The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 399, February 8, 2025 ============================================================== Collected by L. Curtis Boyle Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people: ------------------------------------------------------------ VCF-SoCal - Feb 15-16 (Hotel Fera in Orange, California). https://www.vcfsocal.com/ VCF East is April 4-6, 2025 - same facility as this year. Info Age Science Museum, Wall, NJ. https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-east/ The next Manitoba Retro Computer & Gaming club meetup is at the Fort Rouge Leisure Center in Winnipeg, Manitoba on April 12. This is the same one I attended last weekend, along with D. Bruce Moore and David Kroeker. This next one is more themed around the Commodore 128, but I expect a wide variety of machines like they had this past one, which was TRS-80 themed https://www.facebook.com/groups/mbretro/posts/1830196931063991/ 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/ 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/ BoatFest will be July 11-13 in Hurricane, WV. There is now a promo video for it: https://youtu.be/4KRVVRHlj6g VCF-Midwest (the largest retro show in North America, I believe) is September 13-14 at the Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumberg, Illinois. This year is the 20th anniversary of this show, and there is a lot of collaboration between CocoFest and VCF-MW, so expect a large number of Coco and Glenside people at the show! Still free admission, and hotel booking is open already. https://www.vcfmw.org/ That same weekend, Retro World Expo will be held September 12-14 at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, Connecticut. Tickets and vendor applications aren't quite ready yet but will be soon. This is a gaming oriented retro show (including tournaments) but also includes things like wrestling: https://retroworldexpo.com/ Tandy Assembly for 2025 dates have been announced - it will be Sept 26 to Sep 28 at the Courtyard by Marriott Springfield Downtown in Springfield, Ohio: https://www.tandyassembly.com/ This 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) ------------------------------- 1) Bob Emery posted a video about the PLAY command on his La Coco Strangiato YouTube page, based on a program he wrote more than 20 years ago: https://youtu.be/zkClAtFq4GM?si=NJqdXDn6ZT62xO2x 2) Terry Trapp released a video about the Coco 3 system he bought on Facebook, and getting it up and running: https://youtu.be/nBwhokgA0jI?si=1if9OpjLwPwzvJC7 3) Coco Town posted a video update on why he hasn't been posting videos lately; like LGR, some trees broke and damaged his house: https://youtu.be/y5FWymTJcNs?si=fd2Y6J5qYJVqAuhB 4) George Janssen has released the DSK image with source code for Lesson 15C (continuing on with palette automation/animation) on his channel on the Coco Discord server. The accompanying video is on his YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/afrTkU85voI?si=T82b8j52k6a1bwe8 5) For those that program in CMOC (Pierre Sarrazin's C-like compiler for all Coco's, and for both DECB and OS9), earlier this week he r3leased a new version of it's graphics library 'BGraph's, which is now up to version 0.1.9. This adds a new Trig.h header file that defines some trigonometric primitives, which help drawing 15 degree circle arcs. Other updates include Ellipse now allows a 16 bit radius. He also added some demo programs; a PMODE 3 painting demo that paints with patterns instead of just solid colors, and a Semigraphics-24 mode has been added to the shapes-demo.c mode: http://perso.b2b2c.ca/~sarrazip/dev/cmoc.html (search for "BGraph" to find the spot on the page) 6) Many updates and bug fixes affecting Coco's 1/2/3 have been done to ugBASIC the past few weeks: https://ugbasic.iwashere.eu/changelog/main 7) And speaking about ugBASUC - Erico Monteiro posted a video showing some animations with background sound (simple 1 voice) that also uses ugBASIC's recent add on of the 64x64x4 color true graphics mode (that only takes 1K RAM): https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162268027542641/ Earlier, playing with that screen mode, he drew up a map that was based on Download and/or Prince of Persia: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162263411242641/ He also did a quick graphics editor in ugBASIC to use this same graphics mode: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162262629352641/ 8) Henry of The Break Key fame (oh, and he's a regular panelist here) gives us our first peek at the hardware upgrade that the Coco version of Fujinet is getting - full bus through the cartridge port, no serial bit banger cable needed. Should run a *lot* faster, when it is finished. Henry starts with soldering tips (ha!) (and Henry - that does *NOT* sound like my definition of "fun")..., then goes on to programming & uploading the firmware: https://youtu.be/LCChualtzTw?si=cmYNthmW75-Tl5e7 9) Allen Huffman posted a bit of his Coco commercial program history on his Sub-Etha Software blog. It shows original ad copy from even before the company name (Sub-Etha Software) was decided on, and how it progressed before they were advertising in Rainbow: https://subethasoftware.com/2025/02/05/our-magazine-ads-before-they-were-typeset/ MC-10 ----- 1) The Clueless Engineer returns with part 3 of his getting an original Alice to work. Last episode he had issues with the keyboard. He starts off showing the differences with the MC-10 (which he just got). One interesting thing - the Alice uses less screws: https://youtu.be/A9SVZOl3z24?si=xqX1KiDmK2ywl-f- Dragon 32/64 ------------ 1) Steven Evans has uploaded DragonDOS 64 V1.0 to the World of Dragon forums. This version modifies DragonDOS to operate entirely in 64K RAM mode. This enables it work properly with his RESET Patch that we covered a week or two ago, and a second version of the upload adds a paged directory list, so that it pauses each screen full of filenames: You can read about (and download it) here: https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11238 He also uploaded DragonDOS NX01 in a separate forum thread, which also has regular and Dragon 64 versions. This includes all of Philip G. Scott's bugfix patches from the May and July 1985 issues Dragon User magazine. The posts lists all of the Faults and patches that it installs, as well as the download itself. The latest version at the bottom offers the page pause in addition to the patches, and updated documentation: https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11239 2) Julian Brown posted some more updates about his work-in-progress of his new Dragon 32 motherboard, the latest being where he added most of the power circuit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3935035893422717/ He also sent me a note about the SECAM boards that he is working on... he says they are to create a record of the original SECAM boards that Dragon Data designed, and that these were unique in that they split the video circuit over the main board and the power board.He plans to use it as a reference to make his own design to eventually create analog RGB from the VDG using just transistors and resistors. Game On news (all Coco related platforms): ========================================== 1) Back in mid-January the CPRG Addict started reviewing The Power Stones of Ard II: The Five Towers of Trafa-Zar, a graphical Coco 3 RPG game written by Bill Cleveland and sold by Three C's Projects back in 1990. All in all up through this past week, he wrote 3 blog entries about it, and won the game in the third: Part 1: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2025/01/game-537-power-stones-of-ard-ii-five.html Part 2: https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-five-towers-of-trafa-zar-ashes-and.html Part 3: https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-power-stones-of-ard-ii-five-towers.html 2) With the many updates that have happened in ugBASIC lately for the Coco's and Dragons, a bit of an aside by it's author Marco Spedaletti is a new entry written in ugBASIC for the current BASIC10Liner competition, called "Beyond the Door". On the webpage are screenshots for multiple machines, including the Dragon/Coco 1/2: https://spotlessmind1975.itch.io/btd-10liner The 10 liner webpage (note: it defaults to German, so hover over the "2025" at the top to get the Rules and Game List (so far) for this year in English, although you will have to scroll down on the new page to get to the English part): https://www.homeputerium.de/ 3) James Jewett uploaded an updated version of his Spacewar game, speeding up some routines, adding some graphics to the Quadrant Viewer, and adding an "M" command that will draw a line to your destination in the viewer if you are moving or warping. You can find it in the Facebook Coco group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162270130642641/ 4) Jim Gerrie ported a game to the Coco and Dragon that originally was written as a wargame programming tutorial by Marshall Cavendish for the educational magazine INPUT (which taught programming). The source listings were for multiple platforms (including the Dragon) at the time of it's publication in 1984 to 1986 (The Internet Archive copy shows it being 1997, but the copyright dates on the inside front cover say otherwise). The link to download the game to run is in the comments of the original Facebook post: Game Play video https://youtu.be/cBih2JxvUYw?si=m_3NdoSfhold52aN Original article Part 1 (go through subsequent issues for the remainder of the wargame tutorial): https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbFNGeDhYaFN5aWl3dklaM0xMaFVKUDlXVHctd3xBQ3Jtc0trYXNiNXVPUTVaRXVBeFRFb05oQ2NhYUVJNWR6bzZSdXB2TmNWd0RBREhjYzVDR1k1VDY0TUQ0LUhMR2YzNzhUTExKdXhtRU1jVjhfSWZ4WUh2S09QLUNuZWJTMTFEVDJjMF96ZFp3UXY3Vy00bWtzdw&q=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2FInput_Vol_4_No_40_1997_Marshall_Cavendish_GB%2Fpage%2Fn19%2Fmode%2F2up&v=cBih2JxvUYw 5) Nostalgiavault on YouTube did a bunch of MC-10 game videos this week. #1 is Dinosaur Run! - based on the popular Google game - except it's running on an MC-10 (Jim Gerrie's 2021 port): https://youtu.be/pakOML7WYZU?si=quW-ZVnz8qXWGCtI He also played "Animal" - a very early AI program, and this is a port of one of the very early ones that Creative Computing published: https://youtu.be/vJs1X5VzEPY?si=30mvLcmlA3iI9FyR 2048 (the sliding numbers game that George Janssen made a Coco 3 version not too long ago). As he warns in the description, this is a very slow version: https://youtu.be/RwOu3fBqPcs?si=tnHYLEZ4P1mjSlTK 6) YouTube channel Aldo1235 did an almost 4 minute playing the official Coco version of Frogger: https://youtu.be/hxLwV0sn1RQ?si=4OHFDE1viC5Jcln9 7) Attempts: A gaming channel by LRU did video playing Tom Mix's Skramble, shooting for an official score. He did make it up to level 5: https://youtu.be/rw-V7iLfplg?si=LU48LRNUk939mRUr 8) Chronologically Gamings has been busy this week with both Dragon and Coco games released in November 1982: The original Dragon version of Cyrus Chess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhXRQuXJsCY&t=31s Defense for the Coco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhXRQuXJsCY&t=377s Devil's Island for the Dragon 32: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhXRQuXJsCY&t=833s Doodle Bug for the Coco - with a custom cartridge/label pictured done *much* later (Is this Dave6309's?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUKij-_ifI4&t=863s Dragon Trek for the Dragon 32 (graphics, steerable photons are a couple of more unique things to this version): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCq43AYoOUs&t=27s Invasion / The Force for the Coco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAnClJ8194U&t=850s Conveyor Belt for the Coco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAnClJ8194U&t=1418s 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/