[Index]
The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 404, March 15, 2025
===============================================================
Collected by L. Curtis Boyle and presented by Mark Overholser
Interview schedule:
--------------------
April 5th we will have a special about the RiBBS BBS system - this enabled
Coco 3's to join Fidonet back in the 1990's. We will have it's original
author Ron Bihler, the person who took it over from Ron - Charles "Chuck"
West, and Marc Bosley who was one of the testers.
Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people:
------------------------------------------------------------
The Interim Computer Festival is happening at Intraspace in Seattle
Washington from March 21-23. This is the Pacific Northwest Show that is
hoping to get back to VCF status in the near future:
https://sdf.org/icf/
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/
Retrofest 2025, organized by Tony Jewell, is a retro computer festival
happening in Swindon, England May 31-June 1, 2025. Some Dragon people (like
Richard Harding and Chris Poacher) have already committed to attending
the show, being held at STEAM (the Great Western Railway museum):
Retrofest website:
https://retrofest.uk/
They even have a promo video:
https://youtu.be/UCZ-BtFW9Ok?si=B441wLvpDI2iekLN
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 (now International Retro Computer Expo) will be July 11-13 in
Hurricane, WV. There is now a promo video for it:
https://www.ticketsource.us/ircexpo2025/t-eanjyje
VCF-Midwest (the largest retro show in North America, I believe) is September
13-14 at the Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, 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/
Canada is getting it's own official VCF - Montreal, January 25-26 of
2026. I don't see any more details (the venue, for example) yet:
https://vcfed.org/vcf-montreal/
Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform)
-------------------------------
1) I somehow missed that TRS-80 Retro Programing on YouTube released some
videos last week, taking further his concept of doing Atari style graphics
and gameplay from Extended BASIC:
Asteroids clone-ship control & Code explanation part 1:
https://youtu.be/ObadtmKfVSo?si=914-ms89CN-B4LQ-
Shooting the asteroid (really slowly) (no commentary):
https://youtu.be/2PlGd-S5WHk?si=6NrznpLtu2ChteCqs
2) Coco Town does a deep dive into NitrOS9's module memory management:
https://youtu.be/ELSqN9uLgyM?si=kS6tgrnQbgHjGp3j
3) Richard Goedeken started a project a few years ago to benchmark various
BASIC's against each other on 8 bit machines (and some 16 and 32 bit as
well). This is non-compiled, inteprative BASIC. The Coco 3 faired fairly
well, with Microsoft Extended BASIC, and Richard ran benhmarks at .895,
1.78 and 2.86 Mhz (regular speed, double speed, and GIME-X speed). He
recently ran it using Microware's BASIC09 under NitrOS9/EOU 1.0.1, which
is 1.78 Mhz and justing using the 6809. He ran it both with everything in
floating point (REAL in BASIC09), and then with INTEGER variables where
possible. Even the floating point version ran faster than all other 8 bit
machines (and even faster than several 16 bit machines, including the Apple
IIGS ROM3 Applesoft BASIC at 2.8 MHz, the Atari 1040STe with Atari ST Basic,
and the Mac Classic with Microsoft BASIC 3.0 in REAL mode - these last
two are 8 MHz 16 bit machines!). Some further tests with 6309 optimized
NitrOS9/BASIC09, and GIME-X speeds, may be forthcoming as well... but the
Coco 3 is already very competitive with a well written BASIC designed for
the 6809 architecture (and it's been out since 1980):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zlicfj__PcycbKEbfoiYRijUZh1dqujWPXgh6Um9YO4/edit?gid=0#gid=0
4) George Janssen has started his next lesson series for assembly language
programming on the Coco 3, this time working on his pop-up windowing system:
Part A (where he explains what his subroutine package does (and the fact
that it is a TSR), how it came about, etc.):
https://youtu.be/02qg3BbffsU?si=kd9Yne5ceXrBZZWi
Part B, where he gets into the code and explains how it works:
https://youtu.be/IDbUS4gp5YU?si=ucFrnS2GYyCYkWKn
5) Allen Huffman posted some photos of manuals, etc. that are from
Microware's history (the people that did OS-9), all the way back to their
RT/68 days before the 6809 existed:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/posts/3881548492108066/
Allen also emailed the current holder of the Radio Shack brand to find out
what all they have control of... and he got a response, which he posted
on the Coco Facebook group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162377131177641/
6) Mauricio Matte has released a new version of his CP-400 "Brazilian
Black Beauty" joystick. This version is slightly larger, has 4 buttons
(I believe they all function as the single button on regular joysticks,
but this allows the player to choose left/right handed and/or back/top
buttons, whichever is more comfortable:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162385360657641/
7) Marco Spedaletti has announced the official release of ugBASIC 1.17.1,
the cross platform, open source isomorphic BASIC compiler:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162368274897641/
8) Craig Ianello posted a video in Facebook's 6809/6309/6800 assembly
language group from his "PugPuter" - a single board 6309 based computer
he has been working on that also uses the V9957 video chip. This video
shows scrolling graphics captured from his actual computer - no emulators
here. It also redrawing every pixel every 8th frame, so no hardware
scrolling registers:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/6809assembly/posts/3608790682747621/
MC-10
-----
1) Ron Klein posted an update blog post on his Coco-Pi Project, focusing
on the MC-10 this time around. He mentions XRoar's support for the MC-10,
and working with the MC-10 BASIC compiler (by Greg Dionne), which has
resulted in Ron adding a new feature to compile MC-10 BASIC programs &
launching them automatically in either XRoar or MAME. There is a bug in
both with compiled programs (that works fine on real hardware); but as Ron
mentions, Ciaran already has a test build of XRoar to fix the issue, and he
is contacting Tim Lindner to get the same fixes done in MAME. (It should
be noted the compiler only does regular MC-10 BASIC, not MCX-BASIC). One
other thing Ron has added is ability to send programs from the CocoPi to
a real MC-10 through the cassette cable:
https://coco-pi.com/197-2/
Dragon 32/64
------------
1) Robcfg and William Athing have started a thread on the World of Dragon
forums to talk about their Fujinet for Dragon project (which William was
on our show last week to talk about):
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11259
2) Julian Brown posted some pictures of his updated Dragon ATX boards:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragon32/posts/3966409033618736/
Game On news (all Coco related platforms):
==========================================
1) Renga in Blue did part 3 of their gameplay review of the real
time/partially randomized text adventure, Keys of the Wizard. This one
covers playing at higher difficulty levels... and some bugs that were found:
https://bluerenga.blog/2025/03/08/keys-of-the-wizard-maximum-difficulty/
2) Jim Gerrie ported "Hex War", a 2 player strategy game that originally
appeared in the July 1986 issue of Compute! magazine, written by Todd
Heimarck for the IBM PC Jr. It has 5 variations of play to choose from:
https://youtu.be/-7kFR50kSmU?si=TBHYd1PCTwUkfbYu
3) The Retro Adventurers podcast released episode 18 this past week. The
podcast is about classic text adventure games, and this episode covers
(amongst other things) Calixto Island from Mark Data products (5:00 in),
and they talk about the Dragon 32 as well with special guest Iain Lee:
https://retroadventurers.podbean.com/
4) Pere Serrat has released AGD games pack #65, which has 4 of the newest
AGD engine games (from 2023-2024) for the Coco and Dragon. This package has:
Ghostly Capers
The Hairy Fly
HedgeHogs 2
Space Thunder DX
Screenshots and download on the World of Dragon forums:
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11260
And for those with the Supersprite FM+ board, he has also released the NP11
pack to use the enhanced hardware from that upgrade, and it includes 4 games:
Funky Fungus Reloaded World 2
Kyd Cadet II
Sophia II part 2
Toofy in Fan Land:
https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11261
5) David Ladd let me know that there is a port of the classic Coco game
Downland to the Atari 7800, and it is a free download.
Video from John Hancock's YouTube channel:
https://youtu.be/nGnqrqU09Sk?si=i_v16HYJW26ITEiW
Download:
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/380295-downland-trs-80-color-computer-port/
6) Floyd Resler released some screenshots for his upcoming Gem Quest version
2.0. Adding more monsters, levels, onscreen help on the attract screen,
and save/load games in progress are all new features:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/posts/3880563682206547/
7) Jim Jewett has made another Spacewar update and has added a step by
step guide for navigating the mission, and added a command to the game:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162381496932641/
8) For those who didn't catch it in the Game On Challenge Discord channel,
but I patched Boris the Bold to work on 6309 machines as well as 6809.
9) The YouTube channel Classic Retro Games put up an almost 10 minute
video about Dungeons of Daggorath:
https://youtu.be/uPjzjsWcI80?si=Q5XFf8_4ov8PMvdq
Speak your mind! Let us know what you think at:
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