want-a-free-copy-of-the-realm-of?r=2hpgl3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people: ------------------------------------------------------------ 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 Interim Computer Festival: March 23-24. This is a pre-announcement for a retro computer show in the Pacific Northwest Area. Details (specifically where, etc.) will be coming later, and registration will open in January. (No website yet) CocoFest: May 4-5, 2024 in Carol Stream, Illinois (near Chicago) Holiday Inn & Suites https://www.glensideccc.com/cocofest/ BoatFest 3: June 14-16, 2024 Social Event Space Hurricane, WV https://www.ticketsource.us/boatfest2024/boatfest-retro-computer-expo-2024/e-raedpb VCF SouthWest: June 14-16, 2024 (same weekend as BoatFest, and usually has a lot of Tandy people hanging out since that is Tandy's hometown). Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas - Dallas Dallas, Texas https://www.vcfsw.org/ Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform) ------------------------------- 1) Bob Emery (La Coco Strangiato on YouTube) did a livestream video showing his Turbo-X LED board now fully working, showing it with regular (.895 MHz), double speed (1.78 MHz) and GIME-X turbo (2.86 MHz): https://www.youtube.com/live/jbzrnT2B2QU?si=hJFXfKl_ogmkdQI5 2) David Wiens has made the MSDOS disk file manager (MSF) and it's manual available for download on his website. Bill Nobel and I used this at work to read double density MSDOS/PCDOS disks (both 360K and 720K). It requires the replacement SDisk3 disk driver (also available on his site), which is a much enhanced driver than the stock OS9 or NitrOS9 ones. Since the file manager is native, it also reads and writes to MSDOS disks much faster than utilities like PCDOS, and even includes special commands that handle MSDOS or both MSDOS and OS9 disks at once. The only caveat is that it takes a lot of System RAM (you still need RBF to handle the OS9 side of things, although the old wd1773 driver can be removed: https://www.sardis-technologies.com/csg/csg-msf.htm 3) The Coco Crew has posted an audio interview that Boisy did with Kathy Paur (formerly of Tandy subsidiary A&A Electronics, who were in charge of parts for Tandy computers and other products): https://youtu.be/byuOv81pkvE?si=eVWTO9yQ_uy8E8v4 4) George Janssen has upload Lesson 3 for his new Beginners 6809 assembly course to his YouTube channel, this time covering the MMU in the Coco 3. Part 1 covers how it works: https://youtu.be/LoCF6j6OK-0?si=mlObya6XDZpPkoEt And part 2 covers some actual code using them: https://youtu.be/XE_mq9Pb8vk?si=WWC-IRCx_fYrsHlo 5) The next live Trash Talk show (on YouTube) will be December 16 at 7 pm Eastern. This covers all TRS-80's, usually concentrating on the Z80 models, but it involves the Coco at times, too: https://www.youtube.com/@TRS80TrashTalk 6) Henry of the new YouTube channel "The Break Key" has another cable build video this week - this time for Drivewire. He also shows installing and using pyDrivewire: https://youtu.be/9BhHCVumkGc?si=go1-tYj-aIyOcaJE 7) I was a fish out of water on the Retro Repair Roundup live this past week: https://www.youtube.com/live/6LCo51U_9EQ?si=JW9fQnM4LjL_w1Qm 8) A new Flex Facebook page was created late this past week, for those interested on probably the 3rd most popular OS for the Coco 1/2 (after DECB and OS-9 Level I, and it was the second most popular until OS9 was released alongside the Coco 2): https://www.facebook.com/groups/flexoperatingsystem 9) Thomas Cherryholmes posted an update to his porting Fujinet to the Coco - the cassette based bootstrap is now working: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161064018992641/ And booting Canyon Climber from Oracle Cloud after loading HDBDOS from cassette: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161065946677641/ 10) Simon Jonassen posted an update video to his online Coco 1/2 graphics editor: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161063257282641/ And this morning a screenshot showing color selection using both mouse buttons: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161065638322641/ 11) Joel Ewy has gotten his MM/1 SCSI drive backed up onto to solid state with the BlueSCSI device (which works on multiple older machines), so his MM/1 is back in action. He posted two short videos about the transfer: https://www.facebook.com/groups/3194643584094250/posts/4340014536223810/ MC-10 ----- 1) Dragon 32/64 ------------ 1) Robcfg (who recently joined our Discord - Welcome Rob!) posted a new tool for accessing DragonDOS images. Not only does this let you look at the what files are on a VDK files, but also lets you view BASIC listings, saved picture files, etc. all from within this GUI based programs. Details and screenshots on the World of Dragon forums (I missed this before): https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11145 2) Richard Harding himself posted the 3rd video about the history of Dragon Data from Brian Moore's personal recordings (Brian worked at Dragon Data at the end). This is from when they were in receivership: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3601475996778710/ 3) Julian Brown posted some updates to his Revision 3 Alpha 2 Dragon 32 boards. This once incorporates the new SAM that Ciaran has designed (which can include 256K RAM support). Julians is also planning to try and support full 1.8 MHz with video (like the SAM Doubler does on a Coco 1/2): https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3600035413589435/ 4) Retronaut on YouTube is making a series about going through his tech history. Last night's episode (Chapter 4) is about the Dragon 32, and it sounds like the next episode will be as well: https://youtu.be/5EL-T6iHMts?si=7sMSxGwbzjHUZM9w Game On news (all Coco related platforms): ========================================== 1) The Coco Show's final episode for this year will be recorded live on Twitch and YouTube on Sunday, December 10 at 10 AM EST. You can watch it live here: Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/amigosretrogaming YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AmigosRetroGaming/streams I should note that on Twitch you get to watch and interact with Aaron and Brent during the pre and post show; on YouTube live it's just the regular show (I think). 2) Retro365 continued playing the PC ports of the Mark Data Products graphic adventure games, adding in Sea Search, Shenanigans, Trekboer and The Vortex Factor. https://www.youtube.com/@Retro365/videos 3) Chris Presley announced on the Coco Facebook group that his Star Trek Trivia game is now available on the Color Computer Archive (both to download and play, or play through online XRoar). This is for all 3 Coco's: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161063951117641/ Direct link to DSK image: https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Disks/Games/Star%20Trek%20Trivia%20(Chris%20Presley).zip 4) Tim and AJ on Sibling Rivalry played a very early type in game for the Coco (Laser Star, originally published in Rainbow by Jarb Software). It had bugs still (which I speculated when I first uploaded it - in fact I think I had fixed a few myself, but obviously not all of them). So this is actually 2 parts combined - Tim went through the code before the second segment comparing it to the magazine, and then made a few of his own improvements: https://youtu.be/pHyXLjAl5XQ?si=30BR3wZQm_V9U43_ 5) Jim Gerrie snuck in an MC-10 game last night - Checkers originally by John Krutch in 1981 from the book "Experiments in AI For Small Computers". It's a bit limited - it can't do multiple jumps or king itself on it's own. I am not sure, but I *think* it runs in 4K RAM?: https://youtu.be/Xtyygk6qM1Y?si=faCoYEcrijRevUBT Get connected with more of the CoCo, Dragon and MC-10 community here: ======================================= https://thecoconation.com/community/