The Coco Nation News stories for Episode 406, March 29, 2025 =============================================================== Collected by L. Curtis Boyle 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, Marc Bosley (who helped test it), and Terry Trapp (who is working on getting it running in modern times - both on real hardware and on emulators). Upcoming conventions/trade shows of interest to Coco people: ------------------------------------------------------------ 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/ The same weekend, the Indy Classic Computer & Video Game Expo is going on April 12-13, 2025 at the Crowne Plaza Indianapolis-Airport Hotel in Indianapolis, Indiana. This is the show that has Randy Kindig (of the Floppy Days podcast fame, amongst others) as one of the organizers, who we interviewed on our show some time ago. Entry is $5/person or $10/family https://indyclassic.org/ Saturday April 26 is the next Amigos hosted "International Computer Club", which has people talking about a variety of hardware, software, collecting, etc. retro computer & gaming projects. Both Nick and I have been on this show multiple times, and Nick may be on it to show his Pinball project. 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 is Sept 26 to Sep 28 at the Courtyard by Marriott Springfield Downtown in Springfield, Ohio: https://www.tandyassembly.com/ And they have some exhibitors already (click Exhibitors link) 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. It will be held at the Royal Military College outside of Montreal, but I don't have any more details (the venue, for example) yet: https://vcfed.org/vcf-montreal/ Coco 1/2/3 (and multi-platform) ------------------------------- 0) First some sad news - Paul T Schreiber passed away. He was and engineer at Tandy (and speaker at many retro events about Tandy history) and was directly involved in a lot of projects getting off the ground - including the Coco 2. He was also working on a book when he passed away: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162423200767641/ You can see his Tandy Assembly keynote presentation from 2019 here: https://youtu.be/w2Tb8IOa5VQ?si=MFWY2SR5w_qZqUzZ 1) Coco Town goes back to his Game revolutions (cycle 23), where he talkx about making "1982-style NPC's": https://youtu.be/Ubl9JzrYHCw?si=gONE69U501yhvS6q 2) Allen Huffman made a blog post responding to a Coco Facebook group question originally posted by Rob R., who was asking about which 2 character variable names (the maximum allowed in Extended Color BASIC), due to them being BASIC keywords (he gave an example of "TO"). Allen expands on this, listing others, and also pointing out that some variable names that would work in Color BASIC won't work in Extended and/or Disk BASIC: https://subethasoftware.com/2025/03/24/color-basic-supports-two-letter-variables-except-when-it-doesnt/ 3) Erico Monteiro has been helping both ugBASIC and basic-to-6809 compilers for handling high speed large sprites, and released some videos showing them both running the same graphics: (show 1 video for each from my desktop) 4) Jeff Noyle (of Oblique Triad fame, with games such as Those Darn Marbles, Overlord, The Seventh Link) has been working on a new 512K Coco 3 RPG game, but much more advanced than even The Seventh Link was, called Mythwalker. He currently estimates it will take 4 disks, and he has a website with a video and screenshots to show it's current progress. It features a lot of more modern RPG features than the Coco has ever seen before, including in world game map, special quests, complex storyline & lore, weather, etc, much more interactive in game characters, and more. He is making both a Coco 3 and PC/Windows 10 version as well. To quote Jeff's own announcement in the Coco Discord: "Hello everybody! I've been working on a new fantasy RPG for the coco3 (512k). It's kinda my attempt to atone for The Seventh Link, from back in the day, which was missing a lot of elements of what makes an RPG so fun, like story, NPCs, items, magic systems. You know, richness in general. There's some deets on my website: https://distantsystems.com/Mythwalker/Mythwalker.html ...and the "contact" tab has a link to my discord to which you're all very welcome if you'd like to follow the development in detail, and a link to my Steam page for it (it actually runs on PC and coco, cuz it's written (mostly) in a custom VM for which I've made PC and Coco3 implementations- even the save files are cross-compatible!) so you can wishlist it if you like and get notified if/when it releases. (Planning to charge just a very small nominal price for it.) Kinda hoping to finish in a year or two..." Main page: https://distantsystems.com/Mythwalker/Mythwalker.html steampage with video/screenshots: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3577880/Mythwalker/ 5) Abraham Moller posted a 13+ minute video showing his turning on his $30 Facebook Marketplace Coco 2 system for the first time in years. He also talks a little bit about his Videotex cartridge and what it was for: https://youtu.be/-UjJHYGZnQ0?si=6wdU1phU5KLqjF65 6) NMI on YouTube, who usually covers gameplay videos, did a different kind of video this week, an almost hour long video on fixing a CP-400 Color 2 - a Coco 2 clone from Brazil: https://youtu.be/y4dPkqGgUkw?si=3aRz0Ze_NrDw3bG4 7) XperTek, the Spanish YouTube channel, did a different kind of video than he normally does on his amber monitor equipped Coco 2 - he covered a utility called Sprite Master (with mostly spanish prompts, etc.) used to create PMODE 3 style sprites, including showing them animated. He also showed Lurkley Manor (a Rainbow published adventure game): https://youtu.be/sE203imOS9Y?si=emdpp6v-TZinNHMi 8) Terry Trapp got a copy of RiBBS 2.10 up and running via Telnet (you can try it yourself at Ribbs.griswoldfx.com:6809 with a Telnet client), and he will be with the original authors Ron Bihler & Charles West, as well as an early tester (our very own Marc Bosley) on next weeks show to talk about BBSing, RiBBS and Fidonet on the Coco, next week! His original post (see screenshots in the comments): https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162438293712641/ This screenshot he posted (from the Sysops point of view) shows that Terry had 31 calls and 13 unique users give it a try the first day he had it up: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162441950937641/ He also posted a response to Allen Huffman's question about how Terry got RiBBs onto the internet (this includes a hardware hack to an RS-232 pak to get around a bug in the 6551 serial chip that I always hated - it can't receive data if no carrier is detected... like trying to talk to a modem to do modem set up): https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162440108262641/ For those who want to give RiBBS a try themselves, Terry also released a "RiBBS to Go" disk image (he labelled it as "Ease of Use" set up to run from VCC, that you can download from the Coco gropu on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162431192677641/ 9) David Chesak announced that he has Coco WiFi all in one boards now available, and showed some pictures including options for with or w/o RS232 ROM's, and switching between Modem Pak and RS-232 Pak addressing. Currently you have to DM him to inquire about getting one: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162417245662641/ 10) David Collins released firmware updates for his 6309 based Single Board Computer, including: Systick timer defaulting to 100 hz register facilities to identify/clear an interrupt & adjust the delay Sector size toggling (256/512 bytes) - this will allow the future FLEX boot to work properly - which is already being worked on) CUBIX port being worked on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/flexoperatingsystem/posts/1201457491343700/ His github: https://github.com/lindoran/HB63C09 MC-10 ----- 1) Spriteworx on YouTube (the channel for the author of the MC-10 recently released game, T.H.E.M.) did a reaction video to one of TJ Ferrara's older videos about some of his favourite Retro computers (including the MC-10): https://youtu.be/c5_Gk9bF_48?si=fTwKiQnAVEh3496x Dragon 32/64 ------------ 1) Ciaran shows an update of getting Fuzix (and a version of the 2048 game) running on his Dragon 64 with the SAMx8 chip (and 512K of RAM) and the CocoSDC, including a nicely rendered true lowercase font at 32x24 characters on the screen. We just showed his photos and manual for the hardware last week: https://youtu.be/WGGKEBfRt3I?si=5emufFaxURDcrfHQ 2) Robcfg announced an update to his DragonDOS disk image utility, which now adds the ability to render text based screens that you can find in a disk image (he includes some screenshot samples). Free download from the world of Dragon archives: https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11145&start=20 Game On news (all Coco related platforms): ========================================== 1) Ellimist on YouTube made a speedrun video of Computerware/Scott Cabit's graphic adventure game Adventures in Mythology: https://youtu.be/kThBCQCErQI He also did one with Sands of Egypt in 95 turns: https://youtu.be/9z29h3-HYUM?si=9ZhRjFxZ8zrnzMmD And this morning he dropped a few more Coco adventure game speedruns: Hall of King by Glen Dahlgren/Sundog Systems: https://youtu.be/hzwl0_cS6NQ?si=el6JvmmnfvzHVutX In Quest of the Starlord (also by Glen & Sundog - one of the earliest Coco 3 graphic adventure games & a large one - taking multiple double sided disks): https://youtu.be/6h-NsL8lymI?si=b3bg6mQxYDEvmanE 2) Retro Rick has uploaded a beta update to Mike Snyder's T&D game "Tiler Tex Two" to the Programming and Development -> BASIC channel on Discord. This is a first public beta; he has more changes to come. The main things in this upload is to fix some bugs that showed up in the original if you played for too long - it could eventually bomb out with OS and OM errors. He has not tested all of the levels yet, but once that is complete he is planning on some enhancements, including speeding up the level drawing, some improved graphics, and more: (Show screenshot of announcement) 3) Pere Serrat has two AGD game related updates this week to the Uploads section of the World of Dragon Forums: AGD Games Pack 67. Adds 4 more games for all Coco/Dragons: Andrexoid Dangerous Davie Savage Princess The Slasher https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11267 NP13 Pack #13 (these are the Supersprite FM+ board versions, with full color and sound, and updated with palettes much closer to the original Spectrum versions): Funkey Fungus Reloaded World 4 Funky Fungus Reloaded Final Boss Dan Terrifick III Toofy's Winter Nuts https://archive.worldofdragon.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11268 4) NMI on YouTube released a video short showing Kingpede on his Coco 3 system: https://youtube.com/shorts/1nFHSdLckqA?si=YQavYF819b64BW-o 5) Attempts: A gaming channel (by LRU) on YouTube did another gameplay video for submitting for high scores, this time playing Steve Bjork's Stellar Lifeline on Easy setting: https://youtu.be/e4bUCO6_K3U?si=_s2HsYEJViljWsDC 6) Spanish speaking site XperTek did another gameplay / real hardware on an amber monitor video this week on his YouTube channel - this time playing Ninja Warrior by Charles Forsythe / The Programmer's Guild: https://youtu.be/ow84HDbOPyU?si=z6lFvewiwcZQ2BC_ 7) TGP Highscore runs on YouTube did an Alcatraz II (originally bye Spectral on the Coco, although was on the Dragon 32) speedrun video. This is the second Alcatraz II video in two weeks: https://youtu.be/yj2emRvFduU?si=tW8N4KdeVt5RP5TP 8) Jim Jewett released yet another update to his Spacewar game this past week on the Coco Facebook group. This expands the game to have 5 levels of difficulity, and it also includes a companion program "SPOOFWAR" which contains some easter eggs related to various Sci-Fi movies & programs: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2359462640/posts/10162442267667641/ 9) Not quite ready yet, but darned close is Floyd Resler's Gem Quest 2 (we recently played the original Gem Quest on our Game On Challenge) Screenshot samples of new levels & added elements: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1929079184021683/posts/3893818724214376/ New features: Can now climb off a ladder if a monster is at the top of it. Can shoot a monster one step below you. Can shoot past ladders. Can save a game at any point. There are five save slots. The timer is used as a level-end bonus. Added more levels. Fixed problems on several levels that either caused errors or floor elements to vanish. The original game had 50 icons. This one has nearly 120! There are more monsters and more game elements to interact with! NOTE: there are more additions - but you will have to find them when you play once the final release is out! Speak your mind! Let us know what you think at: ============================================================================== feedback at TheCoCoNation.com Get connected with more of the CoCo, Dragon and MC-10 community here: ============================================================================== https://thecoconation.com/community/