The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 388, November 16, 2024 =================================================================== Collected by L. Curtis Boyle Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people: ------------------------------------------------------------ Today is episode #41 of TRS-80 Trash Talk is being recorded live later today (8 pm) on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TRS80TrashTalk The World of Commodore 2024 is November 30-Dec 1 at the Admiral Inn in Mississauga, Ontario. Why am I mentioning this? Well, it's sponsored by TPUG, and they created the SuperPET (a special PET with a 6809 CPU added...) and they helped port OS-9 Level 1 to it. So it's a sister computer to the Coco after those improvements. https://www.tpug.ca/world-of-commodore/world-of-commodore-2024/ Virtual Coco/Tandy Fest is January 25, 2025, and now has it's own website site up: Mark Overholser is the driving force for it, and can give updates on speakers, etc. https://tandyretroshow.com/ VCF-SoCal - Feb 15-16 (Hotel Fera in Orange, California. https://www.vcfsocal.com/ 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. https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-east/ CocoFest is May 2-3, 2025 (with takedown on the morning of May 4/Sunday) at the Holiday Inn & Suites in Carol Stream (Wheaton), Illinois. Hotel rooms at the special Fest rate are available now ($122/night for two queens or 1 king bed), and apply for May 2-5. You will need to use the Group Rate code of G30 to get this rate, and getting the special rate ends April 7. Bookings for tables will be going up in January. https://www.glensideccc.com/cocofest/ Tables go on sale January 1 at noon, Central standard time. VCF-SW in Texas has been booked with dates: June 20-22, 2025 at the Davidson Gundy Alumni Center, University of Texas, Dallas, Texas. Tables & Tickets will go on sale January 2025. $20/adult ($25 if bought at the door), $10/student ($15 at the door). 17 and under are free (with accompanying adult). Tables are $50. https://www.vcfsw.org/ Tim Lindner let me know that next year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo runs from October 17-19 in 2025 (they just had this years Sept 27-29). https://www.retrogamingexpo.com/ Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform) ------------------------------- First, I want to clarify a few things from last weeks news: A) The Randy Kindig interview with Steve Leninger and Don French isn't just about the TRS-80 Model 1 creation, it does go into a little early Coco history as well. https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-144-interview-with-don-french-and-steve-leininger B) The "House of Future" article with pictures of the VDG screens, as some noted, is not a Coco but a custom set of computers created by Motorola that used their VDG chip. This house was built in 1979 with those computers integrated, a year before the Coco 1 came out. MarcO missed the last of my notes on this story, so I will go through them briefly here: Information on the "House of the Future" itself (scroll down for additional photos), including details on the Motorola computer system it used called "Tuke" (pronounced 'tu-kee') which apparently cost $30,000 at the time and featured ten interconnected Motorola CPU's that "monitor and control all aspects of the house", including monitoring windows & doors, adjusting blinds, temperature controls & logging energy use. It even featured speech synthesis: https://the-haunted-closet.blogspot.com/2020/01/awhatukee-house-of-future-1980-1984.html In the Dragon news section, Marc did show the text interview with Derek Williams (By Richard Harding) which has some real cool history about the Dragon, but he missed the second part where there is a brief video clip from the 1984 Personal Computer World show in Olympia, London, showing the Dragon with a Touchmaster graphics tablet: (SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE FOR THIS VIDEO): http://dragondata.co.uk/history/videos/index.html I was hoping Nick would have a chance to watch Steve Rasmussen's (alias Buck Owens) put up an hour long video on Twitch showing him creating new levels for Nick Marentes H.E.R.O. game, using a Visual BASIC program he hacked together (PLAY FROM 10:23, can fast forward a little from finishing the level design, exporting DATA statements, saving them to LEVELS.DAT on disk and the running VCC with the new level): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2295654639 1) Jim Brain added a 3rd blog post the day before last weeks show concerning his exploration of alternate character sets. https://www.go4retro.com/2024/11/08/expanding-the-mc6847-deciphering-the-interface/ As Jim mentioned on the show last week, Having a way to load character sets directly from the Coco while it's running would be the ideal goal, allowing some CocoVGA functionality on the Coco 1/2. I had seen some comments in the chat sidebar speculating that redefining the character sets to do 256x192-like graphics was basically a waste and that at that point one should just switch to the 256x192 true graphics mode, but I don't agree; One has to take into consideration that the text screen (even with the new font(s)) is still only 512 bytes of data to move around; the equivalent full graphics screen (PMODE 4) is 6K. So a program could be *much* faster (especially if you are writing in BASIC vs. Assembly), and with properly defined characters, one could even get smooth pixel by pixel (or 2 or 4 pixels at a time) movement vs. the more blocky 8 pixel chunks that text characters currently use. Kicking in higher Semigraphics modes (like the 12 and 24 modes that we can now use from BASIC) would allow designing some such offset characters to give smoother scrolling both vertically and horizontally. And lastly, the ability to trigger and IRQ or FIRQ based on a count of scanlines (or multiple counts per screen frame) not only allows one to change the character set & screen mode (and/or color set) for different parts of the screen, but it could serve double duty for doing sound effects in the background between the 60/50 times per second that we have with VSYNC and the 15,000+ times per second we get with HSYNC, allowing background sound (sampled or generated) to run on a Coco 1/2 without so much CPU overhead. 2) CocoTown on YouTube returns to his Moon Patrol style gaming with a video about adding scoring: https://youtu.be/kygaCZgpIUs?si=1rM_2eufMcolMnYT 3) RetroAndGaming on YouTube (who just got his Coco 1 working with S-Video recently) released a video showing how the speedup POKE's work on Coco's: https://youtu.be/138scXKZNIE?si=w4ld88xngoo9kchW 4) SjslTech on YouTube picked up a Computer Buyers Guide, which actually goes into surprising depth about how computers work before listing a bunch of machines and their specs, including a section on TRS-80's: https://youtu.be/3jW4VCgKniQ?si=6SiCvbfEaDxanecq&t=480 5) Erico Monteiro has been experimenting with animated characters (Which he is showing at RetroSC this weekend!) in low res graphics with comic book style word balloons. He showed a preview on Facebook (the text is in Portuguese for the show this weekend) https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/big-trouble-in-retrosc-tomorrow/10161822164712641/ A slightly earlier post showing some other characters (There are 10 in all) https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161810828697641/ And what all 10 look like (not animated): https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10161799409247641/ 6) Daniel Flakelar posted a photo of his PAL Coco 2 upgraded to composite - and how he used the case design to make it neat and tidy: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/just-did-the-composite-mod-to-the-pal-coco2-nice-convenient-spot-to-put-some-hid/10161796824137641/ 7) David Collins announced that he has entered his 63C09 based single board computer into PCBWay's yearly design contest: https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/ive-entered-my-sbc-into-the-yearly-design-contest-at-pcbway-this-weekend-i-hope-/3520556828237674/ PCBWay page entry: https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/The_HB63C09M_SBC_97a82b55.html 8) ugBASIC continues to get updates and bugfixes. The past two weeks has included fixes to DATA statements with empty strings, CLEAR now clearing variables correctly, and fixed blit register allocation & dynamic strings for 3 CPU's (including 6809), as well as many updates for specific machines: https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/changelog/main MC-10 ----- 1) Jim Gerrie updated his Nova Scotia flag program on the MC-10 that we showed a couple of weeks ago to show 3 flags associated with the maritime province: Provincial Flag, Acadian Flag, and the Grand Council Flag of the Miqmaq/L'nu native peoples: https://youtu.be/et_TqnCkLS8?si=V2W-y_SCJFTtuYUD 2) Jim is also looking for assembly coder volunteers to convert the chess game Usurpator (originally written for the 6800) to the MC-10 and it's 6803: https://www.facebook.com/groups/731424100317748/posts/8538150252978388/ Dragon 32/64 ------------ 1) Richard Harding has uploaded high quality scans of original Dragon Data software artwork: http://dragondata.co.uk/Software/artwork/index.html 2) YouTube channel Fix or No Fix did a 3/4 hour followup video about restoring The Dragon 32 system he got. This round he works on the cassette deck and joystick adaptor: https://youtu.be/GqAXhu4FtmI?si=nFXan9MiknbPII66 Game On news (all Coco related platforms): ========================================== 1) Jim Gerrie has The Caves of Narzod (originally by Max Bettridge from the Australian Coco magazine, October 1985) running on a Coco , but only from tape. He is asking for some help to fix any ML routines for disk. Both Paul Fiscarelli sent him versions fixed for disk. It's a graphical adventure game: https://youtu.be/tjgiDv8tJ4E?si=TGOPnziRsl7Nj0D8 2) Stu, of the Tandy (TRS-80) Discord and Stu's Game Reviews) revisited the Coco this week, this time tackling Cyrus Chess (vs. the original Microchess he played earlier). This is a title written in the UK and appeared on the Dragon first, and then Tandy got rights to sell it here in North America about a year later: https://www.youtube.com/live/rg1QMxqiRdU?si=JxDBHiMsgiQn_QT4 3) non_maskable_interrupt on YouTube did another Coco 3 gameplay YouTube Short, this time covering Tandy/Greg Zumwalt's official Tetris: https://youtube.com/shorts/0xPRun7LPqQ?si=nPbfOFPpZq0QWh9Q 4) As promised last week, Pere Serrat is keeping himself busy making updated versions of the AGD engine games for Coco's and Dragons with the SuperSprite FM+ upgrade board. These new versions feature changed colors sets to more closely match the ZX-Spectrum originals that the Coco/Dragon versions are ported from. Pack #2 features 6 more games: Antiquity Jones, Apulija-13, Baldy ZX, Baby Monkey, Bean Brothers and Bol Ke Ase: https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11205 Pack #3 features an additional 6 games: Bomb Bomb Buster, Boxes, B-Squared, Cap'n Rescue, Cap'n Rescue - Reprisal, and Cap'n Rescue - The Escape: https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11206 5) Chronologically Gaming covered the Dragon 32 game "Jerusalem Adventure 2" from Microdeal this past week, which originally came out in November 1982 (it was originally out on the Coco a year earlier): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS6C_D6_SPc&t=28s 6) French YouTube channel "GENERATION MICROS" went through the November/December 1984 issue of TILT magazine, which covers video games for both Micros and game consoles. there is a general review of 500 games in alphabetical order (starts about 25 minutes in) including 6809 machines like the Thomson MO series, the Vectrex and the Dragon 32. Each of them has a photo as well, and some Coco / Dragon games are included, like Blochead (#27) (although the photo is upside down), Bridge Master (#35), Cyrus Chess (#60), Cosmic Cruiser (#79), Crash (#81), Cu*Bert (#90), Cuthbert Goes Digging (#92), Cuthbert In the Mines (#93), Dragon Chess (#115), El Bandito (#123), Fruity (#152), Glaxxons (#159), Junior's Revenge (#211), Kriegspiel (#221), Leggit (#243), Lunar Rover Patrol (#263), Nerble Force (#298) (they have Skramble pictured instead), Shenanigans (#387), Skramble (#390) (here is the swapped Nerble Force picture), Touchstone (#455), 3D Lunattack (#464), 3D Seiddab Attack (#466), 3D Space Wars (#467), Ugh! (#472), Whirlybird Run (#488). They also do brief specs/reviews of the Thomson series computers, The Alice and Alice 90 (44:07), and the Dragon 32 (54:43), MC-10 (1:08:21), TRS-80 Color 2 (although they bizarrely show a photo of a Coco 1 - and an older model at that!) (1:09:00) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuSettBKiHE&t=2649s&ab_channel=GENERATIONMICROS 7) After the .... "accident" last episode, AJ finally calmed down enough to rejoin her sibling Tim Lindner for part 9 of Dungeons of Daggorath for their Sibling Rivalry show: https://youtu.be/4NaMxJEej4E?si=Uo7s4CA0glZb94Nl Speak your mind! Let us know what you think at: ============================================================================== feedback at TheCoCoNation.com If replying on a mailing list, please trim rGet connected with more of the CoCo, Dragon and MC-10 community here: ============================================================================== https://thecoconation.com/community/