The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 368, June 29, 2024 =================================================================== Collected by L. Curtis Boyle Special Guests today: --------------------- None Interview schedule: -------------------- None Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people: ------------------------------------------------------------ The Canberra Vintage Computer Exhibition 2024 (supported by VCF) takes place in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia was a 1 day event from 10 am to 3 pm on June 29 at Radford College. They had a wide variety of machines on display, and Ian Maveric (of the Trash Talkers podcast, Coco RS-232 pak clones,etc.) is one of the people helping from the TRS-80 & clone side: https://www.facebook.com/events/s/canberra-vintage-computer-exhi/693500242752070/ I think they recorded some of the seminars; I will try to find them for next week's show. VCF-West looks to be happening August 2-3 (Fri-Sat) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This year they are a full partner with the museum, so that admission for both the museum and VCF can be done with one purchase, and the are taking people booking to be speakers/presenters now as well. CHM (Computer History Museum) 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA https://vcfed.org/2024/03/14/vcf-west/ VCF-Midwest has announced their new, larger venue for this year (#19) - the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, IL. Sept 7-8, 2024 (Sept 6 evening (Friday) is reserved for vendors, etc to set up). Unfortunately, their original block of rooms already sold out in 3 hours after they announced yesterday. VCF is working with the hotel to get more, but that won't happen until Monday) https://vcfmw.org/ Tandy Assembly for 2024 has been announced for Sep 27-29, 2024. UPDATE: THEY HAVE STARTED POSTING EXHIBITORS ON THEIR WEBSITE Courtyard by Marriott Springfield Springfield, Ohio http://www.tandyassembly.com/ Retro Computer Festival 2024: November 9-10, 2024 Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, England In the early stages of planning for this year, this is (I believe) the largest general retro computing show in the UK (it's their VCF style show), covering all retro machines. NOTE: thanks to Randy Kindig, it is confirmed that it is a 2 day show. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/72253/Retro-Computer-Festival-2024-Saturday-9th-November/ The Dragon Meetup is being worked on - two possible venues (only a few blocks from each other in Cambridge) and dates are still being ironed out. Some discussions about it on the World of Dragon forums: https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11179 Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform) ------------------------------- 1) Coco Town, after multiple episodes on optimizing graphics, sound, etc. is back to adding new features to his Moon Patrol project, originally started in his teens. This time around, he adds level encoding (mapping), and holes in the terrain: https://youtu.be/a0LWibCzVLg?si=hZl6E_XuXsXEOG0Q 2) The next live TRS-80 Trash Talk (episode 40) will be July 6. They are looking to try and get their largest panel ever... if anybody is interested in joining (I just might), you can do so via the Tandy Discord, or send me a message and I will pass it on. Their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TRS80TrashTalk 3) The "Fujinet state of the union" talk that Thomas Cherryhomes gave a few weeks ago at VCF-SW (including a lot of Coco updates) is now available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dmrtCV4nC54?si=ZfuGpCg9oYeHYSr6 4) A bit of strange news - the Home Computer Museum's Coco 3 exhibit (This is the hands on computer museum in the Netherlands) had their SD Card stolen, so the Coco 3 part of the museum had been shutdown for a few weeks. But they now have a populated SD card back, and the display is back up! https://www.instagram.com/homecomputermuseum/p/C8rzjpOIcNq/?img_index=1 5) Boisy Pitre posted a quick video showing how fast OS-9 Level 1 (and BASIC09) boot from the F256 machine that he has been porting OS9 to. Level 1 boots from Drivewire, and with that loaded (including a driver for the 512K flash disk) he shows it running a few utility commands and BASIC09 from the flash (not pre-loaded), showing how fast the flash drive works: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161401493397641/ And for a lot more detail on the F256 and OS9 in general, you can see Boisy's full presentation from VCF-SW (which includes the mention that there is a 6809 specific version coming out as one of the models for the upcoming F256-2 version... combined with the Turbo09 project that Boisy is also involved with, this should run faster than the Coco3FPGA (which is equivalent of a 25 MHz 6809...): https://youtu.be/KY_qHCr-zh8?si=kiiYUNFCrHsPmqfA The preliminary product page for the upcoming F256K2 (expected out October 2024, for $495 USD): https://c256foenix.com/f256k2/?v=3e8d115eb4b3 6) John Whitworth put up a video showing his sRGB boards working with audio (as well as a photo of the adapter) on a Coco 2: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161390090247641/ Details and how to order the board can be found on John's DragonPlus Electronics site (this works with Coco 1's, 2's (including T1's) and Dragons... possibly with CP-400's, etc. from Brazil?): https://dragonpluselectronics.com/product/superrgb-6x09-for-dragon-and-coco-12-computers/ 7) Inspired (or challenged?) by Mark Siegel, Simon Jonassen is working on extending his Coco 3 demo from a few years back to add "pseudo" alpha blend transparency, and uploaded a video showing it moving across the screen. The final version will have the ball bouncing instead of just gliding sideways: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161388066407641/ 8) Lee Perkins posted to Facebook and Discord that he would like some further testers for his 8 way hardware scrolling engine for his 6309/2 MB RAM port of a PC game to the Coco 3... particularly timing switching screen modes from 320 / 16 color graphics to 40 column text. I think he has the timings between different GIME's figured out now, and has been helping emulator writers get their emulators to match real hardware). A screenshot showing the effect can be seen here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161386004117641/ UPDATE: He has the player's sprite added to a screenshot from Discord: (load local file cloud_kingdoms_withplayer_screenshot.jpg. Taken from a real monitor) 9) I don't know if any are left, but Leslie Anderson is offering FREE HD63C09ECP's - 3 MHz rated 6309's with external clock but in the PLCC (square) form factor. This matches nicely with the adaptor board to 40 pin DIP that we showed recently (and there is a picture of it in the comments for those that missed it): https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/3399325737027451/ 10) Ultra Gamer81 on YouTube posted a video showing the entire original Coco 3 in store demo that Tandy themselves made to sell the Color Computer 3: https://youtu.be/grD8Ez0ezpc?si=wmEIp8tgR-MjtcNv 11) Randy Kindig and Earl Evans talk about ugBASIC on episode 13 of the NEXT WITHOUT FOR podcast. This is the cross platform compiled BASIC that has Coco 1/2 and Coco 3 options along with many other computers: https://www.facebook.com/groups/floppydays/posts/3743654522559627/ Episode and show links: https://www.nextwithoutfor.org/2024/06/show-013-ugbasic.html 12) Jason "CocoMan" Reighard uploaded his BoatFest video right before showtime: https://youtu.be/xNsW-XlkxWM Thanks to Jason Timmons for mentioning CocoFest and it's growth during the VCF Showrunner panel from VCF-SW! (https://youtu.be/bVJoF-5w-Mw?si=F-0Wem3g8dQbDORO for those interested in the history of VCF and where it is now) MC-10 ----- 1) Dragon 32/64 ------------ 1) Vintage Geek (who have a great hands on museum if you are ever in Knoxville, Tennessee) released a video about the Tano Dragon. This is the Dragon 64 with NTSC output: https://youtu.be/FxVvGZAWumw?si=xltyvvkBvGR0GH8X 2) FranzL on the World of Dragon forums mentioned that he has scans of most issues of "Siegfrieds Drachenpost" - a German Dragon newsletter from the early 1980's. He just uploaded scans of the 21 issues he has this morning, and they are currently being processed: https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11182 3) Julian Brown has further updates on his "Kitchen sink" Dragon motherboard, which has a ton of extra features. He also just sent me this morning the complete list of what he has accomplished on this project in June (with the caveat that his time was limited by him doing an engine swap in his son's car as well). So, I will show a picture of his latest board design, and read his complete update: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3740494966210145/ (read file from my desktop, "CoCoNation Dragon RevX4 progress update June 26 2024.txt" 4) KukmanPL on YouTube put up a Polish video showing his running the Dragon 32 emulator thanks to the Recallbox system on the Raspberry 5. Unfortunately, there is now Close Captioning or auto-translate available... does anyone listening speak Polish? (from his screenshots, it looks like it is more emulating a Coco 1/2 with artifact colors (or the NTSC Dragon Tano): https://youtu.be/KdroBsz3A5U?si=YFfbeuBK46vG2tIQ Game On news (all Coco related platforms): ========================================== 1) Jim Gerrie has converted another sample game program from the book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Artificial Intelligence" by Richard Forsyth and Chris Naylor in 1986. This one is called the "Four-site game" and was originally written for the IBM PC in GW BASIC: https://youtu.be/yuzd6NuDdt0?si=v52XJqf-6HKWFxWO Download it from the Internet Archive where Jim now has all of his programs. He also ported "Fuzzy Rita" (originally written by Tim Hartnell in 1985 from the book "Exploring Expert Systems on Your Micro Computer"): https://youtu.be/CmXf_gXYr2Y?si=lwiBti0vLUK15sxU And he typed in The Tower of Hanoi, originally by J.L. Elkhorne in 1985, which was an actual MC-10 listing from the UK book "Bumper Book of Computer Programs" (published in 1986), which was a book made by "Your Computer" magazine: https://youtu.be/QyVSngsDNtA?si=2Flbxqm4hQA0-8pD 2) XperTek covers the original Coco launch title Chess on his amber monitor equipped Coco 2 (real hardware): https://youtu.be/8h0diUSi2sg?si=eCg23YQvgLvAFr6f Speak your mind! 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