[Index]
The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 378, September 7, 2024
===================================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle
Special Guests today:
---------------------
Interview schedule:
--------------------
None
Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
The World of Retro Computing 2024 is September 14-15 in Kitchener, Ontario,
Canada (west of Toronto). This year it is located in the old Goudies
Department Store, 8 Queen Street North. Free admission, and this covers all
kinds of retro computers. Some people in the Coco community are planning on
going, and Stacy Vetzal from the Coco Facebook group is planning on having
a booth. We are hoping to have 4 guests on next week to talk about the show:
https://worldofretrocomputing.com/2024-worc-expo
Tandy Assembly for 2024 has been announced for Sep 27-29, 2024. An update
from Pete on August 9 - they have now sold out of tables for the show! And
another announcement - Steve Leininger, the designer of the TRS-80, is
the keynote speaker!
http://www.tandyassembly.com/speakers.html">http://www.tandyassembly.com/speakers.html
Courtyard by Marriott Springfield
Springfield, Ohio
http://www.tandyassembly.com/
Also that weekend is the Amigos next live ICC (International Computer
Club), which will be at 4 PM EST on September 28. This is for all retro
computers & gaming consoles. It streams live on their Twitch channel and
YouTube channels).
Previous club videos can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaD3XRYu1lQTWrMYYPmaOa4AIj4xArroD
The Dragon Meetup is 100% official now: October 12-13, 2024 at the Museum
of Technology in Cambridge, England:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3776261519300156/
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. Tickets can be ordered online for individual
days or both days.
All of their events (including separate entries for both days) at the
bottom of this page:
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pages/30677/What-s-On/
The Saturday event specifically:
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/72253/Retro-Computer-Festival-2024-Saturday-9th-November/
Retro SC, the retro show in Brazil, is having their 2024 event on November
16. This always has a strong Coco/CP-400/etc. contingent, including multiple
people who have been guests on our show.It is happening at 1670 Haroldo
Soares Glavan road, Cacupé, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina.
https://retrosc.org/
VCF East has had a date change for next years show due to a scheduling
conflict. It is now April 4-6, 2025 - same facility as this year. Info
Age Science Museum, Wall, NJ.
Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
1) Jamie Lee Cho has announced a new utility written in Python that helps
translate the Coco's Microsoft BASIC's to OS-9's BASIC09, including most
graphics statements. This should make converting them a lot easier. It's not
perfect (and Jamie lists some limitations in the readme) but should save a
lot of time translating. This is part of his ever expanding coco-tools suite:
https://github.com/jamieleecho/coco-tools
Readme:
https://github.com/jamieleecho/coco-tools/blob/main/README.decb-to-b09.md
2) EJ Jacquay (maintainer and programmer for the current VCC emulator)
mentioned in the #general-emulators channel that he has made a boot.rom
for both VCC and MAME, that allows the boot track for NitrOS9 to be in a
virtual ROM, which allows booting straight to the hard drive image with
no floppy image attached. I am not sure if this has been released to the
public yet (as of this past Monday)
3) CocoTown, as part of his SepTandy contributions, put up a video showing
how to automate the MAME Coco debugger and how to use the LUA scripting
capabilities that MAME itself can use:
https://youtu.be/ySY8EN0sE6I?si=cJXF41LIDDoS1hlF
4) TRS-80 Retro Programing posted a quick 10 minute video of his experience
in getting ChatGPI to generate Coco Extended BASIC code:
https://youtu.be/kot0aiTGUmk?si=9Glchca8UstmXuZv
5) Ciaran has announced that XRoar version 1.6 has been released. This
contains some bug fixes for 6309 emulation, Coco 3 emulation, more dialog
boxes under Windows, more keyboard/joystick profiles, physical joysticks
end up in menus, and support for both the Dragon Professional and the
Tandy Deluxe Color Computer (both of which feature preliminary AY-3-891x
sound chip support):
Announcement:
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11191
Download:
https://www.6809.org.uk/xroar/
6) More updates to ugBASIC (micro game BASIC), including some Coco or 6809
specific ones:
Main branch:
https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/changelog/main
Beta branch:
https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/changelog/beta
7) Erico Monteiro uploaded a DSK image to the Facebook Coco group that
has a test pattern for the extra artifact colors, and some test images
that he converted to the Coco (after running the loader, hit spacebar to
see the other pictures):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161597760297641/
8) Gregory Roscow showed a Coco 2 he found on ebay that was rebranded as
a "Game & Education Machine" from Automated Functions Inc. Besides the
rebranding, it also has an internal speaker with an added volume knob on
the back:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161594900322641/
9) The Tandy Assembly Facebook page featured another Coco related spotlight
for the upcoming show - Elizabeth Hayes showing her artistic skills on
her repainted Coco 2. This is the focus of her exhibit this year titled
"Pretty In Pink":
https://www.facebook.com/tandyassembly/posts/pfbid0YcBioDG6KjW9jvLDiMDr12udLoHhigTdrpbSGGLV4yr8eZ9TF2B6w61HtKUJ348Tl
10) As promised, David Mitchell has the first version of his SepTandy
project available on his GitHub (a PLAY statement editor for making sound
effects in Extended BASIC), and includes some screenshots:
https://davysretrocorner.blogspot.com/2024/09/septtandy-2024-introducing-echo-co.html
MC-10
-----
1) Bruce Maret posted photos of the upgrades he did to his MC-10 this past
week - composite video output and the PiKey-10 keyboard/joystick adaptor:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/8011354878991264/
Dragon 32/64
------------
1) Julian Brown just received his next Dragon reinvented motherboard -
aside from the CPU, almost everything on it is using more modern chips and
surface mounted, and it is an ATX style board. It includes up to 4 MB of
RAM, a hardware serial port, 512K ROM, dual 3 channel sound generators,
and the possibility of running a slightly overclocked 63C09E CPU at 3.56 MHz:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3798197950439846/
He also showed his Multipak clone that he is working on:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3798025403790434/
2) John Whitworth (of DragonPlus Electronics) showed a small MSX 2 Sound
Mixer board - from the sound mixing circuitry on the SuperSprite FM+
board - squashed onto a 27x28 mm PCB:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3794902197436088/
Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Jim Gerrie updates for the week:
- Mad Monkeys is a new game that Jim himself is writing for the MC-10
(ie not a port). This is the 3rd installment, where the player can now
continue on after clearing a screen:
https://youtu.be/FucJ9qSqTfg?si=m_142o6orw80SEgp
- Bakudan Otoko originally by Shinichi Nakamoto & Shigeki Fujiwara in
1980. This is the predecessor to Bomber Man, and was made by Hudson Soft
as a tech demo for their BASIC compiler, and Jim attempted to recreate
that original demo:
https://youtu.be/3kaE8CE5-QQ?si=oS0gR6iO3VH7ezvs
2) Chronologically Gaming continues to cover game releases from October
1982. The Coco / Dragon ones that they covered this past week are:
Lemans (Spectral Associates):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JohQ9Zosu-k&t=38s
Madness and the Minotaur on the Dragon 32 (with completely different
artwork than the original Coco version):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqJ90LyxpXI&t=33s
Mansion Adventure 1 for the Dragon 32:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqJ90LyxpXI&t=754s
3) Tim and AJ return with another 2&1/2 hours of playing Dungeons of
Daggorath - one of the marque Coco games of all time - good enough that
it spawned a PC port. How far does AJ get by the end of this episode?
https://youtu.be/-M-k8ocCjs4?si=EDzF5AorP0-n8cnv
4) As part of SepTandy, YaggieBoat on YouTube put up a just about 2 minute
video of computer vs computer gameplay of Tandy's Castle Guard on a Coco 2:
https://youtu.be/Awy7TwHPZWE?si=maApPd7H42cdB4Cn
5) TJ Ferreira put up a video showing the unboxing of a brand new MC-10
game - with full color packaging and everything, and a Atari joystick
adaptor that plugs into the serial I/O port (it only allows one axis - X
or Y - at once along with a joystick button). It is called T.H.E.M. (from
Spriteworx), and requires the MCX-32SD (the game comes on an SD Card) &
the serial joystick interface. TJ will be doing a gameplay video later. I
don't think this is on sale yet; I didn't see it on the itch.io page.
https://youtu.be/aztiCjKobO8?si=eEZy_WtfDh1Wg-Wk
6) The Collector's Quest podcast latest episode #179 "So You Want to Collect
Halloween Games #4" and covers all kinds of games (not just computer)
has a rather familiar one from the Coco and Dragon that they talk about:
https://youtu.be/If1mVAiKQ7U?si=m6U1OKbZN_IKr3k-&t=2715
7) Retronaut on YouTube goes through the first issue of UK magazine Computer
& Video Games from November 1981. Included in the news section in this
issue is an article on Dino Wars for the TRS-80 Color Computer Computer:
https://youtu.be/_ajqE1bYA-I?si=KoCUkliIZnHL80y6&t=1580
Speak your mind! Let us know what you think at:
==============================================================================
feedback@TheCoCoNation.com
Get connected with more of the CoCo, Dragon and MC-10 community here:
==============================================================================
https://thecoconation.com/community/